Lent Week 5 Saturday

Readings: Ezekiel 37:21-28; Psalm: Jeremiah 31:10-13; John 11:45-56

The reading from Ezekiel summarises the ways in which the people of Israel knew that the Lord was still with them, that he was still on their side. He had given them a land and now, after the exile, they were to be restored to it. He had taken them from among the nations to make them one people and now he would do this again. He had given them laws and statutes that would guarantee their fidelity to the covenant. He would give them a leader, a new David who would be both prince and shepherd. He would dwell with them in a sanctuary, in a new temple, in which His glory would once again be present.

These gifts - the land, being a nation, laws and statutes, a leader, a sanctuary - made real the covenant whereby Israel was God's people and the Lord was Israel's God. It was in these gifts that the shared life of the covenant was to be seen.

The Jewish leaders feared that Jesus was a threat to all this. They feared that the Romans would come and take away their land and destroy their nation. They feared another fall of Jerusalem, another loss of everything, a new exile. And for reasons that remain unclear they feared that the teaching of Jesus would provoke it. 'Better', prophesied the high priest Caiaphas, 'that one man die for the people rather than the whole nation be lost'.

Paradoxically, Caiaphas gave believers in Jesus one of the most powerful statements of the meaning of his death: he died for the nation and to gather into one the scattered children of God. He died for all, in other words. Paradoxically also, it was precisely through this death that the promises treasured by Ezekiel and the other prophets were brought to fulfillment.

On one level it might seem that the fears of Caiaphas and others were justified: soon after the Temple was destroyed, the land was lost, and the nation was scattered. But before that, and separate from it, a new land was established which was no longer geographical but spiritual (for a worship of God in spirit and in truth). A new sanctuary was set up which was no longer a building but the body of Jesus from which saving waters flowed. A new nation was born which is the Church, made up of Jews (the first nation) and the Gentiles (the scattered children of God). A new leader rose up who is both prince and shepherd. The everlasting covenant of peace was sealed in his blood. A new law was given which did not dissolve the old one but which brought it to perfection, its demands (the great commandment) being written directly on the human heart.

'I will be their God and they will be my people'. This communion, this shared life, was always the goal of the covenant. Through many vicissitudes, through trials and errors, through triumphs and losses, through times of fidelity and times of apostasy - the desire persisted for a definitive sealing of this covenant.

'Will he come to the Passover feast?' is the question with which today's gospel reading ends. Will the Lamb be present for the feast? How could they have known that this ancient ritual, and the covenant it remembered, were to be fulfilled and transformed beyond anybody's imagination? So that now, in these coming days, two thousand years later, millions of people all over the world will read about the land and the temple, about the law and the nation, about the sacrifices and the promises, and they will see these things as promised also to them.

The promise remains valid and is now true at all times for all men and women: 'I will turn their mourning into joy, I will console and gladden them after their sorrows'.

Lent Week 5 Friday

Readings: Jeremiah 20:10-13; Psalm 18; John 10:31-42

We return to the comparison between the experience of Jeremiah and that of Jesus. We heard about it some days ago and here it is again. There are many similarities but there are also some striking differences. They are both preachers of the Word of God. They both seek to serve the cause of truth and justice. They are both betrayed or abandoned by friends, and left alone to suffer persecution from their enemies.

One striking difference is this: whereas the Lord fights as a mighty champion alongside Jeremiah, the Lord fights as a mighty champion in Jesus. Believe the works, Jesus says in today's gospel, so that you may realize and understand 'that the Father is in me and I am in the Father'. 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself', St Paul will say later. A second striking difference, presumably following on from the first, is that Jeremiah's understandable cry for vengeance is not repeated on the lips of Jesus. 'Let me witness the vengeance you take on them', prays Jeremiah. It is a very understandable prayer. Pope Francis said that someone who laid a hand on his mother could expect a punch from him.

The way in which the divine power works in Jesus is different. It is not a simple moralistic correction of the understandable reactions of Jeremiah and Francis. It is not simply saying, in the words of Jesus, if you suffer oppression, persecution, and violence, instead of giving the perpetrator a punch, try to 'turn the other cheek'. It is saying that vengeance as exercised by God - whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts - will take a radically different form to vengeance as exercised by human beings. Through the works of Jesus, everything is being taken up into a new dispensation in which all human relationships will be transformed.

'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do'. This will be Jesus' prayer concerning his persecutors, his only remark about them from the cross. It gives us a glimpse, not of divine weakness in the face of human violence, but of the divine power when confronted with human violence. Because God is love, and His characteristic action is to create, the vengeance of God, like any other of God's actions, must have those characteristics - it can only be loving and creative. And so it will be that God will take vengeance on his enemies who have killed his Son by raising his Son from the dead, establishing for all men and women, even for those enemies who kill him, a kingdom of peace, justice, reconciliation and love. Imagine a world in which reconciliation becomes possible, forgiveness becomes natural, and new beginnings take the place of endless retribution.

'Many began to believe in him' is how today's gospel reading concludes. It is a start and if we can even say this much - I have begun to believe in him - we are doing well. We are on the right road. Through faith in him the Spirit of Jesus comes to dwell also in us, not just to struggle alongside us but to work within us, praying in us when we do not know how to pray, pouring the love of God into our hearts, making us to be 'gods', creatures participating in the divine nature.

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.

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.

Lent Week 4 Wednesday

Readings: Isaiah 49:8-15; Psalm 144; John 5:17-30

Christ is our judge, appointed to this office by the Father who has seated him at his right hand. What do we hear in the sentence 'Christ is our judge'? It may be that the word 'judge' stands out, making us fearful. Contemporary culture encourages the non-judgemental which strengthens what seems like a natural anxiety about our lives, our work, or our actions being judged.

It is, however, part of the wonderful good news that Christ is our judge. The word in the sentence that stood out for the first Christian believers was the word 'Christ' and not the word 'judge'. What a blessed relief it is, and what a gift, that the judge of our lives, our work, and our actions, is Jesus Christ. Nobody else, in the end. Of course we are all the time judging others and being judged by them. But the import of this gospel is that in the end, fundamentally, and most radically, we are judged by Christ, and by him alone.

There is even more, since for those who believe in him there will be a judgement without judgement - 'without being brought to judgement they pass from death to life' (John 5:24). Those who believe in him know the truth and there is no need for a further moment in which the relationship between their lives and the truth needs to be pointed out. In seeing the truth, those who believe see the distance between themselves and truth. They see their lives, their work, and their actions, in the light of truth, at once perfectly just and infinitely compassionate - and so they are judged without being judged.

Two great representations of the Last Judgement illustrate the point. The best known Last Judgement scene is that of Michelangelo, in the Sistine Chapel. A huge, brooding Christ comes to separate sheep and goats, just and unjust, and his presence is formidable and terrifying. The fact that this has become the best known Last Judgement scene serves to confirm that we know more about fear than we do about love.

A less well-known Last Judgement, whose theology is much sounder than Michelangelo's, is that of Fra Angelico in the priory of San Marco in Florence. There is the same separation of sheep and goats, of just and unjust, but Christ is not terrifying. He is gentle, and beautiful, and all he does is show his wounds. Those who believe in him do not need any further evaluation or criterion for assessing their lives, work, and actions. They are judged by the truth of his loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection and in the light of that truth can judge themselves: they see what is the case.

The saintly person knows that he falls seven times a day. Those of us whose consciences have become less sharp are not equipped to see the true state of our lives, work, and actions. Then judgement is needed, we need help, that things be pointed out and made clear for us. Jesus says further on in Saint John's gospel, 'the word that I have spoken will be (your) judge on the last day', the Word from the Father that is truth (John 12:48; 17:17).

Lent Week 4 Tuesday

Readings: Ezekiel 47:1-9,12; Psalm 45; John 5:1-3,5-16

There is a wonderful hospitality in Jesus' question, 'do you want to be well again?' It can seem a bit strange: surely the answer is obvious. But Jesus does not presume. As well as his hospitality there is his obedience in the literal sense of the term: his listening, the way he provides a space in which the other person can speak and be heard. It is at the heart of all loving, that we allow the other to be, to speak, to tell us what it is they want, to listen to what they want to say and not just hear what we think they want to say.

It makes Jesus' comment towards the end even more perplexing: 'be sure not to sin any more, or something worse may happen to you'. Worse than what, we might wonder. Worse than being ill for thirty eight years? But surely Jesus himself has been fighting hard against this connection of sin and suffering, has been trying to break that link. In Chapter 9 of St John's gospel we will find him resisting the idea very strongly, in the case of the man born blind.

'Something worse' can only mean spiritual paralysis, worse than the physical disability from which he had suffered. It brings this story close to that of the paralysed man let down through the roof to whom Jesus says 'your sins are forgiven'. Which is more difficult, to say your sins are forgiven or to say arise and walk? To forgive sins must be the more difficult, the healing of humanity at that radical level where desire is confused, understanding is clouded, and the will is distorted.

But this is the healing promised by the paschal mystery. All who have entered the waters of baptism (the Sheep Pool) are made new, born again, set right, made able to walk in the way of Jesus. He is never sentimental and always truthful. The sick man is brought into the light of that truth. He is healed but he must continue now to walk in the same light. And so the man becomes an apostle, telling them that it was Jesus who had cured him.

Lent Week 4 Monday

Readings: Isaiah 65:17-21; Psalm 29; John 4:43-54

Here we are told that Jesus is going down well with the Galileans. Perhaps it was only in his home town of Nazareth that he was not welcomed. But a mis-match continues between people's expectations and desires on the one hand, and the teaching and call of Jesus on the other. We find it here again. The man's request seems innocent and straightforward: his son is ill and he would like him to be healed. It is now Jesus who seems to get it wrong: 'so you will not believe unless you see signs and portents'. We can imagine the poor man saying, 'well no, actually, I just want my son to be well again'.

But Jesus receives the expression of any desire - for healing, for teaching, for more wine - as a desire for faith and seeks to lead all who approach him to the deeper level of faith. So it is with the disciples, the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, Martha and Mary, even his mother Mary. God's gift is not simply the meeting of our need. Faith is a gift that opens us beyond our need to the reality and truth of God.

So all gifts of God also have the character of 'signs and portents' because they always point beyond themselves to God who is infinite and eternal. God is not just 'our size'. He has become our size - the Word was made flesh - in order that we might grow beyond our immediate needs and basic desires. The theological virtues of faith, hope and love open us up in this way. These are the capacities or virtues of the new creature, the one who is being transformed by God's grace, the one who is being divinised.

So the court official receives the gift of his son's healing but he - and all his household - also receive the gift of faith in Jesus. From now on the liturgies of Lent focus more and more on the coming paschal mystery through which Christ not only fulfills the thirst of creation but reveals the thirst of God for creation. The fulfillment of that divine thirst is the new creation established in the Resurrection, a new heavens and a new earth, a city that is 'Joy' and a people that is 'Gladness', things beyond what the human heart can imagine, what God has prepared for those who love him.

Lent Week 4 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

John 9 is masterly in showing how those who cannot see are led to ever clearer sight and those who think they can see become uncertain, confused and eventually blind. The central characters are Jesus and the man who was born blind. The blind man’s journey takes him from darkness to light. He comes to see not just the things around him, which he had not seen before, but the reality of Jesus.  At first he refers to him simply as ‘the man called Jesus’. Under pressure from the Pharisees he comes to see further: ‘he is a prophet’. Further pressure leads to him saying ‘if this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything’. Finally, meeting Jesus now as one who can see, the man is asked whether he believes in the Son of Man. ‘Who is he that I may believe in him’, he asks. Just as he revealed himself to the woman of Samaria so now Jesus says ‘You have seen him, the one speaking to you is he’. And the man believes, and worships, ‘I do believe, Lord’.

The people wonder whether it is the same man or not. Their confidence in the testimony of their own eyes is shaken. It looks like the man who was born blind, and some are certain it is he, but others are not so sure: ‘it only looks like him’. Appearances and reality become confused, and people’s confidence in the testimony of their eyes is weakened.

But the parents and their son speak confidently of what they know without exaggeration and without ambiguity. They seem to be holy people rather than sinners, since they are simply honest and are not moved by the intimidation of the powerful. The parents of the man born blind are involved from the beginning, referred to in the opening question of the disciples: ‘who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ This confident way of seeing the world, to which both disciples and Pharisees subscribe, is immediately and decisively rejected by Jesus. This is not at all how he sees things: the man’s blindness, far from being evidence of somebody’s sin, is rather for the sake of making visible the wonders of God.

Like their son, the parents answer simply and honestly about what they know to be certain. They are not prepared to get into theological arguments with the Pharisees but simply speak what they know, what the witness of their own eyes tells them, and they do not lose confidence in that. ‘He is old enough, ask him’, they say. The blind man likewise is not disposed to speculation (which is a kind of imaginary seeing) but stays simply with what he knows to be true. It makes the witness of his faith at the end all the more compelling: here is a man prepared to speak only what he is certain to be true and he has come to believe in Jesus as the Son of Man.

The Pharisees begin with supreme confidence in how they see the world. For them it is obvious that somebody has sinned here, either the man or his parents, and this explains his blindness. His healing by Jesus disturbs their world. Once again he has acted on the Sabbath, but that is only the beginning. They try to force the man, and then his parents, to confirm that the Pharisees’ way of seeing things is correct and that what is going on must be from the evil one rather than from God. The man and his parents resist this pressure as we have seen: a simple and straightforward ‘whatever about all that (theological speculation), what we know is this …’

The Pharisees stand on their authority to teach and interpret the law and so cannot receive the man’s testimony. They must squeeze his experience into their way of seeing and cannot allow what has happened to illuminate the world in a new way. They persist in thinking they are the ones who see correctly and that the man, his parents, Jesus, the disciples – these are all getting it wrong, colluding in sinful activity rather than making visible the wonderful works of God.

But the transformation in their case is as complete as the transformation of the man born blind. He was blind and now he can see. They thought they could see, persist in their belief, and so are blind in a way that is more difficult to heal. The whole story is rounded off by Jesus directly contradicting the premise with which it began: ‘if you were blind you would have no sin’, he says to them, but because you persist in saying ‘we see’, your sin remains.

So what position do we take up in all this? Are we among those confident of their own way of seeing the world to the point of being closed to any new revelation or illumination? Have we identified ourselves so completely with our way of seeing things that it would require a miracle to shift us to something broader, wider, and deeper? In the presence of Jesus, the light of the world, are we among those who reach out for his help in order to see, or do we prefer to stand like bats in the sunlight, relying on our familiar way of seeing, unaware that we are still dealing only with shadows, images, vain speculations?

Lent Week 3 Saturday

Readings: Hosea 6:1-6; Psalm 51; Luke 18:9-14

A friend told me about a teacher who, in explaining the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, was horrified to hear herself saying to the children in her class,  'so let us thank God that we are not like the Pharisee'. This is the wonderful trap set by this parable. We cannot imagine the publican returning home, kicking the air in delight, and saying to himself (and perhaps to others), 'I did it. I made it. I am not like the Pharisee.' So we need to be very careful in reading this story and thinking about it.

There is a prayer that reaches heaven and there is a way of praying which, it seems, does not reach heaven. It sets obstacles to its own success. We are told that the Pharisee said his prayer 'to himself'. His prayer involves a kind of mathematics which he believes ought to justify him in the sight of God. In fact he does more than he is strictly obliged to do and so ought to be really safe and sound. It is essential to his mathematics that he should compare himself with others: this is how mathematics works, with proportions, sizes, comparisons.

But prayer does not work this way. The publican, or tax-collector, does not pray to himself, he prays to God. He is unable to raise his eyes to heaven, but his prayer is in the right direction. He is not comparing himself with others, he looks just at himself and at God, and he sees all he needs to see in that comparison. He stands in a kind of solitude before God and sees his poverty in the light of that solitude. There is a long tradition in the Bible of recognising this kind of prayer as the one that is truly effective, the prayer of the humble person, the one who is broken hearted, the person who is truly contrite for their sins. This is the prayer that pierces the clouds and reaches the throne of grace.

There is no time now to compare oneself with others, the matter is too urgent, too critical, and comparisons with others have become a luxury. If life is a contest, a struggle or 'agonia', then it is not against others that we must struggle but only with ourselves. And also with God. Prayer is the only weapon we have for the struggle with ourselves and with God, the struggle to live in the truth. George Herbert in his wonderful poem about prayer speaks of its power. It is, he says, 'Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, / Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear'. The prayer of the humble person pierces the clouds and reaches the throne of grace.

At this point in Lent we should, by God's grace, have found our way to this kind of praying. The sacrament of penance is a gift of Christ to the Church which allows us to confess God's mercy, to seal our repentance, and to return home justified. But that justification is not on the basis of our own performance: it is completely God's mercy and something that is ours on the basis of our hope in God.

Lent Week 3 Friday

Readings: Hosea 14:2-10; Psalm 81; Mark 12:28-34

‘Take with you words’, the Lord says through the prophet Hosea. ‘Prepare a speech’ is another translation of the phrase. Like somebody trying to figure out the best words for a difficult meeting with another person, we are to think hard and decide on the best thing to say. ‘You have collapsed through your guilt’, the prophet says, which will make the people feel powerless and probably speechless. If it is so – and it is so, very often – what words can ever be adequate to bring with us into God’s presence?

And yet a simple effort at repentance, acknowledging their helplessness, immediately wins the Lord’s renewed attention and His renewed care. ‘I have humbled him but I will prosper him’. This in response to words that are ordinary, honest, and not dramatic. It means that any turning back towards the Lord immediately wins his forgiveness. Once again the father in the story of the Prodigal Son comes to mind, watching out for the first sign of the son’s return, ready to rush out to welcome him back.

We now say each day at Mass ‘say but the word and my soul shall be healed’. What word is it that will immediately heal the soul? One candidate is, clearly, the Word of God Himself, the Word incarnate in Jesus. Is this the word uttered by the Father and which effects the healing of our souls? Yes has to be the answer: Jesus is the one who saves us from our sins. It might also be the word ‘love’ or ‘come to me’ or ‘do not fear’ or ‘your sins are forgiven’ or ‘I will, be healed’. All of these simple words effect great things in the gospels: all that is needed on our side is the acknowledgment of our need and the request for help (however fumbling our words).

This faltering conversation between God who speaks a word to us and we finding words with which to come to him means we are ‘not far from the kingdom of God’. As long as the exchange continues we are in the right place. The temptation is to give up on the exchange, to stop the conversation, and then we are really lost. Pope Francis says that we tire of asking for forgiveness long before God tires of showing mercy. In fact God is tireless – infinite – in showing mercy. It encourages us to continue the Lenten journey, to continue trying to find words even when we know that what really counts is the word that comes from God. ‘Say but the word and my soul shall be healed’.  Or (Hosea puts these words too on God’s lips) ‘because of me you bear fruit’.

Lent Week 3 Thursday

Readings: Jeremiah 7:23-28; Psalm 94; Luke 11:14-23

The best known 'finger of God' is the one painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Across the gap between the tip of God's finger and the tip of Adam's finger the mysterious energy of creation is transmitted. The phrase has also become part of the hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus as a title for the Holy Spirit who is dextrae Dei digitus, the finger of God's right hand.

The image is not used very often in the Bible but whenever it is, it is in relation to the most significant things. In the Book of Exodus, the magicians of Pharaoh describe the power working through Aaron as the finger of God (Exodus 8:19). The law or wisdom of God was inscribed by the finger of God on the tablets of stone given to Moses (Exodus 31:18). Psalm 8 celebrates God's power as Creator: 'when I see the heavens, the work of your fingers'. 

So in creation, in the giving of the Law, in mysterious events, in the casting out of demons, the 'finger of God' means the power of God is at work.

There are two other references, less clear but each of them intriguing. At Belshazzar's feast, as recounted in Daniel 5, the writing on the wall is done by the fingers of a human hand. But it is another divine intervention, a revelation of God's providence for the people concerned. In John 8 Jesus wrote on the ground with his finger in the presence of the woman taken in adultery. Nobody knows what he wrote or what the gesture meant but presumably something to do with God's providence in relation to the woman and to her accusers.

So an ordinary thing, the finger, applied to God as an image, is used rarely in the Scriptures but always in contexts of great significance: creation, revelation, covenant, providence. As a result it finds its way into one of the great hymns of the liturgy and onto the ceiling of Christianity's most famous chapel.

Lent Week 3 Wednesday

Readings: Deuteronomy 4:1, 5-9; Ps 147; Matthew 5:17-19

The 'end', or 'purpose', of the Law is that the holiness of God be revealed, and that a people living according to that law might be brought into communion - a sharing of life and love - with God who is holy. What does the word 'holy' mean? We know it means infinitely just and loving, and we know this from Christ who is the fulness of the Law.

The verses of Matthew read today are said to be the most controverisal in that gospel. If we have a narrow understanding of law and of what the term refers to here, then these verses are very difficult to reconcile with, for example, some of Paul's statements about the Law. But if the term 'law' is understood more profoundly, as it is for example in Baruch or in Psalm 119/118, then it refers to God's wisdom, God's word, God's way for His people. We know where that way, that truth, and that life, are revealed fully. It is he, Jesus, who is the fulness of the Law, he is the one who keeps it to the letter, because he is himself the Word (= wisdom; = law).

Two words in the gospel support this interpretation. Jesus says he has come not to abolish but to complete or fulfill the Law, to bring it to its pleroma. He is the pleroma, the fulness of time and the fulness of things, and God's wisdom, word and way are all complete in him.

The other phrase is variously translated. Nothing disappears from the law 'until its purpose is achieved', or 'until all things are accomplished'. At this point in Lent we cannot but think of Jesus' 'hour', the fulness of time, when all that has been foretold and all that has been promised will be fulfilled. God's holiness will be revealed as never before, God's heart of justice and love exposed as never before.

The new and eternal covenant sealed in his blood does not replace the old but brings it to its full flourishing. The Lord our God is nearer to us now than when we first believed, is how Paul puts it, the wisdom of God's Word now dwelling in our hearts through the Spirit that has been poured into them.

As we turn the corner of this mid-point of Lent we begin to look away from ourselves and our own spiritual and moral efforts, to look simply at Christ in whom those efforts dissolve on the one hand (come to their end) and in whom they find their destination on the other (fulfill their purpose).

Lent Week 3 Tuesday

Readings: Daniel 3:25, 34-43; Psalm 25; Matthew 18:21-35

Today's parable challenge two pieces of popular wisdom. The first is that a person who has had a particular negative experience will automatically be sympathetic and understanding towards another person having a comparable experience. Much pastoral care and counselling support operates on this basis and it seems reasonable. We expect that those who have experienced a particular loss or anxiety will be better placed to help others undergoing that loss or feeling that anxiety.

But the servant in the gospel parable has no sympathy for the man who owes him money even though his own creditor had just released him from a much greater debt. His action is astonishing to those looking on and it remains astonishing to us, to the point where we may well be unmoved by the torture to which he is subjected at the end. We might even find ourselves rejoicing in that torture and saying ‘well good enough for him’.

And here is the wonderful trap set by this parable, because we then find ourselves behaving as he did. Who is he except a character in a story with a fictional debt, and who are we except real sinners who have been released by God from a real debt, the consequence of our sins. We might imagine the wicked servant turning his head on the rack, looking towards us with bloodshot eyes, and saying ‘so you think you are different from me? Which of you, even though you have been released by God from the debt of your sins, has not sometimes refused to forgive others, has not borne grudges and nursed hurts, has not manoeuvred to get away with things yourself while calling others strictly to account?’

The other piece of popular wisdom challenged by the readings is that human beings make progress by forgiving and forgetting. Once again it seems reasonable, the advice often offered to people who cannot leave behind some sad experience or painful betrayal: ‘try to forgive and forget, you’ve got to move on and not allow this thing to continue to poison your life’. But the scriptures tell us that forgiveness is possible not by forgetting the past but by remembering it, by remembering more about the past, as well as by remembering our present situation and our future destiny. If popular wisdom says ‘forgive and forget’, biblical wisdom, coming to a climax in Christ, says ‘remember and so learn forgiveness’.

The wicked servant’s colleagues are astonished that he could so quickly forget the mercy he had been shown. If you or I find it difficult to forgive somebody, then we can begin here, by remembering the times we have been forgiven. It is not reasonable to expect forgiveness and mercy if you are not prepared to show them. It is absurd to continue to ask mercy of God if you are not prepared to show mercy to others. We need to remember at least that much.

In his prayer which is the first reading today, Azariah, from the heart of the fire, remembers the God of his ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. 'For your name's sake', he says, calling on God also to remember his honour and to remember his covenant. ‘Do this in memory of me’, Jesus says at the last supper. Remember the covenant of the Most High, the new and everlasting covenant, sealed not by a (fictional) heartless servant stretched on the rack, but by the (real) Son of God nailed to the cross. If you want to learn forgiveness remember how the human heart of the Eternal Word was pierced. Remember how that blood dissolved the walls of hostility between people and established peace. It is not a case of forgiving and forgetting. It is a case of remembering, remembering many things, and so learning what forgiveness means.

Those who believe in Jesus are to be ambassadors of forgiveness in the world, and messengers of reconciliation. But forgiveness is not easy to do and the capacity to forgive is not one that is wilfully achieved. No matter how powerful we consider our willpower to be we cannot force ourselves into forgiveness. In the end it is a gift from God as Alexander Pope intimated in his famous comment that ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’. Perhaps forgiving is not strictly speaking something we ‘do’ but something we find ourselves capable of experiencing, a fruit of the Holy Spirit in us, a sign of the life of Christ in us, a participation in the divine nature, a way of relating to others in which we find ourselves (by God’s grace) being compassionate as the Heavenly Father is compassionate.

Lent Week 3 Monday

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-15; Psalm 42; Luke 4:24-30

The idea for this homily was given to me by one of the Dominican cooperator brothers. Formerly called lay brothers, the cooperators are Dominicans called to serve our mission of preaching as solemnly professed lay members of the Order. It is a distinct vocation from that of the Dominican priest although the two vocations are intimately connected. The brothers protect our religious life, remind us that we are not only priests, and in many cases have far more helpful relationships with people than some priests manage to establish. I met with one of our brothers some time ago and in chatting about this and that he opened my eyes to things in today's first reading.

There are 'important' people in the story, some whose names we know, Naaman and Elisha, and some whose titles we know, the King of Aram and the King of Israel. But the action is achieved through crucial interventions by a number of anonymous people - the servant girl who told Naaman's wife about the prophet in Samaria, the messengers who carried the information about the cure from Elisha to Naaman, and the servants who massaged Naaman's ego and tempered his pride by saying 'if the prophet had asked you to do something difficult, would you not have done it?'

The brother speaking with me about this story did not have to spell it out: as well as the well known and public actors in these events there were the 'cooperators', the people whose names are not remembered but without whose service the thing would never have happened. We know that life is like this everywhere. There are people whose names become known and there are others whose lives remain hidden. On the last day there will be amazing revelations as we see not just Mary and the other saints already recognised by the Church but a huge band of anonymous people whose prayer and love for others, heroic and extraordinarily generous, will be made known to the whole Church.

In the meantime it is salutary for us to recall the 'cooperators' who have helped us in all kinds of ways in the course of our lives, to remember them with gratitude and thank God for their help, to pray for them and to them, that they might continue to help us on our journey towards God.

Lent Week 3 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Exodus 17:3-7; Psalm 95: Romans 5:1-2, 5-8; John 4:5-42

Pope Paul VI described Jesus as the great evangelizer. We can regard his encounter with the Samaritan woman as a lesson, from the Master, in 'evangelizing'. What do we find?

They are brought together by a shared human need and vulnerability. He is tired and thirsty. She has come to draw water, presumably for her and her family's needs. It is the sixth hour, noon, and so the hottest part of the day. It is the meeting of a man and a woman, persons who are different and yet complementary, with the interest and potential that always accompanies such meetings. (I am influenced by a painting of the scene in a house where I once lived, which represents Jesus as handsome and the woman as beautiful, a mature man and a mature woman, looking at each other with interest and growing affection.)

The shared human need for water opens the conversation. His request for a drink breaks a number of taboos: man and woman talking alone, Jew and Samaritan sharing the same cup; 'how is it that a Jew asks me, a Samaritan, for a drink?' Pope Francis, in Evangelii gaudium, says that evangelizing means reaching out to others, going out to strangers and foreigners, leaving the comfort zone of our established ways of living and acting. 'Jesus breaks through the dull categories with which we would enclose him and constantly amazes us by his divine creativity' (EG 11).

We see this divine creativity immediately as he shifts the conversation to a deeper level: 'if you knew the gift of God, and who is asking, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water'.  He is speaking immediately of the Blessed Trinity and the communion in the Divine life which he has come to share with human beings. But he does not immediately use that theological language or anything like it: for now the Spirit is 'the gift of God, living water' and the Eternal Son is 'the one who is asking'. The encounter remains simply human even while it begins to radiate with a transcendent meaning.

The woman, practical, wonders how he will get this living water to her since he has no bucket and the well is deep. 'Are you greater than Jacob, our father?' The newness of the gospel is always set within the framework of God's earlier deeds and in fact comes from the same sources. Here the woman establishes common ground with Jesus through remembering Jacob, a father older than the division between Jews and Samaritans. In speaking of the eternal newness of the gospel, Pope Francis speaks also of grateful remembrance from which the joy of evangelizing always arises. There are many things we must remember, the humanity and history we share with all other human beings, the common source of our being in God's love and our common destiny in His eternal kingdom.

Jesus explains that the living water he is speaking about is within, a spring within the person welling up to eternal life. The woman, for the moment, resists the charms of this mystical poet and answers, perhaps with a touch of sarcasm, 'so give me this water you are talking about so that I will not thirst again and will not need to come here either'.

There is another shift of gear and Jesus challenges her in a different way. He mentions her husband, she says she has none, he says she is right because she has had five. 'So you are not just a poet', she seems to say: 'I see that you are a prophet'. Is it a question of religious differences now? Perhaps she is offended that he is criticising polygamy, which seems to have been permissible among the Samaritans. To this day the Samaritans worship on Mount Gerizim, she says, the Jews on Mount Zion. He seems to have introduced the question of religious difference and she reminds him of another aspect of it: where exactly is it that God wants his people to worship him?

Jesus deepens the reflection again. 'Woman', he says - it is how he also addresses his mother in John 2 and John 19 - 'the hour is coming' when true worship will be neither here nor there but will be a worship of the Father in spirit and in truth. The woman seems to have had enough. It is as if she is saying 'whatever about all that, I know that when the Messiah comes he will show us all things'. And Jesus reveals to her that it is He who is speaking to her.

Significantly the woman leaves her jar behind and goes into the city, talking straightaway about the man she has met outside: 'can this be the Christ?' She has become a preacher of the good news, filled already with the living water (which is faith in Christ and the gift of the Spirit), and talking to others about the one she has encountered. The fields are white for harvest, Jesus says, as he sees the people streaming out of the town, coming to see him, their interest aroused by the testimony of the woman. There is joy in this work, Jesus continues, the joy of the gospel, sower and reaper rejoicing together, each one contributing to the freedom and flourishing of those coming to believe in Him.

Many Samaritans came to believe in him, we are told, because of the woman's testimony. And many more believed because of Jesus' word, since he who had stopped to have a drink at the well ended up staying with them for two days. We have heard for ourselves, they said, and 'we know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world'.

What do we find in this conversation that leads to evangelization? We find respect and equality from the beginning. We find an interest of each in the other. We find a mutual knowledge of each one's history and values. We find a speaking of the truth on both sides. We find a conversation that deepens rapidly, as Jesus leads the woman towards faith and her remarks open doors for what he says next. We find Jesus as a teacher of skill and delicacy, using poetic imagery (the teacher must use signs to illustrate his doctrine), asking provocative questions (the teacher must stretch the students with his questions) and we find growing affection (for the teacher must love his students).

Pope Francis quotes Pope Benedict saying that the Church grows 'by attraction'. Those who preach the gospel should 'point to a horizon of beauty' (EG 15) - this is what will capture and fascinate people, actions and words that have integrity, beauty, and holiness. In his encounter with the woman of Samaria, Jesus shows us how to do it.

Lent Week 2 Saturday

Readings: Micah 7:14-15, 18-20; Psalm 102; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32

'A man had two sons ...' Thus begins one of the greatest stories ever told, that of the prodigal son. It is sometimes now called the story of the prodigal father, or even the story of the elder brother. All three characters are important and teach us something essential about ourselves, about our relationships with others, and about God.

Henri Nouwen was a Dutch priest and writer in spirituality. One of his last works is also one of his most popular books, a long meditation on the parable of the prodigal son using the text of Luke 15 and a painting by Rembrandt, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, which is in St Petersburg. (Nouwen’s book is entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son. A Story of Homecoming, and was published by Darton, Longman and Todd in 1992.)

The younger son is the best known character in the story, the one who is anxious to leave home and go away and have a good time and see the world. His request for his inheritance says to his father, in effect, ‘it’s time you were dead’. One can imagine the kind of wound that must be to a father. Yet he lets him go. The son’s departure is a radical rejection of ‘home’. In his eagerness to be gone, he has become deaf to the voice of love.

Worse is to follow as he wastes what he has been given, falls on hard times and finds himself — horror of horrors for a Jew — reduced to looking after pigs. Worse still is his hunger to eat even what the pigs were eating. It is difficult to imagine anybody sinking lower. He is completely lost, his plans and dreams in tatters round his feet (like his shoes in Rembrant’s painting), adrift in an alien and foreign land.

But ‘he came to himself’. What does this mean? It is the turning point of his story and so is worth pondering. Nouwen interprets it as meaning ‘he remembered whose son he was’. He remembered his father. He is unable to claim anything more from his father who has already given him his share of the inheritance. All he can stand on is the fact that he is the son. It is true he has messed up his life. He feels unworthy to be counted now as his father’s son but perhaps the father will take him back as a servant in his household. And so he takes the long journey home, ‘long’ at least in terms of the moral courage it required.

Some people will find it easy to identify with the rake, the younger son. I suspect, though, that more of us see ourselves in the older one and sympathise with his position. After all he has been working hard for his father, stayed with him, tried to do his best, looked after the family property ... and when this wastrel comes home, having destroyed a goodly portion of the family’s property, the father welcomes him back like a hero and throws a great feast in his honour!

The elder brother has the more difficult task, to try to ‘come home’ to his brother in spite of resentment and bitterness. He refuses to join the party. He cannot enter into that joy. There is a great tragedy here, a good person finds himself alienated from ‘home’, struggling with things from which it is more difficult to be converted.

We are not told whether the elder son was able to make the journey required of him. Perhaps this is because the story is addressed also to us and presents us with this question: are you to be reconciled with your father and brother, with your mother and sister? The story of the elder son does not end on a page of the gospel text but in the life of each of us as we struggle with similar difficulties.

We are told that the father appealed to the elder son to ‘come to himself’. Disowning his brother (and father?) the elder son refers to the prodigal as ‘your son’. In reply the father refers to him as ‘your brother’. Like his brother, the elder son needs to remember who he is, where he belongs, where ‘home’ is. He must let go of rivalry, learn to trust, be grateful, and share in the common joy, the ‘sound of angels cheering’ as a sinner repents and returns to the household.

The third character in the story is the father, old and, in Rembrandt’s painting, almost blind, but full of compassion, watching out for his son and rushing to meet him before he arrives at the house. He represents for us the heart of God which is rich in mercy and open to all equally, the first and everlasting love which has brought us into being and sustains us in all our ways even when those ways involve journeys through selfishness and ruin, through resentment and bitterness. We may see ourselves in one of the sons (or in both). But we must also come to be like the father, ‘compassionate as our heavenly father is compassionate’. 

This homily was first published in the newsletter of St Dominic's Priory, London