6th Sunday of Easter C.

One of the things I like about the history of the early Church as we read it in the Acts of the Apostles during these weeks after Easter, is just how like ourselves the people in the story are. And so I think it would be worth our while looking more closely for a few moments at what exactly is going on in that first reading, convinced, as I am, that in it will see a reflection of ourselves.

In last week’s reading, we heard how Paul and Barnabas, on their return to Antioch at the end of Paul’s first missionary journey, told the community there how the pagans, in towns all over what we know today as Turkey, had accepted the message of the Gospel. Antioch, in northern Syria, had been founded about 300 BC and by the time we read about it in Acts, had become a kind of safe haven for christians who had fled from Jerusalem during the persecution that followed the martyrdom of Stephen. The community there were delighted to hear about what had happened to Paul and Barnabas, but their happiness was disturbed when some men arrived from Jerusalem and started telling them that the new pagan converts would have to be circumcised. This, as we heard in the reading, led to a disagreement, as a result of which Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to meet the apostles and resolve the matter. And if we are to appreciate the relevance of today’s liturgy to our own situation, it is vitally important that we understand the forces at work here.

Elsewhere in this same chapter, St Luke tells us that those who disagreed with Paul were Pharisees who had converted to Christianity. And so they were, by nature, traditional and conservative in their thinking. For them, God was circumcision, the Law of Moses and everything they were used to as pious Jews and they simply could not envisage anything different from that. And it took the famous meeting in Jerusalem in 49 AD – often rather grandiosely called the Council of Jerusalem – to resolve the matter in favour of the more open position taken by St Paul. And yet, in the very letter sent from Jerusalem to Antioch to confirm this decision – part of which we heard this morning - we see signs of the very conservatism which had just been rejected. “It has been decided by the Holy Spirit and ourselves” the letter says, “not to saddle you with any burdens beyond these essentials. You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from fornication.” Now with fornication they maybe had a point, but if there is one thing the rest of this is not it is ‘essential.’ If it were, black pudding would still be off the menu for Christians. But it isn’t. And the reason is simple. All that stuff about blood and the meat of strangled animals is pure Judaism; no more to do with christianity than circumcision or any other precept of the Mosaic Law. So how did this happen? How could the early Church have such a moment of profound insight one day and then renege on it the next. Well, for the answer to that question, I would like to turn to my friend, Ignatius of Loyola, and his teaching on discernment.

At the heart of Ignatius’ great insight is the concept of ‘spiritual consolation.’ It is what happens when the Spirit of God moves in us, doing what the Spirit of God always does and what only the Spirit of God can do, which is stir faith, hope and love in the human heart. Most of us will have had one or two outstanding moments of consolation in our lives – my own most powerful one happened when I was only eleven – but the truth is that they happen to us all the time in all kinds of ordinary ways. And why wouldn’t they, given that, as Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel, God lives in us. We are temples of the Holy Spirit who never ceases to move in us, inviting us to let go of purely human ways of thinking and embrace the teaching of Jesus. There are in all our lives moments of clarity and insight when we see the rightness of what Jesus teaches and our hearts are drawn to it. This is ‘spiritual consolation.’ Such moments, however, do not last for ever. They are often, in fact, brief and short-lived, as they encounter another movement in us which cries out against what Jesus says. We are OK as long as the Gospel is compatible with our values and life-style and doesn’t challenge us. But as soon as it clashes with these and calls us beyond the limits of what we consider reasonable and acceptable – to love our enemies or confront our dearly-held prejudices for example - a battle begins inside us. And what St Ignatius saw so clearly is that, if we are to know the peace Jesus speaks of today, a peace the world cannot give, we must trust our moments of consolation and live out of them, even when they have passed and been replaced by other feelings and inclinations which would take us in entirely the opposite direction. It’s perfectly possible to have the most profound experiences of God and then live as if they had never happened. It’s even possible to forget them completely. I have seen it happen to many people over the years and it helps explain why for the Church two thousand years ago reneged so quickly on whst it had so recently decided. And so we must remember our consolations, our moments of clarity and insight, trust them and, above all, make all our decisions of the basis of them.

The great modern example of this at the level of the Church is, of course, the Second Vatican Council. It was a time of immense insight when the Spirit did things in the Church noone at the time thought possible. It was no sooner over, however, than the resistance began. People did not want to go where the Council was leading and forty years on we are still, in may ways, living as if it never happened. But the same can happen in our own lives. Cast your mind back over the years to moments of clarity and insight in your own lives. Maybe it was a Week of Prayer; maybe it was a retreat of some kind and maybe it had nothing to do with anything ‘holy’ at all. But whatever it was – and I have no doubt every person here has experienced such moments – do you remember them, have you trusted them, are you acting out of them or are you living as if they never even happened?


BIDDING PRAYERS


We begin our prayer today by asking God to stir in us memories of times when, in our individual lives, we have experienced moments of spiritual consolation; moments when we saw clearly the rightness of what Jesus teaches and felt drawn to it. We pray for the courage and commitment we need to trust these experiences and live out of them long after the experience itself has passed………………………….Lord hear us

Pope John Paul II, as we have heard so often, called the Second Vatican Council the most powerful movement of the Spirit in the Church in modern times. It was a profound moment of consolation for the whole Church and we pray that, even now, forty years after the event, we will learn to trust what happened at that time, be open to what the Council taught and make its teaching the basis of the way we live as a parish committed to Jesus and the Gospel………………………………..Lord hear us

The struggle we heard about in the first reading, which became the first great crisis to confront the Church, was a struggle between two very different ways of thinking. On the one hand there was an attitude of openness to the world and on the other there was a more traditional, narrow religious way of thinking. Led by the Spirit of God and inspired by St Paul, the early Church chose the way of openness and we pray for the grace to remain faithful to that decision throughout history………….Lord hear us

The letter sent to Antioch and the other young christian communities of the time spoke of placing no burdens on people apart from what was essential. And so we pray for the Church today that it will have the wisdom it needs to apply that same principle in our own time. We pray especially that we will know how to distinguish what is merely human regulation, and so open to change, from what is from God and so can never be changed no matter what the world thinks…………….Lord hear us

In the Gospel today Jesus speaks of a peace the world cannot give. This is the peace that comes from living by the values of the Gospel: loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, turning the other cheek and so on. It can never come from the barrel of a gun and is not the product of political wrangling or diplomacy. It is a peace that comes from God and we pray that the men and women of our time will learn to be open to it………………………………Lord hear us

Jesus also tells us in today’s Gospel that the Holy Spirit will teach us everything and remind us of all that he himself has told us. And so we pray that, as we gather here each week to be fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist, we will be open to all that the Spirit is saying to us and always willing to go where we are led, especially when we would rather not go…….Lord hear us