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?
