3rd Sunday of Advent Year C

3rd Sunday of Advent 2021

Zephaniah 3:14-18; “Psalm” = Isaiah 12:2-6; Phil 4:4-7; Luke 3:10-18

What sort of mood are you in? There is no doubt about the mood to which Holy Mother Church invites us today. This is Gaudete Sunday—Rejoice Sunday—and the Lectionary lays joy on with a trowel.

“Shout for joy” urges Zephaniah, “Rejoice, exult with all your heart”. And he depicts God too as being full of joy: “He will exult with joy over you...He will dance with shouts of joy for you.”

There is something beautiful about the idea of God dancing, and shouting with joy while He does it. I envisage God doing a sort of Highland Fling, with the odd yell and hoot thrown in.

In our refrain in what follows—not actually a psalm, but an extract from the Book of Isaiah—we exhort ourselves to “sing and shout for joy”, and we do it four times. Meanwhile, Isaiah goes on to tell us “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation” before reaching the refrain which we have been using, and ordering “People of Zion, sing and shout for joy”.

Next comes Paul’s advice to the Christians at Philippi: “Rejoice in the Lord always—again I say rejoice”. This gives us a grand total of a dozen uses of the words “joy” and “rejoice” in the course of two prose passages and a would-be psalm.

So, rejoice! “I can’t” you may reply. “My pet budgie has just died screaming, I have trodden barefoot on broken glass, and my mother-in-law is staying over Christmas.”

More seriously, you may genuinely say “I have suffered bereavement” or “I am deeply depressed”. I heard from two people last week, men around the sixty mark, whom I taught in my early days as a priest. Both of them have been widowed in the past year, and are feeling the pain as each approaches his first Christmas without his spouse. To make things worse, one of them was woken by the police one night a few days ago to be informed that his younger brother had been found dead. He himself has now suffered a heart attack.

A few days later, I was asked to pray for a two year old boy who is on a ventilator suffering from leukaemia. Multiply these situations almost infinitely as you consider all the bereaved spouses, children, and parents around the world; all those in war zones; those suffering from hunger, disease, severe handicap, or depression; and ask “Where are such people to find joy?” Indeed, you may be asking it about yourself.

Beware! Do not try to come up with an easy, comfortable answer, because in such circumstances, no genuine answer is easy or comfortable. It may even be the case that there is no answer, easy or difficult. All that you can do is to hold that suffering person in your heart, your mind, and your prayer. If they are physically close to you, you may even hold them in your arms. Do not try to console them with clichés: silent, loving presence is a far better option.

So what price joy then? Remember that, like grief, joy goes very deep. Like grief, it comes upon us: it can’t be forced. Sometimes, we have to wait in patience, and gradually joy will seep through. Even in the darkest times, we have to cling, even if only by our fingertips, to trust in God, and the light will eventually dawn. And remember to be there, as a source of strength, for those from whom joy may seem to be very distant.

2nd Sunday of Advent

2nd Sunday of Advent 2021

Baruch 5:1-9; Psalm 125; Philippians 1:3-6, 8-11; Luke 3:1-6

John the Baptist is one of the key figures of Advent. Why? “That’s obvious,” I hear you cry. “He was the forerunner of Jesus.”

You are quite right. Bear in mind, though, that he acted as the forerunner twice. Firstly, he was the forerunner in his birth. The visitation to his father Zechariah, his conception against all likelihood,  his leaping in his mother’s womb at the presence of the unborn Jesus, and his birth and naming all presaged similar events for Jesus the incarnate Son of God.

At John’s birth, you may recall, his father proclaimed the Benedictus, the prophecy that this child would “go ahead of the Lord, to prepare His ways before Him”. It is this second fulfilment of the forerunner’s role on which we focus today. The first, infantile, fulfilment won’t be in focus until our post-17th December preparation for the Nativity.

So it is the adult John whom we encounter today, preparing the way for the adult Jesus, reminding us that Advent is at least as much about the coming of Jesus here and now, in our daily lives, as it is about His past coming. The call to prepare a way for the Lord is addressed to us as powerfully as it was to John the Baptist.

All three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) quote, or rather misquote, this saying from the prophet whom we call Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah. All of them say “A voice cries in the wilderness: prepare a way for the Lord”. What the prophet actually wrote was “A voice cries: prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord”.

Either way, the quotation fits the situation encountered by the Baptist, and the situation which we encounter today. The Gospel version emphasises the loneliness of the Baptist: he is a voice crying in the wilderness, a lone voice, as we feel ourselves to be in the world of today. Yet at the same time, the world to which he preaches is a wilderness, as our contemporary world may also be.

I spent the first fortnight of Advent in 1982, helping to deliver a parish mission in Marylebone. As I tramped the streets of north London, attempting to track down the birds of passage who had self-identified as Catholics during the last parish census, which appeared to have been taken while Noah was building the Ark, as I discovered that most of them were long gone, and as I encountered locked doors, or was greeted by uncomprehending voices calling down from upstairs windows, all in the shadow of the rather sinister Paddington Green police station, notorious at the time for the interrogation of IRA suspects, I felt very sharply the sensation of being a voice crying in the wilderness, calling out to an unheeding world.

When Deutero-Isaiah delivered his prophecy, it was in the context of the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, the same context as today’s reading from the prophet Baruch, and the responsorial psalm. This was a triumphant return, the way made easy, in the imagination of both prophets, by the removal of all obstacles, the levelling of the ground.

Like the prophets, John the Baptist imagined the removal of those obstacles which stood in the way of God’s people, and of God Himself. That same John was to play his part in the removal of those obstacles, and so are we. What are the obstacles in the way of the Lord who comes to us today?

Rather than mountains and hills, we encounter indifference, misunderstanding, and hostility. The world, at least here in Europe, has no enthusiasm for the coming of the Christ, for the Kingdom, or Reign, of God. Like the Jewish exiles portrayed in the psalm, we may feel that we are sowing in tears: unlike them, we struggle to imagine ourselves returning full of song, since our harvest appears to be a scanty one. We do not hear the heathen saying “What marvels the Lord worked for them”.

But then again, neither did John the Baptist. Yes, he had initial success—people flocked to him—yet he ended his life in prison under sentence of death. What mattered was not the success or failure of his mission, but his faithfulness to it. His task was to sow, to prepare, to open the way for the One who was to come.

Our task is the same: to be faithful to the call we have received from God. By our prayer, by our way of life, by the steadfastness of our response to the God who calls us, we are to sow seeds, we are to prepare the way for the One who comes after us. That is our Advent mission: not simply to indulge in a sentimental remembrance of His first coming, but to smooth His passage as He comes again.

1st Sunday Advent Year C

1st Sunday of Advent 2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thess 3:12-4:2; Luke 21: 25-28, 34-36

If I were to ask you “What is Advent about?” I suspect that most of you would reply “Preparing for Christmas” and you would be right—up to a point. Advent IS a preparation for Christmas, just as Lent is a preparation for Easter, and to the same extent.

Lent is a preparation for Easter, but I am sure that you would agree that it is far more than that. It is also a matter of following Jesus into the wilderness and, in the events of Holy Week, to the Cross. Advent too is far wider than we might imagine.

In Advent, we look in three directions. We look backwards, to the First Coming of the Son of God in our human flesh, but we also look forward to His Second Coming in glory as Judge at the end of time, and we look to the present, to recognise His coming at every moment of our lives.

The looking back is present today in our First Reading which, in the time of its writing, was a looking forward. Jeremiah prepares the people for the coming of a “virtuous branch”, a descendant of the House of David “who shall practise honesty and integrity in the land”. We identify that “virtuous branch” as Jesus, Messiah and Saviour, whose birth we recall in our Christ Mass, our Christmas celebration.

Yet we must be careful not to rush to Christmas too soon. The promise of the Messiah and, more particularly, of His Kingdom, will be kept before our eyes throughout Advent by our reading of the prophet Isaiah, but it is important to remember that the Church does not begin to focus on the Christmas event until 17th December, devoting the last week of Advent to proximate preparation for the feast, as the last week of Lent is a proximate preparation for Easter.

Until then, our focus is directed to the Second Coming of Our Lord, and, perhaps most importantly of all, to His present coming every day in our lives. Consequently today’s Gospel prepares us, not for the First Coming of Jesus, which has already happened, but for His return in glory.

The warnings contained in Jesus’ prophecy seem to take on a particular urgency in our own time. We are literally “bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves” as rising sea levels threaten the very existence of island nations such as the Maldives, the Bahamas, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, while dire predictions tell us that the melting of the polar ice will bring increasingly destructive flooding to our own coastal areas. Nations are in agony throughout the earth, and there are many signs of impending disaster.

Whether all of this presages the imminent return of the Son of Man I do not know, but there is certainly enough evidence of our own mortality to shake us out of complacency. While we make our own small efforts to protect the world, uniting them with, we hope, the larger scale efforts of governments, we remain conscious that we live each day in the light of eternity, and that an end, and a final encounter with the Judge, will come for us, if not yet for the earth.

So, as both the Gospel and the reading from the First Letter to the Thessalonians remind us, we must remain alert, conscious that each day may be our last, and using that awareness not to fill us with despair, or to lead us to seek refuge in Christmas lights, alcoholic oblivion, or even sentimental devotion, but to lead us to deeper prayer, and a stronger love for our neighbour both near and far.

We look, then, in Advent, both back and forward, but, perhaps most importantly, we look around, to recognise the coming of Christ and His presence here and now, today. We deepen our awareness of the Christ who comes today, in the people who cross our path, whether closely or remotely, of whom Our Lord said “whatever you did to the least of mine you did to me”; in the events of daily life, which bring us a share in the anguish of Gethsemane and Calvary and in the joy of the Resurrection, in the silence of our private prayer, and in the Mass where He comes in the gathering of His people, in His word, and in the Body broken and the Blood poured out, offered to the Father and shared with us.

Jesus came in the past; He will come in the future; but especially, He does come in the present, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. As Karl Rahner, the great twentieth century German Jesuit theologian and spiritual writer, expressed in a prayer to Jesus: “Now is the one single hour of your Advent.”

Christ the King Year B

Christ the King 2021

Daniel 7:13-14; Apocalypse 1:5-8; John 18: 33-37

“Kings ain’t what they used to be”, to misquote the old song. I think that I am correct in saying that the only old style king, the only absolute monarch, remaining in today’s world, is to be found in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, in southern Africa.

Other countries, though not a great number, have constitutional monarchs, largely figureheads, and indeed Spain restored the monarchy in 1975. Our own Queen is widely respected for her devotion to duty, as she continues to carry out commitments at the age of 95; for her wisdom, acquired through an engagement with, and a study of, international affairs stretching back over seventy years; and for her common sense, evident in her speeches which show up, by contrast, the stupidity and cupidity of many politicians, not least in her Christmas broadcasts, in which she is the only public figure to

refer to Jesus, without hesitation, as Our Lord. Whether a similar respect will be accorded to her successor is open to question for a whole variety of reasons.

In general, we can see kingship as an outmoded concept, and the Feast of Christ the King as an anomaly, an oddity in the eyes of the inhabitants of most countries, a relatively new feast which, perhaps, deserves to be quietly dropped from the liturgical calendar.

Whether plans to drop it exist, I have no idea. For the present, at least, it remains, and we must do our best to make something of it. In this attempt, the irrelevance of kings may actually be a help, rather than a hindrance.

Why might that be? It is because Christ, as a king, is seen as an irrelevance in His own time. Indeed, this irrelevance in the eyes of the world forms the basis of His kingship. Pilate, as we have heard, sees it as a basis for insult, asking “Are you the King of the Jews?”, a sarcastic question, showing contempt for Jesus, but having a particular edge for the Jewish people who, since the Babylonian Exile centuries before, had considered that only God could be their king.

Pilate was to follow through on this sneering question, affixing the proclamation “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” to the Cross in no fewer than three languages, announcing to the world his contempt, not only for the criminal hanging there, but for the whole of Jesus’ subject race. Thus, the whole concept of the kingship of Christ began as an insulting joke.

It began too as a questioning of truth. “All who are on the side of truth listen to my voice” said Our Lord, and we recall Pilate’s presumably mocking response “What is truth?”, a question and a mockery which are effectively echoed to day by politicians in many parts of the world, by the wielders of wealth, and even by certain bishops, to say nothing of the “influencers” who post lies and insults on social media.

Christ’s kingship then, is a matter of affirming, and living for, truth. Into that kingship, awkward as the word may be, we are baptised, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us. Consequently, this feast is, for us, a reminder and a summons to live always in truth, being true to ourselves, which means being true to our rebirth as children of God, and brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.

Inevitably, this will bring us into conflict with those elements in the world which effectively deny the reality or the importance of truth, the truth of the Lordship of Christ and of the  dignity of every human being. We must insist too on the truth which is expressed through justice and, as we are becoming increasingly aware, through a respectable stewardship of the whole of creation.

This conflict with the denial of truth will bring us to share in the sufferings of Christ, whose kingship was declared on a Cross. It is in the crucifixion of Christ that we recognise Him as our King, our ruler, our leader, whatever term we wish to use—a term which identifies us with Him, and which demands that we follow Him in our own commitment to truth.

33rd Sunday Year B

33rd Sunday 2021

Daniel 12: 1-3; Hebrews 10:11-14, 18; Mark 13:24-32

A few days ago I had a haircut. As I looked into the mirror after the event, I realised that what had been a fly’s footpath of a parting was now a dual carriageway. My head, like Caesar’s Gaul, is now divided into three parts, with hair to right and left, and (almost) unadorned bonce in the middle.

Going back almost twelve years, I made my debut in semi-professional football at the age of 59, taking the place of an injured assistant referee (linesman in old money) for around sixty minutes of a Northern Premier League fixture. Whatever the difficulties in terms of decision making, there were no physical problems: I could run the touchline with barely a thought, and didn’t need glasses to see across the pitch.

A little over a month ago, an identical situation arose. This time it was a matter of forty five minutes, plus four minutes of stoppage time. My glasses had to remain in place throughout, and by the end of the match, my right calf was complaining bitterly. Clearly, some things have changed.

All of us are inevitably growing older, and therefore closer to death, from the moment we are conceived. For a number of years it is an uphill advance towards physical (and, one hopes, psychological and spiritual) maturity until a plateau is reached, and we begin to descend, at least physically. The longer we live, the more reminders of mortality we receive. On this earth, at least, we are not built to last.

The same is true of our world. Those of us who grew up in the 50s and 60s, did so in the shadow of The Bomb. As a child, I took it for granted that, as my grandfather had been called up for the First World War and my father for the Second, so I would be called up for the Third. Even for a less childish mind, that would have been a not unreasonable assumption. The danger that the Cold War would become hot, destroying the world in a nuclear holocaust, was real, especially at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Now we are aware of another threat to humankind’s survival, one which is already taking its toll. No one apart from a handful of cranks now doubts the reality of climate change, as the polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise, and pollution spreads over land and sea. Whether the COP 26 conference will lead to genuine change is anybody’s guess, though most people have grasped the irony of thousands of delegates travelling to and fro in private jets and motorcades of SUVs.

Today is the last Sunday but one of the Church’s year, and, as always on this day, the Mass readings bring us stark reminders of life’s limits. We are going to die, and our world is going to end. When the latter will happen, even Jesus in His humanity did not know, though we can form a rough, but unreliable, estimate of our own life span.

From the Book of Daniel, written at a time of deep crisis for the Jewish people, when the land was occupied by a Seleucid army and the Temple had been desecrated, we receive warnings of a time of unparalleled distress, as the writer interprets present sufferings as a prelude to worse to come. Meanwhile, the Gospel points to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple on the one hand, and to the end of the world and the return in glory of the Son of Man on the other, the former foreshadowing the latter.

All of this reminds us to be in a state of readiness. As the years pass, our bodies give us increasing hints that death will come to us one day: the calamities resulting from global warming bring ever increasing awareness of the world’s fragility. While we do all in our power to prevent or delay the destruction of the planet, we accept our own built in obsolescence, and ask ourselves “Am I ready for my final encounter with the Lord?” which may come at any time, perhaps even today.

32nd Sunday

32nd Sunday 2021

1Kings 17:10-16; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

I often quote to myself the comment of the author of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. This is usually when I look back through old homilies and discover that the brilliant new insight which I have just had is exactly the same insight which struck me the last time these readings occurred, and the time before that, and so on.

This week though, I have amazed myself. On looking back, I find that I have reached a different conclusion from that in previous homilies on these readings. I decided to begin “It strikes me that the key word from today’s readings is ‘generosity’”. Checking with my own past, I discovered that six years ago I had concluded that the key word was “trust”, and that I had approached things from a different angle.

Keep that word “trust” in mind. It is clearly an important concept for both widows whom we encounter today—trust in God and, for the widow in Sidon, trust in God’s prophet Elijah—but follow me, if you will, in looking at generosity.

Both widows exhibit complete generosity. The Sidonian widow shares her remaining food with Elijah. Does she believe him when he tells her that her supply will not, after all, run out? Or is she simply showing that self-emptying generosity which is so often the mark of those who have little or nothing, that willingness to share what little remains?

Similarly, the widow in the Gospel is willing to give everything to God, trusting in Him for the future. This is a definite meeting point between generosity and trust.

Where do we come in? Both generosity and trust are demanded of us. How are they demanded, and how do we respond?

Under present circumstances, I think that it is fair to draw examples from international affairs. The developing countries are desperately short of COVID vaccines, and the richer nations are being asked to share, and, in particular, to waive patents on the vaccines, so that they may be affordable for the people of the developing world. Some countries, our own included, are showing reluctance, perhaps believing that there may not be enough to go round, but in particular, being unwilling to reduce the profits of the drug companies. There appears to be a lack of generosity here—there is certainly no trust in God—but it is also a self-defeating attitude since, if the poorer countries cannot protect their people, new variants of the virus will arise which will, in turn, affect the richer nations. We shall find ourselves bitten on the bum!

We could draw similar examples from the area of climate change. Rich nations, companies, and individuals are unwilling to make vital changes for the sake of poorer peoples, but also in fact for their—indeed our—own sakes.

Bringing things to a personal level, we should, indeed must, question ourselves about our own generosity, about our willingness to share, and about our trust in God. How many of us who stood and applauded NHS and care workers are willing to pay more in tax to ensure that those same workers receive proper remuneration, and that our health and care services are better resourced?

And how far am I willing to place myself in God’s hands, entrusting my future to Him, while being generous with my material resources, my time, indeed my whole life? Every day, in the course of my prayers, I make two acts of self-surrender to God, one taken from St. Ignatius beginning “Lord Jesus Christ, take all my freedom, my memory, my understanding and my will...” and the other from St. Alphonsus which begins “Lord from this day forward, do with me, and with all that belongs to me, as it shall please thee...”. How serious am I, really, in making these prayers?

If you make a Morning Offering, as I hope that you may, entrusting your day and your life to God, how much of that day and that life are you truly giving to Him? Generosity and trust: perhaps they are both key words, for individuals, for communities of whatever sort, and for nations.

All Saints 2021

All Saints 2021

Apocalypse 7:2-4, 9-14; 1 John 3:1-3; Matt 5:1-12

Have you ever noticed what a powerful sensation memory can be? It probably comes second only to love as a subject for song: “Memories are made of this”; “Thanks for the memories”; “I remember you”; “Remember me to one who lives there” and so on. Then there are popular sayings: “Rosemary for remembrance”; “Remember, remember, the fifth of November”.

The slightest thing can trigger a memory: a glimpse, a scent, a snatch of song. I have what I call my laundry songs. From the beginning of February to the end of August 1968, I worked in the washhouse at the Lancaster and District Laundry, a very happy episode in my life, where Radio 1, then in its infancy, played all through the working day over the loudspeakers. Any song from that era takes me straight back to the steam and water of those days, as if no time had elapsed.

What does memory achieve? It can give us comfort, it can cause us pain, it can lead to regret, it can remind us of our mortality. Staying with the subject of songs, it can shock us when the idols of our younger days are seen as they are now.

You may remember Arthur Garfunkel, either as one half of the duo Simon and Garfunkel, or as a soloist, lending his glorious tones to such melodies as “Bright Eyes” (1979). He was particularly remarkable for his mass of blond curly hair, surrounding his head like a halo. Recently, I saw a video of him singing with his son: he is completely bald, and appears as a withered old man, his arms like sticks, a living reminder of the ravages of time.

Such emotions as memory calls forth are significant, and can play a softening role in hearts which are becoming cold and hard. Does memory serve any other purpose?

For the Christian, the answer is a resounding “Yes”. We believe in the Communion of Saints, an ongoing union and communion with all who have gone before us, whether their union with God is complete (the Saints) or they are still being perfected in ways that we cannot comprehend (the Holy Souls).

Although we separate these forerunners of ours into two categories, and give them two separate feasts, there is little to be gained by trying to decide who fits into which group. What matters is that all of them are “ours” united with us in the one Body of Christ, bound together by a bond of mutual support.

Some people still cling to the false notion propagated by some of the more fanatical Reformers, that the process of ongoing purification after death, which for convenience we call Purgatory, is some sort of mediaeval Catholic invention. Nothing could be further from the truth. Until the Reformation, belief in Purgatory (whether one uses the name or not) was universal among Christians and it is widely held, to a greater or lesser extent, by very many non-Catholic Christians today. CS Lewis, for instance, considered it to be self-evident.

In the Gospels, Jesus calls us to be perfect, in the literal meaning of “complete”. How many of us will be “complete” at the time of our death? Clearly, for almost all of us, there will still be work to be done. St. Paul reports a practice in the early Church of being baptised for the dead, to bring them into the Body of Christ, a clear indication of belief in the need and possibility of post mortem fulfilment. Frequently, the scriptures speak of our being judged on the basis of our actions in this life. That judgement, if it is to be in any way just—and we believe in a just God—will conclude that the vast majority of us are a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly, very definitely a work in progress.

To me, the most powerful of all scriptural “proofs” is today’s passage from the First Letter of St. John, which promises that we shall be “like God, because we shall see Him as He really is”. To become like God will entail an enormous change, and no change is ever painless. (There is a beautiful saying that Purgatory is seeing God and realising that we are not fit to be seen.)

It may, as St. Paul suggests, take place in the blink of an eye: it may be a slower process, but remember that these distinctions are meaningless, because we are dealing with eternity, and not time. However it happens, happen it will, and it is bound to be painful, but a joyful pain, as pain can be.

In conclusion, may I point out that if, in my case, anybody adopts the silly and essentially atheistic modern fad of “celebrating my life”, I shall come back and haunt them. They will pray for my soul, a loving duty within the Communion of Saints, or I will know the reason why.

30th Sunday Year B

30th Sunday 2021

Jeremiah 31:7-9; Psalm 125; Hebrews 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52

We have a change of mood this week. Last Sunday, if you recall, we heard of the suffering Christ, and were called to follow Him in receiving the baptism of blood and the cup of suffering. Today, there is an emphasis on God’s gifts, and a mood of rejoicing, indeed of exuberance.

It is something which we encounter, perhaps surprisingly, in the Book of Jeremiah. He is frequently regarded as a doom and gloom merchant: a Jeremiah is someone who prophesies disaster, an Eeyore who sees only the dark side.

In general, there is some truth in this, but only because Jeremiah was constantly facing a dark and difficult situation. Much of the book attributed to him deals with the perils of the Jewish people, who were about to undergo seventy years of exile in Babylon. Jeremiah is concerned to prepare them for this ordeal, pointing to the way of dealing with it, and resisting the false promises of the false prophets, who were misleading the people with empty promises. (Far be it from me to suggest a resemblance to modern day politics.)

All that Jeremiah prophesied came true, but today we meet a different Jeremiah both literally and metaphorically. The seventy yers of exile are coming to an end: during that time, the original Jeremiah would almost certainly have died, and the author of this part of the book must be his successor as prophet of the Lord.

The mood too is very different: there is a spirit of jubilation which is almost palpable. “Proclaim! Praise! Shout!” the people are told, and we can feel like shouting with them. God is fulfilling His promises which He made through the original Jeremiah long ago—that after seventy years He would lead the exiles home.

Two points occur to me. Firstly, the returning exiles would largely have been the descendants of those who were originally taken from their home land. Any survivors among those first exiles would have been children or babes in arms at the time, and would now be elderly, especially by the standards of those days. The majority of those who made the trip back to Judah and Jerusalem would have known them almost as places of fable, a promised land of which they had heard but which they had never seen. God, we realise, is faithful to His promises, but we, like the Jews of the 6th century BC, must be prepared to wait in faith.

Secondly, to gain some idea of the overwhelming sense of liberation which the people must have experienced, I think of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Soviet communism. Anyone over the age of forty will have thought of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as an ever present threat. Many of us recall the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956: still more will remember the snuffing out of the Prague spring in 1968.

Since 1961, the Berlin Wall had stood as an apparently permanent reminder of the division of Europe, a symbol of despair for so many who lived under totalitarian regimes. Suddenly, in 1989, in a matter of weeks, nay days, it was gone , to be followed by the collapse of the whole Soviet Union and the rebirth of subject nations such as Georgia and the Baltic states. Celebration was  unrestrained at an apparent, or indeed, genuine, miracle.

Of course, since then, many hopes have been dashed, and there have been multiple setbacks and failures. The same was true of the exiles returning from Babylon. The same is true of us, who have been liberated by the death and resurrection of the Christ. Liberty brings responsibilities, it entails struggle and suffering, as last Sunday’s readings reminded us, but it is no less real for that. The Jewish people continued to squander many of the blessings of freedom by repeatedly turning away from God, and so do we. Like them we must, with God’s help, continue to work at our freedom.

Today’s psalm deals with the same historical event, and displays the same exhilaration as the passage from Jeremiah: “When the Lord delivered Sion from bondage, it seemed like a dream. So must the fall of the Berlin Wall have seemed to those who lived beyond the physical wall, ad the metaphorical Iron Curtain. So must the restoration of his sight have seemed to the blind beggar Bartimaeus.

In the account of Bartimaeus’ cure, we encounter that same jubilation which we found in Jeremiah and the psalm. Anticipating what is to happen, Bartimaeus throws off his cloak and jumps to his feet. Then, once he is cured, he follows Jesus along the road, an indication that a spiritual, as well as a physical, blindness has been cured. Bartimaeus too would have experienced suffering as a follower of Christ, but his blindness was gone forever.

What about us? Do we rejoice and exult that we have been liberated by Christ from sin and from eternal death? Do we recognise all the blessings which we receive in our daily lives? Do we follow enthusiastically along the road in company with Jesus, recognising that our failures, our setbacks, and our sufferings cannot outweigh the liberation, the dreamlike liberation, which we have been given?

29th Sunday Year B

29th Sunday 2021

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

Those of you who attended Sr. Reina’s Final Profession last Sunday will recall the challenging readings which Sister chose, beginning “My child, if you aspire to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for an ordeal,” from the book of Ecclesiasticus. Fr. Peter, in his homily, picked up on this theme, and warned that, along with the joys and successes, there will be difficulties and even disasters.

A year or two or three before Sister Reina’s Profession, I recall that, at my diaconate ordination, I received a card which quoted Our Lord’s closing words from today’s Gospel: “The Son of Man Himself came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many”.

The two messages, from occasions in fact forty six years apart, are essentially the same. We are called—and that means not just sisters or priests but all the baptised—to be the Body of the Son of Man, who came to serve and to suffer. A religious sister assumes that role in a very public way, as a sign to the rest of the Church and to the world, but it is a role to which every Christian is committed.

We hear it expressed today, firstly by Deutero-Isaiah (Second Isaiah) in one of his Songs of the Suffering Servant. These songs are, for us, associated particularly with Holy Week, when we hear how Jesus, Son and Servant, fitted perfectly the description of the Servant crushed with suffering, offering His life in atonement, taking the faults of many on Himself. Can you see how you, to a lesser degree, fit within that context, uniting your own sufferings and difficulties with those of Jesus, offering them to the Father for the salvation of the world, making up by them, as St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, all that has still to be undergone in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of His Body, the Church?

In the Second Reading, from the Letter to the Hebrews, we hear Jesus described as the Supreme High Priest. Why? Because He has suffered and died, taking His own blood into the true Holy of Holies, the presence of God, as the priests took the blood of sacrificed animals into the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. This true priest is one of us, “feeling our weaknesses with us”, being tempted as we are; and we, by our baptism and confirmation are anointed by the Holy Spirit as priests with and in Him.

Finally, in the Gospel, Our Lord points out to James and John and, by extension, to the rest of us, that we are called to receive His baptism and to drink His cup. “That’s fine,” you may say: “I have been baptised, and I drink the cup of His Blood.” True, but the baptism and the cup here have a fuller and a deeper meaning. Jesus, already baptised by John, still has another baptism to endure, a baptism of blood; still has another cup to drink, that cup of suffering which He prayed, in the Garden of the Agony, might pass Him by. He now asks us, as He asked the two brothers, whether we can share His baptism and His cup. How do you answer that question?

All of this we must do without pretensions, without swank, without seeking earthly power. In line with these words of Our Lord, Pope Francis has stated that anyone who wishes to be a bishop is the last person who should become one. That may seem obvious to you and me, but there are people who actually long to be bishops. Indeed, there was a cardinal at the last conclave who allegedly lost favour because he was said to be actively canvassing for votes to become pope. Similarly, the American cardinal who is most prominent in his criticism of the Holy Father is notorious for swanning around in a cappa magna, the huge flowing train beloved of the prince bishops of old, behaviour which surely runs contrary to Our Lord’s strictures on broader phylacteries and longer tassels.

Does all this sound a little gloomy, as if following Christ, being part of the Body of Christ, is all self-denial and suffering? It isn’t. The joy and fulfilment in Our Lord’s life are very evident in the Gospels. I suspect that the true message is that, only by seeking to live in Christ and to imitate His life of service, will we find that joy and fulfilment. There is no room for that superficial, spurious joy of the “Smile, Jesus loves you” variety. Only my awareness that it would not be very Christlike keeps me from wanting to bop the “Smile...” brigade on the nose and to say “Try smiling now, sunshine.” Joy there is, but only in the context of service.

28th Sunday year B

28th Sunday 2021

Wisdom 7:7-11; Hebrews 4:12-13; Mark 10:17-30

“I prayed and understanding was given me; I entreated and the spirit of Wisdom came to me.”

But what is Wisdom, spelt with a capital letter? In the Old Testament, it tends to mean God’s word, expressed in the scriptures. Some of the early Church Fathers identified it with the Word, also spelt with a capital, meaning the Word-made-flesh, the Second Person of the Trinity, God’s Word taking flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. Others of the Fathers saw it rather as the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who pours wisdom (with a small w) down upon us.

However we view wisdom, true wisdom is something which comes from God, and is somehow an expression and a presence of God Himself. That is how the author of the Letter to the Hebrews views it, identifying it with God’s scriptural word, but also with God Himself from whom, we are told, no created thing can hide and to whose eyes everything is laid open.

So God’s word, whether with a small or a capital “w”, penetrates us, and opens us up to God Himself. Does that happen to you and me when we read or hear the scriptures? Do you ponder on the scriptures, and especially the Gospels, asking yourself what a particular passage may imply for you and your life? Perhaps today, after Mass, you could spend some time reflecting on that episode of the rich man, and considering how you respond to the presence and the call of Jesus.

When you think of the Word with a capital letter, imagine yourself as that man, in the presence of Jesus, for so you are. He looks at you, and He loves you. What call is he giving you today, at this particular moment in your life and the life of the planet? How does that call strike you, and how willing are you to respond to it?

Does it make you uncomfortable, as it made the rich man? I hope that it does: if God’s call does not disturb us, then we are either complacent or unheeding. Where does that discomfort lead you? Do you, like the rich man of the Gospel, go away sad, unwilling to answer that call?

Again, if you walk away and are not sad, there is something amiss. If your negative response doesn’t niggle you, doesn’t leave you uneasy, then you have missed the point. You haven’t opened yourself to God’s word, enabling it to cut into you like a precise surgical implement, nor have you opened yourself to His Word Jesus Christ, who comes to you both in the written word and in a personal encounter.

As long as there is sadness, as long as there is unease, there is hope. Did that man thrust away his sadness, and simply return to his unfulfilled life? Or did his sadness gnaw away at him, until he felt obliged to seek out Jesus again, this time to answer “Yes”?

If you have said “Yes” to Jesus, He will unfold to you gradually what form that “yes” will take, what impact it will have on your life. As He told Peter, there will be both losses and gains, but in God’s good time and in eternity, the latter will outweigh the former.

Yesterday was the Feast of St. John Henry Newman, the most recently canonised English saint. Newman wrote a novel entitled “Loss and Gain”, because His “Yes” to Jesus’ call entailed the loss of all that he had received in terms of honour, respect, and much that was fulfilling in his life as an Anglican clergyman, to be replaced by suspicion and criticism from both outside and within the Roman communion, until he was finally vindicated by the award of a red hat by Pope Leo XIII.

It may well be that Jesus is not asking you for as radical a change as those required of Newman or the rich man of the Gospel, but who knows? He has looked at you and loved you with that piercing blade-like look which allows no hiding place, that look which, at cockcrow in the High Priest’s courtyard, made Peter go out and weep bitterly. What effect does that look have on you?

27th Sunday Year B

27th Sunday 2021 

Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16

I love that First Reading, part of the second creation account from the Book of Genesis: it is one of the most glorious pieces of poetry ever written. You can envisage the scene: God, having created the man, now wondering what to do with him. It is a very different insight from the evolutionary approach taken in Genesis chapter one, accounting for the complementarity of the sexes in a literary, rather than a literal way.

There is almost an evolution in God’s thought processes as imagined here; imagined, indeed, rather mischievously. “Right”, thinks God, “I have made this creature called man, but he is a bit of a sore thumb at the moment. He needs a companion. I shall make animals, and see if they will be enough.”

So the man sits there, and gives names to the animals and birds as God brings them to him. “That’s a cow, and that’s a horse, and I’ll call that funny looking one a duck billed platypus. What’s next?”

“Aye, you’re right” says God. “You need a ‘next’, don’t you? Right, I have just created anaesthetic, so I am going to put you to sleep, and perform the first operation.”

So God puts the man—let’s call him Adam, which is Hebrew for “man”—to sleep, and forms his mate/companion/significant other/other half, out of him. And when the man wakes up, he has a totally different reaction from anything that went before. You can almost see him leaping up and down with excitement: “Yippee! Yabadabadoo! This is what I’ve been looking for! This is part of me, bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh—we need to put ourselves together again!” And so, best beloved, we have the sacrament of marriage.

Then along come the dull and dopey atheists (or so called atheists, as I don’t actually believe in the existence of atheists) shouting, in their literalist manner, “It’s not true! It didn’t happen like that! It’s not scientific!”

Of course it isn’t, you dingbats! It’s not supposed to be. Have you never heard of poetry? Have you never read Tolkien? No, of course you haven’t. If it doesn’t fit in with your own colourless, dreary, literalistic mindset, you are not interested. You don’t actually believe in science, but in scientism, a false religion which is to genuine science what Islamism is to genuine Islam. You really do need to get out more.

Our Lord takes, as the basis of His pronouncement on marriage, this insight of Genesis that marriage is rooted in the very nature of human beings; that it entails a fulfilment of that nature. The union which constitutes marriage is a complete union, making one person out of two.

Yet Jesus was the first to accept the fallibility of human nature, its lack of that completeness which is the literal meaning of perfection. At one level, it is startling that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews states that God made the man Jesus “perfect through suffering”. This doesn’t mean that Jesus was imperfect, in our usual sense of the term, but that, until He suffered, He was incomplete as a human being: He lacked something of human experience.

Always, He could recognise that incompletion in others, and was compassionate with it. He set out the nature of marriage, but was always gentle and forgiving with people who fell short of the ideal, and that must be our approach too. We must maintain the essential rootedness of marriage, whilst being compassionate with individuals, and in particular not seeking to compel people to remain in abusive relationships which are in themselves a denial of marriage.

We are also increasingly realising that there are people whose basic nature does not reflect the complementarity of the sexes, but are drawn by nature towards others of the same sex. That is a situation which calls for much more prayer and reflection than it has yet received.

26th Sunday Year B

26th Sunday 2021

Numbers 11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48

Are today’s readings positive, affirming, encouraging? Or are they stern, alarming, frightening? The answer, I think, is “Yes”. They are both, holding both encouragement and warning, promise and alarm.

The reading from the Book of Numbers is probably the most consistently positive. The Spirit comes down on the seventy elders and gives them the power of prophets. There is, for someone whose pronunciation of English takes a northern form, something particularly comforting about the names of the two outsiders, who receive the gift of prophecy, even though they did not go to the Tent of Meeting: it is very affirming to hear that Eldad and Medad (mi dad=my dad) are prophesying in the camp.

On a more serious note, Moses’ attitude to these two is also encouraging. He accepts their right to prophesy, and refuses to stop them. Indeed, he goes further: “If only the whole people of the Lord were prophets, and the Lord gave His Spirit to them all”.

Wait a minute, though. The whole people of the Lord ARE prophets, and the Lord HAS given His Spirit to us all. Have we not all been baptised? Have not most of us been confirmed? This is not the place to discuss whether it is right to separate confirmation from baptism as a different sacrament: suffice it to say that God’s Spirit is given to us in both. Why is that Spirit given to us? The prayer which accompanies the anointing with chrism immediately after baptism gives the best explanation. In the old translation, it reads: “as Christ was anointed priest, prophet, and king, so may you live always as a member of His body...” So the Church, and you as a member of it, have received the Holy Spirit and have been anointed to be a prophet.

“Grand as owt!” you may say. “When do I begin?”

It is to be hoped that you have already begun. St. James gives us a clue. We are to denounce injustice, exploitation, neglect of the poor, and failure to be aware of them. Wait a minute though! To whom do we prophesy first? Must it not be to ourselves, complicit as we are, as members of the developed world, in the exploitation of the developing world, (which we used to call, rather patronisingly, “the third world”)?

To take an immediate example: have you supported attempts to persuade the government to ensure that sufficient supplies of vaccines to fight COVID are made available to the developing world? That seems to me to be a prophetic duty. And have you interrogated yourself as to how your own lifestyle may contribute, not only to the oppression of the poor, but also to the degradation of the planet, an issue of daily increasing urgency?

From the days of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Pope Francis’ Laudato si and Fratelli tuti the Catholic Church’s social teaching has consistently spoken prophetically of the demands of justice; but unless we apply those messages to our own lives, we are liable to find James’ condemnations being applied to us.

So, James offers us both encouragement and stark warning. The same is true of Jesus in today’s Gospel. Our Lord takes a positive and inclusive approach to those who act positively in His name. Indeed, He goes further, promising to reward apparent outsiders, who are kind to His disciples.

Yet He is uncompromising in His attitude towards those who exploit others, especially “the little ones who have faith”. I suspect that it is impossible to hear those words today without thinking of child abuse, and especially child abuse by the clergy and others who represent the Church.

But there are no grounds for anyone to be complacent, as Jesus goes on to insist that we must all be uncompromising in opposing and rooting out the deep causes of our own sins, those tendencies in each one of us which prevent us from realising our full potential as children of God. So our readings today present us with both encouragement and warning: God is on our side, but we have to respond and play our part.

25th Week

25th Sunday

St. James would have fitted well into the world of modern psychology. He has grasped a principle which is at the heart of current understanding of the human condition, namely that we have to look within ourselves for the root of many of our difficulties.

Searching for an explanation of conflict, James puts the question “Isn’t it precisely in the desires fighting within your own selves?”. Of course, many people are the victims of violence by others, but when we ourselves are roused to anger, or even rage, when we feel frustrated over what we don’t have, then we need to look within for the source of our dissatisfaction, bitterness, resentment, rather than blame other people, or ill fortune, for the way we feel.

It may well be, as the psychologists tend to suggest, that we are deeply influenced by what happened to us in childhood, or even in the womb, but we then have to take responsibility for our own response to these influences. We all have distinct personalities, shaped by nature and nurture, (or by heredity and environment, to use more technical terms) but God has given us free will in our living out of those personalities.

If we are honest, we have to accept that most of us are prone to selfishness, which is perhaps the root of all sin. From this selfishness arise the jealousy and ambition of which St. James complains, and which we see working out in the behaviour and attitude of the disciples. Rather than focus their attention on the Lord, and on His prophecy of suffering, death, and resurrection, they fall into an argument about which of them is the greatest, revealing their own jealousy and ambition very sharply.

From our viewpoint, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to criticise the first followers of Our Lord. We would like to think that, if we had had the advantages of seeing Him face to face, of hearing Him speak, of spending time in His company, our behaviour would have been very different.

Really? (Or “seriously?” to use the current expression.) We do hear Him speak to us in the Gospels, we spend time in His company every time we pray, we encounter Him intimately in the Blessed Sacrament, and is our behaviour really any better than that of the apostles? How often do we criticise other people? How often do we pass judgement on their faults? On the other hand, how rarely do we look into ourselves honestly and thoroughly, to recognise the selfishness and self-absorption which drive so many of our actions?

To give you an example: my computer frequently drives me to distraction. When things go wrong, I often fall into a blind panic. I catastrophise, as the experts would say, assuming that total disaster has struck; and then I expect someone to come and fix the problem here and now, making my needs their priority.

No doubt the shrinks would have a field day, with my reaction. But in all honesty, I don’t need them to tell me that I am indulging in pure selfishness, that I am making myself the centre of the universe, entitled to have everything run exactly as I wish.

I am also, strangely enough, displaying a lack of faith. St. James hints at this when he comments “The reason you don’t have what you want is that you don’t pray for it” or “You don’t pray properly”. If I had the trust, the faith, the gumption, to place the whole situation in God’s hands, my computer might not work any better, but I would have a sense of proportion, a realisation of how much or how little things really matter in God’s sight and in the context of His love for me.

That perhaps is the real issue. If only we could realise how much God loves us, we would lose much of our selfishness at a stroke. We would not feel the urge to compare ourselves with others, because we would be secure in knowing that we are loved, that we are infinitely precious in God’s sight.

Today take some time to reflect on the truth that God’s Son died out of pure love for you, to consider how intensely He must therefore love you. If only we could do that seriously and thoroughly, we would lose much of our insecurity, and be freed to love in return, with no need for that jealousy or selfish ambition identified by St. James.

24th Sunday Year B

24th Sunday 2021

Isaiah 50:5-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35

Blooming ‘eck, Peter! You weren’t expecting that, were you? After all, you were only doing your job. According to Matthew, the Lord had just named you as the rock on which He was going to build His Church, and this was your opportunity to show Him what a good choice He had made.

And you went the right way about it. You took Jesus to one side, exactly as He had described how you and the rest should deal with problems: there was no question of making a public fuss. Then you quietly told Him that, with you in charge, this didn’t need to happen.

You must have been feeling that you had done a really good job: your first challenge in your new role, and you had handled it perfectly. Then this happened. You were absolutely humiliated. You were called Satan, you who, just a few minutes before, had been told that God had inspired you. Yet now you were in trouble for not thinking in God’s way. Not only bruised, battered, and humiliated; you must have been thoroughly confused.

To be honest, I don’t think you should take it too personally. You simply happen to have pressed a very sensitive button. With the best will in the world, and completely without intending to, you had tempted the Lord to turn aside from His mission, to avoid the way of suffering: and it was one heck of a temptation.

Did you notice what Jesus did when you spoke to Him? He turned away from you, because He could feel the force and the attraction of what you were saying. Did He want to suffer? Of course not: and you were offering Him a way out, an offer which was hugely tempting.

That’s why He called you Satan. He wasn’t actually speaking to you, but to Satan, the Tempter, who was using you, using your voice, the voice of a friend, and what is a stronger temptation than that? If you really dread something, and your friend tells you that you needn’t go through with it, aren’t you mightily tempted to go along with him? Jesus is fully human, so He would have felt the same. That’s why He turned away from you, and in doing that, He saw the others, and He knew that He had to go through it for them, and for all the others who had gone before them, and all those who would come after them, until the end of time—but it was a close thing.

As for being inspired by God, and then thinking not in God’s way but man’s, that’s a tricky one. You will learn, and your successors will learn, to trust entirely in God, allowing Him to speak through you, and not to trust your own judgement.

Finally, there is one more thing. Don’t forget what Jesus went on to say: that all of us will have to suffer, taking His way, not our own, and carrying our cross in His footsteps.

But don’t worry. He will be with you, and with the rest of us. He will, in the end, give you courage beyond anything you could imagine, and He will tell you to strengthen us all. So don’t be downhearted, Peter. There will be setbacks along the way—massive setbacks, indeed—but you will be a source of strength and encouragement for millions yet to be born.

23rd Sunday Year B

23rd Sunday2021

Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark7:31-37

Oh heck! It’s here again! Every three years, this Gospel passage recurs, and every three years I am transported straight back to the equivalent Sunday in 1976, the first Sunday of term at St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, my first Sunday as a member of staff, the oil of ordination still wet on my hands.

Every three years I recall the homily by the headmaster Fr. Peter O’Neill, as he focused on one sentence “He has done all things well” and told the two hundred or so lads assembled before him that they should so conduct themselves that, at the end of the year, people would say of them “He has done all things well”. Good headmasterly stuff, even if not quite Alan Bennett.

What are the things that Jesus had done well, and how far may we be expected to imitate them? He had, most recently, as we have just heard, cured a deaf man who had a speech impediment, and had thus fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which we heard in the First Reading.

Can we do that? “Can we heck as like!” I hear you cry. Wait a minute though. What really lies behind Jesus’ miracle here? It is a sign that the Kingdom of God, foretold by the prophets, has arrived. The cure of this man, important as it was for him, has a wider significance. To an extent, we are all deaf, and each of us has a speech impediment, until Jesus ushers in the Kingdom, touches our ears and our tongue, and enables us to hear and to speak clearly.

The Kingdom IS here, Jesus HAS touched our ears and our tongues and enabled us to hear and to speak clearly, if only we are willing. If we are prepared to listen, we can hear His message, and can convey it by word and action. Through the way we live, we can and should be “heralds of the Great King” as Francis of Assisi described himself.

When Pope St. John Paul II added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary, he included as the third, “the proclamation of the Kingdom and the call to conversion”. The Kingdom of God is proclaimed to us, and we are constantly called to a conversion of life, to an ongoing adjustment of our lives in response to the call of Christ. This, in turn, calls us to be a sign of the Kingdom in the world, and therefore a channel of conversion for others, as they see the Kingdom at work in us.

Is it likely that we shall do this well? Maybe, maybe not: that isn’t really the point. We do it to the best of our ability, according to the gifts, talents, and graces which God gives us. GK Chesterton coined the expression “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. Of course we want to do worthwhile things well, but what matters is that we do them at all, and leave the results to God, who makes good our defects. Whether we have done them well or badly is not for us to decide; nor, pace Fr. O’Neill, is it for other people, but only for God.

What else are we called to do? Isaiah begins his prophecy with the words “Say to all faint hearts ‘Courage! Do not be afraid’”. All of us have faint hearts at times. We are weighed down by events; sometimes troubles seem to pile one upon another. Yet the Kingdom has been established by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, and so those words are addressed to us “Courage! Do not be afraid”.

At the root of the word “courage”, and of “encourage”, “discourage” is the Latin word “cor” meaning heart. The prophet, and Jesus the Lord, speak to our hearts, calling us to have strength, and an absence of fear, at the very root of our being—and then to convey that same strength, that same lack of fear to others, to be encouragers of others, people who put “heart” into others.

Do we do that, or are we among the negative people, the grumblers, the purveyors of misery? Do people recognise the joy of the Kingdom in us, a joy which is not to be identified with surface happiness, but which may exist along with deep unhappiness at times, because it comes from the very root of our being, where Jesus shares with us the Kingdom? We may never do all things well, but we can strive to be alive with the Kingdom, and so help to build that Kingdom among others.

22nd Sunday Year B

22nd Sunday 2021

Deut 4:1-2,6-8; James 1:17-18, 21-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Does the name Graham Poll mean anything to you?  I can think of a few people who will immediately recognise it, but I suspect that, for the majority, it will be a mystery. Did he perhaps invent the Poll Tax, or the polling booth, or a particularly short hair style?

None of these: in fact, he was an English football referee, who, in a relatively recent World Cup, ruined any chance he might have had of refereeing the Final when he committed a shocking blunder in a group game, showing the yellow card three times to a player before sending him off, the sort of howler you would not expect from the most junior referee on a park pitch, let alone a senior official in the world’s most famous competition.

A few years ago, someone lent me Graham Poll’s autobiography. What struck me, in reading it, was not his account of this incident, but a remark which he made, commenting along the lines: “Sometimes you know that, strictly, by the Laws of the Game, you should award a penalty, but morally it would be the wrong decision, and you don’t give it.”

I don’t recall whether I yelled with delight upon reading this, but I suspect that I did. In the autumn of 2014, I had spent my holidays, as I did for a number of years, refereeing in a schools’ competition in Canada. For one match, a final, I was assistant referee (linesman in old money) along with Dave, my host, an expatriate Lancastrian, whilst the whistle was taken by Joe, an expat Glaswegian.

One team, whom I shall call the Blues, dominated the match, outclassing their opponents, whom we shall name the Whites, but failing to add to the single goal which they had scored early in the game. As the match moved into stoppage time, Whites launched one last desperate attack. Their left wing back brought the ball down the wing, being pulled back, as he came, by a Blues’ defender. As he continued to make progress, Joe decided to apply the Advantage clause, until the attacker, still being unfairly harassed, reached the penalty area, whereupon Joe blew, and pointed to the spot.

All hell broke loose. The Blues went berserk. One of their players pushed Joe, and was sent off, whilst the occupants of the Blues’ substitutes’ bench, immediately behind me, were within a gnat’s breath of invading the pitch.

Eventually, order was restored, the penalty was taken, and converted, and the final whistle blew, facing us with extra time in a febrile atmosphere with one side down to ten men and nursing a huge sense of grievance.

During extra time, Whites, with their one man advantage, mounted an attack. One of their players made his way into the penalty area, twisting and turning, and eventually being caught by a defender’s foot, and going down. It was a clear penalty, right under my nose.

What did I do? I kept my flag firmly down by my side. It would have been dreadfully unjust, in the context of the game, for Whites to win by virtue of a second penalty. That I had no wish to be lynched by the Blues’ management and subs, who were breathing down my neck, was, of course, irrelevant.

Whether Joe had a clear view of the incident, I do not know. Perhaps he too saw the potential injustice of a strict application of the Law. In any case, his whistle remained silent, there were no further goals, and justice was achieved morally, if not by the letter of the Law, when Blues won the penalty shoot-out.

It seems to me that similar issue lies at the heart of Our Lord’s dispute with the Pharisees. Are laws, and in particular the Jewish Law, an end in themselves, or a means to an end? Moses had no doubt: the Law was intended to display the closeness of God to His people; to draw them ever closer to Him. To an extent, the Pharisees had forgotten this: for them, the Law and the laws had become ends in themselves, to be maintained at all costs, for their own sake. God had practically fallen out of the equation.

It is easy for us to become smug; to say “Silly old Pharisees. We would never behave like that.” OR WOULD WE?

21st Sunday Year B

21st Sunday 2021

Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18; Ephesians 5:21-32. John 6: 60-69

Take it or leave it! Essentially, that is the message of today’s First Reading and Gospel. The Israelites, the disciples, and we, are presented with a stark choice. There is no leeway, no compromise, no ifs or buts. Either we are for God, or we are against Him: either we accept Jesus’ words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, without attempting to explain them away, or we cannot count ourselves among His disciples.

The Israelites, after wandering in the desert, have finally reached the Promised Land; and Joshua, who has become their leader following the death of Moses, presents them with alternatives. Either they can follow pagan gods, or they can become disciples of the one true God: they cannot do both.

Joshua gives them what is effectively an ultimatum because, after repeatedly grumbling throughout their time in the wilderness, they have now become careless in their adherence to the one God. Immediately, the people declare their allegiance to God, but their commitment would prove to be fragile, and through the centuries there would be repeated instances of backsliding.

It is fairly clear how this situation is repeated in our world today. People have discovered a whole range of alternative gods, in the forms of comfort, material prosperity, and a sort of superstitious scientism, which deifies science in a way which sensible, rational scientists avoid.

That is the easy, comforting explanation of Joshua’s question as it is posed today. It is too easy, too comforting. It is easy and comforting for us to claim that we have made our choice and avoided those traps.

What, though, of the other traps? What about the trap of grumbling, which was the beginning of the Israelites’ rebellion? I am not suggesting that we should all become Pollyannas, finding everything wonderful and denying reality, joining the ranks of the “Smile, Jesus loves you” brigade. That sort of relentless cheerfulness can be as destructive as its opposite, as GK Chesterton points out in the Fr. Brown story “The Three Tools of Death”.

Yet, if we are honest, we may well discover that we are in danger of falling into a negative mindset. This can quickly develop into an inability to see goodness anywhere, and can lead to effectively denying the goodness of God.

Further, is our commitment to God as genuine as it seems, or is it focused on a god of our own creation, whose ideas conveniently match our own? Do we really worship and serve God, or are we devotees of our own way of seeing and doing things, our own fixed ideas of morality (especially sexual morality) our own preferred style and mood of worship? I still recall the warning of the late Mgr. McReavy, delivered at my first, breathtaking Easter Vigil in the seminary, that liturgy can become an end in itself, “whether it be trad liturgy or pop, folksy or dignified”.

As Joshua faces the Israelites (and us) with a choice, so does Jesus face His disciples (and us). Are we prepared to accept His claim to be the Bread of Life, His instruction to eat His flesh and drink His blood? Some of His followers are not, and His reaction to them is fascinating. He doesn’t say “Whoa! Hang on a minute! You haven’t understood. What I really mean is....” He lets them go with the Parthian shot that they lack the spirit (or more accurately “the Spirit”) to accept Him. Furthermore, He compels the Twelve, His chosen inner circle, to answer the same question. They too must say “Yea” or “Nay”. They too must decide.

If the Twelve had decided to leave, what would that have meant for Jesus’ mission, for salvation history? We shall never know, because Peter, the chosen leader, speaks for them all, and commits them to faith and to following. He would have had no more idea than the leavers what Jesus’ words meant—they would have conveyed nothing until the Last Supper, and those new words spoken over the bread and wine—but he is prepared to entrust himself, and the Church, entirely to Jesus. What about us?

Assumption

Assumption of Our Lady 2021

Apocalypse 11:19, 12:1-6, 10; 1Cor 15:20-26; Luke 1:39-56

If Fr. Val Farrell, now resident at Nazareth House, were to receive royalties for all the occasions on which I have used a phrase which he passed on to me some forty years ago, he would be a rich man. The phrase, describing Our Lady, is “the eschatological ikon of the Church”.

Mary is the eschatological ikon of the Church as I have by now informed you probably more often than you have had hot dinners. This means, as you may now be tired of hearing, that Mary IS what the Church is called to be: she is what you and I are called to be, what we shall be in eternity, and what the Church, at her best, already is, at least in embryo.

Let us consider how this works. The most ancient title of Our Lady, apart from those given to her in the scriptures, is THEOTOKOS, God Bearer, Mother of God. This title was defined by the Council of Ephesus in the year 431. How, you may ask, can it apply to us?

We, as the Church, and as individuals, are called to be mothers of God today, bringing God, in the person of Jesus Christ, into today’s world, making Him present to the world by our words and actions. Mary is Mother of God not only physically, but especially spiritually, enabling Him to be a presence in and for the world: physically, we cannot do the same, but spiritually we can and must.

Many more examples can be drawn from today’s Gospel, of the Visitation. Firstly, Mary is seen as the woman of compassion, setting out to care for her elderly cousin in her pregnancy. Secondly, she is the woman who brings Christ to others, fulfilling her role as Mother of God spiritually, as He makes His presence known to Elizabeth and to her unborn son. Thirdly, she is the woman filled with the Spirit, as she enables others to be filled with the Spirit, as are John who leaps in the womb, and Elizabeth who prophesies. Are not all of these qualities to be looked for in the Church?

Mary goes on to reveal herself as the woman of prayer and praise, as she declaims the Magnificat, a prayer which the Church utters daily at Evening Prayer, or Vespers, and the Anglican Communion at Evensong. In that prayer, she exults in the saving works of God, she rejoices in her own lowliness, and she recognises both the holiness of God and the marvels which He has worked for and in her.

She then goes on to praise the compassion of God, and to encourage us to imitate Him in His preference for the poor and the downtrodden, in words which will find an echo in her Son’s Beatitudes. It is small wonder that the Magnificat has become a rallying cry among those working for justice in Latin America.

Perhaps most significant for today’s feast are Elizabeth’s words “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled”. Mary is the woman of faith, as the Church must be a people of faith, and we must be men and women of faith. This faith is the source of Mary’s blessedness, which she herself asserts will be proclaimed throughout the generations.

The Church’s definition of the Assumption of Mary as a doctrine, is an assertion of the Church’s faith in God’s promise to the Church. St. Paul reminds the Christians of Corinth that “all people will be brought to life in Christ, but all of them in their proper order”. As the Preface of today’s Mass points out, the Assumption of Our Lady makes her once again the eschatological ikon of the Church, because she is “the beginning and the pattern of the Church in its fulfilment”.

Mary is received body and soul into heaven. She is the Ark of the Covenant as the dwelling place of God: she is the woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon and crowned with the stars; but so is the Church. She has been taken to her fulfilment as the first of the redeemed: we are to follow. In the meantime, we must take to heart the words of the Magnificat, and “all generations will call (her) blessed”.

19th Sunday Year B

19th Sunday 2021

1Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6: 41-51

“Those who come to me will never be hungry. Those who believe in me will never thirst.” That is how last Sunday’s Gospel ended, with the emphasis on coming to Jesus and believing in Him.

The Lectionary then omits five verses, before resuming with the complaints of Our Lord’s opponents about His words. As so often, they throw His origins at Him: they know His family, so how can He give Himself airs by claiming to come from God?

Once again, Jesus proceeds to stress “coming” and “believing”: these are the first conditions for benefiting from the Bread of Life. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me...to hear the teaching of the Father and to learn from it is to come to me.....everybody who believes has eternal life.” Coming and believing are at the heart of this discourse.

Then, Our Lord moves His teaching forward, as He speaks specifically about eating, and compares the manna which apparently came down from heaven with the bread which has truly come down from heaven. Using once again an “I am” saying, which identifies Him with the God of the burning bush, He speaks of Himself as the living bread, before spelling out the reality of the bread and of our eating: “the bread which I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world”.

Here it is evident that Our Lord is looking forward to the Last Supper, when He will pronounce over the ritual bread “This is my body” and is making the reality of the change of substance of that bread abundantly clear. This is to be, not a metaphorical eating, but an eating in fact, and an eating, not of bread, but of Jesus Himself.

A little over thirty years ago, when I was chaplain, in Preston, to what was then Lancashire Polytechnic, one of the Catholic students handed me, with understandable disgust, a pamphlet which he had found, composed by a somewhat extreme Ulster Protestant, to help people “convert” Catholics. This pamphlet stated “It is very difficult to convert Catholics because they take John 6 literally, and believe that it relates to the Eucharist”.

In all honesty, it would take a supreme act of wilful blindness not to believe that the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel relates to the Eucharist, but this pamphleteer would have none of it, pointing out triumphantly that John doesn’t mention the Eucharist in his account of the Last Supper. Eh? What is that supposed to prove? That John didn’t believe that Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper? That he is somehow denying that Jesus said “This is my body” and “This is my blood”?

The point is precisely that John didn’t need to describe the Eucharistic action at the Last Supper, because he had already set out its meaning in chapter six. As on other occasions, John takes for granted the account of events set out in the other Gospels, whilst he himself describes their deeper meaning. For instance, he doesn’t describe the Nativity, leaving that to Matthew and Luke, while he himself explores its deeper significance: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...the Word became flesh.”

To deny that John 6 refers to the Eucharist is the equivalent of claiming that his prologue bears no relation to the Nativity. And in order to reassure myself that this pamphlet does not represent a typical Protestant understanding of the Eucharist, I returned to CK Barrett’s Commentary on John. The late Professor Charles Kingsley Barrett is internationally recognised as one of the leading experts on St. John’s Gospel: he was also a Methodist minister, and he has no doubt that this chapter is Eucharistic in its intent.

We are to come to Jesus, and to believe, and then we are to eat and drink, receiving His flesh and blood. Next week, our understanding will be taken further.

18th Sunday Year B

Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 17:20-24; John 6:24-35

I am going to cheat today. I will get to the Gospel, the Bread of Life discourse, eventually, but first I want to head off at a tangent.

Today is the forty fifth anniversary of my first Mass. Actually, what we refer to as a priest’s first Mass is really his second, as he is ordained early enough to concelebrate the ordination Mass—but we won’t split hairs. I had invited my former university chaplain to preach, and he had worked out that today’s Second Reading had been the Epistle, almost eight years before, when I attended Sunday Mass for the first time at Fisher House, the chaplaincy, in the days before the Lectionary had been revised, and the new Lectionary introduced.

He had realised this because of one phrase, namely “a spiritual revolution”. It resonated because that earlier Mass had been celebrated in the autumn of 1968, the year of student revolution throughout Europe, and also in the United States, where protests against the Vietnam War were violently suppressed. “Revolution” was a key word in the student vocabulary, and the visiting preacher on that 1968 Sunday had taken “a spiritual revolution” as his theme.

Does that phrase still resonate today? It probably should, as we are constantly called, both as individuals and as the Church, to be turned upside down by the power of the Holy Spirit. We may feel that we have had our spiritual revolution, that we have answered our vocation, and that we are now entitled to sail peacefully along, resting on our supposed achievements; yet, deep down, we know that this isn’t sufficient.

God’s call is new every day. As God’s people, we are not entitled to take our ease, to settle for the comfortable life. Every day, we must allow the Spirit to disturb us, to shake us out of complacency, to lead us further and more deeply along our pilgrim way. Pope Francis has spent the last eight years doing that for the Church, and we must be prepared to have the same thing happen daily within ourselves.

In this respect, we do find a link with today’s First Reading and Gospel. The people of Israel are our predecessors, on a journey to the Promised Land. Like us, they are called to a spiritual revolution, to have their relationship with God constantly renewed; and, like us, they are reluctant and prone to grumble—and don’t forget that grumbling is one of the most destructive of activities.

It is in response to their grumbling that God gives them the manna, this mysterious “bread from heaven” which will sustain them along the pilgrim way, and which is the forerunner of the true bread from heaven, Christ the Lord, who sustains us by the gift of Himself, principally under the appearances of bread and wine in the Eucharist.

Jesus has already shown Himself to be the fulfilment of the prophets, multiplying loaves like Elisha, and as the new Moses, ascending the mountain and, later, crossing the waters of the lake, as Moses led the people through the sea. Now, He effectively announces Himself as God, the giver of bread, as He claims “I am the Bread of Life”, one of the “I am” sayings with which He identifies Himself with the God of the burning bush, who declared Himself to Moses as “I am, who am”, the One who is pure existence.

Over the next weeks, we shall encounter the development of the Bread of Life theme, but today there is one more crucial point to notice. Jesus doesn’t yet refer to eating and drinking: He speaks first of “coming” and “believing”. “Those who come to me will never be hungry. Those who believe in me will never thirst.” Our reception of the Bread of Life will be of no benefit unless we come with our whole heart, mind, and soul to Him, and believe in Him—unless we constantly undergo our spiritual revolution.