Week 29 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 7:18-25 ; Psalm 119; Luke 12:54-59

This is the third and final part of a lecture on 'Human Nature and Destiny According to St Paul'. It may be of help in thinking about the first half of the Letter to the Romans which we have been reading over the past couple of weeks. The full text of the lecture is to be found here.

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Who Are We Talking About? An Answer From Genealogy

What if Paul’s understanding of human nature and destiny is more readily accessible in terms of the ‘who’ question than of the ‘what’ question? In other words that instead of asking ‘what are we and how are we made up’, we ask ‘who are we, where have we come from and where are we going’. Here I concentrate on the first part of the Letter to the Romans, the work that comes closest to giving us a systematic account of Paul’s gospel.

In Romans 1-8 there are three accounts of the origins of human history, 1.18-23, 5.12-21 and 7.7-13, described by A.Feuillet as ‘narrative maps’ that describe the human predicament in a number of ways. That this narrative approach can be further characterized as genealogical is my own suggestion and it arises from noticing that in Romans 1-8 Jesus Christ is described as son of God, son of Adam, son of Abraham, and son of David.

Let me say a bit more about genealogy. The best-known genealogy in the New Testament is that of Jesus given in Matthew 1.1-17. This tells how Jesus is the son of Abraham, son of David, and son of Mary and Joseph, fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the Babylonian captivity to Jesus Christ.

But there is also a genealogy of Jesus given by Luke, immediately after Jesus’ baptism (3.23-38). This one works backwards, saying he was the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, who was the son (eventually) of David, the son of Abraham, the son of Adam, the son of God. Jesus is described in the opening verses of Romans as ‘descended from David according to the flesh’ and ‘designated Son of God by his resurrection from the dead’ (Romans 1.3,4). He is a son of Abraham, the promised ‘seed’ of Abraham, a fact that is crucial to the theological histories of Romans and Galatians, and he is the son of Adam, even the second or last Adam, a fact that is central not only in Romans but also in the letters to the Corinthians.

I am suggesting that another way of approaching the question of human nature and destiny in Paul is to look at these narrative maps in Romans 1-8 and the genealogical history found there. In what these chapters say about the family of Adam, of Abraham and of David and the relationship of that family to another, heavenly, family, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, we find a rich theological answer to the questions ‘who are we, where have we come from, and where are we going?’

The first narrative map, Romans 1.18-23, tells of the need of all people for the righteousness revealed by God in the gospel. This is not a matter of law and its observance or non-observance but of faith and its justifying power. The key figure in the resolution of the difficulties to which this map testifies is Abraham who believed God and was thereby reckoned as righteous (Romans 3.21-5.11). Everybody knows how central Abraham’s faith is to Paul’s reflections in Romans and Galatians. He is faithful, even ‘our father in faith’, and so becomes a model of the faithful one, his son or seed, Jesus Christ (Galatians 3.16).

But there are two other aspects of Abraham’s story that are important for Paul. One is that Abraham had a son, Isaac, whom he loved and whom he was asked to sacrifice. But God spared the son of Abraham while acknowledging the faith Abraham showed in being prepared to be obedient even to the point of death. Abraham and Isaac become types then of another Father and Son, the Eternal Father and his Son, Jesus, whom the Father did not spare, instead giving him up for us all. This last comment comes in the great climax to these chapters in Romans 8.32.

A further aspect of Abraham’s faith that is central to this story is that he believes that God can even raise the dead. There are some hints that this faith is seen even in Abraham’s acceptance that in spite of his great age (‘one as good as dead’: Hebrews 11.12) he will have a son. We see Abraham’s faith in a God who raises the dead also in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac: ‘he considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead’ (Hebrews 11.19). But it is present from the beginning of Abraham’s relationship with God when he is told that he is to be the father of many nations ‘in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (Romans 4.17).

The second narrative map, Romans 5.12-21, contrasts the situation of humanity in Adam with our situation in Christ. As by one man’s disobedience many came to experience sin and death so – and not just so but ‘much more’ – by one man’s obedience many come to experience grace and life. The power of sin, death and law, strengthening from Adam to Moses and beyond is undone by the saving death and resurrection of Jesus. So this narrative history opens onto an account of baptism. Our old self has died, nay been crucified, with him. We have been brought from death to life, no longer under law but under grace. This re-creation of Adam is brought about by the second or last Adam, Jesus, the son of Adam.

The third narrative map, Romans 7.7-13, seems more psychological than anthropological or historical. It describes an inner conflict that agitates and hinders human fulfillment: ‘I do not understand my own actions’, Paul says (7.15), ‘wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?’ (7.24). The answer to his question is ‘thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (7.25). For Paul Jesus is the Son of God and his death and resurrection is the source of the Spirit. Romans 7 belongs with Romans 8, that great symphony of life in the Spirit which is only fully appreciated in its contrast with Romans 7, a darker composition reminding us of what life in the flesh involves. In Romans 7 we find many of the concepts of Paul’s anthropology: law, sin, flesh, inmost self, members, mind, death, life. Romans 8 presents the contrast: human nature is set free by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death (8.2). It may seem that Romans 7-8 invites us to return to a dualistic anthropology in terms of flesh and spirit but the philosophical and psychological categories need now to be understood always in relation to the historical and – I have suggested – genealogical narratives we find in these chapters.

So what happens through these chapters? We are given three narrative maps, stories about the human situation that tell about the weakness of our nature and the difficulty of our plight. This is not a diagnosis apart from the message of the gospel but something illuminated by the gospel and understood properly only in its light. What we are taught is that we belong to the family of Adam and of Abraham, of Moses and of David. This family has won the loving attention and saving intervention of another ‘family’, the Father, the Son and the Spirit. In the course of these chapters God is revealed as a Father (3.21-5.11) who did not spare his own Son through whose death and resurrection (5.12-7.6) the Spirit is at work adopting us and making us to be children of God (8). This is our genealogy also. Who am I? Who are you? As human creatures we belong to the first family, that of Adam and Abraham, and as believers we belong now also to the second family, that of the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

Paul’s understanding of human destiny is not so much a question of God adding something to our nature, as it is God taking us into a new milieu, to be with Christ and to be in Christ. This cannot happen without the transformation of our being and our capacities but it is not that we find a place for God in our world (‘the solution to our problems’) but that God makes a place for us in His world (‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’). The principle of Christian action is the Spirit/spirit for ‘the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Romans 8.16).

The destiny of the human being for Paul is Christ, to be in Christ, to be Christ, Christ living in us. Another way of putting this is to speak of freedom: ‘for freedom Christ has set us free’ (Galatians 5.1); ‘now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life’ (Romans 8.21).

There is much else that could be said. Romans 9-11 consider Jesus as the son of David and the particular question of the failure of Judaism as a whole to believe in Jesus as the Christ. Romans 12-16 carry the reflection further, to the new Israel, the Christian community and various aspects of its sacramental and moral life. Already in Romans 7 there is a (neglected?) reference to the body of Christ. We have died to the law through the body of Christ so that we may belong to another, to that same Christ who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God (Romans 7.4). For Paul, human nature has been made ready for this marriage through the righteousness of God, the faithfulness of Jesus and the grace of the Spirit. The ‘flesh’ that is problematic is replaced by the ‘body’ that enables communion and fruitfulness. For Paul our nature’s fulfillment is in presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, and our destiny is to enter into the spiritual worship of genuine love (Romans 12.1,9).

Week 29 Tuesday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 5:12-21 ; Psalm 40; Luke 12:35-38

There are a number of places in the New Testament where the most significant teaching hangs on the simplest words, often on prepositions. John's gospel gives us more than one example of this ('as ... so ...') and so too does the Letter to the Colossians ('all things through ... for ... in ... him'). Today's first reading is another example. 'As' the first Adam through his disobedience stands at the head of a history of loss and alienation, 'so' the second or last Adam through his obedience stands at the head of a history of redemption and restoration.

But it would be a mistake to think that the analogy or proportion implied by the 'as ... so' means equivalence or equality between the two. As if the two Adams stood at the head of two opposing but equal consequences. As if the second or last Adam simply undid what was brought about by the first. As is the case with many analogies, the difference here is greater than the similarity. Perhaps it is yet another consequence of sin, and the self-centredness that it brings, that we find this difficult to understand and to accept. We think that Christ's work is measured by our sin. We can even end up understanding Christ in terms of the first Adam - as the solution to our problem, as the answer to our question - rather than the other way round - as a new creation, an adoption as sons, the gift of an eternal life that radically heals, strengthens, and transforms the old man .

As if salvation history were centred on Adam, the 'old man', and his needs, rather than on Christ, the 'new man', and the love that He is. Two other simple words bring home the radical disproportion between the world of Adam and the world of Christ: 'much more', Paul says, and he says it over and over again here. 'Much more' does grace, and the gracious gift of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, overflow, bathing humanity in the new freedom, the new life, brought by Christ. If death comes to reign because of sin, 'much more' will we come to reign in life through Christ. 'Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more': grace will never be outdone and never eclipsed, the light will never be comprehended by the darkness, hatred will never understand love, death has no ability to threaten eternal life.

This disproportion between our sin and God's grace is shocking, and it ought to be so. This shock is described in today's gospel reading. The faithful servants, who will later say 'we are only servants, we have only done our duty', are here the objects of a divine grace: the master, far from asking them to see to his needs when he arrives home, makes them sit at table and he himself serves them. It is a reversal of the natural order, a revolution of the kingdom of grace, the kind of shocking initiative we associate with Love.

Once again George Herbert helps us to meditate on this theology of grace. One of his poems, called simply 'Love', begins like this:

"Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin".

And after an exchange between the soul and Love, in which the soul sees the disproportion between its need and Love's desire - I am a sinner, at best a servant - the poem concludes like this:

"'You must sit down', says Love, 'and taste my meat'. / So I did sit and eat."

Week 29 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Romans 4:20-25; Luke 1:69-75; Luke 12:13-21

Most homilies and sermons are quickly forgotten, a few stay in the memory always. There are some stories and jokes one hears that hang around, illustrations and analogies that the good preacher or teacher will use to impress something crucial on the mind of his listeners. One such in my case is a comment by the Irish Dominican, Donagh O'Shea, speaking about the difference between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. It is the same river that flows into both bodies of water but one is dead whereas the other is living. The difference is that the waters of the Jordan flow through the Sea of Galilee, in at one side and out at the other, whereas when they run into the Dead Sea that is where they end: there is no outflow, the water evaporates, the salt increases, and the sea is dead. The sea that allows the water to flow through it is alive with many creatures and its waters are healthy. The sea that holds on to what it receives is dead.

It comes to mind thinking about today's gospel reading, in particular the comment of Jesus that 'one's life does not consist of possessions'. The foolish man who thinks he can store everything up for happy years to come has decided to stop living: 'this night your life will be demanded of you'. Clearly it means that he dies before he has a chance to benefit from what he has stored up. But it can also have another meaning, that in deciding to find his life in what he possesses, he kills his life. There is no longer a flowing in and a flowing out, no longer the exchange and commerce of life's activities, no longer the relationships that characterise any real living. Even if he were to continue to live physically, in every other way he would be dead.

In this he becomes like the rich man in the parable of Luke 16: turned in on himself and blind to what is around him. But to be 'rich in what matters to God' is to be rich in the way that God is rich, which means rich in generosity, rich in grace. Jesus speaks of this soon after telling this parable (Luke 12:32-34). The Father's good pleasure, he says, is to give you the kingdom (12:32). The purse that does not grow old is the purse that gives as well as receives, a purse whose owner thinks of others and not just of himself (12:33-34). And if we are to be alive as the heavenly Father is alive, then we will be alert and responsive to all that is happening around us, to everyone who crosses our path, to all that comes our way. 'Be merciful as your Father is merciful', Jesus teaches in Luke 6:36, and the Father is kind also to the ungrateful and the selfish.

The credit side of our account, Paul says in the first reading, consists in having faith in God that is something like the faith shown by Abraham. This requires a very different kind of calculation whose key principle is to believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. Those who have received this gift establish their life not on what they possess but on the power of God who, as Paul says earlier in Romans 4, gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Like the Sea of Galilee, those who believe are alive ('the righteous man lives through faith', Romans 1:17). The person of faith is ready to give and to share because they trust that the heavenly Father will give them whatever they need. They are ready to let go and to venture forth. They are ready to turn around and to try again. They are ready to listen and to consider. They have nothing but they receive everything. In the words of the prayer of Saint Francis, they become channels, rich in the gifts of God which they hand on, pass around, and share with others.

Week 29 Sunday (Year C)

Readings: Exodus 17:8-13; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8

It is tempting to take this parable as a kind of self-contained teaching about prayer, in which case the final comment of Jesus, ‘when the Son of Man comes will he find any faith on earth?’, will seem like a kind of retaliation in advance in case you have not received what you’ve prayed for: ‘well did you have enough faith’, something like that. But this is to misunderstand the parable and the significance of that final comment which is not just tagged on. Because what it does, this final question from Jesus, is bind the parable securely into the longer section of the gospel that precedes it. That whole section is about the coming of the Son of Man and the parable is about the kind of attitude we ought to have in relation, not just to anything we might want or desire, but in relation precisely to that coming, the coming of the Son of Man. We are to long for it, and seek it from God, as earnestly and as confidently as the widow pesters the unjust judge.

If this is the context then it is not accidental that what the widow is seeking is justice. She is not looking for a new dress or a Christmas holiday in the Canary Islands. There is another time and place to think about that kind of praying. But the kind of praying she is involved in here is eschatological. It is about the end of the world as we know it. What she is looking for is justice, in other words the judgement of God, that final act in which God will reveal himself as the champion of the poor and oppressed, the Father of the orphans and the widows whose God he has long promised to be. In a parallel parable in Luke about a man disturbing his friend at night we read that God will give not just ‘good things’ to his people as Matthew puts it, but ‘the Holy Spirit’. In Luke it is very clear that God knows what we need and that we can be brought to pray not just for what we want but for what we need: in the one case the Holy Spirit, in this case justice.

The unjust judge is a kind of foil, an absurd comparison with God, so that Jesus can underline that we can confidently look to God, a judge who is absolutely just, to hear the cry of those who call out to Him for justice. He will answer speedily. Or will he? The text gets a bit confused and the translations vary because it seems to say that God will answer speedily even if he delays. But when he does answer it will be quickly. Something like that.

This confusion about what we might call the timeline involved here is another thing that alerts us to the fact that what Jesus is speaking about is the coming of the Son of Man. When will this widow’s prayer be answered? It will be answered on the day of the Lord, for it is the justice of that day that she seeks. At what time will this widow’s prayer be answered? It will be answered at an hour you do not expect. Just as we read elsewhere that the kingdom of God is neither here nor there but is in the midst of us, so the kingdom of God is neither now nor then but is coming upon us. Space and time are refashioned as we are taken into this kingdom of God that is already among us and for whose consummation we are to pray.

This strange world, the world of the end times, the world of the apocalypse, is the world in which this widow is praying. Surely she is another feminine figure representing the Church, representing all of us. Jesus presents her to us as an example of the faith and confidence we need to persevere in prayer in this world. She is praying in a wild world of corruption and justice-seeking, where goodness and evil do battle, and where cries of distress call out for a re-fashioning of things that can only come, it seems, from God himself. The world in which she is praying is a terrible one that seems God-forsaken and yet she continues to cry out for justice. She keeps faith and hope that she will surely be vindicated even though the world in which she prays is this world in which we are living. Moses in the first reading is thus a model for her perseverance, the need to work hard to sustain faith and hope in situations of distress.

Of course we could continue these reflections in the direction of Jesus’ own experience of dereliction and injustice, his cries of distress in Gethsemane and from the Cross. In that hour in which goodness and evil are most dramatically ranged against each other we believe that the justice of our just judge has been revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The divine re-fashioning of creation has begun. We enter into that strange world which is already here whenever we celebrate the paschal mystery in the Eucharistic sacrifice.

And we try to be obedient to what Jesus teaches us in this parable because each time we celebrate the sacred mysteries we declare ourselves to be waiting in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Sun of Justice.

You will find here another homily on today's gospel reading

Week 29 Monday (Year 2)

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

There are teachings about the dangers of riches that are common to Matthew, Mark and Luke. You cannot serve both God and Mammon, for example. So too the image of the camel trying to get through the eye of a needle is found in all three gospels: easier for him to do that than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But today's parable is found only in Luke's gospel. Along with his sensitivity and compassion, indeed because of it, Luke has a particular emphasis on the dangers of riches. He does not qualify the beatitude of the poor as Matthew does, adding the phrase 'in spirit' - happy are you poor is Luke's version, and it is he who adds the woes, beginning with 'woe to you who are rich'. Jesus does not say 'woe to you who are unduly attached to your possessions', or 'woe to you who are not sharing what you have with others'. Just having things is itself problematic.

'None of you can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions', we read in Luke 14. And Luke 16 is all about this warning against riches. There we find the crafty steward, the rich man and Lazarus, the Pharisees described as 'lovers of money', and a strange encouragement to the disciples to use money, 'that tainted thing', for the service of the kingdom.

In Luke we find Jesus's teaching about riches at its most radical. This teaching is here made physical, we might say. It is not a question of our attitude to our possessions, it is a problem that comes with having possessions at all. The warning is that human beings inevitably begin to find meaning and security and a sense of identity in their possessions. Rather than just using them, they become us somehow and we become them. We store up treasure of various kinds (not just money) to secure our lives, to give them meaning, and to establish ourselves in a sense of identity: to be someone. If it is by what we have that we become someone, then we have lost ourselves.

Jesus reminds us in today's gospel reading that 'one's life does not consist of possessions'. To act as if it does means to lose one's life. To be genuinely 'rich' means receiving the gift of the kingdom and practising the generosity which is at its heart: letting our possessions flow through us, we might say, not counting them as our own. It is another way of saying that we are to become like Jesus who, though he was rich, became poor, so that we who are poor might become rich.

Week 29 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Isaiah 53:10-11; Psalm 33; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45

The choice of readings heightens the dissonance between what Jesus is trying to teach the disciples and how they are still misunderstanding things. He is the servant of the Lord who gives his life as an offering for sin. He is the Son of Man who came to serve and not to be served. If the second reading offers a title, 'great high priest', that seems to invite glory in a worldly sense, such an interpretation is quickly dispelled: he is our great high priest precisely because he has been tested in every way though he is without sin. Jesus' way is not about becoming a 'great one' who can then 'lord' it over others. It is about a lordship, of course, but of a different kind. The Son of Man came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The notion of 'ransoming' has caused problems in the course of the Church's history: if Jesus gives his life to ransom us, to whom does he give it, why is it required, and what exactly is the ransom? We cannot just ignore the idea since we find the term, or versions of it, meaning either ransoming or redeeming, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, 1 Timothy, Hebrews, and 1 Peter.

The biblical authors, unlike later theologians, focus on the redeemed and the ransomed, the great fact of human liberation achieved by Jesus. He is our redeemer and our ransomer. That liberation is from slavery and exile now understood spiritually in the first place: our alienation from God is overcome. The sacrifice of our great high priest addresses the root-causes of oppression and injustice, it is an offering for sin.

The content of his teaching, the content of the whole New Testament, is not firstly a doctrine or even an example that would remain somehow external to us. The content of his teaching and of the New Testament, the new covenant itself, is Jesus himself, the Son of Man and Son of God who loves the Father simply and completely, and who is obedient to the Father in serving the purposes of God for the salvation of the world.

We do, of course, continue to misunderstand, and will seek to manipulate even the throne of mercy, the grace of God. We translate it back into the language of exchange and power. Much of the drama of the Church's history is its continuing struggle with this misunderstanding. But the Word of God reminds us that we are wanderers in need of teaching and guidance. We are confined in various ways, subject to powers that limit our freedom and distort our understanding. We have been set free for a new life by the one who became our servant, taking on the condition of a slave but becoming the mighty champion who leads us through the heavens.