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.

Week 28 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 5:18-25; Psalm 1; Luke 11:42-46

There is a beautiful image in today's responsorial psalm. The one who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it is like a tree planted by the water's edge. He yields fruit in due season, his leaves never fade, and all he does prospers. Such a person has well-placed roots. The spring of life and energy and action in her is healthy and reliable and fruitful.

St Paul knew this psalm very well. He is the most famous Pharisee to come to faith in Jesus and what he says about the law and the Spirit is therefore of great interest. He contrasts them, yes, but not as two alternative codes of law, one detailed and negative, the other general and positive. It is rather that any person's ability to keep the law of God - which we all ought to do - depends on his or her being planted in the Spirit, rooted in that divine gift of living water. Paul had come to realise that the positive fruits of the law could only be borne by people living in the Spirit. The law is good and wise and true as he says elsewhere. But without the Spirit any effort to live by the law will be 'fleshly', it will inevitably be partial and external, selective and more or less hypocritical.

It can be tempting to set up an easy opposition between 'old testament law' and 'new testament spirit'. But to give in to this tempation would be a very serious misunderstanding of the gospel, and of the whole history of salvation. The new law is not an alternative to the old law but is its full flourishing. The new law, of which the prophets already spoke, is the life of the faithful believer flowing from his or her communion with the Lord, the God of Israel. What will secure that communion for us?

Jesus himself warns us off this facile opposition through a couple of clues in today's gospel reading. 'These you should have done', he says, referring to justice and the love of God, 'without overlooking the others', those more minor matters of the law which the faithful person will also want to observe, because they are part of God's law.

The second clue comes in his response to the lawyer. 'You impose on people burdens too hard to carry', Jesus says. The yoke or burden is another image for God's law which guides the steps of the one who submits to it. In Matthew's gospel Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden (same term as here) is light. What makes it an easy yoke? That is does not ask very much of us? What makes it a light burden? That its demands are superficial and not radical? He is speaking of the cross and walking behind him on that way. So too is Paul in Galatians: 'far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world' (6:14). He speaks of crucifixion in today's first reading also, another warning against any understanding of Christian discipleship that would under-estimate its costliness.

The tree by the water's edge is the cross of Christ planted in our earth. Just down the road from where I now live is the church of San Clemente with its renowned mosaic of the cross as the tree of life. This dry and dead wood, irrigated by the blood of the one dying upon it, becomes a living tree from which flows the water of the river of life, the gift of the Spirit, the sacramental life of the Church. This is the light and eternally fruitful burden we are asked to accept and to carry. Its power reaches the depths of our hearts, irrigating the dry and dead places,  filling us with its own love. That love is the Holy Spirit who enables us to observe the law of God and so to bear the fruit of the cross: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against which there is no law, but which are the fulfillment of the law of God, God's intention for His people.

Week 28 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 5:1-6; Psalm 118; Luke 11:37-41

What Jesus says to the Pharisee is a bit obscure: 'as to what is within, give alms': that's the translation to which you are referred here. But what can that mean? 'Give alms from what you have' is another translation but it says nothing really: from what else could one give alms? The proper translation seems to be 'give for alms those things that are within'. It fits with what Jesus is saying about the outside and the inside. It also links neatly with what Paul says in the first reading: what counts is not circumcision or uncircumcision - things external - but 'faith working through love'.

We are being asked to give of ourselves, then, and of our deepest selves, sharing what we think, how we feel, what we believe, what it is we value. What is within must be purified in the first place, Jesus says: what we think, how we feel, what we believe, what it is we value. There are many practical consequences once we begin to consider the fantasies that occupy our minds, the disortions that trouble our feelings, the questions that challenge our faith, the ambivalences that leave our hearts divided.

The way to this purification is not simply through asceticism and willpower. It is through remaining in the company of Christ, living by His Spirit, continuing to seek the freedom for which He has set us free. The way is through prayer, that which is most within in any human being, the only place from which our faith can work through our love.

Week 28 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Galatians 4:22-24, 26-27, 31-5:1; Psalm 113;  Luke 11:29-32

In what does the sign of Jonah consist? For Luke, it is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the Ninevites that is the sign for those listening to Jesus. The Queen of Sheba came to hear Solomon’s wisdom and the people of Nineveh heard Jonah’s preaching. There is something here greater than either Jonah or Solomon. You ought, then, to listen to him, to Jesus, to live by his wisdom, and to answer his call to repentance.

In Matthew, Jesus brings in the earlier part of Jonah’s adventures and points to his three days in the belly of the fish. This is the sign of Jonah, according to Matthew, a foreshadowing of the three days Jesus would spend lying dead in the tomb. Matthew’s account gives us the stronger imagery and we may be tempted to assume that Luke implies the same thing. There are few biblical images more powerful than that of Jonah in the belly of the great fish.

But there is no indication that the Ninevites knew anything about the fish! For Luke, the sign is the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the people. And this clears the way for us to notice something else in Jonah’s experience at Nineveh. Not only do the people repent, but God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them. God’s repentance displeased Jonah exceedingly, we are told, and he was angry.

When Jesus directed his listeners to the sign of Jonah it has to be that the divine mercy shown there is uppermost in his mind. He has come, after all, to show us the Father. The repentance of God in the Book of Jonah anticipates so many of the parables of Jesus in which the justice of God becomes puzzling because swallowed up in God’s mercy. If we feel a bit angry at the prodigal son, or the eleventh-hour labourers who are paid the same as those who worked all day, or at the thought of prostitutes and other public sinners entering the kingdom of heaven before us, then we are in the company of Jonah.

He felt used by God. His mission was a complete success, the whole city repented at his preaching, and still he was angry. This, then, is the sign of Jonah. In calling us to repentance, God is asking us to become like Him. He is always ready to be merciful, to turn towards us. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son, the first sign of repentance from the sinner wins God’s attention and mercy. (In fact we believe it would not even be possible without God’s prior attention and mercy.)

The freedom of heaven, of which Paul speaks in the first reading, is seen in God's freedom and extravagant generosity which so annoy Jonah. Grace is not confined and those who are called to be preachers of grace must never forget it. The servant of the Word is always at God's disposal, doing only his duty, preaching the call to repentance and the coming of the kingdom. There is no neat measure of the effectiveness of that preaching, no way of predicting what its results might be.

For freedom Christ has set you free, Paul says elsewhere in Galatians. As followers of Jesus we are messengers of that freedom, servants doing our duty, instruments in whatever way God judges best in alerting others to the freedom God has promised.