We have talked a lot in recent weeks about personal decision making, about the supremacy of conscience over law – the basis of Catholic morality since the Middle Ages - and about discerning the will of God for ourselves as individuals. Last week, we explored two of the basic requirements for discernment. The first was the inner freedom necessary to go where God leads. This means seeking from God the grace to move beyond the limits of our own thinking, and so be able to go where God leads especially when it’s where we would rather not go. In this way, we saw that conscience and discernment, far from being an easy option, an excuse for doing what suits us, represent all that’s adult and mature in human nature. And the second requirement was accurate information about the choices we face, a thought which led us to reflect briefly on our relationship with the teaching authority of the Church. But by far the most important part of discernment is what is known as ‘discernment of spirits,’ and given what we heard in this morning’s readings, I would like to say something about this today.
Essentially, discernment of spirits is about sifting through our day to day experience to identify what it is that is moving or motivating us to do what we do at any given moment. All kinds of thoughts, feelings, moods, desires and inclinations go on inside us and even as children we soon learn that some of these are unacceptable.. But when it comes to discerning God’s will, the job of sorting them out and deciding which ones are reliable and which are not is more serious. Discernment of spirits goes much further that what those around us may or may not find acceptable. It is based on the firm conviction that, somewhere among all these different and often contradictory movements, God is moving in us. And so, for the man or woman of faith, the aim is to identify this movement of God and act on it. If we do so, provided we have the necessary freedom and our discernment is honest and accurate, we can be confident that we are doing God’s will. And what today’s readings do is identify with the utmost clarity an attitude which will always be found in a person who is being moved by God. But, of course, the opposite is also true. Its absence makes genuine discernment impossible. And its there today, very clearly, in both the second reading and the Gospel.
In the gospel, St Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the crowds, he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected like sheep without a shepherd. This was not a passing reaction in Jesus. It was utterly fundamental to who he was. And so any person moved by the Spirit of Jesus will, of absolute necessity, have this same fundamental attitude of care and compassion towards the world and its people. It’s a common theme in our reflections each week, but that does not make it any the less true; that any tendency to sit in judgement on the world by pious, Church-going people, any bitterness, anger or hatred directed against those whose habits or life-style are different from our own, even when this is understandable at a purely human level, is not and cannot be of God. And so, to the extent that we are moved by such spirits of constant criticism and fault-finding we cannot discern the will of God in our lives. And St Paul, in the second reading confirms this in words which, again, you are very familiar with. ‘What proves that God loves us,’ he writes, ‘is that Jesus died for us while we were still sinners.’ This, too, is a statement of God’s fundamental attitude to the world and so will always be true in the life of a person who is doing God’s will and responding to the movement of God’s Spirit. It’s not the way the world thinks. But it is the way God thinks, turning human logic on its head.
And, of course, the reason for this is that the basic way in which human beings relate to each other is that we love those who love us and respond positively to those who, for whatever reason, we like or find attractive in some way. But with God it is not like that. In the mind of God, the distinction between people who are loveable and people who are not loveable simply does not exist. Every buman being is infinitely loved by God, not because of what we do or don’t do, but for no other reason than that we exist. Nothing we do can diminish God’s love for us and nothing we do can increase it. It is freely given with no strings attached, and although such love is ultimately beyond human comprehension, any person who is genuinely seeking to know God’s will will find themselves being inexorably drawn, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the orbit of this divine love. The whole history of the cosmos is the story of God drawing us to himself. The struggle between selfishness and self-giving, between hatred and love, between giving and taking underpins the whole of history as humanity struggles to respond to the call of the God who draws us to himself from deep within ourselves. And it is within the context of this universal call that we are called to be the Church.
The first reading this week speaks of Israel as a nation chosen by God from among all the nations on earth. And so they were a kind of pilot project, a model which would later extend, in Jesus, to every nation on earth. And that is what the Church is too. As humanity makes its way through history, we are also called to be a pilot project, a sign of what, one day, will be the reality for everyone. To extend the cosmic metaphor, we are called to boldly go where no-one has gone before, to break through the frontiers of normal human thinking and, empowered by the Spirit, to show the world what the love of God is like. We are called to love as God loves, reaching out to those whom the world considers unattractive or unloveable. We are called to open our doors to the whole of humanity, making no distinction between the so-called deserving and undeserving poor. Jesus did the unthinkable in his own day and touched the lepers of society. The Church – and that means all of us – are called to touch today’s lepers, those whom others shy away from in disgust.
The harvest indeed is rich and the labourers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to raise up many good, committed, hard-working men and women to do his work in the world today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
Faith is a journey from where we are now to a place God longs to show us. It means letting go of what is familiar, passing through periods of uncertainty and doubt, entering new and unexpected places, learning a whole new language, the language of the kingdom, and slowly but surely being led to the point where we begin to think as God thinks rather than as the world thinks. And so we ask God to give us the courage and inner freedom we need to make this great journey...........Lord hear us
Spirits other than the Spirit of God are at work in us and their name is legion. These include the spirits of selfishness, self-righteousness, self-importance, narrow-mindedness, and many others. Like the unclean spirits in the gospel they cry out to be left alone, undisturbed, so that they can carry on doing their ungodly work in us. And so we ask God to caste these unclean spirits out of us so that we can become more and more open to his will in everything that happens..............Lord hear us
When Jesus saw the crowds in today’s gospel he felt sorry for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This compassion for the human condition is central to who Jesus is, revealing to us, as it does, the very nature of God and his relationship with the world and its people. And so we ask God to stir this same attitude of compassion towards the world in us, enabling us to move beyond the judgemental attitudes too often found in religious people...............Lord hear us
To love as God loves has nothing to do with having nice feelings towards people. The love we speak of is an act of the will which exists independently of how we feel. It begins by wishing others well, regardless of what they may or may not have done. It means holding them up before God, asking him pour into their lives all the graces and blessings they need. And it ends by treating them the way with the dignity and respect due to every human being. And so we pray for this grace..............Lord hear us
St Teresa of Avila famously said, ‘If you don’t love someone, treat them as if you did and you will learn to.’ And so we pray for the grace we need to do this with those living on the margins of our modern-day society. Often they behave in what, to us, are unacceptable ways. Many indulge in crime or anti-social behaviour. But we pray for the grace we need to begin to understand why they are the way they are and that, had we had their experience, most of us would be the same............Lord hear us
Jesus reminds us today that, although the need and the harvest are both great, generally speaking, the labourers are few. And so we ask God to stir in the hearts of many people in today’s world an awareness that something in the way we live has to change radically if we are to solve the many problems facing the world at this time. We simply cannot go on living the way we do and we seek from God the wisdom and courage we need to face up to this urgent reality.............Lord hear us
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