There are times when it is impossible to understand fully the teaching of Jesus without some knowledge of the historical background to the scripture passages we read each week. And today is one of those. In this morning’s Gospel we heard how the Scribes and Pharisees questioned Jesus about why his disciples did not respect the tradition of the elders and ate with unclean hands. Behind this question, however, lies the whole story of how the Jewish Law had developed over centuries, and, since it also takes us to the heart of Jesus’ conflict with the religious leaders of his day, a conflict which runs through the whole of the New Testament and is still with us, I would like to tell you about it briefly this morning.
In its original form the Law consisted of the Ten Commandments, to which were added the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch. These books do contain some detailed instructions about the daily life of the people, but, in its simplest form, the Law, as is obvious with the Ten Commandments, consisted of general principles which the individual had to apply to the concrete circumstances in which he found himself. And for centuries that’s exactly what happened. But four of five hundred years before the birth of Jesus – around the time of the Exile in Babylon – there came into being a class of legal experts whom we know as the Scribes. And we are all familiar with what happens when lawyers get involved. They were not content with general moral principles, and, as a result of their efforts, literally thousands and thousands of rules and regulations came into being which came to control every conceivable aspect of of Jewish life. These rules and regulations were never written down, however, and were known as the oral law. Or, as we heard them called today, the tradition of the elders. And so that we can have a better understanding of what it was Jesus took issue with, I would like to explain to you in some detail what was involved in the particular example contained in today’s Gospel; the rules surrounding the washing of hands.
And the first thing we have to understand about these rules is that they were nothing to do with hygiene. They were about religion, and anyone who did not conform to them was considered ritually unclean and so unacceptable to God. A lot of those whom the Gospel calls sinners, for example, were only sinners in the sense that they were poor and so unable observe every single detail of the Law. In the case of eating, the hands first had to be held with the fingertips pointing upwards. Water was then poured over them which had to run at least down to the wrist and while the hands were wet each one had to be cleaned with the fist of the other. The amount of water was also closely measured and had to be the amount which could be contained in one and a half egg-shells. But since the hands had been unclean before this water was poured, the water itself was now unclean through contact with unclean hands. And so, this time, with fingertips pointing downwards, the whole process had to be gone through again before the person was ready to eat, a procedure which had to be gone through, not just before the meal, but in between each of its courses as well. And for the Scribes and Pharisees this, from morning to night, was what religion and serving God were about. The Law had begun centuries earlier with sound moral principles like truth, honesty in dealing with others, respect for human life, the care of elderly parents and so on, and by Jesus’ day these principles had been lost sight of, buried under a pile of rules and regulations. The spirit of the Law had been completely lost, and, faced with this sad reality, Jesus is utterly scathing in his criticism of it.
But just try to imagine what it was like for the Scribes and Pharisees. Jesus was undermining everything they believed in. For them the rules surrounding the washing of hands were what their religion was about. In his commentary on Mark’s Gospel from which the details of this homily are taken, Professor William Barclay writes of how a Rabbi who failed to perform these actions on just one occasion was buried an excommunicated man. He tells the story of another Rabbi, imprisoned by the Romans, who almost died of thirst because he used the water given him by his guards to wash his hands and not for drinking. Ritual cleanness and its opposite, ritual uncleanness, meant everything to the pious Jew in Jesus’ day. A woman after childbirth was unclean. Lepers were unclean. Anyone who touched a dead body was unclean. A dish touched by a gentile was unclean and so on, to the point where a strict Jew who returned from the market immersed his whole body in clean water in case he had inadvertently touched or been touch by anything that was ritually unclean. And all of this, Jesus is telling them, is a load of garbage. No wonder they crucified him.
But he goes further than that, telling them – and this in many ways was the most shocking thing of all – that nothing that goes into a man can make him unclean, an idea that was complete anathema to the people of his time. In the book of Maccabees, for example, we hear the story of how, during the reign of the Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes, hundreds of Jews died horrific deaths rather than eat pork. And here is Jesus, again telling them that none of this, the stuff of legends, matters; that it is what comes out of the heart of a person that matters. Faith in God is not about external things, It is not about rules and regulations. It is about much deeper things than that.
My original intention when I first began to prepare this homily was to speak for a while about the background to this week’s Gospel and then, using that as a starting point, move on to reflect on how, in many ways, nothing much has changed; how the tendency to bury the things that really matter under a pile of rubbish has gone on all through history and still goes on in the Church today. But in the end I decided not to do that. The conclusion I came to was that, if you cannot see it for yourselves; if the similarities between then and now are not staring you in the face; if it is not immediately obvious how we do similar if not indentical things ourselves, then there is really no point in my spelling it out for you.
BIDDING PRAYERS
It has been said that every celebration of Mass should carry a health warning. This is because, at the heart of the Mass, lies a profound call to change radically the way we live. And so, consciously or unconsciously, we protect ourselves from this threat to the way we live by turning the Mass into a religious ritual. In this way, we rob it of its original meaning and, like the people in Jesus’ day, leave ourselves largely untouched by it. And so we pray for the insight to see this............Lord hear us
Many of us are old enough to remember a time when a Catholic was a person who went to Mass, married in the Church, made his or her Easter Duties and performed a variety of other external actions associated with what it was to be ‘A practising Catholic.’ But a genuine Catholic is a person who, fed by the Word and the Eucharist, makes the teaching of Jesus a reality in the world, and we ask God to raise up many such Catholic men and women in this parish...........Lord hear us
Before too long, we will start again the process of preparing children and parents for the celebration of Confirmation and First Communion. And so, even now, we begin to pray for them. We pray, in particular, that, following on what he heard Jesus say in this week’s Gospel, we will never again see in this parish a celebration of any sacrament which revolves around purely external things and has little or nothing to do with the true meaning of the sacrament in question...........Lord hear us
Our prayer, too, can be superficial and lacking in depth. This happens especially when it becomes tied up with the fundamentally superstitious notion that we can make deals with God or influence him by performing particular actions or saying certain words a fixed number of times. This is exactly the kind of thing which made Jesus so angry throughout the Gospels and we pray for the grace we need to recognize any sign of it in the way we ourselves pray.....Lord hear us
The word which sums up everything Jesus hated and opposed in the religious world of his day is the word hypocrisy. It has its roots in the Greek term for an actor and finishes up meaning a person whose life is a piece of acting without any sincerity behind it all. Sadly, there is, and always has been, a strong streak of such hypocrisy running through most religions, and we pray that, as far as is possible, God will protect us from it here in St Matthew’s...........Lord hear us
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were deeply shocked by his teaching, which undermined the whole basis of their religious thinking. And so they crucified him. But the truth is often shocking and difficult to accept. This has happened in our own day with the Second Vatican Council, still resisted by many in the Church, and we pray for the courage and generosity we need to accept the truth even when it challenges our whole way of thinking too...........Lord hear us
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Saturday, 22 August 2009
21st Sunday of the Year B
For the fifth week in a row today we heard from chapter six of John’s Gospel, a section where Jesus makes the most astonishing statements about himself. His body is real food and his blood real drink. If we eat his body and drink his blood we will have life in us. He is, he says, the living bread which has come down from heaven and anyone who eats this bread, which is his body, will live for ever. These are truly astonishing claims, and many of Jesus’ own followers, the Gospel tells us, found them completely unacceptable. ‘This is intolerable language,’ they said. ‘How could anyone accept it?’..words which find an echo in the hearts and minds of millions today for whom traditional Christian beliefs, like the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and many others, seem to belong to another age and to be totally out of tune with the way we think today. It might have been OK for people in the Middle Ages to have believed all that stuff, the argument goes, but you can’t seriously expect people today to believe it, an attitude which, if we are serious about our faith, we must respond to. And if our response to it is to be genuine and effective it must begin with understanding, not least because, like most things, the argument has an element of truth in it.
Fundamentally, you see, there are two things at work here. The way we think about truth has indeed changed radically over the last three hundred years or so. What historians call The Enlightenment was a movement in history which marked the beginning of our modern scientific age. It represented a real break with the past and a rejection of a way of thinking about the world which had dominated the world for centuries, the problem for the Church being that many of its doctrines and believes had been formulated during that now rejected, and, in the eyes of many, discredited past and were expressed in its language. And so, in classic fashion, the baby was thrown out with the bath water, leaving the Church with the task of expressing ancient truths in a new language, a task it has not completed yet and which many would say it has hardly begun. And it’s important that we understand this and not keep blaming the world for its lack of belief when part of the responsibility is ours.
But there is, undoubtedly, another element to all this, and it is the relativism of our age, so strongly attacked over and over again by both the present Pope and his predecessor John Paul II. And we ourselves have reflected on it often. It’s that tendency to reduce truth to what we think it is. To reject as nonsense anything we don’t understand or disagree with. To create our own personal version of the truth which fits in with what we think, suits us, doesn’t challenge us, confirms our prejudices and enables us to justify more or less anything we want to. We ourselves become the source of truth. We define what truth is and so it is inevitably limited and constrained by the narrowness of our thinking and the limits of our understanding. And when that happens, when we become god in our own lives, we have effectively lost touch with genuine truth which, if there is a God, can only come from him. The fullness of truth is always greater than we are, always far beyond the limits of our understanding and until we open ourselves up to the truth that comes from God, which we call Revelation, we are doomed to live trapped in our own ignorance. As Jesus says in that same Gospel passage: ‘It is the spirit who gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.’
So how do we open ourselves up to this revealed truth, this truth which comes from God and goes far beyond the limits of human understanding? Well, the simple answer to that is that we do it through faith. St Ignatius speaks about a deep interior knowledge which does not come from ourselves but from the Spirit living in us and which, since it is a gift to each individual, cannot really be communicated to others. Like the bridesmaids in the parable, we all have to buy our own oil. We cannot live of what belongs to others. Or, as in the story of the Marriage Feast at Cana, we all have to draw the water for ourselves. But what I would like to do in the short time that remains today is remind you again of some of things we ought to look out for in ourselves if we want to be open to the truth that comes from God and not put too many obstacles in its way.
And the first of these is to be very wary of too much certainty. Certainty tends to be the refuge of those who cannot live with truths greater than themselves and generally speaking the degree of certainty we have on any matter is in inverse proportion to the amount we know about it. I know one person who, the less he knows about any subject,the more he waxes lyrical about it. And as I have said to you so often, the number of things I personally am certian about diminishes all the time. Beware, too, of gods who agree with you all the time, share your prejudices and never challenge you in any way. You can be absolutely sure that these gods are gods you have created in your own image and likeness and not the other way round. And beware of finding the views and opinions of others ‘intolerable.’ Usually this is because they are a threat to the comfortable little world we have created for ourselves and at some level we are afraid that if we acknowledge the truth in them we will have to change in some way. And on this point I recommend to you the spiritual reading on the back of this week’s bulletin.
But most of all, we need to learn again what it is to believe. To believe is to soar beyond the limits of our own understanding and enter a world which would be unknown and unknowable without the gift of faith. There are many things about the Church which do not fall into this category and are in need of radical change. But there are others which do. These are the great truths of our faith. They are about God, Jesus, Resurrection, Eucharist and the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. Only through the Spirit can we accept such things and I invite you to let that Spirit move in you today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the first reading this week from the book of Joshua, the people of Israel vow that they will serve the Lord. They have no intention, they say, of deserting the God who brought them and their ancestors out of the land of Egypt. The whole history of the Old Testament is littered with such promises and yet the reality was that the people, over and over again, did what they said they would not. And so we pray for the wisdom to see a reflection of ourselves in this ...Lord hear us
In the Gospel story today Jesus’ own disciples find what he is saying to them intolerable. They cannot understand it and so are unable or unwilling to accept it. And yet what Jesus is telling them is the most wonderful truth imaginable. He is the bread of life. His body is real food and his blood real drink, a mystery we celebrate each week when we come together for Mass and receive Jesus in Holy Communion. And so we ask God to deepen our faith in what we do...Lord hear us
Finding what he says about the Eucharist intolerable, many of those who heard Jesus walked away and did not go with him any longer. In our own day, too, of course, many have walked away from the celebration of the Eucharist and stopped receiving Jesus under the appearances of bread and wine. But we pray that, in God’s infinite providence, this will prove to be no more than a stage in a much longer journey and will lead to deeper faith fit for the age in which we live.... Lord hear us
As his disciples walk away and leave him, unable to accept what he is saying, Jesus makes no attempt to water down his teaching or try to persuade them to stay. On the contrary, he asks the twelve if they would like to go too. In this we see the wonderful mystery of a God who offers us everything but forces nothing upon us. Having given us the gift of freedom he does not take back his gift. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to use that gift well and allow others to do the same......Lord hear us
In response to Jesus’ question, Peter answers for men and women of faith in every age. ‘Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life and we believe. Peter, of course, is a symbol of the Church which, despite its many weaknesses and the weaknesses of its members, keeps the flame of faith alive in every age. And so we pray for the Church that it will rise to the challenges of the age we are living through and be all that it is called to be for the sake of the world.....Lord hear us
And we pray in a very special way that God will lead us to a mature and deep faith in the great mystery of the Real Presence of Jesus among us under the appearances of bread and wine. Pope Benedict has called us to a new and deeper appreciation of this doctrine and urged us to rediscover the ancient practice of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. And so we pray that in this parish, which for years has had three periods of Exposition every week, this will finally happen.....Lord hear us.
Fundamentally, you see, there are two things at work here. The way we think about truth has indeed changed radically over the last three hundred years or so. What historians call The Enlightenment was a movement in history which marked the beginning of our modern scientific age. It represented a real break with the past and a rejection of a way of thinking about the world which had dominated the world for centuries, the problem for the Church being that many of its doctrines and believes had been formulated during that now rejected, and, in the eyes of many, discredited past and were expressed in its language. And so, in classic fashion, the baby was thrown out with the bath water, leaving the Church with the task of expressing ancient truths in a new language, a task it has not completed yet and which many would say it has hardly begun. And it’s important that we understand this and not keep blaming the world for its lack of belief when part of the responsibility is ours.
But there is, undoubtedly, another element to all this, and it is the relativism of our age, so strongly attacked over and over again by both the present Pope and his predecessor John Paul II. And we ourselves have reflected on it often. It’s that tendency to reduce truth to what we think it is. To reject as nonsense anything we don’t understand or disagree with. To create our own personal version of the truth which fits in with what we think, suits us, doesn’t challenge us, confirms our prejudices and enables us to justify more or less anything we want to. We ourselves become the source of truth. We define what truth is and so it is inevitably limited and constrained by the narrowness of our thinking and the limits of our understanding. And when that happens, when we become god in our own lives, we have effectively lost touch with genuine truth which, if there is a God, can only come from him. The fullness of truth is always greater than we are, always far beyond the limits of our understanding and until we open ourselves up to the truth that comes from God, which we call Revelation, we are doomed to live trapped in our own ignorance. As Jesus says in that same Gospel passage: ‘It is the spirit who gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.’
So how do we open ourselves up to this revealed truth, this truth which comes from God and goes far beyond the limits of human understanding? Well, the simple answer to that is that we do it through faith. St Ignatius speaks about a deep interior knowledge which does not come from ourselves but from the Spirit living in us and which, since it is a gift to each individual, cannot really be communicated to others. Like the bridesmaids in the parable, we all have to buy our own oil. We cannot live of what belongs to others. Or, as in the story of the Marriage Feast at Cana, we all have to draw the water for ourselves. But what I would like to do in the short time that remains today is remind you again of some of things we ought to look out for in ourselves if we want to be open to the truth that comes from God and not put too many obstacles in its way.
And the first of these is to be very wary of too much certainty. Certainty tends to be the refuge of those who cannot live with truths greater than themselves and generally speaking the degree of certainty we have on any matter is in inverse proportion to the amount we know about it. I know one person who, the less he knows about any subject,the more he waxes lyrical about it. And as I have said to you so often, the number of things I personally am certian about diminishes all the time. Beware, too, of gods who agree with you all the time, share your prejudices and never challenge you in any way. You can be absolutely sure that these gods are gods you have created in your own image and likeness and not the other way round. And beware of finding the views and opinions of others ‘intolerable.’ Usually this is because they are a threat to the comfortable little world we have created for ourselves and at some level we are afraid that if we acknowledge the truth in them we will have to change in some way. And on this point I recommend to you the spiritual reading on the back of this week’s bulletin.
But most of all, we need to learn again what it is to believe. To believe is to soar beyond the limits of our own understanding and enter a world which would be unknown and unknowable without the gift of faith. There are many things about the Church which do not fall into this category and are in need of radical change. But there are others which do. These are the great truths of our faith. They are about God, Jesus, Resurrection, Eucharist and the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. Only through the Spirit can we accept such things and I invite you to let that Spirit move in you today.
BIDDING PRAYERS
In the first reading this week from the book of Joshua, the people of Israel vow that they will serve the Lord. They have no intention, they say, of deserting the God who brought them and their ancestors out of the land of Egypt. The whole history of the Old Testament is littered with such promises and yet the reality was that the people, over and over again, did what they said they would not. And so we pray for the wisdom to see a reflection of ourselves in this ...Lord hear us
In the Gospel story today Jesus’ own disciples find what he is saying to them intolerable. They cannot understand it and so are unable or unwilling to accept it. And yet what Jesus is telling them is the most wonderful truth imaginable. He is the bread of life. His body is real food and his blood real drink, a mystery we celebrate each week when we come together for Mass and receive Jesus in Holy Communion. And so we ask God to deepen our faith in what we do...Lord hear us
Finding what he says about the Eucharist intolerable, many of those who heard Jesus walked away and did not go with him any longer. In our own day, too, of course, many have walked away from the celebration of the Eucharist and stopped receiving Jesus under the appearances of bread and wine. But we pray that, in God’s infinite providence, this will prove to be no more than a stage in a much longer journey and will lead to deeper faith fit for the age in which we live.... Lord hear us
As his disciples walk away and leave him, unable to accept what he is saying, Jesus makes no attempt to water down his teaching or try to persuade them to stay. On the contrary, he asks the twelve if they would like to go too. In this we see the wonderful mystery of a God who offers us everything but forces nothing upon us. Having given us the gift of freedom he does not take back his gift. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to use that gift well and allow others to do the same......Lord hear us
In response to Jesus’ question, Peter answers for men and women of faith in every age. ‘Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life and we believe. Peter, of course, is a symbol of the Church which, despite its many weaknesses and the weaknesses of its members, keeps the flame of faith alive in every age. And so we pray for the Church that it will rise to the challenges of the age we are living through and be all that it is called to be for the sake of the world.....Lord hear us
And we pray in a very special way that God will lead us to a mature and deep faith in the great mystery of the Real Presence of Jesus among us under the appearances of bread and wine. Pope Benedict has called us to a new and deeper appreciation of this doctrine and urged us to rediscover the ancient practice of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. And so we pray that in this parish, which for years has had three periods of Exposition every week, this will finally happen.....Lord hear us.
20th Sunday od the Year B
For the last three Sundays I have been listening to homilies rather than giving them, and it has been an interesting experience. All three were based on chapter six of John’s Gospel, read at every Mass over recent weeks, passages which, after the feeding of the 5000, speak to us of how Jesus is the bread of life and how, as we heard today, whoever eats him will draw life from him. But the three homilies were very different from each other. The first was in the Convent of Santa Clara in Tordesillas, north of Madrid, arguably the finest example of Islamic-style architecture outside southern Spain and visited two years ago by nine members of the Men’s Spirituality Group. The homily that day was given by an elderly priest, a man of about my own age, and what he said was good. Basically, he told us that the Church had ritualised the Mass too much over the centuries, reducing it to a religious action, and that, as a result, we had lost sight of its radical call to share with those who are in need, an approach which reflected, I’m pretty sure, that fact that he would have studied in the sixties, around the time of the Second Vatican Council.
The third homily, in contrast, was in the Cathedral in Alcala de Henares, just outside Madrid, Alcala and Salamanca, being the original Oxford and Cambridge of Spain. This time the priest, who was much younger, focused on the story of Elijah who, you may remember from last week, was fed and nourished by God in the wilderness so that he would have the energy and strength to continue with his ministry. And, typical of many younger priests in the Church today, he saw in this an image of how we need energy and strength to fight everything that is wrong and ungodly about the modern world, a view which, as you know, I find unacceptably negative, pessimistic and lacking in any real faith in the resurrection. Of course there are issues in our society today which demand our attention, but Jesus is risen, salvation has already happened and the world is a place filled to overflowing with the goodness of God.
And so the homily I liked best was the second one. If the first two had been in places steeped in history, this one, in contrast, was in a simple parish church in a village in Andalucia. And what the priest spoke to us about there was a God who, in a thousand different ways every day feeds and nourishes his people. The Eucharist may be the high-point of this, the sacrament which embodies it, expresses it and ritualises it whenever the community gathers together, but the reality which the Eucharst expresses goes on all the time. God feeds and nourishes us every day through everything that happens and, given the situation I was in at the time, I was particularly open to this idea. The weather was glorious. The surroundings were beautiful. I was relaxed and happy. There was no pressure of any kind and everything was as near perfect as it could be. And in all of this, God, as he did last week with Elijah, was nourishing and strengthening me so that I, too, would be better able to live a faith-filled life back here in what, for the lack of a better word, some would call the ‘real world.’ And just how real it was came home to me last Monday/Tuesday when, in just a few hours I went from 37 degrees in warm sunny Madrid to 12 degrees in cold, damp Muirkirk, a real coming down to earth with a bang.
But, of course, things like the weather are the least of it. Much more important are all the ordinary and extraordinary things which make up our daily lives. There are times of joy and happiness when, if we stop for a moment to look, it is relatively easy to see God at work, nourishing and feeding us, and to feel, as I did all during my holiday, a deep sense of gratitude. But there are other times, times of worry and anxiety, sickness, pain and death, when it is much more difficult. Virtually the first thing I did when I came back this year was to spend time with Arthur and Maureen (McNeill’s) daughter Fiona and her husband Justin whose nine-year-old daughter Lucy died very suddenly this week, when, just moments before, she had been running around playing with her cousins in the garden. And when things like this happens – as they will have happened to some of you – it is not at all easy to recognize the presence of a God who feeds and nourishes his people every day. And if you are waiting for me to explain it, you will wait in vain. But what I can do is point you in the general direction of the answer, beginning with today’s first reading. In it, the author of the Book of Proverbs speaks of Wisdom. In clear anticipation of the Eucharist, he speaks of how Wisdom has set her table and invites us to eat her bread and drink her wine. And if we do so, the passage says, we will walk in the way of perception. We will taste, as the psalm said, and see that the Lord is good.
But how do we come to this perception, this capacity to see what human eyes alone cannot see, to understand what is beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand, to look into the heart of the human condition, with its joys and sorrows, and see at work there a God who does not think as we think and whose wisdom is foolishness to human reasoning? Well, hard as it is and slow as the process can be, ultimately taking a lifetime, we do it by entering more and more deeply into the mystery of the Eucharist. ‘He or she who eats my flesh and drinks my blood’ says Jesus, ‘Lives in me and I live in him or her.’ St Paul speaks of having within himself the mind that is in Christ Jesus. In other words, he has come to the point where he thinks as Jesus thinks, not as he himself thinks. And it can be the same with us when, instead of what we eat becoming part of us, which is what happens with ordinary food, we become part of who we eat, Jesus himself.
It is a long process, not completed until after death. But when it is complete and we finally see how God has been feeding and nourishing us at every step of our life’s journey, our hearts, I promise you, will be filled with gratitude, not just for some of it, but for all of it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
The first reading this week invites us to leave our foolishness behind and walk in the ways of perception. To be perceptive is to see what others do not necessarily see. It is to see realities and truths which are not immediately obvious to everyone. And so we pray for the gifts of wisdom and perception, that we may learn to see the world through faith-filled eyes and help others to do the same in the light of God’s love and care for the whole of humanity..........Lord hear us
Be careful, St Pauls says in the second reading, about the sort of lives you lead, like intelligent and not senseless people. Do not, he goes on, drug yourselves with wine. This is simply dissipation. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to live in the midst of a world where drugs in all shapes and forms, many of them legal and respectable, are widely used as a way of escaping from and avoiding the realities of life rather than living them to the full and finding God in them...........Lord hear us
In the Gospel this week, Jesus tells us that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood have eternal life in them. Eternal life, in other words, is not just something which lies in the future. It is something which, by being joined to Jesus, we begin to share in now. It happens when we begin to seek the kingdom above all things and slowly but surely learn to live by its values. It happens, ultimately, when we learn to love as Jesus loves. And so we pray that this eternal life will grow in us........Lord hear us
To learn to think as Jesus thinks and love as Jesus loves: to have in us the mind that is in Christ Jesus; means being open to constant conversion in our lives. It means embarking on a life-long spiritual journey which will only end when we see God face to face and share in his own inner life. This journey will take us through all the seasons of life. There will be good times and bad times, happy times and sad times. But we pray for the perception we need to find God in it all.........Lord hear us
At the heart of the Eucharist which has filled our Sunday liturgies for several weeks now and will do so again next week, is the call to share with others, especially those who are in need. As Jesus pours himself out for us on the cross, so we are invited to do the same for our brothers and sisters. As we share in the one bread and the one cup, so we are called to reach out beyond the limits of our own community to the wider world beyond. So we pray for the grace to understand this..........Lord hear us
When we meet God face to face and finally, for the very first time, see the world and its history as God had always seen them, our hearts will be filled to overflowing with the most immense sense of gratitude. Then, all our questions will be answered and the limits of our own understanding will be seen for what they always were. And so we pray that, even now, we will begin to experience that gratitude in the midst of everything that happens to us..........Lord hear us
The third homily, in contrast, was in the Cathedral in Alcala de Henares, just outside Madrid, Alcala and Salamanca, being the original Oxford and Cambridge of Spain. This time the priest, who was much younger, focused on the story of Elijah who, you may remember from last week, was fed and nourished by God in the wilderness so that he would have the energy and strength to continue with his ministry. And, typical of many younger priests in the Church today, he saw in this an image of how we need energy and strength to fight everything that is wrong and ungodly about the modern world, a view which, as you know, I find unacceptably negative, pessimistic and lacking in any real faith in the resurrection. Of course there are issues in our society today which demand our attention, but Jesus is risen, salvation has already happened and the world is a place filled to overflowing with the goodness of God.
And so the homily I liked best was the second one. If the first two had been in places steeped in history, this one, in contrast, was in a simple parish church in a village in Andalucia. And what the priest spoke to us about there was a God who, in a thousand different ways every day feeds and nourishes his people. The Eucharist may be the high-point of this, the sacrament which embodies it, expresses it and ritualises it whenever the community gathers together, but the reality which the Eucharst expresses goes on all the time. God feeds and nourishes us every day through everything that happens and, given the situation I was in at the time, I was particularly open to this idea. The weather was glorious. The surroundings were beautiful. I was relaxed and happy. There was no pressure of any kind and everything was as near perfect as it could be. And in all of this, God, as he did last week with Elijah, was nourishing and strengthening me so that I, too, would be better able to live a faith-filled life back here in what, for the lack of a better word, some would call the ‘real world.’ And just how real it was came home to me last Monday/Tuesday when, in just a few hours I went from 37 degrees in warm sunny Madrid to 12 degrees in cold, damp Muirkirk, a real coming down to earth with a bang.
But, of course, things like the weather are the least of it. Much more important are all the ordinary and extraordinary things which make up our daily lives. There are times of joy and happiness when, if we stop for a moment to look, it is relatively easy to see God at work, nourishing and feeding us, and to feel, as I did all during my holiday, a deep sense of gratitude. But there are other times, times of worry and anxiety, sickness, pain and death, when it is much more difficult. Virtually the first thing I did when I came back this year was to spend time with Arthur and Maureen (McNeill’s) daughter Fiona and her husband Justin whose nine-year-old daughter Lucy died very suddenly this week, when, just moments before, she had been running around playing with her cousins in the garden. And when things like this happens – as they will have happened to some of you – it is not at all easy to recognize the presence of a God who feeds and nourishes his people every day. And if you are waiting for me to explain it, you will wait in vain. But what I can do is point you in the general direction of the answer, beginning with today’s first reading. In it, the author of the Book of Proverbs speaks of Wisdom. In clear anticipation of the Eucharist, he speaks of how Wisdom has set her table and invites us to eat her bread and drink her wine. And if we do so, the passage says, we will walk in the way of perception. We will taste, as the psalm said, and see that the Lord is good.
But how do we come to this perception, this capacity to see what human eyes alone cannot see, to understand what is beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand, to look into the heart of the human condition, with its joys and sorrows, and see at work there a God who does not think as we think and whose wisdom is foolishness to human reasoning? Well, hard as it is and slow as the process can be, ultimately taking a lifetime, we do it by entering more and more deeply into the mystery of the Eucharist. ‘He or she who eats my flesh and drinks my blood’ says Jesus, ‘Lives in me and I live in him or her.’ St Paul speaks of having within himself the mind that is in Christ Jesus. In other words, he has come to the point where he thinks as Jesus thinks, not as he himself thinks. And it can be the same with us when, instead of what we eat becoming part of us, which is what happens with ordinary food, we become part of who we eat, Jesus himself.
It is a long process, not completed until after death. But when it is complete and we finally see how God has been feeding and nourishing us at every step of our life’s journey, our hearts, I promise you, will be filled with gratitude, not just for some of it, but for all of it.
BIDDING PRAYERS
The first reading this week invites us to leave our foolishness behind and walk in the ways of perception. To be perceptive is to see what others do not necessarily see. It is to see realities and truths which are not immediately obvious to everyone. And so we pray for the gifts of wisdom and perception, that we may learn to see the world through faith-filled eyes and help others to do the same in the light of God’s love and care for the whole of humanity..........Lord hear us
Be careful, St Pauls says in the second reading, about the sort of lives you lead, like intelligent and not senseless people. Do not, he goes on, drug yourselves with wine. This is simply dissipation. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to live in the midst of a world where drugs in all shapes and forms, many of them legal and respectable, are widely used as a way of escaping from and avoiding the realities of life rather than living them to the full and finding God in them...........Lord hear us
In the Gospel this week, Jesus tells us that those who eat his flesh and drink his blood have eternal life in them. Eternal life, in other words, is not just something which lies in the future. It is something which, by being joined to Jesus, we begin to share in now. It happens when we begin to seek the kingdom above all things and slowly but surely learn to live by its values. It happens, ultimately, when we learn to love as Jesus loves. And so we pray that this eternal life will grow in us........Lord hear us
To learn to think as Jesus thinks and love as Jesus loves: to have in us the mind that is in Christ Jesus; means being open to constant conversion in our lives. It means embarking on a life-long spiritual journey which will only end when we see God face to face and share in his own inner life. This journey will take us through all the seasons of life. There will be good times and bad times, happy times and sad times. But we pray for the perception we need to find God in it all.........Lord hear us
At the heart of the Eucharist which has filled our Sunday liturgies for several weeks now and will do so again next week, is the call to share with others, especially those who are in need. As Jesus pours himself out for us on the cross, so we are invited to do the same for our brothers and sisters. As we share in the one bread and the one cup, so we are called to reach out beyond the limits of our own community to the wider world beyond. So we pray for the grace to understand this..........Lord hear us
When we meet God face to face and finally, for the very first time, see the world and its history as God had always seen them, our hearts will be filled to overflowing with the most immense sense of gratitude. Then, all our questions will be answered and the limits of our own understanding will be seen for what they always were. And so we pray that, even now, we will begin to experience that gratitude in the midst of everything that happens to us..........Lord hear us
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