7th Sunday of Easter A

As soon as I read today’s readings I became aware of a tension in them that runs through the whole of the christian life. Tension, in the strict sense of the word - as in, for example, a rope or a chain that is pulled tight - is the result of two opposite forces pulling in different directions. Used in the sense we are using it, the Oxford English Dictionary defines tension as, “the relationship between ideas or qualities with conflicting demands or implications,” examples of which abound in our society today. One very topical one at the moment among politicians is the tension between national security and the civil rights of the individual. Those who emphasise national security want to pass laws which would allow the police to hold terrorist suspects without charge for much longer periods than has been the case up to now, while those whose priority is civil rights are against this. There is truth on both sides and its when apparently conflicting truths enter into dialogue with each other that tension becomes creative. So where is the tension in today’s readings and how creative is it?

Well the basic tension is between the first reading and the psalm, but it is reflected in both the other passages as well. In Acts, St Luke tells us that after the Ascension the apostles went back to Jerusalem, a short distance away. But behind this deceptively simple statement lies a profound truth about the whole of Christianity. Jerusalem, with what one of the hymns we sing calls its shops and stalls and alley-ways and busy crowded streets, is a symbol of the world. We will not find Jesus, as the angel had earlier told the apostles, by staring into the sky. Faith is not, as Marx said it was, the opium of the people, a cunning plan designed to keep the minds of the poor off the causes of the poverty and so stop them doing something about it. Christianity, as is clear from Jesus prayer for his disciples in today’s gospel, is about the most profound involvement with the world and everything in it. I know I have quoted it many times before, but I want to do so again today. Because this is what the Second Vatican Council had to say on the subject in its final document, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: ‘The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the men and women of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their heart…That is why christians cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the world and its history.’

No sooner had we heard this, however, than we were exposed in the responsorial psalm to another idea with what the Oxford Dictionary called ‘conflicting demands or implications.’ This time, instead of that deep commitment to the world, there is an expressed desire to leave it. ‘I am sure I shall see the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living’ we sang in the response, and the second verse said ‘There is one thing I ask of the Lord, for this I long, to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.’ And this is part of our tradition too. St Paul in one of his letters agonizes over whether it is better to carry on working in the world or leave it and be united with Christ. St Teresa of Avila too, in one of her poems, which obviously sounds better in the original Spanish than it does in English, writes, ‘I die because I do not die.’ And how often have you heard people at a funeral say, ‘Well, at least he or she has gone to a better place’ reminding us that, as Jesus himself says, we are in the world but not of it. So how do we manage this tension, this pulling in opposite directions, one towards this world and the other towards the next, and turn it into a tension that is creative? Well, there is one aspect of the recent history of the Church which shows us how this can happen, one which touched my own life in a way which could have meant that I never set foot in St Matthew’s.

In 1972, you see, I was within months of going to the missions in South America. But, at the very last minute, Bishop McGee, for reasons I have never fully understood, asked me if I would postpone it. And so it never happened. And looking back, I have to say I am glad it didn’t. Basically, I was too inexperienced at the time to go to a continent where the struggle between Rome and Liberation Theology was just getting underway. Faced with the abject poverty of millions, many in the Latin American Church turned to political action, and to Marxism in particular, as the solution. They were fed up with what they saw as pie in the sky religion and some, inspired as many were at the time by revolutionaries like Che Guevara, actually came to see violence as the solution and joined the guerilla movements. And so began a struggle with the institutional Church which is only resolving itself now. As far as Rome was concerned this was all wrong. Their argument was that true liberation can never come from any particular political philosophy and even less from the barrel of a gun. Many good men and women, like the ones St Peter is writing to in the second reading, suffered for their commitment to the poor, either at the hands of the Roman Curia or right- wing groups supported by the CIA, and for many years things were not good.

But gradually, as the years have passed, the tension has become more creative. The extreme positions taken up on both sides have softened, as Rome has learned about the demands for social justice and people in Latin America have seen the shortcomings of purely political solutions to problems. Slowly but surely, the Spirit has done his work, which is to keep moving us on. There are still many tensions in the Church, between conservatives and liberals, between those who want to control from the centre and those who want more local decision-making, between those who want married priests or women priests and those who don’t, and so on.

And I just invite you today to recognize this and understand that, in the end, all we can do with these tensions, whether in the world, in the Church or in our individual lives, is live with them and let them do their creative work in us.


BIDDING PRAYERS


We begin today by praying for the great and beautiful world in which we live. Science struggles to explain how it all began but faith tells us where it will all end. The whole of creation is engaged in an epic journey through time which will only end when everything that exists is brought together in Christ. And so we pray for a deep sense of the providence of God at work deep within everything that happens both in the world and in our own individual lives…………………Lord hear us

We pray, too, for the Church. Sent out into the world to be a sign of the presence of Jesus in every age, it travels through history struggling to come to terms with its own weakness, a weakness that is no more than a reflection of the weakness in each one of us. And so we pray that it will be always open to the renewing and healing power of God, striving at all times to be more and more like the Jesus whose face it is called to show to the world……………………………Lord hear us

Eternal life, we hear in today’s gospel, is to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. It is not something we only experience beyond death. It begins now as we come to know God and learn to love as God loves. Knowledge of the one true God transforms the way we see everything, and we ask the Spirit to stir this knowledge in us, enabling us to leave behind forever ways of thinking about God which have more to do with superstition and magic than genuine faith……….Lord hear us

In the second reading, St Peter is writing to first century christians who are suffering for their faith. He encourages them to remain faithful, reminding them that, as we heard him say last week, it is better to suffer for doing what is right than for what is wrong. And so we pray for the courage we need to do what is right in every circumstance regardless of what others around us may be doing, especially if this involves suffering or rejection of any kind……….Lord hear us

And we pray in a special way for people who live in poor under-developed parts of the world. We pray, too, for a deep sense of what life is like for them. We are currently complaining about the way the prices of food and oil are going up, but for millions of our fellow human beings these things means, not just inconvenience, but hunger and starvation And so we pray that the world will respond to their need before the world’s poor have no option left but violence……………….Lord hear us

The psalmist today longs to live in the house of the Lord. And so we pray this week for all who have died that the words of the psalm will be fulfilled in them. We pray, too, for a deep faith in the reality of the Resurrection, a faith which, far from being an excuse for not living our lives to the full here and now, will encourage us to engage with the reality of daily living, allowing the tensions and challenges which go with the human condition to become creative in our lives………..Lord hear us