7th Sunday of Easter C

There is a direct line from the martyrdom of Stephen, which we heard about in the first reading today, right up to our own time, and it passes right through this morning’s second reading from the book of the Apocalypse. Stephen, of courses, was the first christian martyr, stoned to death in Jerusalem during the winter of 36 to 37 AD. But there were many other martyrs in the course of the first three hundred years of the Church’s history and these are the people the author of the Apocalypse is referring to when he speaks about ‘those who have washed their clothes clean’ – a phrase which usually has the words ‘in the blood of the lamb’ added to it, ‘so that they will have the right to feed on the tree of life and come through the gates into the city.’ a reference to the New Jerusalem, a notion which came to signify the Kingdom of God after the destruction of the old Jerusalem by the Romans in 70AD. And so it is important that we have some understanding of the part martyrdom played in the early Church.

For three hundred years, in fact, it was seen by our ancestors in the faith as the pinnacle of the christian life. Jesus had told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him and those early christians could see no more perfect way of doing this than through martyrdom. Not all of them were martyred, of course, but a good number were in the course of the various persecutions that occurred in those first three centuries, and, strange as it may seem to us, many others aspired to be martyrs. It was seen as the ultimate in following Jesus and commentators at the time often describe how christians went to their death in the arenas of Rome singing hymns and praising God.

All of that came to an end, however, at the beginning of the 4th century with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. Suddenly, from being a persecuted minority, christianity became the religion of the state. It was now fashionable to be a christian – in name at least – and the resulting dilution of the Church and the quality of its membership caused dismay among many. For them, the Church had gone soft and, deprived of martyrdom as a way of imitating Jesus, they looked around for an alternative. And they found it in the deserts of the Middle East. Many left behind what they considered a corrupt society and a Church doomed to extinction to follow Jesus through a life of penance and self-denial. And what they were doing, without realising it, was laying the foundations of Monasticism in the East. They were, in effect, the first monks. And then later, in the sixth century, St Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, did something similar in the West. Convinced that it was not possible to live the christian life in Rome where he was studying, with all its corruption and general decadence, he abandonned the city for a life as a hermit. To his surpise, however, others joined him, and in 528 he founded the first monastery as we would know it, at Monte Cassino, a place some of you will have visited. And the rest, as they say, is history as, over the centuries, monasteries grew up all over Europe becoming great centres of learning and spirituality.

But there was one serious problem with the monasteries. They laid the foundations of what can only be described as two-tier christianity. On the one hand, you had the monks and nuns, the successors of the martyrs, those who took the following of Jesus seriously, and on the other you had the masses, the ‘hoy polloi,’ the great unwashed, who, as the centuries passed, deprived of proper pastoral care and led by an uneducated and ill-prepared clergy, became more and more steeped in superstition and ignorance, a superstition and ignorance which was to prove one of the great causes of the Reformation and from which, even today, we have not yet entirely escaped.

Attempts were made to do something about this. One of these happened in the 12th century when St Norbert founded the Premonstratentions or Norbertines whom we knew here in Kilmarnock, in Mount Carmel, until a few years ago. They were an attempt to get the monks out of the monasteries and into the towns and villages where there was so much need for them In the 13th century there were another two great attempts at this as St Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscans and St Dominic the Dominicans with this same purpose in mind. But none of these attempts were completely successful as the Premonstratentions, the Franciscans and the Dominicans were all sucked back into the monastic system they were trying to break out of. And the reason for this was simple. Ever since the end of the persecutions, centuries earlier, noone had really been able to come up with an understanding of holiness, an understanding of what following Jesus really meant, which could be lived in the world and which did not mean having to withdraw from it and live in a monastery. And the person who did that, surprise, surpise, was St Ignatius in the 16th century. How that happened is an other story, a wonderful story as it happens, but suffice it to say at this point that Ignatius developed an understanding of God and the christian life which could be lived by anyone anywhere. It transformed the way we understand holiness and is reflected directly in one of the most important chapters of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The chapter is entitled ‘The Universal Call to Holiness’ and reminds us that, through our baptism, every single one of us here is called to be holy and to follow Jesus in the fullest sense possible. There is no longer any need to be martyred or enter a monastery. We can be holy anywhere and in any circumstance. Only one thing is necessary: that, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, the love of God be in us. In other words, that we love the way God loves.

What that means we have reflected on many times and will, God willing, continue to do so. But just pray, today, that as we do, every single one of us here will come, through prayer and reflection, to know what holiness and the following of Jesus means in the concrete circumstances of our own lives. And that, as with God’s help we do this, we will have something of the committment of those who died as martyrs in those early years or dedicated themselves to lives of penance and self-denial over many centuries, all in the pursuit of holiness as they understood it in their own day.


BIDDING PRAYERS


To be a christian today, a follower of Jesus, is to live a life of faith in the midst of the world. It means reading the signs of the times, reflecting on the great issues of our time and entering deeply into the doubts, struggles and fears of the people around us so that, as men and women of the gospel, we may, through the power of the Spirit living in us, help shed the light of the gospel on them. And so we pray for the wisdom and maturity we need to do this………………………………………..Lord hear us

To be holy is to have the love of God in us. It means loving as God loves, not as the world loves, and we ask God today to show us what this means in the modern world. We ask him to stir in us a deep love for the world and its people, so that, even in the face of all that is worst in human nature, we may, like Stephen as he was being stoned to death, be able to imitate Jesus on the cross and speak only words of understanding and forgiveness………………………Lord hear us

To have the love of God in us in practical terms means feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, welcoming the stranger, doing good to those who hate us, reaching out to those whom the world rejects and finds unloveable and all the other things Jesus speaks of in the gospels. This does not come naturally. It is only possible when God lives in us through the power of the Spirit and we ask that Spirit to move deeply in this parish today and always………. Lord hear us

One of the sad consquences of the two-tier christianity which resulted from the limited understanding of holiness which dominated the Church for so long was the widespread superstition and ignorance which, for so many centuries, masqueraded as faith. We still suffer from it today and as a result millions have rejected God. And so we pray for the grace to move beyond this evil and come to a deeper understanding of every aspect of our faith…………………...Lord hear us

In the gospel today, Jesus prays that his followers may be one. “May they be so completely one” he says to the Father, “that the world will realise it was you who sent me.” Sadly, the unity Jesus prayed for has been shattered over the centuries and the resulting disunity is a serious obstacle to the men and women of our time coming to know Jesus. And so we ask God to show us the way back to the unity which once existed in the Church………………………..Lord hear us

As Stephen was being stoned to death, St Luke tells us that Saul entirely approved of the killing. And yet, within a short time, as he travelled to Damascus, Saul was to experience the most profound conversion and become the apostle of the gentile nations. And so we pray for the grace never to think of any person as beyond redemption, no matter what they may have done in their lives…………...Lord hear us