15th Sunday Year B

15th Sunday 2021

Amos 7:12-15; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

By and large, the Second Reading at Mass tends to receive short shrift. The reason for this is obvious: we tend to focus on the Gospel, as being the most important reading, and the Old Testament reading, being chosen to link in with the Gospel, often features in the homily too. The Second Reading, by contrast, is something of a sore thumb. During Ordinary Time, it simply follows a New Testament Epistle week by week, with no particular relationship with the other readings, and so it finds itself something of an orphan.

Perhaps we can redress the balance a little this week by focusing on the Second Reading, which today takes the form of the first of seven weekly extracts from the Letter of St. Paul to the Church at Ephesus, a large seaport on the coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. Paul was the founder of that Church, and some scholars suggest tht the absence of a more intimate, personal tone may indicate that the letter was written, not by Paul himself, but by one of his followers, but that need not concern us here.

I would like to draw attention to some of the words and phrases of this extract, all of which emphasise God’s choice of us, and His love for us, a choice which He has made from all eternity.

The writer begins by underlining our blessedness: “who has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.” We are blessed as a people, as members of the Church. Do you think of yourself as blessed, as having received gifts from God, especially spiritual gifts, which draw you closer to Him, and which you can use for the benefit of others?

“Before the world was made, He chose us, chose us in Christ.” God has chosen you from all eternity, has loved you with an everlasting love, has made you unique, infinitely precious to Him. Are you aware of being infinitely loved by God, uniquely precious in His sight?

“To be holy and spotless.” This is the root of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. By preserving Mary from all sin from the moment of her conception in her mother’s womb, God ensured that His intention should be fulfilled, His intention of creating a people holy and spotless. Mary already is what we are called and destined to be.

“And to live through love in His presence.” That is our ultimate aim, but we are already practising it. We are always in the presence of God. Are we always living through love?

“His adopted sons and daughters.” Jesus the Christ is the Son of God by nature: God’s intention is that we should share that same status by adoption. How often do you consider the immense love of God, who loves us with the same intensity, the Holy Spirit, with which He loves the only begotten Son?

“To make us praise the glory of His grace.” Our prayers, such as the Glory be to the Father... and the Gloria at Mass are expressions of praise. Do we always use those prayers in a genuine spirit of praise and thanksgiving?

“His free gift to us in the Beloved.” Grace is, by definition, free. We do not need to earn God’s love or God’s grace. He gives it to us freely and liberally.

“Through His blood, we gain our freedom.” That word “freedom” will recur towards the end of the reading. Do you find faith and life in Christ liberating or constricting? If the latter, there may be a need to re-examine some elements of your faith, and your life among God’s people.

“Claimed as God’s own.” The Royal Lancaster Regiment, now incorporated into the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, was known as the King’s Own, giving it a special relationship with the Crown. We, as God’s own, have a special relationship with God, in our belonging to Him.

“Stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit.” This was done at our baptism, and at our confirmation, where the formula is now “Be sealed with the Holy Spirit”. (And woe betide you, in the days of Bishop Brewer, if you did not respond “Amen”.) A seal is a mark of ownership: we are owned by God.

Choice, seal, freedom, adoption as sons and daughters: the whole tenor of this passage is one of encouragement. We are loved and chosen from all eternity: that should give us the confidence to live in loving service.

14th Sunday Year B

14th Sunday 2021

Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2Cor 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6

Many many moons ago, from the beginning of Advent 1982, until Holy Week 1983, I had a brief and inglorious career with the Catholic Missionary Society, conducting parish missions in various parts of England. A mission included eight hours a day of door knocking, ringing the doorbells of people whose addresses appeared on the parish census lists. It never took long in any parish to realise that these lists were hopelessly out of date, many people having moved or died, whilst many of those who were found were at best indifferent, at worst hostile.

Some priests revelled in the work. One of our number, a cheerful Irishman, on approaching a block of flats, would press all the buttons at once to see who might be unearthed. I, on the other hand, tended to press the bell very gently, count ten, and then high tail it away as fast as my legs would carry me.

To me, knocking on the doors of fifty total strangers a day was the nearest thing to hell that I could imagine. Indeed, one night, dreaming that I was to spend eternity doing parish missions, I woke myself up with a cry of dismay.

I mention this because, in the course of one mission, one of my colleagues found himself pondering Our Lord’s words from today’s Gospel: “He was amazed at their lack of faith”. I, meanwhile, had that question of Jesus’ constantly running through my head: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find any faith on earth?”

If that was the situation almost forty years ago, how much more difficult must it be today? Is Jesus still amazed at people’s lack of faith, and what can be done about it?

In all honesty, we need to admit that the Church hasn’t always done the cause of the Kingdom, and of Jesus, a lot of favours. The clergy sexual abuse scandal has caused, and continues to cause, an immense amount of harm. Then, in addition to these ghastly crimes which men knew that they were committing, there are the equally destructive horrors perpetrated by people who genuinely believed that they were doing God’s will, in the residential schools in Ireland and Canada and, we shall probably also learn, in the USA. Small wonder if people are saying “Well, if that’s the face of Christ, then He’s an ugly so-and-so, and I really don’t want to know Him”.

These dreadful events have, in recent years, overshadowed the good which the Church has done over the centuries, and continues to do, in the fields of health care, education, development, the feeding of the hungry, and the defence of the oppressed and the marginalised. It is very easy, but wrong, to conclude that the Church always does more harm than good, especially when a writer such as Hilary Mantel can make a great deal of money—and be given a damehood—by deliberately distorting history by making St. Thomas More into a torturer, and the torturer Thomas Cromwell into a hero chiefly, as she admits herself, to express her hatred of, and to damage the reputation of, the Church of her birth.

So, will Jesus still be amazed at people’s lack of faith, and, when He comes again, will He find any faith on earth? Perhaps more to the immediate point, what can be done to reawaken faith? There is constant talk of evangelisation, but nobody seems willing, or able, to explain what it means. There was even a Decade of Evangelisation, which went down like the proverbial lead balloon. So what is to be done?

Perhaps we need to pay more heed to St. Paul’s words, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, as he ponders his own shortcomings, weaknesses, struggles and failures, and concludes “It is when I am weak that I am strong”. We must remember also, again with St. Paul, that we are preaching a crucified Christ who will always be, to many, a folly and a stumbling block.

In other words, we must be a humble Church, deeply rooted in Christ, and showing to the world the true face of Christ. There must be no trace of arrogance or superiority, and we need to recall the words of Pope St. Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi”: “The modern world listens to witnesses rather than to teachers, and if it listens to teachers, it is because they are also witnesses”. Let us remember too that it is when we are weak that we are strong, and that success and failure are not always what they seem.

13th Sunday Year B

13th Sunday 2021

Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; 2 Cor 8:7,9,13-15; Mark 5:21-43

I am going to tell you a story. It is about an Englishman, an Irishman, an Italian, and a Belgian, and the setting is the Grotto at Lourdes, a little over fifty years ago.

One afternoon, as a brancardier (literally, a stretcher bearer, but in reality, a general helper of the sick) I was on duty at the Grotto. Among the crowds was a young Italian woman on a stretcher, who was anxious to attract my attention. Not knowing any Italian, I called a bilingual Italian colleague, who ascertained that the young woman wanted to be taken through the Grotto, the scene of Our Lady’s apparitions.

Enlisting the help of a young Belgian soldier, and of an Irishman who was higher in the ranks of brancardiers, we wheeled the stretcher to the entrance to the Grotto, where we encountered an obstacle in the form of an official who, like the angel with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden, was barring the way. Apparently it wasn’t the done thing for a stretcher to be taken through the Grotto.

“Pas possible! Pas possible!” exclaimed this individual. The Irishman took charge. “Si, c’est possible!” he insisted—and please don’t tell me that he should have said “oui”, because I remember from O-level French that “yes”, when uttered as a contradiction, is “si”. Thereupon he moved away the barrier at the entrance, and the four of us, the Irishman, the Italian, the Belgian, and I, lifted the stretcher from its trolley, and carried it through the Grotto, the queuing pilgrims happily making way for us.

The young Italian woman reached out and touched the rock, and laughed and cried by turns. We replaced her stretcher on its trolley and went our separate ways.

Now, I suspect that there will be sophisticated people in the ranks of Holy Mother Church who will disapprove of that story. They will consider that processing through the Lourdes Grotto and touching the rock is mere superstition, unworthy of thinking Christians. I knew a woman, high in the ranks of Catholic educationalists, who boasted that she had never been to Lourdes, and that, driving past the end of the road leading to the shrine at Knock, she had carried on driving.

My mother would not have agreed with her; nor would Pope Francis; nor would St. John Henry Newman; nor would Jesus. When I brought home a rose leaf from Assisi, my mother assiduously applied it to her arthritic knee. Pope Francis, a thoroughly cultured Jesuit, has spoken repeatedly in favour of popular devotions. St. John Henry Newman, one of the greatest intellectual figures of the nineteenth century English speaking world, delivered a sermon in praise of the simple faith of the woman with a haemorrhage in today’s Gospel, who wanted to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, and Our Lord Himself blessed the Father for hiding the mysteries of the Kingdom from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.

Furthermore, when Jesus encountered the woman with the haemorrhage, He didn’t call her superstitious. He didn’t tell her to sort out her theological understanding. He said “Your faith has restored you to health. Go in peace, and be free of your complaint.”

Notice something else: the woman’s cure was as automatic as she believed it would be. Jesus didn’t actively cure her: it happened as a response to her faith. The woman was cured before Jesus was aware of it: St. Mark says that the Lord was aware that “power had gone out from Him”. It was a direct result of what the sophisticated would regard as the woman’s superstitious gesture.

Even Jesus Himself was effectively accused of superstition. He was laughed at, but He persisted in taking the hand of the dead girl and telling her to get up. Yet the simple faith of Jairus, the girl’s father, was sufficient, and Jesus was practical enough to remind the bystanders to feed her.

We have a responsibility to develop our understanding of the things of God, and to learn. God has given us an intellect to be developed, and we should use it in God’s service—but, as we gain a deeper intellectual understanding of our faith, let us never despise or lose the simplicity of the faith of the little ones to whom the Father has revealed the mysteries of the Kingdom.

12th Sunday Year B

12th Sunday v2 2021

Job 38:1, 8-11; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41

“For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation”. I always associate that phrase “a new creation”, not only with St. Paul, but also with the late Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, the famous Dominican writer and theologian, who suffered at the hands of the religious authorities in the late 1960s, but who emerged triumphant with both his faith and his sense of humour intact.

I was actually pondering whether

 it was that experience which focused his attention on the new creation, as his reinstatement may have felt like a new birth, and “The New Creation” was the title of a conference which he delivered at Fisher House, the Cambridge chaplaincy, in the spring of 1971, “conference” being Cambridge-speak for a long homily. Delving a little further, however, I discovered that his book entitled “The New Creation”, which I bought later on the basis of that conference, was written in 1963, long before these events, so that theory bites the dust. Never mind!

We do well to ask what the term means. Perhaps it has taken on a new dimension in the context of the green agenda promoted by Pope Benedict XVI, and developed by Pope Francis, notably in his encyclical Laudato si. We must look with new eyes on the created world: we must recognise it as gift, beautiful and fragile, for which we have responsibility.

It is that, but it is also much more than that. GK Chesterton’s explanation comes to mind, of why he became a Catholic. In his Autobiography, Chesterton wrote: “The first essential answer is...to get rid of my sins.” He went on to say that, when a Catholic emerges from Confession, “He may be grey and gouty, but he is only five minutes old”.

To become a new creation is to allow God to re-form us, re-fashion us, so that we see the world, and life, with new eyes. We no longer view our lives as “one damn thing after another” as someone expressed it, or as the same “damn thing” constantly recurring like a perpetual Groundhog Day, which may be one of the temptations of old age, as someone is obliged by physical limitations to accept a restricted routine. Rather, we recognise the presence of Christ in every situation, finding Him more fully both in His silent presence in our own depths, and in the people and situations which we encounter. “Christ plays in ten thousand places” wrote the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His”, whilst William Blake encouraged us “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”.

Nor is it only creation that we view with different eyes: it is also Christ Himself. “Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh” says St. Paul, “that is not how we know Him now”. This was an experience through which the Twelve and all the disciples had to pass.

Despite all that Our Lord had done, and all that He had taught, the disciples struggling to make headway in the boat still saw Him very much in the flesh; they still could not comprehend His true nature. Of course it is important to recognise the full humanity of Jesus, and His total identification with us, but to be “in Christ”, we need to recognise the divinity too.

“Who can this be?” ask the tempest-tossed disciples. Not until His resurrection and ascension, and His gift of the Holy Spirit, would they have an answer to that question, would they become fully a new creation. It is a question that we too must answer. We can easily quote Peter’s response, inspired by the Father and delivered at Caesarea Philippi, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” but, until we make that answer our own, by opening our lives to the Trinity who long to dwell within us, we will fall short of our vocation to be a new creation.

11th Sunday Year B

11th Sunday in Ordinary time 2021

Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

Where are we up to in our sowing and reaping? Or, to put it more accurately, where and how is God working to build the Kingdom? (Because we must always remember that the growth of the Kingdom is God’s work, not ours. We are, as St. Paul commented, co-workers with God, but when we forget that, and attempt to do the job ourselves, the results are disastrous.)

When I was a child, in the 1950s, I don’t think that those questions would have been asked. People rarely spoke about the Kingdom: they spoke about the Church, and effectively identified the Church with the Kingdom. I learnt in Primary School about the Church Militant, the Church Suffering, and the Church Triumphant: the Church Militant was extremely militant, and was seen as being well on its way to becoming the Church Triumphant.

These were the latter days of Pope Pius XII, an ascetic and almost Messianic figure, invariably clothed in white, his trademark gesture a spreading of his arms like those of the crucified Christ. As the Church in this country grew in numbers and confidence, we would often bellow, in churches packed to the doors for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Cardinal Wiseman’s triumphalist hymn “Full in the panting heart of Rome”, with its chorus, rising to a crescendo: “God bless our Pope, God bless our Pope, GOD BLESS OUR POPE, the great, the good”.

Little did we or our elders suspect that, behind the splendid facade, lurked a great mess of rottenness. Scandals continue to come to light which show that sexual abuse by clergy, far from being a result of the alleged indiscipline of the 70s (pace Pope Benedict XVI) was very much alive in the 50s and before. Meanwhile, other scandals are unearthed. Hard on the heels of the revelations of cruelty and forced adoptions in mother and baby homes in Ireland, we learn of ill-treatment in Church-run residential schools for First Nation (formerly called “Indian”) children in Canada, covering the first half of the twentieth century.

Pius XII himself has suffered massive blows to his reputation. His response to news of the treatment of Jews in occupied Europe continues to divide opinion. There is no doubt that the Vatican, along with many monasteries and convents, sheltered and saved the lives of countless Jews, or that the Pope had legitimate fears that speaking out more forcibly might prove counter-productive. Nonetheless, he was a man of his time and background, with that innate dislike and distrust of Jews typical of his era and social class. Even throughout the 50s, when Pius had reformed the Easter liturgy, we still prayed on Good Friday for “the perfidious Jews, that God may remove the veil from their minds”.

Why do I mention this, trawling, as it were, through relatively recent history? It is because we must always remember that the growth of the Kingdom is indeed God’s work: it takes place silently and unseen. Far too easily, we fall into the trap of thinking that it is up to us to make the Kingdom grow; that we know when it is time to begin reaping.

We need a very hefty dose of humility. During that era of our confidence, we were, as often as not, reaping weeds. The danger now lies in our believing that we have learnt from our mistakes, and that, “This time, more than any other time, we’ll get it right”, as the 1982 England World Cup squad sang—and we know what happened there. Hence, in this country, there has been a plethora of programmes and assemblies: “A Time for Building”, “The Church 2,000”, “The National Pastoral Congress”, “Renew”, “New Start with Jesus”, “Fit for Mission”, and various others, all of which have come and gone, barely creating a ripple.

So what do we do now? Perhaps most importantly we remind ourselves that the growth of the Kingdom IS God’s work, and we set ourselves to seek a deeper union with Him, while, at the same time, “reading the signs of the times” as the Second Vatican Council suggested, though always aware that our reading ability is less than we imagined.

Corpus Christi

The Body and Blood of Christ 2021

Exodus 24:3-8; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14: 12-16, 22-26

There is no doubt that the Prime Minister’s wedding in Westminster Cathedral has set the proverbial cat among the equally proverbial pigeons. There has been a great deal of comment on social media, most of it highly critical of the Church’s perceived double standards.

Unfortunately for the Church, she is hoist upon the petard of Canon Law. Without Canon Law there would be anarchy, and one of the greatest problems with which the Church has currently to contend is that bishops ignore Canon Law in order to bully priests. Yet like all law, it throws up anomalies. Hence the PM has been able to exploit a loophole—because he was baptised a Catholic, his previous marriages, having taken place outside the Catholic Church, are technically invalid—and this has given rise to understandable accusations of injustice.

Some of the people who have commented have talked about reasons for leaving the Church. I was pondering, the other evening, the best way of responding to such people, when it struck me, like a bolt of lightning, that for me, at least, it all comes down to the Eucharist. Could I live without sharing sacramentally in the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Lord, Jesus Christ? Would life be truly meaningful to me if I could not receive the Body and Blood of that same Lord in Holy Communion? In the words of a hymn popular in my youth “Could I dare live unless to prove some love for such unmeasured love?”

My answer was a resounding “No!” Life for me would be a desert, a fruitless wasteland, without frequent participation in the Mass, culminating in receiving the living God within myself. I can only grieve for those people who may have been deprived of the Eucharist for months by the pandemic, for those in some parts of the world who are rarely able to receive Jesus in holy communion because of a lack of priests.

This feast which we keep today is an appropriate occasion for pondering this truth. It is the Feast of Corpus Christi—except, of course, that it isn’t. The Missal calls it “The Body and Blood of Christ”—then, in brackets, “Corpus Christi”, which any schoolboy, or indeed, any schoolgirl, a couple of generations ago, would have recognised as an appalling mistranslation. The Body and Blood of Christ is “Corpus ET SANGUIS Christi”, which is what the feast should really be called. What the Missal does is downright sloppy.

For centuries it didn’t greatly matter, because, for a huge chunk of the Church’s history, Communion, for lay people, meant receiving the Body of Christ, though we need always to remember that Christ is received whole and entire—body, blood, soul, and divinity—under either species, whether under the appearances of bread or of wine. Indeed, this feast grew in popularity at a time when people received communion infrequently, and the emphasis was upon adoration of Christ in the Sacred Host, rather than on actually receiving Him.

When the new Lectionary was implemented in 1969, we found ourselves, every three years, with today’s readings, where the emphasis is on the Blood of Christ, rather than on His Body. This is an important adjustment, correcting a neglect of the Blood of Christ, but it drew attention to an anomaly: that the people of God, with some exceptions such as seminarians and members of religious communities, were missing out on the full sign value of the sacrament by not drinking the Precious Blood. Indeed, it was to be another seventeen years before, in England and Wales, the chalice was offered to the laity.

Now because of the pandemic, we are back in the situation where lay people are prohibited from receiving “under both kinds”. I suspect that, when some sort of normality returns, people may still be reluctant to receive from the chalice, because of fear of infection. Of course you are receiving the whole Christ under one species, but how much more fulfilling to be able to obey Christ’s injunction “Take and drink, for this is my blood”.

Trinity

aTrinity Sunday 2021

Deut 4:32-34, 39-40; Romans 8:14-17; Matthew 28: 16-20

If I were to ask you “Have you read Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lamda?” you would no doubt reply “Of course I have. I dip into it every day, but it has nothing to do with the Trinity: you might as well ask about Plato’s Demiurge, or his Theory of Forms.” In replying thus, you would, of course, be quite right.

The speculations of the great ancient philosophers have no direct bearing on our understanding of God. Nevertheless, they do show us how people have always struggled to form some concept of God, while at the same time demonstrating how difficult this is.

Those of you who were spared in your youth from grappling with the complexities of Plato and Aristotle may feel that you have much for which to be grateful. To fathom the mysterious analogies of Plato’s sun, divided line, and cave, is difficult enough in English: to have to face it in the original Greek is enough to bring you out in a cold sweat.

This week, it will be half a century since I sat my Finals paper on the theology of Plato and Aristotle, and a year more since I attempted to deconstruct the Theory of Forms, translating gobbets (where on earth does that term come from, I wonder?) and struggling to distinguish the deuteros plous from the protos plous, yet the very mention of such things still has the power to reduce me to a gibbering wreck.

Giants of the ancient world, these two philosophers were attempting to guide their contemporaries to a less crude understanding of reality than was provided by the pantheon of Olympian gods, constantly quarrelling among themselves, and frequently interfering in human affairs to suit their own ends. The result of their efforts was to discredit the notion of a multiplicity of personalised gods in favour of philosophical concepts lacking all human characteristics. (Plato’s Demiurge does have some elements of personality, but it is questionable how seriously the author took him.)

Thus, in Plato we are led to a more or less abstract concept of ideal goodness, whilst Aristotle gives us the Unmoved Mover, whose “thinking is a thinking of thinking”, a being represented by a perfect circle, totally self-absorbed, whose thoughts nonetheless move the universe.

Does any of this have anything to do with today’s feast? Well, both Plato and Aristotle have exercised a powerful influence on Christian thinkers through the ages. Both Platonists and Aristotelians have contributed to our understanding of God.

Like Plato, we see God as ideal goodness and infinite perfection: with Aristotle, we recognise that God is self-sufficient, needing nothing beyond Himself, not moved by, or dependent on, anything.

Where these mighty Greeks fall short is in failing to recognise relationship as an essential element in God’s nature. Plato’s Form of the Good is, to all intents and purposes, abstract: Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is a totally solitary being.

Christianity alone sees God as thoroughly involved in relationship, both in and beyond Himself. There is one God, but God’s very being is expressed in relationship, the Father eternally loving and begetting the Son, who eternally loves the Father, their love being so intense as to be a person, the Holy Spirit. Likewise, that love is so deep that it spills over into Creation, and into human beings as the pinnacle of that Creation.

There is a Christian symbol which carries echoes of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. God is sometimes represented by a circle with spokes and a hub. The hub is inscribed “Deus” (God) whilst at points on the perimeter are “Pater” (Father) “Filius” (Son) and “Spiritus Sanctus” (Holy Spirit). On the sections of the rim joining these three points is written three times “non est”. The Father is not the Son, and neither of them is the Holy Spirit, but from each of them is a spoke joining them to the hub (God) and inscribed “est”. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God.

Relationship, community is the essence of God. As children of God, we must have it as our essence too: relationship, community, with God, and with one another.

Pentecost

Pentecost 2021

Acts 2:1-11; 1Cor 12:3-7, 12-13; John 20: 19-23

I think that you need the gift of tongues to be able to pronounce the various nations who heard the Pentecost proclamation: Medes, Elamites, Phrygians, Cappadocians, Cretans, and so on. I remember at the Diocesan Youth Centre a young man wading valiantly through all the names and being rewarded with a round of applause.

What is the gift of tongues? At Pentecost it was, it seems, a miraculous gift of spontaneous translation, by which the various language groups all heard the preaching of the apostles in their own native tongue. Elsewhere in the New Testament it appears to have a different meaning which I have never been able to fathom, but which has influenced the Charismatic Renewal.

The Charismatic movement has exerted considerable influence within the Church during the last half century or so, though I have to confess that it has never appealed to me. Exuberance is not generally part of my make up unless I am watching football or cricket, and my approach to worship is rather more staid. If I am expected to clap along to a hymn, my response tends to be to thrust my hands into the sleeves of my alb.

Consequently, I am relieved that the Pentecost liturgy always includes the Gospel of Easter Sunday evening, despite the confusion which this sometimes causes. I am more comfortable personally with the gentle Easter Sunday bestowal of the Holy Spirit than with its more spectacular Pentecost manifestation.

What happened on Easter Sunday evening? The risen Christ appeared to the frightened apostles in the Upper Room and breathed the Holy Spirit into them, giving them the power to forgive sins, and preparing them for their mission. Thus their fears were banished; they were made ready for more encounters with the risen Lord; and they were enabled to enter that period of intense prayer, in company with Our Lady, which had its fulfilment in the Pentecost event.

There is more than one way in which the Holy Spirit comes upon us and into us. The apostles encountered the Holy Spirit in these two profoundly different manifestations--in the gentle breathing of Easter, and in the powerful wind and flame of Pentecost—for two different purposes.

We too will receive the Spirit in different ways at different times. Indeed, we have already done so, or we would not be reading the Scriptures and attempting to explore their meaning. As St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, “There is a variety of gifts, but always the same Spirit...The particular way in which the Spirit is given to each person is for a good purpose”.

It has sometimes been claimed, often with a degree of cynicism, that the Holy Spirit has been the forgotten member of the Holy Trinity. If there is truth in that statement it is largely because the Holy Spirit is difficult to envisage. We have pictorial minds, with which we can form a limited image of the Father (we know what a father looks like) and of the Son (we know what a son looks like, and we probably have a definite mental picture of THE SON) but the only physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit have been as a dove, a rushing wind, and tongues of flame: it is difficult to relate to a blast of wind.

I believe though that there is more fiction than reality in our alleged neglect of the Holy Spirit. We have always made the Sign of the Cross, invoking all three persons of the Trinity, and we have done the same in the “Glory be...”  Meetings and gatherings have always begun with the prayer to the Holy Spirit (“Come Holy Spirit...”) and in the Infants I learned to belt out all the verses of “Come Holy Ghost”, admittedly not always accurately:  “Thy sacred wing” became “thy Saint Credwing” and I heard “ne’er decays” as “Mary’s case” fixing in my mind a picture of Our Lady sitting on her suitcase, awaiting the arrival of the taxi which would take her to the station at the beginning of her holiday.

So the Holy Spirit has always been part of our life in Christ. Had that not been so, as St. Paul points out, we would have no such life. Whether spectacularly as at Pentecost, or gently as on Easter Sunday, the Spirit has come and does come to us. Let us pray today for a deeper awareness of the Spirit’s presence.

7th Sunday of Easter

7th Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts: 1:15-17, 20-26; 1John 4:11-16; John 17:11-19

As you are probably aware, for the past fifteen years, the English bishops have been doing the hokey cokey with Holy Days.

You put the Ascension in

You take Epiphany out

In, out, you shake them all about.

(Yes, I know that the hokey cokey was originally a blasphemy against the Mass, but it fits perfectly the shenanigans over Holy Days during the past decade and a half, so I think we are entitled to “spoil the Egyptians” and use it where it is helpful.)

Currently, in England and Wales, the Ascension is back on the Thursday, forty days after Easter, and so today we have the readings for the 7th Sunday of Easter, which went missing for a few years.

These readings today should help us prepare our hearts and minds to be more receptive of the Holy Spirit. Of course the Holy Spirit is not limited to Pentecost, or to the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation. The Spirit is poured out on us every day, and is the driving force of all the sacraments, but it is a wise custom to pray more fervently for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit as we approach the Feast which saw such powerful manifestations of the Spirit.

At the same time, we must not forget that Pentecost was not the first occasion on which the Holy Spirit was given to the apostles. When the risen Christ appeared in the Upper Room on Easter Sunday evening, He breathed on the apostles and said “Receive the Holy Spirit”, giving them the power to forgive sins. That is why that Gospel is used at Pentecost, which can have the unfortunate effect of causing dozy preachers, who haven’t noticed that it refers to Easter Sunday, to claim that the apostles were still cowering in fear at Pentecost.

You and I know that such a notion is baloney. Luke makes clear, in his Ascension Day Gospel, that, after the Ascension, “they went back to Jerusalem full of joy, and were continually in the Temple praising God”. When they did meet in the Upper Room, it was to pray, in company with Our Lady, the Spirit filled woman, for a fresh gift of the Spirit.

Furthermore, today’s episode of the election of Matthias is set between the Ascension and Pentecost, and involves a positive, not a fear filled group. You may have noticed that there were “about a hundred and twenty persons in the congregation”: I very much doubt that these were all crammed into the Upper Room—had they been, I suspect that the floor would have given way.

The apostles at the time were in a fairly similar situation to that in which we find ourselves today, having already received the Holy Spirit, but awaiting a fresh outpouring, which would renew both them and us to proclaim the Gospel. As we continue to pray for a fuller gift of the Spirit, the First Letter of St. John reminds us of the command of mutual love, made possible by the Spirit and by God’s presence within us. As always, that letter is prompting us to examine our consciences: how fully am I living out that commandment of love?

Meanwhile, today’s Gospel is an extract from the High Priestly prayer of Jesus, part of the Farewell Discourses which St. John sets in the context of the Last Supper. In this prayer, Our Lord consecrates us to the Father, and prays especially that we may live in the truth: the words “true” or “truth” occur five times in today’s Gospel.

What does it mean, to be consecrated in the truth? Bear in mind that Jesus said ”I am the truth”, so to be consecrated in the truth is to live in Him. In other words, the truth is something alive, brought to life by the Spirit breathing into us. We find truth set out in the words of Scripture, and in the teachings of the Church, but words on a page can remain dead. They must be brought to life in us by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and by our communion with Him who is the truth.

6th Sunday of Easter

6th Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17

You may be familiar with the saying “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there”. I do, and I wasn’t, at least in the sense implied by that adage: namely, that if you were part of the 60s “scene”, you would have been too far gone on dope and acid to recall it.

I have to confess that the swinging 60s didn’t swing for me. It was the decade of Saturday morning school, O-levels, A-levels, Scholarship exams, and finally adjustment to the mysterious world of university in 1968, the year not only of student revolution, but also of Humanae Vitae and its tumultuous aftermath. I shall always be grateful that I had football refereeing to keep me relatively sane.

In the “Summer of Love” I didn’t go to San Francisco with flowers in my hair—though some of you may well have done so. I went to the Co-op Furnishing Dept. to earn some money. Nor, two years later, did I join the allegedly half a million souls who trekked to Woodstock to try to set their souls free, as Joni Mitchell expressed it in her song which one-hit-wonders Matthews Southern Comfort took to the top of the UK charts the following summer. I was back at the Co-op.

Some years later, probably in 1994, the twenty fifth anniversary, I watched a TV documentary about Woodstock, which featured interviews with some of the “beautiful people” who had been there. They were unanimous in their verdict: “we talked a lot about free love, but we have realised that there is no such thing: love is always costly”.

That puts me in mind of the two elderly Jewish ladies who, for some reason, were on the visiting list of the now defunct parish of St. Augustine, Preston, where I did my diaconate placement in the summer of 1975. (It beat working at the Co-op.) One of these ladies commented “Religion is the Lord, and religion is love, and love means sacrifice”.

This old lady had reached the same conclusion, though I suspect by a very different route, as the Woodstock veterans: namely that love is always costly. We can, I feel, leave to one side the theoretically correct, but experientially questionable claim that God’s love is free. It is freely given, but accepting it will inevitably entail sacrifice, and a sharing in the Cross.

If we doubted that, we have it spelt out by Our Lord in His call to mutual love which we have just heard. “No one can show greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” St. John sets this call in the context of the Last Supper, where Jesus has already summoned His friends to mutual service by washing their feet, and from which He will depart to provide the supreme example of sacrificial love by undergoing His passion and death.

Jesus’ great commandment is a commandment of love, a love made possible by the sacrificial love of Father and Son through the agency of the Holy Spirit; a love which will always demand sacrifice on our part.

That self-sacrificing love which entails the laying down of our lives must be seen in small things, otherwise we shall not be capable of the greater sacrifice. One thing which I gained from my summers at the Co-op was the memory of a cartoon, one of a number drawn on the wall of the Carpet Sewing Room, all the work of an artistic employee, and all featuring the Peanuts characters of Charles Schultz.

The one which lodged in my mind was a night-time scene, with a crescent moon in the sky, and Snoopy lying on top of his kennel. On the back doorstep of his house stood Charlie Brown, clad in his pyjamas, and holding a glass of water. Underneath was the caption: “Love is bringing someone a glass of water in the middle of the night”.

An anti-climax, isn’t it—bathos? Yet it expresses a profound truth. I have often quoted it in wedding homilies. If we are not prepared to make the small sacrifices of love, we shall never be capable of the greater. And to give a nod to the First Reading: the Holy Spirit has been poured out on us to make us able. 

5th Sunday Easter

5th Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 9:26-31; 1John 3:18-24; John 15: 1-8

What do I know about horticulture? Nothing. What do I know about viticulture (the care of vines)? Less than nothing. Where are we going with today’s Gospel? Let’s dive in and find out.

I have to confess that, unless it had bunches of grapes hanging from it, I wouldn’t recognise a vine if it poked me in the eye. In one of my previous parishes, one of the tabernacle covers carried a depiction of vine leaves. To be honest, I thought they were ivy. On the other hand, I am just about capable of recognising a rose bush, so I will start from there.

The first question which strikes me is “What is the difference between cutting away and pruning?” Would it be fair to say that they are the two sides of the same coin? The dead branches, and those which are not going to flourish further, are cut away, which amounts to a pruning of the whole bush.

When this pruning has been done, what is left? Precious little, it seems to me: not much more than a stump. Yet apparently this has to be done if the bush is to retain its value, to continue to fulfil its purpose. As long as there is something arising from the main stem, there is hope of life: yet it seems to be a fairly brutal business.

Our Lord’s description of viticulture is equally brutal. The unfruitful branches are lopped off, whereupon they wither, after which they go on the bonfire. Seemingly, they don’t even have a future as compost.

How does this apply to us—to us as individuals, and to us as the Church? The message seems, at one level, very straightforward. If we remain rooted in Christ, we will bear fruit, and all will be well. If, on the other hand, we do not allow Christ to bear fruit through us, to run through us like sap through the branches, we have no future.

So far, so good: but where does the pruning come in? Is there any one of you who has not been through pain and loss? Is there anyone who has not had to give up something precious, something without which you felt, at the time, that you could not survive? Bereavement is the most obvious example, but there are other things such as the breakdown of a relationship, the loss of a job, the failure of a project, or a collapse in health.

Have these losses destroyed you, as you felt they were doing at the time, or have you come through them leaner, fitter, more positive, more determined, perhaps with an enhanced gift of compassion, and a renewed sense of your need of God, and of union with Jesus Christ, that same God who, you initially thought, had abandoned you? I cannot answer that question for you, but it is worth pondering: have the prunings which you have undergone made you stronger or weaker, better or worse?

And what about the Church? She is going through a very drastic process of pruning at present. So much rottenness has been found among the branches in terms of abuse by clergy, and the cutting away of branches still has a way to go. You won’t be surprised to find me adding the rottenness of cowardly bishops and religious superiors, who are happy to sacrifice innocent priests and monks in order to cover their own backs, a rottenness which the institution is still unwilling to admit.

There is still more. The sin of clericalism, to which Pope Francis repeatedly draws attention—the sense of superiority and of entitlement to lord it over others—is still rampant. The present Holy Father is a gift from God to the Church, initiating a process of root and branch reform, but he is meeting bitter, and literally diabolic opposition, principally in the United States, where the majority of Catholics remain faithful, but where a minority, including some bishops and priests, appear to believe that their allegiance is to be given to Donald Trump, rather than to Jesus Christ.

There is an ancient adage, ecclesia semper reformanda , “the Church always in need of reform”, and what is true of the Church is equally true of us as individuals. We constantly need the vinedresser to be at work, pruning us, cutting us back, enabling us to bear more fruit for Christ.

4th Sunday Easter

4th  Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 4:8-12; 1 John 3:1-2;  John 10:11-18

I am not cut out to be a shepherd in the usual sense of the word. If I had ever doubted that, my doubts would have been laid to rest on my first Easter Sunday in the wonderful and historic parish of St. Thomas the Apostle, Claughton-on-Brock, a truly rural parish, home to more sheep (and cows) than you can shake the proverbial stick at.

Directly opposite the church is a field, and after Mass on Easter Sunday I noticed that a lamb had emerged from that same field through a gap in the fence and was now wandering disconsolately along the grass verge, to the evident distress of its mother.

Enlisting the help of a parishioner, I decided to apply science to the problem. The parishioner and I took up positions several yards apart, with the lamb, and the gap in the fence, between us. The plan was to advance slowly on the lamb from both directions, and so to shepherd it (there’s the word) towards and through the gap, to rejoin the plaintively bleating ewe.

We had reckoned without the ingenuity, perversity, and dexterity of lambs. Sensing a plot, the creature set off at a rate of knots, darted between my legs, and hurtled along the grass verge, before making its way through another gap, and trotting serenely back to its mother. Did it wink at us? I can’t be sure.

So who said that sheep are stupid? Not I, not after that episode, nor indeed after watching sheep at work among the picnickers on the fells of the Lake District or Peak District. More than once, I have seen sheep trample over relaxing fell walkers, as they make a bee line for the backpacks and rucksacks where they know that food will be concealed. In go their heads, and out come the sandwiches, to be held against all comers, and munched enthusiastically, while all the time the raider keeps a wary eye open for counter attacks. Stupid? No! Docile? Not on your life! Crafty? Yes! Thuggish? Not half!

In speaking of Himself as the Good Shepherd, Our Lord never makes the claim that sheep are stupid. They need protection, they need to be known and loved, but they are not fools. Far from being foolish, they have the wisdom to know the Good Shepherd, to recognise His love for them, and to respond.

“I know my own, and my own know me” says Jesus: it is a two way process. He then goes further: “Just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father”. Ponder those words: they are actually breathtaking. The relationship of knowing love, or of loving knowledge, between the sheep and the Good Shepherd, between us and the Son of God, is as close and intimate as the relationship between that same Son and the Father.

That is a remarkable statement. Do we work at our relationship with Jesus the Good Shepherd to make it a statement of the truth?

This moves us on to another question: what about the relationship between priests and people? (Technically, we should begin with bishops and people, but we will settle for something more manageable.) In these days, where a priest will probably be responsible for three parishes, it may seem impossible for that mutual love and knowledge to exist. Certainly the days are long gone when the parish priest and his curates would set out, census books in hand, to knock on the door of every  Catholic, whose personal history was well known and documented.

So what can be done? Being no longer in a parish, I have no intention of teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, to pontificate to my brother priests about what they should be doing. All I can envisage is an adaptation of the old principles to a changed situation: openness; availability; visibility; genuine love, concern, and interest, especially for the less attractive—but above all that knowledge of the Good Shepherd which is rooted in deep prayer.

3rd Sunday of Easter

3rd Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; 1 John 2:1-5; Luke 24:35-48

Many many moons ago, speaking to a gaggle of urchins in the now long defunct Junior Seminary, I asked “Which is the longest season in the Church’s year?” One smart youth raised his hand and replied “Ordinary Time”. Clever so-and –so! No wonder he is now Vicar General of the Diocese.

At one level, he was correct. The greater part of the year is indeed what we term “Ordinary Time”, when vestments are common or garden green, and we are not focusing on any particular event in the life, death, and resurrection of Our Lord. Ordinary Time, though, is not usually reckoned as a season, and it was not what I had in mind.

The answer for which I was searching was Easter, which is, to some people’s surprise, longer than Lent, the latter appearing to be endless because of the penances we undertake. The season of resurrection, the season of joy, is longer than the season of penitence and mourning.

Indeed, there is a sense in which it is always Easter because Christ is risen. Notice that we say “Christ IS risen” rather than “Christ HAS risen, because the resurrection is a present state, and not only a past event.

Every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection: every Mass is a celebration of the resurrection. Yet there is a note of caution to be sounded: every Mass makes present, not only the resurrection of the Lord, but also His Passion and death. Those events of Passion, death, and resurrection are interwoven, inseparable: we cannot have one without the others.

We live in the light of the risen Christ, but we live also in the mystery of His suffering and death. We are the Easter People, as Pope St. John Paul II was fond of reminding us, but we are also the Ash Wednesday People, the Holy Thursday night People, the Good Friday People.

These are not simply truths which we profess: they also play out in our lives. We too have our seasons of wilderness wandering, of Gethsemane anguish, of Calvary darkness, as well as our seasons of Easter joy. They may coincide with the Church’s seasons, or they may not. Often they are woven together, suffering shot through with joy: celebration tempered by sorrow.

It is important that we recognise them for what they are—sharings in the suffering, in the death, and  in the resurrection of the Lord. All of these Christ-events are present realities, and all of them find a place in the pilgrim journey of His people.

There is another event too which we must not neglect. The season of Easter leads us to Pentecost, the feast of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We are also the Pentecost People, filled, guided, and moved by the Holy Spirit; though we should never forget that the Spirit came not only in the wind and flame of Pentecost, but also in the gentle breathing of the Lord on Easter Sunday evening, when he breathed on the disciples and declared “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

So we are at one and the same time the Lent People, the Passiontide People, the Easter People and the Pentecost People. I might add that we are also the Advent People, constantly looking forward to the return of Christ in glory, but also seeking to recognise His present coming in the people and events of everyday. And in deference to that canny youth of yesteryear, perhaps it should also be said that we are the Ordinary Time People, living in the presence of, and sharing the life of, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the mundane apparent non-events of everyday life.

Sunday of Easter Octave

2nd Sunday of Easter 2021

Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 5:1-6; John 20: 19-31

Has it ever struck you that Easter Sunday morning’s Gospel is truncated, cut short? The Beloved Disciple enters the tomb, “he saw, and he believed”, and that is more or less it, apart from a comment about previous lack of belief. We are left with a cliff hanger: you can imagine “to be continued” appearing across the TV screen.

Why should this be? Why was it decided to leave the Gospel at that point when, only a few verses later, we have the encounter between the Magdalene and the risen Christ?

It was to emphasise the emptiness of the tomb; to focus our attention on the absence of Our Lord’s body. This in its turn was done to underline the physical reality of the resurrection. What the women and, subsequently, the apostles, met was not a wraith or a phantom; it was truly Jesus the Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, to borrow a phrase from another context.

This physicality is stressed in today’s Gospel. The risen Christ is able to pass through closed and locked doors: nevertheless, His body is substantial, as He demonstrates when He shows the frightened disciples the wounds of His hands and side.

As a matter of interest, why were they frightened? They had been told by the women that Jesus was risen and that they had met Him. Among them was John who, we were told last week, had seen the empty tomb and the grave clothes, “and believed”. Furthermore, they had been told over and over again by Jesus that He would rise from the dead: so why were they still cowering in fear?

It comes down to human nature, doesn’t it? Despite all the talk about “glass half full” and “glass half empty” people, we are by birth, upbringing, and experience, natural pessimists. The promise of resurrection, and even the women’s testimony to the resurrection, was simply too good to be true.

Has it ever struck you that we never say “It’s too bad to be true”? We are always willing to believe the worst: to believe the best is so much more difficult. Partly, this is the result of experience: many people seem to undergo more bad times than good. Partly, though, it is also an attitude of mind: we are innately suspicious of good news.

Yet the risen Jesus stands among the ten—as they were at that moment, with Judas gone and Thomas absent—to prove that Good News, which we can write with capital letters, is true, is real: in fact, is the only enduring reality. It is bad news which, ultimately, is the myth. Or perhaps we should say, not the myth—for the wounds of Christ are real enough and are not removed by the resurrection—but ephemeral, passing, temporary. It is the Good News which is lasting, substantial, permanent.

And if that Easter Sunday evening appearance isn’t enough to convince us of this, there is more. Along comes Thomas, whom we can identify with Everyman (or Everyone, as we should probably say) the man on the Clapham omnibus, so beloved of early twentieth century writers; the woman on the No. 51 into Carnforth. He speaks for today’s society when he says “Prove it”. Scepticism rules the roost today: unless we have been there and brought back the T-shirt, we refuse to believe in anything.

Thomas demands physical evidence, so Jesus returns and says “Right! Give me your finger. There! I have put it into the nail hole. Give me your hand. Can you feel that gaping wound? Is that physical enough for you?”

It is. Thomas accepts the reality which he can see and feel, and then has the courage and the wisdom to go further; to accept the reality which he cannot see and feel, but can now infer, namely that the Risen Lord is God. Thus we have the first affirmation of the divinity of Christ, as Thomas declares “My Lord and my God”.

What about us? as a popular song asked a few years ago. Like me, you may have been brought up to pray Thomas’ words “My Lord and my God” silently at the elevation of Our Lord’s Body and Blood during the Mass. Like Thomas, we can see a physical reality: do we still, like Thomas, have the faith to go further and to proclaim our faith in the divinity and its present reality? Why would we not, as we learn that there is nothing which God gives us which is too good to be true?

Easter Sunday

THE EASTER VIGIL 2021

It’s a shambles! The Easter Vigil, I mean, and not just this Easter Vigil, with its regulations and restrictions, but the Easter Vigil per se. It was clearly designed by a committee: bits stick out at all angles.

You are probably aware of the definition of a camel as “a horse designed by a committee”. Well, the Vigil is a liturgical camel.

Notice how many times the ceremonies reach a high point, only to dive down again, before there is another leap up. We are riding a prayerful Big Dipper. The first summit comes with the third Lumen Christi, when the paschal candle is held aloft, the church lights all flash on, and the candle is placed in the stand and incensed, before a heavenly voice intones the Exsultet—“Rejoice heavenly powers…” and we ascend to heights of sublimity.

Then, in an instant, we are back down to earth, as we return to the very beginning of things, and read from the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). Often, as this year, we are taken right back to our origins, as we hear that beautifully poetic creation narrative, of a world which God pronounced to be “very good”; always we hear of the crossing of the Red Sea, when the Jewish people were saved by water, as we are saved by the water of baptism, the Easter sacrament.

In my younger and more radical days I used to change the order, having the Old Testament readings first, before heading out to bless the fire and the candle, giving a steady rise to the high point of the Exsultet. With the passing of the years, one becomes more conformist, more “oh blow it!” in attitude, more willing to go with the flow.

So I climbed back onto the Big Dipper, which, after the final Old Testament reading, ascends to a new summit with the Gloria. Never will I forget my first Easter Vigil in the seminary when, at this point, the organ thundered out, the kettle drums and tubular bells joined in, and, as someone pulled a string, the purple hangings covering the frescoes behind the altar all fell down at once. Glorious liturgical kitsch: I felt that I was in heaven.

Inevitably, we are back to the ground with our reading from St. Paul, drawing our attention to the link between the Resurrection and baptism, before we hit the heights again with the triple Alleluia. After this, the Mass continues as usual until the final joy of the sung dismissal, followed by a rousing Easter hymn, at Ushaw always “Thine be the glory”.

So a wonderful, wonderful, awesome celebration; a worthy high point of the year, a glorious sharing in the joy of the risen Christ—but a shambles all the same.

And perhaps it is right that our greatest celebration should be a shambles, because life is a shambles, and the world is a shambles, and the Church is a shambles, and you and I are a shambles. Yet it doesn’t matter, because into the shambles comes a dead man walking, a man with pierced hands and feet, and a pierced side, who says to us “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about the shambles, because I have seen it, and I have plunged into the heart of it, and it has killed me.

“Don’t worry about that either, because I have overcome death, and the shambles, and the wounds, and I am alive again. Look at my wounds. Put your hands into them , and recognize in them the sanctification of the shambles, and of death, and of you.

“Embrace the shambles of the world, and of the Church, and of yourself; live it to the full. And enjoy the shambles of the Vigil, because it proclaims that in the midst of every shambles, glorious like this, or dark and painful, I AM, conquering and healing. It is a shambles, but it is a superb, divine shambles. Enjoy it to the full, for I am risen.”

Holy Thursday

Holy  Thursday 2021

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; 1Cor 11: 23-26; John 13: 1-15

You may remember that around thirty to forty years ago, the custom grew in many parishes and other settings of celebrating something resembling a Passover meal, on or around Holy Thursday.

There would be a seder dish, with the symbolic foods used at Passover, and an explanation would be provided of each of them. There was the question and answer which takes place between father and eldest son in a Jewish household, beginning “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The prayers of Passover would be offered, and it would be pointed out at what point in the meal Jesus would have blessed the bread which became His Body, and which of the ritual cups would have been transformed into His Blood.

As a teaching aid, it was extremely valuable, setting the Last Supper, and hence the Mass, in its original context, taking us back to the roots of our celebration, guarding against the opposite dangers of over-simplification—the idea that Jesus and His disciples “simply had a meal”, which ignores the highly ritualised nature of this particular meal—and over-elaboration, turning the Eucharist into a performance.

Eventually, however, it was banned by the hierarchy on the perfectly reasonable grounds that it could offend the Jewish people, and could be interpreted by them as a form of mimickry, though I could mention that one such celebration which I attended was presided over by a Rabbi.

Yet whilst we are no longer permitted to demonstrate in this way the link between the Passover and the Eucharist, it is important that we should be conscious of that link. Hence, we always have as our First Reading on this night the account of the original Passover, followed immediately by St. Paul’s account of the institution of the Eucharist, which was put into writing before any of the Gospels were written down.

Thus we hear of the Paschal Lamb which was slain, its blood smeared on the doorposts to save the people of Israel from slavery, and can make the connection with Jesus, the true Paschal Lamb, whose blood was shed on the Cross to redeem the world from sin, and is now smeared on the lips of the faithful (as one of the early Church Fathers expresses it) as we share in the Passover from death into life.

We are also introduced to the concept of “memorial”, handed down to us by the Jewish people. When the Jews celebrate Passover, they are not merely remembering a past event, they are making the past present: they are with their ancestors escaping from slavery.

Similarly, when we celebrate Mass, we are not remembering something which happened two thousand years ago; we are participating in those events, made present for us now. This is the meaning of “memorial”. The transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the Lord, and the offering of that Body and Blood in sacrifice to the Father in the crucifixion and resurrection, are a present reality. Hence the widespread annoyance that the most recent changes in the translation of the Mass left untouched the unfortunate expression “in memory of me”, when “as a memorial of me” would have been more appropriate, as conveying more accurately that sense of the past made present.

In using St. John’s account of the Last Supper on this night, the Church is reminding us of another important truth. John doesn’t describe the institution of the Eucharist: he has already given us his Eucharistic discourse in chapter six. Instead, he recounts Jesus’ action in washing His disciples’ feet, a reminder that Eucharist and service are inseparable. If our Eucharistic celebration, our Mass, is to be complete, we must be people of loving service, people who literally or metaphorically wash the feet of others. From the Mass, we must go out to love and serve, for if we fail to do that, our making present of the Lord’s sacrifice, and our receiving of His Body and Blood, will be a contradiction. The love of God, shown to us and celebrated by us in the Mass, must be a reality in our daily lives.

Lent week 5 Year B

5th Sunday of Lent 2021 

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33

I am not going to insult you by asking what were Jesus’ final words from the Cross as reported by St. John, whose account of the Passion we always read on Good Friday. You know as well as I do that those words were, according to the Fourth Gospel “It is accomplished”.

It is fascinating—at least I think it is, and I am the one holding the conch shell (cf.Wm Goulding: “Lord of the Flies”) so I can express my opinion—it is fascinating that the Greek word here translated “accomplished” is, at root, the same word which the Letter to the Hebrews uses, and which is there translated “having been made perfect” and which Our Lord Himself uses, according to Matthew 5:48, when saying “You must be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”.

Now before your eyes glaze over completely, and you become totally catatonic, let me explain. Today’s Mass readings are all pointing towards the concept of completion, fulfillment, perfection; and the fulfillment of everything will occur when Jesus surrenders Himself completely in death into the hands of the Father. Not only will the scriptures be fulfilled, but the whole of human history, for this self-surrender will make possible the Resurrection, and complete the salvation of the world, and the purpose of creation.

Teilhard de Chardin, the twentieth century Jesuit philosopher and theologian, spoke of Christ as the Omega point of history, the focal point around which everything revolves. In the suffering, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, not only His own life but the whole of creation is accomplished, fulfilled, and perfected, and that includes our own perfection. Don’t worry that you feel far from perfect; your perfection will be achieved when, in and with Jesus, you pass through death and into new life.

That will be a glorious accomplishment, and glory is the key element for John when he speaks of the Passion of Our Lord. For John, glory is found, not only in the Resurrection, but already in Jesus’ surrender to death. Thus, John doesn’t dwell on Our Lord’s sufferings—he happily leaves that to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, from whom we hear in a three year cycle on Palm Sunday. Instead, he depicts a Jesus who is completely in control, directing the events of the Passion to the glory of God.

“Now the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” says Jesus, before praying “Father, glorify your name”, a prayer which receives the answer “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again”. Never mind, implies John, that this glorification will entail terrible suffering: God’s Son is fulfilling the Father’s will, and this is glory, this is fulfillment, this is accomplishment, this is perfection.

Both the writer to the Hebrews and St. John make passing reference to the Agony in the Garden. The Letter to the Hebrews comments that “During His life on earth, Jesus offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears to the One who had the power to save Him out of death”—that is an interesting expression, by the way, not “from death” but “out of death”, implying that first He must go into death—and in reading that, we are inevitably reminded of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, and of His sweat which fell like drops of blood.

John, on the other hand, summarises the Gethsemane prayer almost in passing: “Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say: Father save me from this hour? But it is for this very reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Thus, we have the elements of the prayer which the other evangelists record. It is perfectly reasonable that, in the light of those three (synoptic) Gospels, we should meditate deeply on the Agony in the Garden, that we should unite our sufferings with those of Jesus, that we should recognise our own Gethsemane moments as a sharing in the Agony of Jesus, but we should also, with John, accept that they are moments of fulfillment, moments of glory, however painful and inglorious they may seem.

The Passion of the Christ is the fulfillment of the prophets, but also the fulfillment of history. As we mourn for, and share in, His sufferings, we must also remember that, in them, are His perfection and ours, His fulfillment and ours, His glory and ours; in them, the whole purpose of creation is accomplished.

Lent week 4 Year B

4th Sunday of Lent 2021

2 Chronicles 36: 14-16, 19-23; Psalm 136 (137); Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21

Believe it or not, in the late spring/early summer of this year, it will be forty three years since Boney M topped the popular music charts with their version of today’s psalm, “By the rivers of Babylon”. So if you remember that, I am afraid that you can no longer claim to be in the first flush of youth.

This psalm is Israel’s lament during the Babylonian exile, which is described in the passage from the Second Book of Chronicles. Jerusalem was destroyed, the country was laid waste, and in a series of expulsions, the population was taken to exile by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, an exile which lasted for seventy years. Finally, in 538BC, Babylon was itself conquered by the Persians, and Cyrus the Persian king allowed the people of Israel/Judah to return home and to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple.

For the Jewish people, this was an overwhelmingly powerful illustration of God’s love for them, a new Exodus, almost equal in scope to the original Exodus from Egypt. Later, Christians would see it as a foretaste and promise of the even greater liberation of the human race from sin and death by the grace of God who “loved the world so much that He gave His only Son”.

These are words which we need to ponder: “God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son”. Take those words away with you, and let them soak into you. Then add to them the words which come later in today’s Gospel “For God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that, through Him, the world might be saved”.

How often do you or I reflect on those words, or on those which we have heard from the Letter to the Ephesians: “God loved us with so much love”? Throughout history, Gold has repeatedly shown His love, forming a people, rescuing them from slavery, settling them in the Land of Promise, bringing them home from exile, and finally sending His Son to redeem the whole world.

Notice that in particular: “God so loved THE WORLD”—not certain people or groups of people, but “THE WORLD”. Certainly, He has chosen and formed a people to be His Body on earth, but His love encompasses all people, who are linked to His Body in various ways, as the Second Vatican Council reminded us. Hence, Pope Francis in Iraq, like his predecessors Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI at Assisi, prayed with Jews, Muslims, and even non-Abrahamic people, inhabitants of a world which God “loved (and loves) so much”.

So, I ask again, do we take those words seriously, do we use them as a guiding star in our lives, or do we forget that Christ came “not to condemn the world”? Do we sometimes view life as an obstacle race, bobbing and weaving to avoid enough sins to save ourselves from condemnation, forgetting that we have been saved by Christ?

Another question strikes me. Jesus the Son of God redeemed the world by being lifted up on the Cross, and He tells us today that He “must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. This, as you may be aware, is a reference to an incident during the Exodus, when the people, not for the only time, grumbled against Moses and against God. We are told that, as a punishment, God sent fiery serpents among the people, and their bite was fatal, but He also gave a remedy. Moses was to make a bronze serpent and hold it up on a pole: whoever looked at the bronze serpent would live.

My question therefore is this: have you been bitten by a serpent recently? There are many serpents about: the serpent of rage, the serpent of malice, the serpent of bitter words, the serpent of greed, the serpent of self-centredness, and that serpent which is said to be the most deadly of all, the serpent of discouragement.

Have any of those serpents bitten you? And, more importantly, have you looked for healing to Him whom Moses’ bronze serpent foreshadowed, Jesus lifted up on the Cross? Remember: He was sent to us because God loved the world so much.

Lent Week 3 Year B

Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Cor 1:22-25; John 2:13-25

Gentle Jesus, eh? “Making a whip out of some cord, He drove all of them out of the Temple, cattle and sheep as well, scattered the money changers’ coins, knocked their tables over, and said to the pigeon-sellers “Take all this out of here, and stop turning my Father’s house into a market”.

Clearly, the Prince of Peace and advocate of non-violence was prepared to allow righteous anger to lead Him into conduct which, in our more squeamish age, would lead to criminal proceedings. I am reminded of the early days of Pope Francis, when he proceeded to withdraw power and influence from Cardinal Burke, who had long been striving to turn us into a Church of the scribes and Pharisees. The American far right, who loathe the Holy Father because he constantly challenges us to become more Christ-like, set up a cry of “Where’s your mercy now?” It is easy to imagine the original Pharisees asking Our Lord ”Where’s your non-violence now?”

What made Jesus so angry? Interestingly, it wasn’t sexual sin, with which the Church seems at times to have been pre-occupied to the exclusion of practically everything else, but two aspects of failure to observe the Commandments which He stated to be fundamental, love of God and love of neighbour. The Pharisees incurred His wrath for their hypocrisy in rejecting love of neighbour in pursuit of an adherence to petty rules: in the present instance, His ire was aroused by lack of true respect for the Temple as the dwelling place of God.

Yet the buyers and sellers in the Temple believed that they were performing a service to God. The coinage issued by the Roman state, and blasphemously bearing the head of the “deified” Emperor, had to be exchanged for the Jewish coins which alone were acceptable in the Temple, and the people needed cattle and sheep, or pigeons, to offer in sacrifice.

Thus there are two elements in Our Lord’s attack on these aspects of Temple life, one obvious and the other less so. It probably seems clear to us that all this trading in the Temple displayed a lack of the reverence due to a holy place. Business which had begun in the interests of worship in the Temple had “growed” like Topsy and far outstripped its original purpose.

Here we might pause and ask ourselves whether there are similar instances in the Church. There are times when money-raising, which is necessary, can seem like the chief aim of a parish or diocese: far more serious are the financial scandals in which the Vatican has been embroiled in recent years. Yet far more dreadful than any of these is the clerical abuse scandal, of which the Church needs to be thoroughly cleansed and purified, to say nothing of the lesser, but still serious scandal of Pontius Pilate-like bishops and leaders of religious congregations who refuse to become involved in supporting falsely accused members.

Yet there is a second implication of Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, which is less obvious but, in its way, more far-reaching. In driving out those who provided the animals or fowl for sacrifice, Jesus was implicitly indicating the end of Temple worship. He had come as the fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy of the Messiah entering His Temple, and had been rejected. Now He declares His own body to be the true Temple, which is to be destroyed and built up again, unlike the stone-built Temple, which will be destroyed and never rebuilt. This was St. John’s understanding of Jesus’ actions: the Temple has had its day, and now the new Temple is here in the form of Jesus’ body, of which you and I are members.

This entails the encompassing of the Jewish Law within the person of Christ, the fulfillment of the Ten Commandments within the two Commandments of love promulgated by the Christ. Those who, for instance, at various times over the centuries have found their nether garments in a twist over what they have regarded as graven images have missed the point: in reverencing statues of their favourite saints, devout people, far from indulging in idol worship, have been and are engaged in celebrating the Communion of Saints, their and our unity in the one Body of Christ, the true Temple, with those who have gone before. Paradoxically, by a violent act, Jesus has proclaimed the triumph of love, as the two great commandments of love are to be fulfilled in membership of the Temple which is His Body.

Lent Week 2 Year B

2nd Sunday of Lent 2021

Genesis 22:1-2, 9-13, 15-18; Romans 8: 31-34; Mark 9:2-10.

“It is wonderful for us to be here.” Is it? What do you think? Is it wonderful to be in whatever place you are, on this planet, on this day of this year? Is it wonderful to be here, in a world ravaged by pandemic, by hunger, by war, by injustice, by threats to its very existence?

Well, yes, actually it is, because God has put us here, and God is here with us. In the chaplain’s room at Our Lady’s HS Lancaster, there used to be a poster which read “Blossom where you are planted”. There was deep wisdom in that apparently trivial adage.

A friend of mine has recently had to go into a nursing home, and to face the reality that he will probably never walk again unaided. Both the move and the realisation have hit him hard, and he is struggling to come to terms with them. One day last week, he was pouring out his troubles to one of the carers, a lass of nineteen.

“I feel like giving up” he complained.

“No, don’t do that” came the reply. “You have a lot to give, you can achieve a lot, just as you are. Go for it.”

I suggested last week that God sends us angels, both spiritual and human, in our wilderness times. Here was an angel aged 19, imparting heavenly wisdom in an earthly way.

But life isn’t all struggle and misery, even for those who bear the heaviest crosses. There are transfiguration moments, times when light and joy break through, when God reveals His face to us, and we can say without hesitation “It is wonderful for us to be here”.

Perhaps we don’t always recognise those moments at the time. Sometimes it is only in retrospect that we can say, with Jacob, “Truly God is in this place and I never knew it,” when we realise that we have been given a glimpse of the transfigured Christ, and an insight into the promise which awaits us.

Take a few minutes to recall some of your transfiguration moments. You may feel at first that you have none to recall, but if you allow your mind to wander back over your life, you may surprise yourself.

I remember glorious Wednesday afternoons during childhood summers, when the shop closed at dinner time and my mother, father and I would head off on long local walks along the river or canal, before catching the bus home. I remember kneeling in Lancaster Cathedral during my dinner hour from work, and knowing, rather than just believing, that Jesus was present in the tabernacle, and that I had to consider the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood. Many other transfiguration moments have followed, lighting what can sometimes be a deep darkness, and I am sure that the same is true for you.

Yet we cannot hold onto these moments of transfiguration. That is what Peter is trying to do with his suggestion of three tents, where they can stay forever. Instead, he has to endure the disappearance of Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, who must depart because their mission is fulfilled in Jesus. He has to accept, too, the fading of the brightness and, with his companions, make his way down from the mountaintop to the valley of ordinary life, and later to the Garden of the Agony, where they would see their Lord in very different guise.

This fading of the vision reminds us that we must not attempt to cling onto God’s gifts, but must be openhanded, willing to relinquish them with faith that this is for the best, that the promise contained in the gifts will be fulfilled. This is the lesson which Abraham teaches us in his willingness to sacrifice his son. We need not concern ourselves with asking whether a loving God would have demanded human sacrifice, or whether Abraham should have concurred with such a demand. That is beside the point: what matters is that Abraham was willing to let go, and to put total trust in God. St. Paul reminds us how that trust was vindicated when God Himself made the sacrifice of His Son, that sacrifice which, in the last analysis, He did not require of Abraham.

This Lent, ponder your transfiguration moments, and thank God for them, but do not try to cling to them. Let them return to God as pledges that His promises will be fulfilled.