30th Sunday Year C

30th Sunday 2025

Sirach 35:15-17, 20-22; 2Tim 4;6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

I am going to confuse you even more than usual this week, as I am going to focus less on the Gospel than on the First Reading. The latter is taken from the Book of Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, a title with which you may be more familiar. My reason is that Sirach is writing primarily about justice which, incidentally, features also in Our Lord’s explanation of the Gospel parable.

Bishop Swarbrick’s (the Bishop of Lancaster) motto is borrowed from St. John Henry Newman, and reads in English “Holiness before peace:” in other words, “Let me be concerned with doing God’s will, rather than with being comfortable”. I would propose an appendix to the Bishop’s motto, which would read “Justice before peace”.

Peace is a weasel word, covering a multitude of sins. When people talk about or pray for peace, they are sometimes asking simply to be left alone, not to be disturbed. We do not like to be disturbed, but sometimes it is necessary. From time to time, the status quo needs to be challenged, in our own lives, in the Church, in the world.

I suspect that not many of you will have read Tacitus’s “Agricola” recently, though, for all I know, it may be discussed endlessly in Warton, the Yealands, Carnforth, and Silverdale. I have never read it from choice, but it was a set book for Latin A-level in 1967, so I had to study it avidly at that time. You may be aware that “agricola” is the Latin word for farmer, but in this case it is a man’s name. Cnaeus Julius Agricola was the Roman Governor of Britain for six years during the First Century AD, and his career was described by Tacitus, his son-in-law.

One quotation from the book sticks in my mind: “They make a desert and call it peace”—“solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant”. It is put by the author into the mouth of a British chieftain, who is denouncing the Pax Romana, the “Roman peace” which the conquering Romans claim to have established throughout their Empire. This chieftain claims that what the Romans call peace is actually subjugation.

A genuine approach to peace was spelt out by Pope St Paul VI in his 1975 exhortation “Evangelii nuntiandi”. The Pope wrote “If you want peace, work for justice,” insisting, like that Briton long ago, that peace without justice is no peace at all.

Let us look around our contemporary world. Politicians are speaking about peace in Israel/Palestine. What we have is a temporary ceasefire, which has already been violated. Even if it holds, can we really speak in terms of peace when Hamas, whose murderous raid two years ago was evil beyond words, seeks the destruction of Israel? When Israel, having reduced Gaza to ruins, reserves the right to bomb and shell indiscriminately what remains? When ethnic cleansing continues unchecked on the West Bank of the River Jordan?

What about Ukraine? (Not THE Ukraine, by the way, which Ukrainians themselves reject as being a description of their former status as a puppet state under Russian control.) If the guns fall silent now, if the drones and missiles stop wreaking havoc, will that be peace, while Russia holds swathes of Ukrainian territory, where it is imposing Russian language and culture, and delivering a Russian version of recent history? “They make a desert, and call it peace.” “If you want peace, work for justice.”

In our own country, does justice hold sway in all aspects of society? If not, can we truly speak of peace? What can you and I do? Let us pray always for “peace founded on justice”, or for “a just and lasting peace”, for without justice, there can be no peace. Let us pester politicians to seek justice for all people at home and abroad; let us not be selfish when we vote, but rather seek to establish just government; though it isn’t easy, at present, to establish which party, if any, will achieve or even desire that; let us make sure that we ourselves always act justly, and that we put holiness before the comfort of an illusory peace.

29th Sunday Year C

29th Sunday 2025

Exodus 17: 8-13; 2Tim 3:14-4:2; Luke 18: 1-8

Perseverance—are you good at it? Do you have stickability? I ask because perseverance seems to lie at the heart of all our readings today. Moses perseveres in keeping his arms raised, with the help of Aaron and Hur, throughout the day, to enable the Israelites to defeat the Amalekites. Timothy is urged to persevere in studying the scriptures, in preaching and in teaching. Jesus tells the parable of the importunate widow and the unjust judge to encourage us to persevere in prayer, and ends by asking “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

I have a feeling that perseverance is in short supply today. That isn’t entirely people’s fault: it has much to do with the pace of change in our world. There are few, if any, jobs for life in our society. At one time, well within living memory, young people would begin a job or an apprenticeship upon leaving school, and remain in that same job until the end of their working life.

Generations would work in the same mill or factory, go down the same pit, sit in the same office. Around here, if your grandfather had worked at Storey’s or Williamson’s, so might your father, and so, in your turn, might you. Now Storey’s, Williamson’s, Lansil, Nelson’s Silk, Nelson’s Acetate, Gillow’s, have all vanished without trace, though some of their buildings have remained, either to be converted into small units, or to moulder away.

When I was in Sixth Form, I accompanied my father on a day trip to York arranged by the Lancaster and Morecambe Retail Confectioners, for a tour of the huge Rowntree’s factory, in the course of which we also met representatives of Rowntrees’ rivals, Terry’s of York. Rowntree’s and Terry’s are now names from the past, their factories, which once employed thousands, largely demolished. Their workers would, no doubt, have happily persevered in their jobs, as would steelworkers, dockers, carmakers, all manner of people in manufacturing, but those jobs no longer exist. Now even university staff face an uncertain future.

What about relationships? Do we find perseverance there? I would readily admit that, in the past, people—especially women—persevered in abusive marriages when it would have been better to leave in spite of financial difficulties or social stigma. Even taking such cases into account, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is sometimes an unwillingness to persevere in the face of difficulties which may be surmountable.

There is a similar situation in the priesthood and religious life. Here, I have to admit that I am hardly  a shining example of perseverance. Four times I have had to resign appointments because of mental breakdown, though, by the grace of God, I have managed to cling on to priesthood itself.

Similarly, in matters of faith and the practice of faith, we see a reluctance to persevere. You who are here are something of a faithful remnant: so many of your contemporaries are nowhere to be seen. Forty years ago, my then parish priest commented “When people left the Church, they used to storm out in anger because of something which had happened (which may still be the case) but now they just tend to drift away”.

In more recent years, the child abuse scandals have contributed, but there are at least a couple of other factors. The Sunday Trading Laws and the tendency for children’s and youth football leagues to hold their fixtures on a Sunday morning have played their part. Even among practising Catholics, there may be a lack of perseverance in daily prayer, which can lead to a disconnect between what happens in church on a Sunday, and their life during the rest of the week.

So to Our Lord’s question “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” Neither you nor I know the answer to that question, but we are aware that there is a widespread loss of even the notion of God. Only last week, I came across a Youtube post of Stevie Winwood singing that beautiful Easter hymn, translated from the French, “Now the green blade riseth”. Many of you will remember Stevie Winwood as the lead singer of the Spencer Davis Group, and will recall him belting out “Keep on Running” a song which has stood the test of time, as a teenager in early 1966. He is now 77 years old, and gives to “Now the Green Blade” a reverent and gentle treatment.

Before, in dismay, I stopped reading them, I found that all the comments on Mr. Winwood’s performance missed the point completely. People saw the hymn as praise of the environment, as an ode to nature, as reproducing the myth of John Barleycorn. Although the reference to the Resurrection of the Christ is as specific as can be, people simply failed to notice or to understand it.

“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” I do not know. Let us at least ensure that we play our part by our perseverance in prayer, in reception of the sacraments, in proclaiming the Gospel by word and example, whatever difficulties we may face.

28th Sunday Year C

28th Sunday 2025

2Kings 5:14-17; 2Tim 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19

Do children still read “The Black Arrow” by Robert Louis Stevenson? I suspect not, as there is so much recent children’s literature available. I recall reading “The Black Arrow” at the very time that a serialisation of it appeared on children’s television, and I can still feel the horror which gripped me as the supposed leper, hooded and cloaked and ringing his bell to keep people away, suddenly turned to chase the young hero and heroine. I suspect that the episode ended there, leaving us on tenterhooks until the following week.

In the end, this turned out to be no leper, but Sir Daniel Brackley, later to be revealed as the villain, in disguise, but it showed the deep fear of leprosy which persisted until recent times. That fear was justified: leprosy is highly contagious, and you may remember that St. Damian of Molokai, whose story I also learned in Primary School, and whom RL Stevenson greatly admired, himself contracted leprosy from those whom he was nursing.

One of the great curses of leprosy was the isolation to which it gave rise. Lepers had to live apart, avoiding all contact with society. For Jewish lepers in biblical times there was the added handicap of being ritually unclean, barred from the religious life of the community.

People would therefore go to great lengths in search of a cure. Naaman, whose leprosy must have been less severe at this stage, as he was an army commander and travelled with a retinue, came to Samaria to seek a cure from the prophet Elisha. Why, having been cured, did he ask for two mule-loads of earth?

This was a result of the belief in tribal gods. People were expected to worship the gods of the land in which they were: hence Naaman, who has been converted to faith in the God of Israel, wants a quantity of the soil of Israel, in order that he may stand on it when he prays, and so technically be in Israel. As a footnote, it is worth considering that he, a foreigner and until then, a pagan, returned from his cure to thank Elisha and to worship God.

Why then do the nine Jewish lepers fail to return to praise God and to thank Jesus? Is it ingratitude on their part? That may be a factor, reminding us of the importance of gratitude—gratitude to God and gratitude to other people.

How much do we take for granted, especially where God is concerned? How much of our prayer is prayer of thanksgiving? Our central act of worship is the Eucharist, which the Second Vatican Council described as “the source and summit of the Christian life”, and “Eucharist” means “thanksgiving”; to this day, the Greek word for “thank you” is efcharisto. As Christians, and especially as Catholics, we are a Eucharistic people: an ungrateful Catholic is a contradiction in terms.

There may, though, be another factor involved, and that, ironically, is the religion of the Jewish lepers. The very thing which should make them grateful gets in the way of their gratitude. You remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the priest and the Levite pass by the injured man. The reason was probably fear of ritual contamination, which would have disqualified them from carrying out their religious duties.

Here, another religious element is involved. Jesus has told the cured lepers to show themselves to the priests. This was to obtain an official declaration that they were free of the disease: without it, they could not return to the life of the community. Hence, they were so focused on being ritually declared clean, that every other consideration was left aside. Again, religious duty stood in the way of what should have been a higher priority.

On the other hand, the Samaritan, being outside the pale of Judaism, has no need of, and is probably not entitled to, such a declaration. Hence, he is free to give rein to his natural inclination to praise God and to thank Jesus.

What is this saying to us? That Judaism is bad? Surely not! It is the religion which Jesus Himself practised. That religion itself is bad? Again, not so! Without formal religion, without the community of the Church, we lack cohesion, and a context in which to love and serve God, and to receive His greatest gifts. Rather, it is the old truth that rules, including religious rules, are a means to an end. Once they become an end in themselves, they turn into an idol, because they betray their proper function. Let us by all means keep the rules, but always remembering their purpose. Let them lead us closer to God, and enable us to express and celebrate that gratitude which is at the heart of all worship.

27th Sunday of the Year C

27th Sunday 2025

Habakkuk 1:2-3, 2:2-4; 2 Timothy 1:6-8, 13-14; Luke 17:5-10

“We are useless servants: we have only done what was our duty.”

Three cheers for the new translation, which has corrected the carelessness of the Jerusalem Bible, which we formerly used. The JB often flowed more smoothly than the present translation, but it was sometimes slipshod.

This is a case in point. The Jerusalem Bible has “we are merely servants” which glosses over the actual text. The Greek word is achreioi meaning “useless”. In other words, not only are we “merely” servants: we are no good even as servants.

Thus, we are warned not to give ourselves airs but, perhaps more importantly, not to attribute any success to ourselves. On our own, we would achieve nothing: it is God who accomplishes the work, not us. All that we have is faith in God, and not reliance on our own efforts or our own virtue.

The prophet Habakkuk makes a similar point when he writes that the righteous shall live by their faith, something on which St. Paul insisted. When the latter speaks of “justification by faith”, he is not saying that we shouldn’t do good works: rather, he is making the point that these works come from God, so we shouldn’t claim the credit for them. Instead, we put our faith in God, who enables us to carry out the good works. Neither our own efforts, nor the keeping of the rules, can give life to ourselves or to others.

All of which leads me to a story which I have told more than once before, but for which I make no apology, as it deserves to be retold. It dates back to my first term in seminary, more than half a century ago.

When I entered the seminary in 1971, there was still a Junior Seminary on the same premises, and the priests on the staff of the latter would alternate with the Senior Seminary staff in presiding and preaching at Sunday Mass. Among the former was Fr. Tony Pearson, a priest of the Leeds Diocese who, in a Sunday homily, recalled the advice which he, as a young man about to enter the seminary, had been given by his parish priest.

It was only a few years ago that I discovered that the parish priest in question had been Fr. John O’Connor, who received GK Chesterton into the Church and on whose personality, though not his appearance, Chesterton based his priest-detective, Fr. Brown. No wonder he gave wise advice.

“Tony” he had said to the young Anthony Pearson. “When you go to Ushaw, there’ll be lots of things you’ve got to do, and lots of things you’ve not got to do, and if you do all the things you’ve got to do, and you don’t do all the things you’ve not got to do, then they’ll make you a bishop. And Tony, you’ll be no bloody good.”

It was long after Fr. Pearson’s time in Ushaw, and also after mine, that these words proved prophetic. There came a student who, apparently, kept every rule, not deviating by an iota from even the pettiest regulation. In vain, his fellow-students attempted to humanise him, even on one occasion sticking his head down the toilet and pulling the chain—not normal seminarian behaviour, I hasten to add, but a sign of desperation—but all to no avail. He remained an irredeemable model student, and in due course was made a bishop—not in this Diocese, I hasten to add.

Since then, he has fulfilled Fr. O’Connor’s prediction to the letter, being, as many believe, “no bloody good”. He has turned back the clock in his Diocese by several decades, unpicking the good work undertaken by his predecessor who, while always demonstrating deep pastoral concern, had also spent years working with priests and lay people to implement the vision of the Second Vatican Council.

I have not a shadow of doubt that this onetime model student is a very good and dedicated man, thoroughly devoted to the service of God, but he does appear to me to underline Jesus’ description of all of us as “useless” servants. If we rely on our own virtue, our own fulfilment, as we see it, of God’s will, we shall come unstuck, or perhaps we shall be too stuck for God to use us as He wishes. I am not implying that we should be anarchists, but that we must always be open to God’s leading us, because He alone knows what will bear fruit, whereas we are indeed “useless servants”.

26th Sunday Year C

26th Sunday 2025

Amos 6:4-7; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Luke 16:19-31

How does that parable of the rich man and Lazarus strike you? Does it encourage you? Does it alarm you? Does it leave you unmoved? I have to say that it frightens me.

Why should that be? It frightens me because the rich man isn’t a bad man. He doesn’t ill-treat Lazarus, doesn’t shout abuse at him, doesn’t have him arrested. Even in Hades he is concerned for the well-being of his brothers. There is something quite likeable about him, and yet he is condemned.

What are his faults? Essentially they amount to complacency, insensitivity, lack of awareness. He falls into the same category as the complacent, self-centred, self-indulgent people who are condemned by the Prophet Amos. They live in luxury with no concern for the well-being of others, and particularly of those closest to them.

(Incidentally, I am not thrilled by the expression “those who stretch themselves out”. It sounds like some form of aerobics. The Jerusalem Bible expresses it as “those who sprawl”, depicting it as another instance of luxurious idleness, which I find easier to understand.)

That luxurious idleness, the fault which Amos targets, is the fault too of the rich man of the Gospel. It blinds him to the presence, indeed the very existence, of the poor man Lazarus. Even the dogs show more awareness, comforting him by licking his sores. By the rich man, Lazarus is every bit as overlooked as the crumbs falling from the table. It is even possible to imagine the banqueters feeding the leftovers to the dogs, while Lazarus remains unnoticed until he fades away and dies. It is what the moral theologians call “culpable ignorance”, an ignorance for which there is no excuse, and its outcome is punishment in Hades.

The relevance to us of this parable strikes me as disturbingly, worryingly clear. In our world today there are more Lazaruses than you could shake the proverbial stick at—try expressing that without ending your sentence with a preposition. They are to be found in the streets of our cities sleeping in doorways. They risk death, trying to cross the Mediterranean and the English Channel in leaky boats. They lie starving in the bombarded hospitals of Gaza; bleeding from the assaults of jihadists in Syria, in Nigeria, in Mozambique; mortally wounded by civil war in Sudan and South Sudan; languishing in the prison camps of Russia and Belarus; hiding from the raids of the Border Force in the United States.

Lazarus is everywhere. If, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins so beautifully and so truthfully wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His,” so Lazarus, and indeed Christ, struggles in ten million places, wasting in limbs and anguished in eyes not His.

What is our response? The response of governments is to slash overseas aid, thus ironically multiplying the numbers of refugees prepared to risk their lives, not as the naysayers claim, in order to live in luxury at taxpayers’ expense, but to eke out a fear-filled existence among a hostile population.

In many ways, we are more blameworthy than the rich man of the parable. Unlike him, we are not unaware of Lazarus’s existence, his presence both at our door and on the other side of the world. Our society is familiar with Lazarus, and despises him, yelling at the government to “look after our own”, but then decrying attempts to do even that.

If the rich man went to hell for culpable ignorance, what about us who cannot claim his excuse? Even the one who rose from the dead has come back to warn us as the rich man begged would happen. What response are we making to Him, present in all the Lazaruses of the world?

25th Sunday Year C

25th Sunday 2025

Amos 8:4-7; 1Tim 2:1-8; Luke 16:10-13

Beware easy targets: take special care in front of open goals. Programmes of sporting bloopers are full of people shooting wide of empty nets, dropping undroppable catches, failing to score unmissable tries. I recall a Scottish striker rushing to tap the ball into the net, and somehow clearing it off the line; Shane Warne being regaled with chants of “What’s it like to drop the Ashes” after spilling a dolly of a catch in the crucial final Test of 2005; Don Fox missing the simplest of conversions in front of the posts, and thus handing the Rugby League Cup to the opposing team.

All of this occurs to me as I ponder today’s Readings. Surely, they are a gift to the preacher? All you have to do is to condemn the big bankers and the city slickers, the monopoly capitalists and the politicians who support them, the other politicians who fiddle their expenses, and the millionaires who, to the applause of sections of the press, use legal but immoral means to avoid paying their share of taxes; and you can sit down again, basking in a sense of virtue?

No, you can’t. You never can. The scriptures never make things that easy, because they demand self-examination; and the parable of the man who sees the speck in his brother’s eye whilst ignoring the log in his own always looms large.

What then is the log which obscures our vision here? the stumble which will keep the unguarded net intact? Is it not that same lack of self-awareness which so often blinds us to our own faults? How many of us who decry the greed of others nonetheless do business, for the sake of cheapness, with a company which is notorious for not paying its share of taxes and for treating its workers badly? How many of us vote for a party because it promises “wealth creation”—surely a euphemism for greed? Why does a majority of the population allegedly support the slashing of overseas aid on the grounds that we should “look after our own” while at the same time denouncing those who are dependent on benefits as scroungers, regardless of the battle for survival which so many endure?

It is fascinating that the main political parties are terrified of offending pensioners—and I speak as a pensioner myself who am extremely grateful for my pension, but who cannot see any justification for the triple lock, at a time when swathes of the younger generation struggle to make ends meet. It simply adds to the conviction that we baby boomers are selfish.

I wonder how many of the people who bemoan the decline of town centres—and is there anyone among us who hasn’t done that?—have contributed to that decline by our own shopping habits, first abandoning the high street in favour of cheaper out-of-town supermarkets, and then shifting again to shopping on line. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in changing our shopping habits, but we cannot then moan because town centre shops are closing—and do we ever pause to consider those who lose their livelihoods, whether shop workers, bank employees, or whoever, as a result of our actions?

Before the 1997 General Election, the Bishops of England and Wales produced an excellent document entitled “The Common Good”, not telling people how to vote, but pointing to the moral factors which voters should consider. It was immediately denounced by the then editor of the Times, himself a Catholic, as being “economically illiterate”. What have we come to when Catholics place economics above moral justice? What price the Gospel if even we begin to think in those terms. DO WE?

Incidentally, a couple of days ago, I came across a couple of snippets from the forthcoming biography of the Pope, based on interviews with him. In them, Leo expresses regret that some Catholics place economic considerations above the demands of justice—so at least I got that part right.

Exaltation of the Cross (replaces 24th Sunday)

Exaltation of the Cross 2025

Numbers 21:4-9; Philippians 2:6-11; John 3:13-17

What a pity the name of this feast has been altered. It used to be known as the Triumph of the Cross, rather than the Exaltation of the Cross.

“Why is that a problem?” you may ask. “Don’t the two words amount to the same thing?” That, I assume, is what the liturgists thought, but they were not entirely correct, which I attribute to the decline of the Classics. Ototototototoi  as Aeschylus and Aristophanes would have said—in effect, “Woe is me!”

There is a subtle difference, arising from the nature of a Triumph in the Roman Republic, and subsequently in the Empire. St. Paul, as a Roman citizen, knew the difference. In 2 Corinthians 2:14, he writes about “God leading us in Christ’s Triumphal Procession”.

That is because, in Rome, a Triumph was a special event. It was an honour bestowed on a particularly successful general, who was allowed, in contravention of normal law, to lead his army, fully armed, through the streets of Rome. In the Triumphal Procession, which was greeted enthusiastically throughout the city, would be carried the booty which had been gained, often including exotic animals, wild or tame, and a group, representative of the prisoners whom he had captured, especially their tribal chiefs, who would subsequently be executed or sold as slaves.

Thus, the Triumph of the Cross meant, not only that the Cross has been exalted—raised up high—but that it brings in its wake all those whom it has captured and taken to itself: ourselves first of all, but also the powers of evil which have been overcome by Christ’s death on the Cross.

Notice that it is the Cross which is awarded this Triumph. It is not only the Resurrection which marks Christ’s victory, or achieves it, but his submission to, and acceptance of, His Passion and Death. The Resurrection may be regarded as the fruits of victory, but that victory, and hence the Triumph, are achieved through the Cross.

This is pointed out in that passage from the Letter to the Philippians which we have just heard. This is thought to be an early hymn, used in the liturgy, celebrating Christ’s self-emptying, beginning with His taking human flesh, but carried to its full extent by Jesus’ acceptance of death. It is because of this total self-emptying, in His acceptance of the Cross, that God the Father has raised Him, via that same Cross, to Resurrection.

Exaltation, raising up, is certainly a major aspect of this Feast. Jesus, lifted up on the Cross, is both the sign and the means of our healing and salvation. He refers, in today’s Gospel passage, to the episode described in our First Reading from the Book of Numbers, when the grumbling Israelites were attacked and bitten fatally by the “fiery serpents”. The bronze serpent, lifted up on a pole by Moses, was the sign and source of their healing, their rescue from death, but it was also a sign of the far greater rescue and healing which were to be achieved by Christ, lifted up on the Cross.

What is the significance of all this to us? It seems to me that both the Triumph and the Exaltation concern us. By His acceptance of the Cross, Christ has captured us, leading us in His Triumphal Procession, not to be enslaved or executed, but to be liberated into new life. Through being lifted up on that same Cross, He has become both the sign and the means of our healing. St. Paul tells us that he glories in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and so should we, always looking upon the Cross, every cross or crucifix, with reverence.

23rd Sunday Year C

23rd Sunday 2025

Wisdom 9:13-18; Philemon 9-10, 12-17: Luke 14: 25-33

We have another tramstopper of a Gospel today. We begin with a call to “hate” our nearest and dearest, move to a demand to take up our own Cross, and conclude with a warning that discipleship entails “renouncing” (literally “separating ourselves from”) all our possessions. Sandwiched among them are those two parables which don’t appear to belong, of the tower-builder and the warlike king. What do we make of it all?

Firstly, we have to ask what Our Lord means here by the word “hate”. Is He really asking us to hate anyone, especially those closest to us? That would make no sense, if taken in its literal English meaning. In particular, it would contradict that Second Commandment which Jesus insists is similar to the First, namely to love our neighbour as ourselves.

The point is that Jesus wasn’t speaking in English. He was a Jew, a Semite, and the word miseo (I hate) is here what is described as a Semitic usage, effectively an exaggeration for the sake of emphasis. Our Lord is insisting that we must not put anyone before Him, that we must not put the Second Commandment before the First, that love of God must always have primacy. Elsewhere in the Gospels, He expresses the point in a more easily comprehensible way, saying that “anyone who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me”. It is not a matter of hating: it is a matter of sorting out our priorities.

As for taking up the Cross, that is a call to follow in the Master’s footsteps, as Simon of Cyrene did when he helped to carry the Cross of Jesus. It is interesting that Jesus here speaks of the disciple taking up his/her OWN Cross. The Cross comes to each of us in a different way: it is uniquely our own, yet in taking it up we are, in a mysterious way, taking up Jesus’ Cross too, as did Simon.

To “bear” or “take up” is, in Greek, bastazo, as in St. John’s account of Jesus’ carrying His own Cross. It is almost as if Our Lord lifts the Cross with a flourish, and we are asked to do the same. What though is our own Cross?

I would suggest that it entails the difficulties and struggles which all of us encounter at various points in our lives. It may also include the concept of voluntary penance, but it involves principally those things which come upon us unasked, sometimes because of our faith. How do we respond to setbacks, to failures, to illness, to the approach of death? Do we grumble and complain, blame God, go into “Why me?” mode. We are perfectly entitled to resist our sufferings, but we do so in the light of God’s love, uniting our sufferings with those of Jesus, our Cross with His, refusing to become bitter or negative, recognising that He is with us in our sufferings. If they pass, we thank Him joyfully: if not, we bear them courageously.

In keeping with all of this is that final sentence, calling us to “renounce” all that we have. Like the apparent “hate” which we have encountered, it entails not being dominated by material things, not allowing possessions to possess us, sitting light to the things of this world. We are not to be acquisitive like the capitalists: we are to remember that love of neighbour entails a commitment to justice, to share fairly this earth and all that it offers.

What then of the two parables, which are linked to the instructions by the words “for” and “therefore”? According to the Jerome Biblical Commentary, to which I turn when even more flummoxed than usual, those words do not belong. They have been added to create an artificial connection. If we omit them, and allow the parables to stand on their own, then those parables make more sense.

Jesus is warning us not to charge recklessly into things, promising the earth but failing to deliver even a spadeful of soil. A modern equivalent is the injunction not to bite off more than we can chew. We do not make exaggerated promises to Jesus: we do our best and discover that, with that, He can and will deliver more than we thought possible.

On the other hand, we must not be over-cautious. For instance it seems to me that God is calling more people to the priesthood and consecrated life than are at present prepared to admit it. Some people appear to require cast iron certainty before they are prepared to respond. This is unrealistic. We have to go with the balance of probabilities, trusting God to sort out our future. Let us be sensible, but let us not be timid.

22nd Sunday Year C

22nd Sunday 2025

Sirach 3:17f, 20,28f; Hebrews 12:18f, 22-24; Luke14:1, 7-14.

If you were looking for a key word from today’s readings, what might it be? I would plump for the word “humble”. Does that seem reasonable? Then we have to ask “What does it mean?”

Even if you haven’t read “David Copperfield”, which I thoroughly recommend, you may be familiar with Uriah Heep, a horribly unpleasant and conniving character, who misses no opportunity of claiming that he is “ ‘umble, Master Copperfield” and that his mother, another unlikeable character is equally “ ‘umble”. Inevitably, people who claim to be humble are self-centred, or they wouldn’t be seeking to draw attention to their supposed qualities.

What then is the true meaning of the word, and of its noun “humility”? To learn the real significance of any word, it helps to trace its roots. The word “humble” comes from the Latin word “humus” which means “ground”, “soil”, “earth”. Consequently, to be humble is to be earthy, to have one’s feet on the ground, to be well grounded, and therefore to have a true self-understanding.

It does not mean that you turn yourself into a doormat, or that you despise yourself. Doormats may be laid on the ground, but they are not OF the ground, OF the earth, and they have no self-awareness. In the Letter to the Philippians, we are told that Christ humbled Himself in becoming human, and that He was “humbler yet” in accepting death on the Cross, yet He was always conscious of His true identity. He allowed Himself to be lowly among the lowly, but He never forgot that He was the Son of the Father. His awareness of His true identity, of His true worth, was always present.

When Sirach tells the great that they must humble themselves, he makes it clear that they are aware of their greatness. They ae intelligent, as he goes on to say, and their self-humbling is a conscious act.

Where, in our recent past, do we find an example of such humility? Is it not in Pope Francis’ actions in going into prison and washing the feet of criminals? We find it also in his injunction to pastors to live with the smell of the sheep, to know, love, and serve the people. All of this is in imitation of His Lord and master, Jesus, who associated with the poor and the lowly, and who washed the feet of the apostles.

This reminds us that our humility is to bear fruit in positive action. At the end of today’s Gospel passage, Our Lord tells His host to invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” to his feasts. I have mentioned previously the Irish priest, based in London who, when someone knocked at his door asking for money, would instead take them around the corner to a café and sit down to a meal with them.

I recall something similar from St. Mary’s, Morecambe, forty years ago. As the congregation emerged from Sunday Mass, a mentally disturbed man appeared and started begging.  A parishioner took him home and shared her dinner with him, an action as brave as it was generous, as it became known that he had the potential to be violent. On this occasion, overcome by her kindness, he was as meek as a lamb.

Where does, or may, OUR humility manifest itself? That passage from the Letter to the Philippians which I mentioned earlier begins “In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus. Humility begins in the mind. It is an attitude which some people possess naturally, and which the rest of us must cultivate.

It entails recognising out true worth as children of God, and the equal worth of every other person, like us created in the image and likeness of God. It involves remembering Jesus’ own words “Whatever you did to the least of mine you did to me”, and so realising that every face that we see is the face of Christ.

Anther story which I recall came from a parishioner of St. Gregory’s, Preston. This lady’s elderly father-in-law had come to live with them. He insisted on wearing his bed-socks, and sometimes, when approaching the toilet, he would miss the target, soaking the aforementioned item of clothing. Clare then had the unenviable task of peeling off the saturated bed-socks, and washing father-in-law’s feet. She told me “I managed to do it by telling myself “These are Our Lord’s feet that I am washing”. There, I think, were encapsulated humility, faith, and wisdom.

21st Sunday of Year C

21st Sunday 2025

Isaiah 66:18-21; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30

The compilers of the Lectionary have been bowling us some real googlies recently, and today is no exception. My question is: are we to be encouraged by today’s readings, or alarmed?

My suspicion is that the answer to that is “a bit of both”. We should be encouraged, but we cannot be complacent. The encouragement can be found in all three readings, which remind us that salvation, and membership of God’s people, are open to everyone and not only to God’s original chosen people, the Jews.

We begin with the conclusion to the Book of Isaiah. This part of the Book, attributed to a prophet whom we call Trito-Isaiah (Third Isaiah), dates from the period after the return of the Jewish people from exile in Babylon, and their settlement in their own ancestral homeland. It was a time of optimism, expressed by the prophet who foresees “all nations and tongues” being brought into God’s people, including those who “have not heard my fame or seen my glory”.

So far, so positive, and we can, to an extent, recognise the fulfilment of that prophecy in the Church, the new Israel. Or should we perhaps say that we see its potential fulfilment? Very many people still do not recognise the one God; and the Church has, over the millennia, behaved abominably towards the Jewish people, the original People of God.

Steps have been taken to address that wrong, especially in “Nostra Aetate” the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Church’s relations with non-Christian Religions, which recognises that the Jewish people continue to enjoy a special relationship with God through the Covenants. This was reinforced by Pope Benedict XVI who, in his magnificent three volume “Jesus of Nazareth” stated that we are not in the business of trying to convert Jews, who have their own way to God.

“Nostra Aetate” also states that the Church “rejects nothing that is good” in other non-Christian religions, and expresses particular respect for the Muslims. Sadly, we are only too aware of the persistence of antisemitism, exacerbated by the behaviour of the current Israeli government, and of the persistence of jihadism among Muslims who seek to impose Islam on the world by force.

We find further encouragement in the Letter to the Hebrews, which reminds us that we are sons and daughters of God, a breathtaking realisation. Yet much of this passage is spent pointing out that our relationship with God isn’t all wine and roses, or cakes and ale. It involves discipline, something which Jesus Himself expressed in terms of “taking up the Cross”. Attempting a painless following of Christ is a venture doomed to failure.

Turning to the Gospel, we find the greatest challenge of all, as the Lord declares that many who claim to know Him are in for a rude awakening. The Way of the Cross to which we are called entails striving to “enter through the narrow door”. That doesn’t mean that we should be attempting to make life difficult for ourselves: rather, that if we are truly faithful to Christ, then He will give us a share in His sufferings.

If we claim to know Jesus, but do not encounter suffering, then that is not the true Jesus, but a figure of our own making. If the Cross does not chafe our shoulders at times, if our path seems completely smooth, then we are on the wrong path, and we will not find the narrow door to which Jesus directs us. There is no need to go in for self-flagellation; our genuine commitment to Jesus, our faithful carrying of the Cross, will do that for us.

This passage may at first strike us as grim, but once more there is plenty to encourage us. “People will come from East and West and from North and South to recline at table in the Kingdom of God.” Potentially, those people are us, who were not part of the original chosen people, but who have now been adopted as sons and daughters of God. In the last analysis, the question is “What are we making of that adoption?”

20th Sunday Year C

20th Sunday 2025

Jeremiah 38:4-6,8-10; Psalm 39(40); Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

“Well, here’s a how-de-do” as Gilbert and Sullivan have Yum Yum sing in the Mikado. I am constantly encouraging people to be positive—to avoid negativity—yet here we have a set of readings which verge on the gloomy. Is positivity then mistaken?

“Certainly not!” I would reply. We are called to be positive, but we are also called to be realistic. The Christian life, whilst rooted in the positive, entails a sharing in the Cross. The Cross leads to resurrection, but it is still painful as we carry it, and as we share in the Lord’s death. Life in Christ is not all beer and skittles.

As Christians, we are not called to be Pollyanna, to fix our faces in a relentless grin. I have no patience with the “Smile, Jesus loves you” brigade. As I have mentioned before, I am sorely tempted to bop them on the nose and to say “Try smiling now, Sunshine”. Our call is to trust in God always to lead us through the Dark Night, to keep us positive in faith, hope, and love.

It is against this background that we contemplate today’s readings. First, we meet Jeremiah, who has a reputation as a prophet of doom. Indeed, his name has become part of the language, somewhat unfairly: someone who always looks on the dark side may be called a Jeremiah.

Yet Jeremiah’s prophecies were based on an accurate assessment of the state of things. The people of Judah and Jerusalem had turned away from God, and Jeremiah was merely warning them of the consequences, in terms of destruction and exile. Events proved him correct.

Secretly, the king knew that Jeremiah was right, and he took little persuasion to rescue and restore him. Had he and his successors had the courage of their convictions and followed Jeremiah’s instructions, the Babylonian Exile might have been averted.

Jeremiah’s plight is echoed by the psalm. “He drew me from the deadly pit, from the miry clay,” which is exactly what happened to the prophet. A seemingly gloomy psalm ends on a note of trust and hope: “Wretched and poor though I am, the Lord is mindful of me. You are my rescuer, my help: O God, do not delay.”

Likewise, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, whilst recognising the difficulties which we will face, is positive in his outlook. He urges us to look to Jesus, to contemplate His sufferings and the opposition He endured, but to recognise that He was ultimately triumphant.

Opposition is also a hallmark of Our Lord’s remarks in the Gospel. He draws attention to the sufferings which He Himself faces, and point out that He will be the object and cause of division and strife. Thus will be fulfilled Simeon’s prophecy at the Presentation of the forty day old Jesus in the Temple, which, like this passage, is found in St. Luke’s Gospel. Simeon, as you recall, declared that “this child will be the cause of the rise and fall of many in Israel” and that “He will be a sign that is rejected” (or “a sign that is spoken against” or “a sign of contradiction”).

So events have proved. Throughout the ages, presumably because of the existence of evil, wars have been fought and families divided over the name and person of Jesus. I have mentioned before the elderly lady in my home parish who described how, as a young woman, she was put out of the house when she declared her intention of becoming a Catholic. Many years later, her only son became a priest. I have also referred to the young man who, over forty years ago, told me that his atheist parents had declared that, if he became a Christian, they would no longer regard him as their son.

The following of Christ will always bring the Cross into our lives in one way or another. Far from this being a reason for negativity, it should be a cause for rejoicing as it will bring us closer to Him, and to the “cloud of witnesses” mentioned in the Letter to the Hebrews, and will lead us to the Resurrection.

Assumption 15th August

Assumption 2025

Apocalypse 11:19,12:1-6,10; 1Cor 15:20-27; Luke 1:39-56

“Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”

That line was written by William Wordsworth as a description of Our Lady. He was speaking of the Immaculate Conception—her preservation from all stain of sin—but the description is equally fitting for today’s feast of the Assumption.

In that line by Wordsworth (who, incidentally, wasn’t a Catholic) every word is significant, not least “our”. Mary is one of us: she is OUR Lady because she is OURS. We can even go further and say “she is US”.

Mary is us at our best. She is what we are called to be, a truth which is sometimes expressed by saying that she is the eschatological ikon of the Church—yet in reality, not only of the Church, but of the whole human race. She is the one created being who has fulfilled what, from the beginning, our nature was intended to be, free from sin and raised body and soul to the fullness of life with God.

The claim is sometimes made that the Assumption of Our Lady is “not in the Bible”. That depends what you mean by “not in the Bible”. There is no actual description of the event, but so much is said in both Testaments about the promises made to God’s people that it is impossible not to see the Assumption as the fulfilment of those promises.

As Elizabeth says, when visited by the newly pregnant Mary, the latter is “blessed because she believed that there will be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord”. The word for “fulfilment” is, in the Greek of the Gospel, teleiosis which conveys the concept of ultimate conclusion, of the end of things. It is from the same root—telos—as the word which Jesus was to se to mean “perfect”, “complete”, “thoroughly made” and relates to the end of time. Elizabeth may have been thinking only of the promise of the birth of the Saviour, but at this time she is prophesying under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and in speaking of teleiosis, she is unwittingly proclaiming, in Mary, the fulfilment of all God’s promises.

This is brought out still further in Mary’s response, the Magnificat. How much of this was actually spoken by Mary herself is irrelevant. This is the inspired word of God, delivered by the Holy Spirit, and at its conclusion it speaks not only of the personal promise to Our Lady, but also of the promises to all God’s people, right back to the days of Abraham.

It is these promises which are to be fulfilled in Mary, and to cause “all generations to call [her]blessed”. Those extremist self-styled evangelicals who deny honour to Mary are rejecting the very Gospel which they claim to uphold.

We find a similar teleological—end of time—theme in the extract from the Apocalypse which forms our First Reading. This clearly refers to Mary in the person of “the woman clothed with the sun” who brings forth “the male child who is to rule all the nations”. She is also the Ark of the Covenant, as she carried God within herself.

Yet scripture scholars point out that this woman is also Israel, and the Church. In other words Mary, present in heaven, is there as the representative of all God’s people. In her, the people of Israel, and of the new Israel which is the Church, are already present in heaven. This is indeed a reason for all generations to call her blessed, because her Assumption is also ours: in Mary fulfilled, in us awaited. She is indeed OUR Lady because she is ours, because she is us.

19th Sunday of Year C

19th Sunday 2025

Wisdom 18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19; Luke12:32-48

“Everyone to whom much was given, of them much will be required.”

What have you been given? Not much, if you take heed of the moaners and groaners who appear to form a considerable portion of our society. According to them, whatever they had has been taken away; and everything, and particularly this country, is going to hell in a handcart.

Are they correct? Indeed, there are people who are in the grip of poverty, but they tend not to be among the moaners and groaners. The genuine poor are too busy trying to make ends meet to waste their time complaining. It is generally the relatively comfortable who have the leisure to bemoan their lot. It is difficult not to feel that, if they were given everything, they would still find something to grumble about. Frequently, what is involved is attitude rather than reality. Negativity is a very easy state of mind to develop, but it is destructive, addictive, contagious, and sinful.

What then of you and me? We must resist the temptation towards negative attitudes, because they will take us over and, by degrees, destroy us. We need always to consider and reflect upon our blessings, developing a positive mindset, recognising what is good, and consequently being motivated to improve what is less than good.

We have indeed been given a great deal. Indeed, we have been given everything, because we have been given Jesus Christ, God the Son, as one of us. Through our Baptism, we have been given new life in Him; we have, through Baptism and Confirmation, received the Holy Spirit. Similarly, we have been given the Mass, the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the ongoing presence of Jesus’ own sacrifice, which He offered through His life, and particularly through His suffering, death, and resurrection.

Every time we come to Mass, we encounter Christ in the gathering of His people, in His word proclaimed in the Scriptures, in the person of the priest, and in the Sacrament and Sacrifice of His Body and Blood. We have too His abiding presence in the tabernacle, His healing presence in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and in the Sacrament of the Sick, and for some in the Sacraments of Matrimony or Holy Orders.

Furthermore, we have been granted membership of the Church, the Body of Christ, united with our brothers and sisters throughout the world, in communion with them and with those who have gone before us throughout the ages, gathered in union and communion with the successor of Peter. I always cringe when I hear the term “our Church”: it isn’t OUR Church, it is the Church of Christ, and we are members of it, of Him, and of one another. Nor is it our Church as distinct from other people’s Church: it is THE Church, and it is His.

Likewise, we have been given the gift of faith which, as the Letter to the Hebrews points out, must be fulfilled in action, as it was by Abraham and Sarah, and by the other patriarchs and saints. This is where we encounter the demand, of which Jesus speaks in the Gospel.

Faith has been given to us, not to lie fallow, or to be brought out only on Sundays, though it must be brought out then, as we recognise our communion with our brothers and sisters, and fulfil part of our duty to God. It needs to be the driving force of our lives.

More and more we seek to entrust our lives to God. Like Abraham, we are constantly on a journey. We do not know from day to day what God will ask of us, as Abraham did not know where his journey would lead.

Each day we are called to recognise the events of that day as elements of our call from God. What is God asking of us when such or such a thing happens, when something unexpected occurs, or even when life appears to be a matter of routine?

Perhaps we do not know. We need therefore to be people who reflect, who ponder the events of our lives, to consider what God may be saying to us among them. Above all, as Our Lord’s parables remind us, we need to be people who realise that He is always among us, always within us; that His coming to us relates not only to our death, but is a reality of every day.

18th Sunday of Year C

18th Sunday 2025

Ecclesiastes 1:2, 21-23; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12: 13-21

I have previously begun a homily with a question drawn from a song, and I make no apology for doing so again, as I believe this question to be particularly apposite to today’s First Reading and Gospel, and indeed, to today’s world. The question is

                   Sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Of course you know the answer: “Another day older and deeper in debt”, the song being “Sixteen Tons” originally recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford (yes, honestly) circa 1960, though there is a much better recent version by a band named Southern Raised. Google “Sixteen Tons by Southern Raised” and I guarantee you a treat.

Why do I quote it? I do so because it fits today’s readings, but also because it describes the situation facing many people both in our own country and around the world, particularly in the Developing World, whose development is hindered by debt and corruption. The world over, we see the situation described in Ecclesiastes and St. Luke, the rich becoming richer at the expense of the poor.

This isn’t a political matter, it is a moral and religious matter, a matter of corporate sin, about which Pope St. John Paul II used to speak so eloquently. Our Lord, in today’s Gospel, makes it clear that the rich man of the parable is guilty of sin, the sin of covetousness or pleonexia and that he will suffer the consequences.

Yet governments and political parties advocate greed and covetousness, lauding them as virtues instead of denouncing them as sins and vices. Even in the developing world, politicians and others enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. Blessed Floribert Kositi was last month beatified as a martyr. He was a devout Catholic and newly qualified customs officer in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was beaten to death for rejecting bribes and threats, as he refused to allow into the country contaminated and therefore potentially poisonous rice.

Not only the DRC but many countries in Africa are exploited by developed countries for their mineral deposits, for which local people dig their sixteen tons whilst seeing no benefit to themselves, instead becoming “older and deeper in debt”. Debt is a massive issue on a national scale, as countries in Africa and elsewhere are crippled by interest payments. The Catholic Church, especially through the agency of CAFOD, Aid to the Church in Need, and others, has campaigned vigorously for the cancellation of debt, as have secular organisations. As individual Catholics, we should be supporting such campaigns.

Yet in our country and others, it is easy to find a similar situation, with the rich benefiting at the expense of the poor. Much of the hostility to immigrants comes from people who are struggling to survive, despite working every hour God sends, or on the other hand being unable to find work. Their situation is exploited by wealthy politicians and rabble rousers, who make immigrants their scapegoat, as their predecessors in the 1930s targeted Jews.

Our own government and, still more, the government of the USA, have slashed Overseas Aid, a move which has proved popular with struggling people, whose call is to “look after our own”. We should indeed be looking after our own, but by targeting the rich and covetous, rather than those who are poorer still.

The opposite, however, is happening. In America, Congress has approved Trump’s bill which deprives tens of thousands of poor citizens of medical care in order to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, a grievous sin which even the normally supine US Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced. In this country, a supposedly respectable newspaper published, a week or two ago, a leading article condemning in unbelievably harsh terms the proposal for a Wealth Tax which might be a small step towards redressing the balance, while at the same time perhaps reducing the guilt of today’s equivalents of the rich man of the parable. So extreme was this article that I had to check the date to ensure that it wasn’t 1st April.

Both the author of Ecclesiastes and, most importantly of all, Jesus Himself denounce the injustice arising from covetousness, and the exploitation of the poor to benefit the rich. Are we, in the light of the Gospel and of Catholic Social Teaching, playing our part, by lobbying MPs, by supporting campaigns, not as a matter of politics but of justice and of faith?

17th Sunday Year C

17th Sunday 2025

Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13

I love that account of Abraham carrying out a Dutch auction with God, trying to persuade God to spare the people of Sodom. Unfortunately, God couldn’t find a single righteous person in Sodom, and the city was destroyed.

In truth, there are no righteous people anywhere, if we are depending on our own righteousness. As the Letter to the Colossians implies, and as St. Paul states explicitly elsewhere, we have no righteousness of our own: all our righteousness comes from Christ, who has cancelled our sins through His Cross. Even the secular world condemns people who are self-righteous, yet it is a fault to which religious people may be particularly prone, regarding themselves as virtuous and everyone else as sinful. It is a fault against which we must be on guard.

Turning to the Gospel, I have to tell again the story of Terry. It is a story which the Sisters have heard ad infinitum, but it bears re-telling, especially if you haven’t heard it.

Terry was a sad character, dirty and unkempt, who used to do the rounds of the Preston churches—and may still do so for aught I know—always with the same demand: “Some tea—in a cup!” Sometimes he would pay for the tea by putting a few coppers through the letter box; at other times, he would leave a present, often in the form of a heap of soil, though on one occasion I found myself the puzzled owner of a wheel trim.

I suspect that he had been a patient displaced by the closure of the big mental hospitals, and, like so many, had fallen through the net of care in the community. Where he slept, I have no idea, though clearly he was fed somewhere.

One night, I had gone to bed and, after reading for a while, had switched off my light and retired to the land of Nod. I was awakened by the shrilling of the doorbell. Light back on; glance at watch; it was half past eleven. Shrugging into my dressing gown, I made my way somewhat reluctantly downstairs and opened the door.

There stood Terry. His demand was the same as ever: “Some tea—in a cup!”

Half past eleven in the morning is one thing. I tend to the view that half past eleven at night is something entirely different.

“Terry,” I said, as patiently as I could manage, “It’s half past eleven. I am not making tea at this hour.”

“Some tea—in a cup!”

“Terry, you have woken me up. I want to go back to bed. You can’t expect tea at this hour.”

“Some tea—in a cup!”

“Terry….”

“Some tea—in a cup!”

Terry got his tea—in a cup—and I returned to bed, if not disgruntled, then at least rather less than gruntled, as PG Wodehouse might have said. Next morning, I made my way across to the church to prepare for Mass. I opened the Lectionary, and what should be the Gospel of the day but “Which of you has a friend who will go to him at midnight….?” Ah well, at least Terry had been half an hour early.

Thus, I proved to myself that at least one of the parables works in practical terms, and I have often wondered how I should have felt, reading those words, had I turned down Terry’s request. There is surely a moral there, that we have to be willing to take that extra, perhaps unwelcome, step to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters.

But what of the central message of the parable? Certainly, Terry proved that persistence, yes even impudence, can prevail in a human context. But is it, as Jesus declares, equally true of God? I suspect that most, if not all, of us will have prayed for something, and apparently failed to have our prayers answered.

Have we been persistent enough? Probably. Have we been praying for the wrong thing? Possibly, but not necessarily.  Does God see the whole of the picture, of which we see only a part? Yes, and so it is not impossible, in the greater scheme of things, that apparent non-answers will have been for the best. Is it true that, whilst not giving us what we wanted, God may actually have been giving us what we needed? Again, it is possible. Any of you who are parents will know that it is sometimes better if you do not give in to a child’s requests, yes even demands.

All of these thoughts are valid, but we must be careful not to be too glib in answering the distress of those whose prayers have apparently not been answered. In the last analysis, we do not know, we do not fully understand. All that we can do is to maintain our trust in God, and to support and comfort as best we can those who may feel that God has let them down.

16th Sunday Year C

16th Sunday 2025

Genesis 18: 1-10; Colossians 1: 24-28; Luke 10: 38-42

By heck! We have a triple whammy today—three very powerful readings. What are we to make of each of them?

Our reading from the Book of Genesis brings three strangers to visit Abraham. Who are they? And why are there three of them? In some sense at least, they are God, because the first verse begins “The Lord appeared to Abraham”, whereupon the three men materialise.

The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) doesn’t always distinguish between “the Lord” and “the angel of the Lord”: sometimes the terms appear to be indistinguishable as titles of God. Here, three men appear, yet Abraham addresses them in the singular, saying “O Lord”. Towards the end of the passage we are told that “they” (plural) ask Abraham “Where is Sarah, your wife?” yet after he has answered them, we are next told that it is “the Lord” who comments further “I shall surely return to you about this time next year and Sarah your wife shall have a son”.

If anything can be called “clear” in this passage, it is clear that, in some way, the three men are a presence of God. Things become even more complex a few verses further on, though, when the three men go on towards Sodom, whilst “the Lord” remains speaking with Abraham.  So God is somehow separate from the three men, yet identified with them.

How significant is it that there are three? Is this an early intimation of the Trinity? There is a famous icon depicting the three, and effectively identifying them with the Holy Trinity. It is unlikely that the author of this passage in Genesis was thinking in Trinitarian terms, but might we consider that the inspiration of the Holy Spirit was at work?

Turning to the reading from the Letter to the Colossians, I find one of my favourite scriptural quotations. I knew a priest who, finding himself in a group in which people were asked to quote their favourite passage from the Bible, and considering this unduly intrusive, replied “A vain hope for safety is the horse” (Psalms). I was never in danger of being made a bishop: had I been so, I would have been sorely tempted to take as my motto “He stinketh, for he is four days buried” (originally about Lazarus). Here however, I find a particularly encouraging quotation.

“In my flesh, I am making up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His Body—that is the Church.” What does that mean? It tells us that, when we suffer, as all of us do at times, our sufferings can be part of the Passion of Jesus, and so can help to redeem the world. This is the understanding that underlies the old encouragement to “Offer it up”. It won’t necessarily make the suffering any less painful, but it will make it less futile, less apparently pointless, because we can understand that we are helping Jesus to save the world.

Finally, we encounter Martha and Mary. The crucial sentence here arrives towards the end: “One thing is necessary”. I still have vivid memories—which tends to be true of anything more than forty years ago, but less so of anything recent—of the Lenten retreat delivered during my first year in the seminary (1971/2) by Fr. Denis Clinch, who subsequently spent many years as the Rector of the Hidden Gem, aka St. Mary’s, Mulberry Street, Manchester.

Those words to Martha formed the backbone of the retreat, as Fr. Clinch clearly saw them as addressed to all followers of Christ. Lowering his voice dramatically, he would announce at some point during practically all his talks “Few things are necessary. INDEED—only one”.

What is the one thing necessary? It is to carry out God’s will in every moment and every situation. Martha’s problem here is that she hasn’t taken the trouble to find out what Jesus wants of her on this occasion. She is anxious to serve Him, but hasn’t asked how He wants to be served. In this moment, He has a greater desire for her attention than for her sausage and mash, even if served with mushy peas. The Jerusalem Bible translation runs “You worry and fret about so many things”. Is that as true of you as it is of me? Can you and I seek instead, the one thing necessary?

15th Sunday of Year C

15th Sunday 2025

Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37

“The word is very near to you. It is in your heart and in your mouth, so that you can do it.” What is the word? At one level, it is the Word with a capital W, Jesus Christ who is the Word of God, and who dwells within us. He is in our hearts; He will be in our mouths when we speak His word.

Can we say more than that? Yes we can, because we have the summary which we know well, and which is provided for us today by the naughty lawyer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself”.

Do you notice something which upsets a claim which is sometimes made about Our Lord? People will allege that Jesus was the first to link the demands of love of God and of neighbour, yet according to this account the link was already familiar: the lawyer expresses it without hesitation. Furthermore, the scribe in Mark’s version of this episode endorses Jesus’ linking of the two as if it is something well known, rather than a novel idea.

Whatever the origin, it is clear that these two commandments are to form the basis of our lives. But what if the two come into conflict?

“Don’t be daft,” you will say. “They can’t.” And of course you are correct. I will rephrase it: “What if the two appear to come into conflict?”

“Explain! Explain!” you will demand, doing your best Dalek impression. “Well, look at the parable” I will reply. “Why do the priest and the Levite pass by without helping the injured man?”

“Because they are mean so-and-sos, as religious people often are” you will respond. Possibly, but what if it is more complex than that? Perhaps they are on their way to the Temple in Jerusalem to carry out their religious duties. They still have a way to go, and if they stop to help, it may cause them to be late, and if the man is dead, they will incur ritual defilement, and be unable to carry out those duties. There may be a whole Temple-full of people depending on them.

Switch the time frame. I am on my way to provide Mass at some parish or other. The people in church depend on me. I have no mobile signal, so I can’t forewarn anybody. If I am able to make an emergency call for an ambulance, I will have to wait for its arrival, and who knows how long that will take? Might I have an excuse for hurrying by, especially if you are among the people waiting in church?

“Certainly not,” you will say. “Your duty of care must take precedence” and you will be correct. But broaden things a little. Does people’s interpretation of God’s Law sometimes make them less compassionate, less committed to love of neighbour, than non-religious people? It shouldn’t, but does it?

I am thinking of the United States. Before each of the last two presidential elections, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has stated that abortion is their pre-eminent concern. Consequently, a candidate who shall be nameless has paid lip service to the pro-life cause, and has garnered support from some, but by no means all, of the bishops.

Of course, abortion is an important issue, a matter of life and death. But so is health care for all, regardless of income. So is overseas aid. So is capital punishment. So is care for refugees, and for the victims of tyranny. The candidate in question, now the President, has slashed overseas aid, and it has been estimated that fourteen million lives are at risk as a result. His cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will leave tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of his (and the bishops’) fellow citizens without access to healthcare. His enthusiasm for capital punishment will lead to the deaths, admittedly of a much smaller number, at the hands of the authorities, and many of those executed will be innocent. Many American bishops have protested vehemently against the President’s actions, now endorsed by Congress, but the complaint from the Conference of Bishops as a body can best be described as mealy-mouthed.

The point which I am trying to make is that our love of God, and our fulfilment of His commands, must always be compatible with our love of neighbour. If it appears not to be so, then it is not genuine. The Samaritan of the parable is not constrained by the religious scruples of the priest and the Levite, and so his love of neighbour in fact displays more genuine love of God than does their religious attitude. As religious people, we must avoid making similar mistakes to theirs.

14th Sunday of the Year C

14th Sunday 2025

Isaiah 66:10-14; Psalm 65 (66); Galatians 6:14-18; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20

“Cry out with joy to God, all the earth.” Well, the earth may cry out with joy to God, but do we? Do you and I? This is one of those “rejoice” days. If we include all the repetitions of the psalm refrain, the words “joy” or “rejoice” occur thirteen times in the First Reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel.

So are we people of joy, or are we miserable so-and-sos, whose name is Legion, for they are many? Every couple of months, I submit n article on some vaguely religious topic to the Westmorland Gazette. (Yes, I know we are in Lancashire, not Westmorland, but we are only a handful of miles from the county boundary, and in any case it wasn’t my idea.)

My latest, sent in a few days ago, began by claiming that, if there is one phrase which I detest above all others, it is “The Good Old Days”. Why should that be? People who talk about the Good Old Days always seem to imply that the good days are inevitably behind us, that today is a miserable time, that there is nothing to rejoice in. It is a phrase which rules out joy, which refuses to recognise goodness in people, and in the world around us; that denies joy in the present, and hope for the future. To tht extent, it is profoundly unChristian.

When were the Good Old Days anyway? For my generation of seventy-somethings, they appear to have been the 1950s and 60s. Wait a minute, though! From those days, I distinctly remember my grandmother complaining bitterly how awful the times were compared with the Good Old Days, which for her were the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps, then, the Good Old Days belonged to the reign of Queen Victoria. That won’t work either. In the Office of Readings in the breviary, we find St. Augustine rebuking his congregation for always going on about the Good Old Days, which they claimed were so much better than their own times. Augustine lived from 354 to 430 AD, so moaning about the Good Old Days is at least 1600 years old, and probably far older.

Augustine declares that the reason people think that the old days were better than today is that they are not living in them. They, and we, look at the past through rose tinted spectacles: we filter out the bad memories, and exaggerate the good. It strikes me that there is another factor involved: in those past days we were young, the world was our oyster, and we were going to change it for the better. Now we are not young, our opportunities are more limited, not all our dreams or ambitions were fulfilled, and so we hanker after that imaginary glorious past.

Does it matter? Yes, I believe that it does. It prevents us from responding to God’s call to rejoice, to find joy in our world today, in creation, in people created in the image and likeness of God, in the presence of God in every situation, in the reality that our names are written in Heaven.

It is an attitude which, in blinding us to the presence of Heaven, can actually create Hell for us. I have quoted before CS Lewis’s “The Last Battle” the final part of his Chronicles of Narnia. There, the Dwarves, who have been constantly grumbling and moaning, reach the logical conclusion of their attitude, in that they no longer have the ability to see or to experience anything good.

Thus, they are sitting on a sunlit hillside, but are convinced that they are chained up in a dungeon: they are eating a magnificent banquet, but believe that they are being force fed straw. They have literally created Hell for themselves, by refusing to recognise goodness when the encountered it. Are we in danger of doing the same?

Today’s scriptures speak thirteen times of joy and rejoicing. Are we going to respond in kind? Are we prepared to recognise God’s goodness to us today, beginning with His self-giving to us in this Mass, and continuing from there?

St. Peter and St. Paul Year C

Saints Peter and Paul 2025

Acts 12: 1-11; 2Tim 4: 6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16: 13-19

On the evening of this day in 1961, I along with a gaggle of future classmates and a cluster of parents, was ushered for the first time through the portals of the establishment which was to be responsible for my secondary education. We were told some things, asked others, and then sent away to return on a September Thursday.

How, you may ask, am I so certain of the date? That’s easy: it was a Holy Day of Obligation, and the four of us who were attending Catholic Primary schools had enjoyed a day off, whilst our contemporaries in state or C of E schools hadn’t.

The principle of giving children a day off to celebrate a Holy Day was a sound one, though no doubt difficult or even impossible in today’s very different social conditions. After all, a Holy Day originally entailed a holiday as a matter of course—that is the origin of the word “holiday” which was a day free from work to celebrate, through attendance at Mass, but also through recreation, whatever Church festival (Holy Day) was occurring.

In sterner centuries, and as the nature of work changed, and the Church was no longer responsible for setting the agenda of countries, the concept of holiday for a Holy Day was lost, and the rule of obligation prevailed. No longer were Catholics free from work to celebrate the Holy Day to the full: instead, they were (and are) expected to fit Mass in before work, or during their dinner hour (if such a thing still exists) or after their return from work, and the priest, conscious of people’s needs, feels obliged to keep Mass as short as possible to facilitate the rush to work.

Many years after that original approach to secondary education, I found myself, as a priest, attempting to instil the delights of Latin, Greek, and Ancient History into a new generation of lads. On a Sunday morning, I would usually supply a Mass for Fr. Donald Gordon, the delightfully gentle and prayerful parish priest of Sacred Heart, Hindley Green, on the outskirts of Wigan. Fr. Gordon was far from being a radical, but he would maintain, quietly and logically, that if there was no holiday, there could be no obligation, a view which failed to find favour with the powers-that-be.

Today, we keep the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Had it not been a Sunday, priests would be hastening from church to church, seeking to make Mass as available as possible, while the faithful would be scratching their heads, attempting to work out where and when they could “fulfil the obligation”.

It is an important feast, though whether it really deserves to impose an obligation, or to displace Sunday’s liturgy, is another matter. Peter and Paul are universally recognised as foundation stones of the Church, the former even owing his name to that role. They are giants, on whose shoulders we stand, and whose very peculiarities remind us of the pre-eminence of grace: only the grace of God could have built the Church on two such different and such flawed characters.

There is an antiphon for today’s feast in the Roman breviary, which claims “They loved each other in life”. In your dreams, matey! There are indications in the scriptures that they could barely stand each other. Paul openly sneers to the Galatians about the authority of Peter and the other apostles, whilst demanding from the Corinthians respect for his own authority. Also to the Galatians, he brags about calling out Peter’s cowardice in a way which contradicts Jesus’ own instructions.

That same cowardice of Peter emerged even more dramatically in his threefold denial of Jesus. Add to that his tendency to promise more than he could deliver, and Paul’s ability to fall out with anybody and everybody, and we may feel justified in applying the term “flawed genius” to both.

This is where grace is seen at work. Would you or I have chosen either Peter or Paul to guide the Church in its infancy? I doubt it; yet Jesus did so, with results which will endure as long as time lasts. Today we honour Peter and Paul, warts and all, we reflect on our own flaws, and we thank God for using these two saints to enable us to belong to the Body of Christ almost two millennia later.

Corpus Christi Year C

Body and Blood of Christ 2025

Genesis 14:18-20; 1Cor 11:23-26; Luke 9:11-17

Sister Michaela remembers everything. Among other things, Sister remembers a homily which I delivered on this Feast in Our Lady’s High School, Lancaster, forty years ago, when she was a member of Sixth Form.

I remember it too. At the time, the Assembly Hall, where Mass was taking place, was so arranged that, as I stood at the lectern, I was looking up in the direction of Lancaster Castle where fifteen men, both priests and laypeople, had been tried and imprisoned before being dragged on hurdles through the streets to the Low Moor, where they were hanged, drawn, and quartered. I think that I am correct in saying that Lancaster can count more martyrs than anywhere else in England, outside London.

Why were they martyred? Purely and simply, they were martyred for the Mass. The case of the Elizabethan and Jacobean martyrs was, to a degree, different from that of their predecessors such as Thomas More and John Fisher, who suffered under Henry VIII. For the Henrician martyrs, the principal issue was the authority of the Pope: for their successors, it was the survival of the Mass on the island of Great Britain.

All of this, I brought into my homily. I began by noting that some people complained that Mass was “boring”. After pointing out the suffering and horrendous deaths which the Lancaster martyrs and others throughout the country had been prepared to suffer to keep the Mass in existence, I asked, somewhat more dramatically than is my wont, “How the hang can that be boring (pun intended)?”

Yes of course we have all sat through sloppily prepared liturgies, tedious homilies, and the self-advertisement of over chatty or outwardly pious priests. But in the last analysis, so what? There is an old adage: “You don’t go to Mass for the priest”. Conversely, you don’t stay away from Mass for the priest. You go to Mass—I go to Mass—to encounter the living God.

Whatever the quality or the style of the liturgy, Jesus is there in the gathering of His people, in the word proclaimed, in the person of the priest—not in himself but in his standing in the place of Christ—and above all in the sacrament and sacrifice of the Lamb of God, who makes present in every Mass his once and perfect sacrifice offered on Calvary. That is true whether it be a coffee table Mass in a student room, solemn High Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, or anything between.

Some time ago, I read a letter in the Tablet from a gentleman who claimed that he had followed Mass on line during the pandemic, and that he would continue to do so, even though public Mass had been restored, because the homilies and the liturgy were better than in his home parish. I had to check the date to make sure that this wasn’t 1st April.

What on earth (or in heaven) did this man consider the Mass to be—the Royal Variety Performance, or what? Did the presence of Christ in the gathered community—together, not on the other side of a television screen—mean nothing to him? Or did he consider himself superior to the great grey unwashed collection of plebs who formed the Body of Christ in his parish?

Above all, how was he to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, the focus of today’s Feast, through a TV screen? Seemingly, that Body and Blood, which his ancestors and ours had risked their lives to offer and receive as they crept secretly to Mass “in silent farm, on lonely hill” (Ronald Knox) were less important than his own intellectual and aesthetic superiority. Apparently, he cared nothing for Jesus’ words “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever, and revealing them to mere children”. He was one of the “learned and the clever”, and the anawim , the Poor of the Lord, with their second rate liturgy, could go hang. Arrogance of that sort really takes some beating.

I was once asked whether, if I had been alive at the time of the English Reformation, I would have conformed to the new order of things. Making all due allowance for my innate cowardice and fear of pain and hardship, I replied that I hoped not, as I could not live without the Body and Blood of Christ, which the “reformed” order could not offer me. I actually suspect that sheer bloody mindedness might have supplied what courage lacked, and that I would have refused conformity because I am by nature downright contrary, and ever since my schooldays have resented unjust and arbitrary authority.

Nevertheless, I do hope that my motivation might have risen higher, that I would always have been driven, that I always will be driven, by hunger and thirst for the Body and Blood of Christ, which are vital, beyond our liturgical preferences and our intellectual or aesthetic sensibilities.