Week 29 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 2.12-22; Psalm 84; Luke 12.35-38

THE LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS

Oprah Winfrey has said that the most important book in her life is the Letter to the Ephesians. Scholars of the Bible tell us that Ephesians is more accurately described as ‘school of Paul’ rather than coming directly from the pen of Saint Paul himself. Nor does it seem like a letter in the ordinary sense. Its first half (chapters 1-3) is a majestic prayer and its second half (chapters 4-6) a homily or exhortation to worthy living. It begins with a brief greeting and ends with a brief farewell as if someone, in sending on the prayer and homily, adds a short covering note. In between is a wonderful summary of Christian ‘doctrine and life’.

The first half of Ephesians is one of the greatest Biblical texts on the theme of ‘grace’. It is read at Mass from last Thursday to Thursday of this week. Grace is God’s kindly love turned towards humanity, God’s generosity and forgiveness, God’s initiative in creating and re-creating. This kindly love is a blessing for us who receive it but is also a reason for us to bless God in return. In fact, God’s grace is itself the source of our capacity to give thanks to God in a way that is fitting.

God’s grace is not just a sentiment or a thought in God: it is something powerful and effective, a mystery hidden in God from all eternity but revealed historically in the election of God’s people, the coming of Jesus Christ and the founding of the Church in the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus.

Ephesians has much to say about the ‘household of God’, the community of the Church, where the variety of gifts ensures that the needs of the community are met and the unity of ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism’ means this variety is held together in harmony. The Church is where Jew and Gentile, reconciled through the death of Christ, share a new life of faith, integrity and holiness.

Nobody is a stranger or outsider to this mystery. Each of us is a participant in God’s grace. Each of us is called to be a ‘servant of the gospel’, ‘imitating God’ by loving as he loved us and offering ourselves as a fragrant offering.

In its second half, read at Mass from this Friday until Thursday of next week, Ephesians exhorts us to live lives worthy of what we have received, a translation into Christian terms of Shakespeare’s ‘to thine own self be true’. The motive for right living is that we be true to who we now are, that we ‘walk’ in accordance with our new life, that we grow towards the fullness of God and of Christ in which we already share. Our older, outer self dies as our newer, inner self is built up through faith, hope and love.

Worthy living for Ephesians is about honesty and integrity in speech, sexual relationships, family and business life. The language of Ephesians is marked by the social circumstances of its time but the key values remain pertinent and challenging, not least the placing of human marriage at the heart of the Christian mystery.

At first sight Ephesians might seem like exactly the kind of text we do not need: ‘wives be subject to your husbands’, for example. But it says a lot more: ‘submit to one another’ or ‘husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church and gives his life for her’, for example.

Ephesians stands in a long biblical tradition for which the relationship between God and God’s people is compared to marriage which is then a symbolic or ‘sacramental’ instance of the mutual love of God and God’s people. The focus for Ephesians is the intimacy of the married couple and how that unique human experience might help us to understand how close Christ is to the Church which is his body.

At first sight we might react to the language of Ephesians about married life. Thinking about this text again we might find ourselves wondering what it means for a man to make a woman holy by loving her or for a woman to make a man holy by loving him.

Both parts of Ephesians speak of power and of the Christian calling. God’s love is powerful in raising Jesus from the dead and exalting him above all other powers as head of the Church. Human beings are involved in the same mystery and are called to live it out by renouncing older ways of relating. Walking in a way that is worthy of our new life is only possible if we put on ‘the armour of God’, truth, integrity, faith. Our only strength is ‘in the Lord’ who has made us members of His household and whose grace continues to fashion us as ‘God’s work of art’.

Week 29 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 2:1–10; Psalm 100; Luke 12:13–21

There are teachings on the dangers of wealth that are common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. One cannot serve both God and Mammon, for example. The image of a camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle is also found in all three Gospels: it is easier for a camel to do so than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But today’s parable is found only in the Gospel of Luke. In addition to his sensitivity and compassion – indeed, precisely because of them – Luke places particular emphasis on the dangers of wealth. He does not qualify the beatitude of the poor as Matthew does, by adding the phrase ‘in spirit’ – ‘blessed are you who are poor’ is Luke’s version, and it is he who adds the woes, beginning with ‘woe to you who are rich’. Jesus does not say ‘woe to you who are unduly attached to your possessions’, nor ‘woe to you who do not share what you have with others’. The mere fact of possessing things is in itself problematic.

‘None of you can be my disciple unless you give up all your possessions,’ we read in Luke 14. Luke 16 is one long warning. And Luke 16 is entirely centred on this warning against riches. Here we find the shrewd steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisees described as ‘lovers of money’, and a strange encouragement to the disciples to use money – ‘that defiled thing’ – in the service of the kingdom.

In Luke we find Jesus’ teaching on riches in its most radical form. This teaching is, so to speak, made tangible here. It is not a question of our attitude towards our possessions, but a problem that arises from having possessions. The warning is that human beings inevitably begin to find meaning, security and a sense of identity in their possessions. Instead of using them, our possessions somehow become us, and we become them. We accumulate treasures of various kinds (not just money) to secure our lives, to give them meaning and to affirm a sense of identity: to be somebody. If it is through what we have that we become somebody, then we have lost ourselves.

Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel reading that ‘life does not consist of possessions’. To behave as if it did is to lose one’s life. To be truly ‘rich’ means to receive the gift of the Kingdom and to practise the generosity that lies at its heart: to let our possessions flow through us, so to speak, without regarding them as our own. It is another way of saying that we must become like Jesus who, though he was rich, made himself poor, so that we who are poor might become rich.

Week 29 Sunday Year A

Readings: Isaiah 45:1, 46; Psalm 96; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b; Matthew 22:15-21

Beginning with flattery (what the Irish will recognise immediately as plámás), Pharisees and Herodians question Jesus about paying taxes to Caesar. If he says 'pay' he is in one kind of trouble, if he says 'don't pay' he is in a different kind of trouble. Instead, and as usual, he takes the ground from beneath their feet and changes the basis of the question completely. Whose image is on the coin to be paid? Caesar's. Then give Caesar what is his. And give God what is His.

Sometimes this has been taken to mean that human life and affairs can be divided between a realm that belongs to Caesar (the state, political matters) and a realm that belongs to God (the Church, religion). But there is something wrong about the idea that there might be an area of human life that does not belong to God. And Jesus endorses our suspicion by what he says. Not explicitly, but very clearly.

If whatever bears the image of Caesar belongs to Caesar then whatever bears the image of God belongs to God. What is there that bears the image of God? If the image of Caesar is found on coins, where is the image of God to be found? We know from the Bible that it is the human being that bears the image of God. So it is the human being that belongs to God. And this cannot mean only some parts or aspects or activities of the human being, it must mean the human being in his or her entirety, in all her activities and relationships, in all his projects and commitments. It must mean also each and every single human being since no distinction is made: each and every one is created in the image and likeness of God.

It is a supremely clever answer. While seeming to divide human affairs between two masters Jesus does exactly the opposite, relativising our loyalty to 'Caesar' while acknowledging it, making it abundantly clear that such loyalty is always within a deeper, more all-embracing, and transcendent loyalty, that which is given to God alone. Give to God what belongs to God: in other words, everything.

 

Week 28 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 1.15-23; Psalm 8; Luke 12.8-12

The vision proposed to us in the readings today is, as we might say, really something else. It is not just a question of a morality or a philosophy to place alongside other proposals of that kind. It is a cosmic, we can even say a metaphysical, vision, of Christ, a man, who is the Son of God, the head of the Church, which is his body, and the fullness of him who himself fills the whole creation.

The gospel reading adds to that along the same lines. Besides the Son who fills all creation there is the Spirit who gives the disciples the words they will need when they are being persecuted.

There is a lot in the readings on the moral level, on human behaviour. As is the usual pattern in Paul's letters, he begins by praising the Ephesians for their faith, love and hope. These are the essential content of the Christian life, the practices in which that life expresses itself. But they are not human achievements, things we can generate from the depths of our souls if only we try hard enough. They are gifts of God, the work in us of the Spirit of wisdom, enlightenment and love. We see the power of the Spirit in what he has done for Christ, raising him from the dead and exalting him to the right hand of the Father. The Church, the body of Christ in human history, is the work of the Spirit who is the power operating in Christ as the head of the Church, as head of humanity, and as the fulness of all creation.

Which is why one can say this vision is really something else.

The gospel reading might also be taken in a moralistic way - do not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit for that is an unforgivable sin. That would be to cut off the branch on which you are sitting. That would be to explode the foundation. on which your house is built. That would be to insult the power which establishes in you these gifts of faith, hope and charity.

In this brief passage the gospel of Luke records a teaching of Jesus - about the Spirit, about truth, about love - which he will develop at much greater length in his discourses at the Last Supper recorded in the gospel of John. This is the deepest reach of the teaching of Jesus about his work and the letter to the Ephesians is anohter development of that teaching. Of course there is a way of living that comes with Christ and his teaching. But that way of living is made possible by a new way of being. To be one who has received the Spirit is to be a person of faith, hope and charity. It is to be a person of wisdom and perception. It is to be what Paul elsewhere calls a 'new creation', a new reality, a new being.

To blaspheme against the Holy Spirit would mean rejecting all that. Let us instead pray for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit on ourselves, on the Church, on the world, that we might allow God to shape us into all that God wants us to be.

Saint Ignatius of Antioch, whose memory we keep today, asked the Romans not to do anything to prevent his martyrdom. 'Only when I am with God', he says, 'will I be truly a human being.' The same is true even for those of us who are not martyrs: only with God are we truly human.

Week 28 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 1:11-14; Psalm 33; Luke 12:1-7

Elisabeth of the Trinity was a French Carmelite nun who lived at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Searching the New Testament for words that would serve as her motto, Saint Elisabeth fixed on a phrase that we find twice in the first reading at Mass today: she wanted to be, on earth and in heaven, 'the praise of his glory'. Saint Paul says, in fact, that those who come to believe in Christ have been predestined to be 'the praise of Christ's glory', that they are among those whom God has acquired for himself to the praise of his glory.

What is this glory, to the praise of which blessed Elisabeth wanted to consecrate herself completely? It is the word of truth, says Paul, the Word that is Christ himself, bringing to the world the light of truth, the light of redemption, the first installment of which we have already received when we were sealed with the Holy Spirit.

In the gospel reading also Jesus speaks about truth, the light that will illuminate all things. In 2016 our Order, the Order of preachers founded by Saint Dominic Guzman, celebrates the eighth centenary of its confirmation. It is an Order specially dedicated to preaching the gospel of truth for the salvation of human beings. Many things in the readings today call us back to this, our Christian vocation: to live in the truth of the Lord.

We might, however, interpret as threats certain expressions about truth in the gospel reading that we read today - in this light  all secrets will be revealed, and what has been whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops. If it was a cruel light we would have reason to be fearful. But this light of the Word of God is always the light of an eternal and infinite love. The attention God gives to our hairs, and to all the details of our lives, is not the attention of an enemy, or of one who does not have our interest at heart. It is comparable instead to the attention adults give to a newborn child, when we look carefully at all the details of the baby, with a look of affection, admiration and love.

So this light of love and truth is what Dominicans have preached for eight hundred years and continue to preach today. This is the glory to the praise of which Saint Elisabeth of the Trinity wished to dedicate herself completely.

This homily was preached at a Mass broadcast on Radio Maria (Italia) on Friday 14 October 2016. The Mass was celebrated at the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria della Neve e San Domenico, in Pratovecchio, Tuscany.

Saint Teresa of Avila - 15 October

TERESA OF AVILA

1515 - 1582

 

One of Teresa's best friends and key advisers was Domingo Banez, one of the greatest of the 16th century Spanish Dominican theologians who helped her find her way through mystical experiences, defended her before the Inquisition, and saved the Carmelite reform from ruin. There were quite a few other men in Teresa’s life too (after Jesus, of course). Her flirtation with some young fellow at the age of 16 brought shame on the family (by the standards of 16th century Catholic Spain) and led to her being sent away to a boarding school. She was fondest, it seems, of Jeronimo Gracian, thirty years younger, the first provincial of the reformed Carmelite friars. Another great ally was St John of the Cross, the man with whom she is most often remembered, whom she greatly admired, but whom she found just a wee bit intense and humourless.

Teresa’s conversion to a serious following of Christ coincided with a midlife crisis. She had been plagued by illness and frustration throughout her twenties and thirties, finding life in the convent not that much different from life in the world outside. The sisters seemed more concerned with social status and the political interests of their families than with building spiritual companionship, which was what Teresa understood a religious community to be about. She could point no fingers, however, because her own life of faith and prayer was dry and dreary, and conditions in the convent were not helping her to move forward.

Reading Augustine’s Confessions, and seeing a particular picture representing the sufferings of Jesus, opened things up for her. We can think of her moving from a notional to a real assent, to use John Henry Newman’s terms, moving from a sincere acceptance of the truth of the Gospel that nevertheless left her lethargic and depressed, to a real acceptance of the truth of the Gospel that filled her with energy and zeal. Such a real acceptance is, of course, not the outcome of human effort alone but part of the teaching that the Spirit effects in those seeking to follow Christ (Luke 12:12). Teresa’s account of this change is given in her Autobiography, a book read by Edith Stein during the course of a single night in 1921, bringing about her conversion to the Catholic faith, awakening her vocation to the Carmelites, and opening for her the way of perfection.

It is never perfect human beings that Teresa has in mind when she talks, as she does often, about perfection. She had plenty of experience of religious life, after all. That which is perfect is the love of God revealed in Christ and transforming us by making us thirsty in a way that will never be completed, never perfected, in this world. The encounter between great Christians like Augustine, Teresa, and Edith Stein reminds us that the entire community of the Church, not just religious communities within it, ought to be a place of spiritual companionship, a friendship established on the deepest thing we can share, what St Paul describes as ‘the righteousness of faith resting on grace’ (Romans 4:13,16).

Teresa then spends the second half of her life here, there and everywhere in Spain, founding monasteries, negotiating with bishops, coping with problems in the communities, and writing great works like The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, works that remain among the wisest and most accessible guidebooks to the ways of prayer.

It is in the Book of her Foundations, though, that Teresa’s personality shines through most clearly. She is witty, shrewd, down to earth, sincere, full of fear, full of courage, single-minded in her love and service of Christ. Far from being a retiring and diffident contemplative, she is fully occupied with people and with business, showing remarkable political skill in handling the many problems connected with her foundations – the legal processes of buying property, the patience needed to deal with townspeople, benefactors, and bishops (‘through her, friends become enemies’, quipped one bishop), the prudence needed to choose suitable women for the new communities and especially the prioresses (some of them are very holy, she says, and not suited to being prioresses), the rivalry of other religious orders, the resentment of the other Carmelites, the brooding presence of the Inquisition. As regards the last, in introducing one of her writings she says, ‘I ask God to give me the grace not to say anything that might merit my being denounced to the Inquisition’ (Satirical Critique). She seemed so hemmed in and pinned down by practical worries and temporal responsibilities that her freedom in following Christ in all of this, and in spite of all of this, is all the more striking.

Because a sense of humour is one of the surest signs of a real assent to God, it is not surprising that there is much humour in the life of Teresa of Avila. A herd of bulls comes between the sisters and their convent one night and they barely manage to slip in unnoticed. Teresa is highly amused by this turn of events but neither she nor any of the other sisters is tempted to become Spain’s first matadora. On the sisters’ first night in another foundation they discovered that they had brought five clocks but no bed. One benefactor insists that the chapel he has paid for should also have a font containing orange-flower water, and Teresa is somewhat bemused by this.

Encouraged by Banez, her Dominican confessor and director, she is famously sceptical of mystical experiences in spite of having a few remarkable ones herself and she warns people constantly about putting any store by unusual experiences in prayer. It is more through ordinary events, favourable and unfavourable, that she sees the will of Christ and the opposition of the devil manifesting themselves. Banez was a renowned theologian of grace and we can perhaps see his influence in the way Teresa talks about the relationship of body and soul, of temporal and spiritual. The soul can do nothing, she says, except abide by the laws of the body and all its needs and changes (Foundations 29.2). She is not sure whether her advice about prioresses is ‘spiritual or temporal’ but it does not matter since what concerns her is the way temporal matters affect spiritual good (Visitation 2 and 10). Love is not seen if it is kept hidden in corners, she writes, but love is seen ‘in the midst of the occasions of falling’ (Foundations 5.15). Rules and regulations are necessary in the same way that houses are, to shelter the work going on inside them. Constitutions should be agreed on quickly so that people can get on with living, and she found the protracted disagreements among the friars tedious.

On John of the Cross’s more austere spirituality she says that ‘seeking God would be very costly if we could not do so until we were dead to the world’. ‘God deliver me’, she says, ‘from people so spiritual that they want to turn everything into perfect contemplation, no matter what’. Nevertheless we should be grateful to John of the Cross, she says about one piece of his writing, ‘for having explained so well what we did not ask’ (Satirical Critique 6-7). Perhaps she was a little jealous of little John!

Teresa of Avila remains an inspiration and a trustworthy guide for all who try to persevere in prayer. She is a Doctor of the Church of whom the liturgy says that God inspires us by her holy life, instructs us by her preaching, and gives us His protection in answer to her prayers. I have offered some thoughts here about her conversion, about her understanding of the Christian way as one of shared friendship and love, and about her freedom and energy in the service of Christ and the Church. One of her own poems has become well known and is a fitting, if familiar, conclusion:

Nada te turbe,                        Let nothing trouble you,

nada te espante,                    Let nothing scare you,

todo se pasa,                         All is fleeting,

Dios no se muda.                  God alone is unchanging.

La paciencia                         Patience

todo lo alcanza,                    Everything obtains.

quien a Dios tiene                Who possesses God

nada le falta:                        Nothing wants.

solo Dios basta.                   God alone suffices.

Listen here to this poem as it is sung at Taizé

Week 28 Thursday (Year 2)

Readings: Ephesians 1:1-10; Psalm 98; Luke 11:47-54

In Luke's account, Jesus is invariably gentler than he is presented in Matthew or in Mark, whether in regard to the apostles and disciples or in regard to the enemies of Jesus. But of course the end result is the same: Jesus is crucified. Today's gospel contains woes against various elements in the religious authorities, as incisive if not as insulting as the woes against the scribes and Pharisees that we find in Matthew 23. And the end result is the same: they are increasingly angry with him and with what he is saying about them to the people.

Here they are described as 'scholars of the law' and 'those who build the monuments of the prophets' but it is the same scribes and Pharisees who see that the criticisms are leveled against them and who react accordingly. The scholars of the law have taken away the key of knowledge, not entering themselves but not allowing anybody else to enter either. A less clearly defined group, those who build the monuments of the prophets, are those who support prophets as long as they are dead but whenever a living prophet arises will be among the first to make sure he is silenced.

Religious teachers and authorities have to listen carefully to these words and examine their own thoughts, words, deeds and omissions in the light of them. Just like everybody else, and even more so, they are called to repent and to position themselves in God's way of bringing in the kingdom of grace. The challenge to them is to remain open to the Spirit who breathes where he will and who cannot be confined to particular institutions or doctrines or practices. And yet it is the same Spirit who establishes and animates the institutions and doctrines and practices in which the relationship with God is lived and understood and celebrated.

It is too simple to set up here an easy contrast between Judaism and Christianity. It is too easy also to set up an easy contrast between institutional types and charismatic types, or between priestly types and prophetic types, between radicals who are faithful to the wild call of the gospel and liberals who will always be at hand to anoint the bodies of dead prophets and to bury martyred apostles. Often the best we can manage is to live between such polarities, making efforts to keep people together, complementing each other in the ways in which they bear witness to the truth of God.

But the mystery of God's will is that all things are summed up in Christ. It is Christ who is the recapitulation of all things. We are not going to do it no matter what our political or intellectual achievements. It is Christ who brings all together, opening the door of knowledge and revealing the glory of God's grace. We are not going to do it no matter what our institutional structures, our grand strategies or our good intentions.

When the Blood of this prophet is shed, and the blood of this Apostle is poured out, it is the moment of the world's redemption. He is not just one more martyred prophet in the line running from Abel to Zechariah. This dead body is not to be contained in any tomb, to be honoured once a year by those claiming to be his heirs. Because it has been carried to the throne of grace, this Blood flows forever, redeeming and bringing forgiveness. The power of this Blood tears the curtain of the Temple and opens the way to a new knowledge and a new life. This is the Blood which establishes unity between the persecuted and those who killed them. This is the Blood which heals the world's wounds, forgives the world's sins, and lavishes grace on the world.

The preaching of this truth and the testimony to this grace continue to invite rejection and persecution. That preaching and that testimony continue to call us to repent and to change, to position ourselves in God's way of bringing in the kingdom of grace. And that, it seems, will always be some kind of threat to us, a subversion of our comfort, a relativisation of our achievements, a criticism of our best intentions, changes in our way of living. Only the Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets, will keep us on this road of repentance, ready to learn and to change again, the Spirit who bears witness with the water and the Blood to the riches of God's grace.