Lent Week 5 Thursday

Readings: Genesis 17:3-9; Psalm 105; John 8:51-59

In the first reading God seems like an enthusiastic lover, pleading his suit with the one he wishes to be with him. Let's live together, you and I, here in this place. We will be fruitful and for many generations and can make our home together here. It will be wonderful and we will be happy together. At the end of the reading, almost as an afterthought, he adds 'of course you must keep the covenant as well'.

It recalls Pope Francis' comments in the early days of his papacy that we will grow tired of asking for mercy before God grows tired of showing mercy. God seems more engaged and more involved in the work of establishing this covenant than do the human beings who are to be the partners in the relationship.

Abraham always reminds us of the covenant and of the faith that is required if we are to be loyal to the agreement God has made with His people. Abraham figures in the discussion between Jesus and the Jews in today's gospel reading. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus - there are these high points marking the journey of the covenant across the centuries and through the pages of the Bible. Each moment in which the covenant is endorsed and renewed involves God becoming more involved with the people, coming ever closer to them, being ever more intimately involved in their lives. And each such moment obliges God, so to speak, to reveal more about himself.

When Jesus says 'before Abraham was, I am' he is clearly making the most explicit claim about his mission as Messiah and about his nature as the Son of God. He uses the Divine Name to speak about himself which explains the fierce reaction in his hearers. Because he is 'I am', he is the heart and foundation of the covenant established with Abraham. He is the suitor seeking to be in relationship with his beloved, standing at the foundation of the covenant, 'before' it then, the One.

We believe the covenant established in Jesus is the final and definitive one, the new and eternal covenant. God could not have become more involved in the life and history of His people than He has done in Jesus. And God cannot reveal more about Himself than He has done in opening His heart to us in the paschal mystery of Jesus.

We are called to be participants in this story, interlocutors of God in the unfolding of His relationship with human beings. It is a story whose origins are lost in the mists of time - before Abraham was - but it is a story established in the present eternal moment - I am. Whoever keeps this word, the covenant promise, will never taste death for, as the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel said, to say 'I love you' is to say 'you will not die'. And God says to us 'I love you' and I want to establish with you an everlasting pact.

The Annunciation of the Lord

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-14; 8:10; Psalm 39 (40); Hebrews 10:4-10; Luke 1:26-38

In the first reading the Lord offers King Ahaz a sign, coming either from the depths of Sheol or from the heights above. This is where we would expect any decent sign to come from, from out of this world, either from the depths or from the heights, something to make us sit up and take notice.

The sign eventually given is not the one first offered, an offer Ahaz rejects. Instead it is the most natural, the most ordinary sign: a young woman will give birth to a son and her son will not only continue the line of David but will rule wisely and well. He is Hezekiah, one of the best of the kings of Judah, the son of Ahaz and the young woman.

More of the same, then, we might be tempted to say, but in the circumstances of threats against Judah, the southern kingdom, and the fall of Israel, the northern kingdom, a sign that Judah would survive and even prosper was, surely, a welcome one. And this is what the birth of this good king meant: God was still with his people.

Mary does not exactly ask for a sign when she hears Gabriel's message. 'How can this come about', she says, 'since I am a virgin?' The natural and ordinary pregnancy and birth of this child, another son of the house of David, becomes supernatural and extraordinary: the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the child will be holy and will be called 'Son of God'. Undoubtedly a sign from the heights above, then, this child who will rule wisely and well, and whose kingdom, unlike that of Hezekiah, will have no end.

What about the depths of Sheol though? Well, he is to be called 'Jesus', or 'Joshua', the one who led the people through the waters of the Jordan, out of the wilderness and into the land flowing with milk and honey. Let what you have said be done to me, Mary says, and the child is conceived in her body. The offering of the body the child receives from Mary is the sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world: this is what today's second reading teaches.

The natural and ordinary is under constant threat from the depths of Sheol. All that is, and lives, and seeks to love, is pulled down by a void of nothingness from which it has come, by the fascination of evil which distorts its desire, by a kind of gravity towards death which brings disintegration, disharmony, and utter darkness.

So the body cannot remain peaceful and serene, natural and ordinary. As he grows in strength and wisdom, so too forces of evil gather against him and the kingdom that has no end is established through a battle that pits the heights above against the depths of Sheol. Asked whether he thought Vatican Two's document on the church in the world should be more optimistic or more pessimistic Cardinal Jean Daniélou replied 'both'.

We are unlikely to overestimate the power of darkness - part of its power is precisely to turn us the other way, to underestimate its power (except when we see it working dramatically in others), even to forget it as applying to ourselves. But we can never overestimate the power coming from above, the power of the Spirit that overshadowed Mary, the power of the holy king who is called Son of God, the power of the Father, infinite and eternal, wise and good.

The battle is engaged in the body Jesus received from his mother. All who are incorporated into that body draw close to this battle, Mary in the first place in the sufferings she endured, all who make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, the Church which is his body and which itself at times seems close to disintegration, disharmony, utter darkness.

We may not have asked for a sign, perhaps for fear of tempting the Lord our God. But we have been given one not in the ordinary and naturally beautiful body of the child recently born but in the body hanging on the cross, a body which Mary allowed to come about ('let what you have said be done'), a body that remains a sign of contradiction, revealing the depths of the world's sin but from whose defeated side flows the life of that kingdom that is without end, the everlasting kingdom of justice, love and peace.

You can listen to this homily here

Lent Week 5 Tuesday

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 102; John 8:21-30

The birth we are witnessing has many consequences. One of them is new life - eternal life - for those who come to believe in Christ, those who come to believe that he is, as he says twice in this gospel passage, the 'I am'. He is the Lord, the presence of God, the one who reveals the Father to the world.

The salvation of humanity and the healing of the world: these are consequences of this birth whose labour pains are steadily stronger as we move through the fifth week of Lent. And these things come about alongside another consequence of infinite significance: we are given a new understanding of God. The One Jesus refers to as 'the Father' is made known to us and we glimpse what he is like.

The contrast between two pictures of God in today's readings brings this out very clearly. In the Book of Numbers God is vindictive and punishing, a 'big man' whose patience is limited, who speaks the language of sin and punishment, who is trapped, it seems, within the same recurring dynamic as the people. If they are ungrateful and complaining then he will punish them and this time he does so by sending deadly snakes among them.

We will, of course, sympathise with the people who are trying to understand God's way of working in their lives. God continues to act like an unsteady 'big man' who is at times sentimental about his people and at times angry with them. Here, when they show signs of repentance also, he immediately repents of the evil he is doing them: they kiss and make up and the story continues.

Jesus also associates sin and death. He speaks of people dying because of sin, or rather of people dying in their sins. But he does not say that the Father is out to kill them. Sin brings death with it. Sin is itself a kind of death. Who will rescue us from this body of death?, Saint Paul cries. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The bronze serpent, by a kind of sympathetic magic, cures people who have been bitten by the real serpents. Jesus lifted up on the cross is a kind of bronze serpent taking into himself all the power of sin and evil and death, so that whoever comes to believe belongs with him where he is in the company of the Father. Believing in the Son of Man lifted up is the equivalent of looking at the bronze serpent.

Jesus is also pleading with us to understand what the Father is like, that he is not the primitive god of tribal religions anymore than he is a lifeless idol. He is the one who sent Jesus and that already tells us much about him. He is the one who sent Jesus not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him.

Our ego will have us focusing on the consequences for us of this birth. But the more important consequences are simply the revelation of the Father (what God is like: the only Son alone can teach us this) and the revelation of the union between the Father and the Son (I do nothing on my own, I say only what the Father taught me, he is with me, and I always do what pleases him).

Let us try to forget ourselves and to think only in the second place of the consequences for us of this birth into which Jesus is entering. Let us try instead to keep our minds and hearts fixed on him, the loving servant, the beloved son, the one who is teaching us that the life of God is love, the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Just as sin is already a kind of death, so seeing this divine mystery is already eternal life. 'This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent' (John 17:3).

It is no longer simply the case that God beholds the earth from his heaven. Now he leads us in our journey from this world into the kingdom of eternal love. It is a journey that will take him to Gethsemane and to Golgotha before it takes him to Easter and Pentecost.

Lent Week 5 Monday

Readings: Daniel 13:1-9, 15-17, 19-30, 33-62 or 13:41c-62; Psalm 23; John 8:1-11

It is a fair attempt at ensuring due process and a fair trial, to insist, as the law of Moses did, on the testimony of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15-21). It was an effort an ensuring that there could not be miscarriages of justice. Of course conspiracies to frame people and have them unjustly tried were always possible as long as people were prepared to get together to bear false witness. It was one of the major commandments of the law, and is one of the essential structures of any just society, that people not bear false witness but speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

We know from experience that no system of justice is perfect and that no combination of human beings involved in administering a system of justice will do so perfectly. It is one of the strongest arguments against capital punishment: no matter how good the system of justice might be, it is always administered by human beings and therefore liable to distortion and corruption. In the case of capital punishment there is no going back.

In the final days of Lent we are presented with figures who are unjustly treated even when the system of justice is being followed correctly. Susanna is one such figure and we hear about her in today's long but dramatic first reading. From the early days of the Church she has been a 'type of Christ', foreshadowing in her experience what was to happen to Jesus later on. It requires divine intervention, working through Daniel, to illuminate the truth of the situation. Here the testimony of two corrupt witnesses will be enough to condemn Susanna unless the Lord intervenes to ensure that a higher justice - the justice of truth rather than simply that of evidence - triumphs in her case.

In the final days of Jesus' life there is much focus on the justice of the trial he received. It was easy for the authorities who wanted to destroy him to find someone in his circle to betray him and it was easy for them to find others to testify against him. When false witnesses arise and speak against him they report his words but fail to see the true meaning of those words. 'He said he would destroy the Temple and raise it in three days'. 'He is telling us not to pay tribute to Caesar and that he himself is a king.' They are confused, Mark's gospel tells us, and understandably so since Jesus is trying to lead people beyond their normal categories of thought, expectation and understanding.

Who are to be the witnesses that will vindicate Him? In the passages from John's gospel which we read these days there is much about this question. We see the kind of non-judgmental judge Jesus is - his treatment of the woman taken in adultery is simply the most powerful moment in that revelation. But what of Jesus himself? Who will bear witness to Him? Who can vindicate the justice of His cause? Who will confirm the truth of His teaching?

It can only be the Father, says Jesus, He is the one who vindicates me, who bears witness to me, who confirms the truth of what I am saying. The Father knows where I come from and where I am going, Jesus says, because it is He who sent me. So the requirement of the Law, that there be the testimony of two witnesses, is fulfilled: the Father and Jesus can bear witness to who he is, to his origin and to his mission. But we might well sympathise with the confusion of the witnesses, even with disciples struggling to understand, if the logic of Jesus's argument in today's gospel reading is not immediately clear.

We need more light if we are to have any hope of understanding what Jesus is saying here. We believe that light has been given in the events we celebrate in the coming days. For the moment at least this much is clear: Jesus moves forward on the strength of his relationship with the Father. If everything else falls away, as eventually everything else will fall away, this will stand. He is sure of the Father's presence and certain too that, when the hour comes, the Father will bear witness to the Son in ways that only the creating power of God can as yet imagine.

Lent Week 5 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Ezekiel 37:12-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:8-11; John 11:1-45

In the Franciscan church at Arezzo is the wonderful cycle of frescoes by Piero della Francesca illustrating the legend of the True Cross. A part of that legend is that the cross of Jesus was erected in the same place in which Adam, the first man, had been buried. One of the scenes represented in the frescoes is the death of Adam, a powerfully poignant painting. Standing around the dying man are the members of his family including Eve, his partner from the beginning. They keep vigil, as all families do sooner or later, watching over the one who is dying and giving full attention to what he is going through and to what he might say before he finally leaves them.

The difference here is that this is the first natural death of a human being. Abel had been murdered by Cain but that was something different. In watching the dying of Adam his family are witnessing for the first time the full consequences of sin, the end of human life as we know it. Faced with death, which is both natural for an animal of our kind and unnatural for a being with the capacities that we have, Adam's family are the first to be dismayed, puzzled and resigned to this most inevitable of events. They pave the way for all human beings who have followed after them and who have faced the same questions: death is so final and so undeniable but what is it?

We know that death means the end of life, of experience, of possibilities, of communication, of presence. Sometimes the suffering that has preceded it has been so deep and intense that the coming of death is a 'happy release'. In such circumstances we are more conscious of the end of suffering than of any other aspect of it. Often though death has a tragic character. It comes too soon, it comes too painfully, it is no respecter of persons, it cuts through all commitments, relationships and obligations, it removes people abruptly leaving no time for farewells, it devastates families and lovers, parents and children, friends and admirers. It leaves the aching heart, the empty place, a sense of loss without hope of replenishment, a merciless silence.

Gathered at the tomb of Lazarus is another family and another group of friends. The chief mourners are Martha and Mary, sisters of the dead man. Friends arrive, including Jesus of Nazareth, but he comes too late. 'If you had been here', Martha says to him, Lazarus would not have died. Jesus could have healed him and preserved him from death. Instead a greater sign is to be given, not the healing of a man from sickness but the restoration of a man to life.

Paul describes Jesus as the Second Adam or the Last Adam, and here he performs a sign which shows that the work he has come to do is the most radical possible, a work that complements and transcends what the First Adam had brought about. The way the world has been structured up to now, in particular the relationship between sin and death, this is to be all undone. The way in which God's original intention had been disturbed is to be overcome and a new reality, a new life, a new creation are to be inaugurated.

Jesus is fully present in the human experience of that death which is a consequence of sin. He becomes visibly upset and weeps for his friend Lazarus. And he calls him forth from the tomb, tells the mourners to release him from the tight shroud, and to let him live freely again.

Love follows death. It stays with those who have died and continues to hold them even while their bodies are corrupting in the earth. Combined with faith, love now grounds a remarkable hope, reaching beyond death, reaching up to the Lord of Life. What happened to Lazarus is not yet resurrection, only a sign of what was to happen in the tomb of Jesus.

Lazarus is restored to life, not resurrected to the new life. He is unbound, set free and given back to his people. In the raising of Lazarus death is conquered, momentarily. But in the resurrection of Jesus death is conquered definitively. There will then be no earthly body emerging from the tomb, there will be only the empty tomb. There will then be no resuscitated person needing help to be unbound and to live again, for the grave clothes will be cast aside and the appearance of the new body will be glorious. There will then be no return to life as it was before, for the new heavens and the new earth will have begun to be created.

Lazarus was not the resurrection but bears witness to the resurrection. Jesus is the resurrection, and the life, and everyone who believes in him will not die but will have eternal life. Love follows death and continues to hold the dead one. When the lovers involved are the Eternal Father and his Only Son then the Father, following Him into death, does not allow his body to see corruption but raises him from the dead, not to live again this natural life with its merciless structures of sin and death but to live in the glory of the resurrected life, in the new creation breathed into existence by the Holy Spirit.

From Piero della Francesca's fresco of the death of Adam in Arezzo we can soon turn to contemplate his more famous painting of the resurrection of Jesus in San Sepolcro, a painting complementary to that in Arezzo but so much more powerful, so much more devastating, for it means the end of this world and the beginning of a new creation.

Lent Week 4 Saturday

Readings: Jeremiah 11:18-20; Psalm 7; John 7:40-53

We are well into the second part of Lent. We have left far behind our concern with ourselves and with our efforts at repentance. The concern now is Jesus and the growing opposition to him. The first readings tell us of innocent people unjustly persecuted – Joseph, Jeremiah, Susanna, the just man of Wisdom 2 – while the readings from Saint John's gospel show how the pressure is mounting on the leaders of the people as the questioning about the identity of Jesus grows more intense.

Today’s gospel reading ends strangely: ‘then each went to his own house’. It seems like an insignificant detail, as if it were to say ‘then they went home for their supper’. There is a contrast between the ordinariness of this return home and the significance of what they had been talking and arguing about.

One of the main questions for now is this: ‘where is Jesus’ home?’ Some prophecies said he would come from Bethlehem while others seemed to indicate that he would be a Nazarene. The gospels give reasons for believing that he comes from each of those places, Bethlehem the home in which he was born, Nazareth the home in which he grew up.

But there is a growing contrast between these ordinary senses of ‘home’ – the comfort of knowing where people come from gives us the comfort of knowing something of their identity – and a sense that the true origins of Jesus are mysterious. They are mysterious not just in the sense that historical scholarship will fail to prove things one way or the other. They are mysterious in a much more profound and transcendent sense. The true home of Jesus is the one he shares with the Eternal Father. The true origin of Jesus is his being sent from the Father. When St John says that ‘each went to his own house’ it means in the case of Jesus that he went to the Father. For the moment he does this in prayer and prayer permeates his life: he is always in the presence of his Father. As the story unfolds he will return home to the Father in the mystery of his death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus is more and more a stranger whom the people and their leaders try to pin down, to find out whether or not he is the messiah, whether he is the prophet who was to come. Jesus simply gets on with his work, which is to open the doors of his home to all who will become his disciples. We are being prepared for further instruction about the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity in the hearts of believers. If we keep his commandments and live according to his way of love, then God will dwell in us and with us. God will share His home with us, so that where the Son is, when he goes home at the end of His day, we will be there also to share the glory that was His before the world was made.

Lent Week 4 Friday

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From her work with very young children, Melanie Klein concluded that envy is a basic and perennial aspect of human experience. In her account of things, envy becomes the ‘original sin’ of humanity, a negative reaction to the source of good when it is being good towards me. It is a kind of resentment that the source of good is so good. The generosity of ‘the good breast’ is experienced as a kind of power over me which obliges me to be grateful and causes me to feel humiliated.

The first reading of today’s Mass is a powerful description of the effects of envy. The good person, simply by being good, is experienced as passing some kind of judgement on my way of living. Klein spoke of envy driving people into what she called the paranoid-schizoid position and we see these things described also in the first reading. The other person’s holiness is experienced as a threat to me even when that holiness places itself at my service. ‘Even to see him is a hardship for us’. We can presume that the just one is not making the judgements that the wicked attribute to him but their paranoia projects these judgements on to him. ‘In their thoughts they erred’: the deadly sins originate always in fantasies, thoughts that we find rising up within us without our having put them there. Of all these deadly thoughts, envy is one of the most insidious.

Envy hates to see others happy, or good, or holy. It experiences the happiness, goodness and holiness of others as some kind of deprivation. Thomas Aquinas describes it as a kind of sadness which results from feeling that God’s gifts to another person somehow take away from my worth and excellence. In this it is, of course, a kind of madness, but then all the deadly sins are forms of madness. Envy prevents me admiring and respecting others. I will feel obliged to pull them down in some way, to attribute wicked motives to them, to undermine the reputation they have for goodness.

Envy cannot bear to be grateful which is why it resents the source of good not only when it is being good to others but even when it is being good to myself. To be grateful is to acknowledge dependence and this is something envy cannot bear, it feels like a loss of self. At its worst envy becomes violent and physically destructive. The sense of humiliation and resentment that accompanies it makes it feel justified in trying to destroy the good one whom it feels has brought about this terrible feeling of denigration, dependence and even annihilation in itself. So Jesus becomes the victim of envy, the motivations of his eventual destruction at the hands of men following exactly this analysis of envy and what it leads to.

To ‘begrudge a brother his grace’ is one way of describing what arises from envy. Not only does the envious person feel that God's gifts to others are a threat to him, he also envies the Holy Spirit who is the source of grace. We see clearly the kind of madness it is, not only to resent God’s gifts to others as if this were some kind of slight in my regard, but to envy the generosity of the Spirit, the abundant kindness of God’s good breast.

Envy would prefer that all should be equally unhappy and is the most debilitating of sins. It seeks to pull everybody down to the same level of misery. After it has done its worst to others it becomes self-consuming and self-destructive. In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer says that envy is the worst sin – all other sins are only against one virtue whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.

For Thomas Aquinas the cure for envy is charity. We see how powerful a vice envy is: only the most powerful of the virtues can dissolve its power. Loving others enables us to enjoy, rather than envy, their achievements and blessings. The gifts of God to those I love I will experience as gifts in which I share. It is essential that we understand the roots of envy in us, that we understand its madness, and that we grow in the virtue of charity, which alone conquers the violence and destruction wrought by envy.

The kindergarten, Melanie Klein's 'laboratory', is a place full of sweet and innocent children. It is also a place where envy first raises its ugly head and begins to distort and destroy any possibility of communion and friendship. Our hope depends on the One who, destroyed by our envy, is raised to a new life. This new life means even more abundant kindness and blessing for the world, along with the capacity to rejoice in, rather than to resent, the love that is beyond all envy.