FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT

At the end of last week’s story of the prodigal son, we left the elder brother outside, refusing to go in and be part of the celebration to mark the return of his younger brother. And it’s not hard to know why. What the father was doing was completely beyond, not only the elder son’s comprehension, but the comprehension of the entire village. According to Jewish law, what the younger son had done was literally unforgiveable. Legally he had ceased to exist and technically the father now had only one son. So much so, that if the younger son ever returned, the local people would have seen it as their duty to kill him as soon as he set foot in the village on the grounds that he was already dead, which was why the father rushed out to meet him before anyone else could get to him. This was the world of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the world of religion rather than faith, a world which Jesus challenges to the very depth of its being by his call to forgive, not seven times but seventy seven times..

And now this week we have the story of Jesus and the woman caught committing adultery, with those words of Jesus ringing down through the centuries, ‘Let he or she who has not sinned throw the first stone.’ What Jesus is saying, both last week and again this week, could not be clearer. If we want to enter the kingdom of God there must be no judgement and no condemnation of anyone. Our willingness to forgive must know no limits. For anyone who seeks to follow Jesus and live by his teaching, no-one, no matter what they have done, can be beyond forgiveness. There are no exceptions. And he means none.

So how is this possible? How can we be expected to forgive everyone? Surely, to use the examples people always bring up, Jesus is not talking about people like Hitler or Stalin. Surely he cannot expect us to forgive terrorists and those who blow up innocent people in places all over the world. Well, the simple answer to that is that he does. What he doesn’t expect, however, is that we do it on our own. The forgiveness we are speaking of here is only possible through the power of the Spirit working deep within us. But without a willingness to forgive in this way: without a desire to forgive as God forgives, or, as my friend St Ignatius would say, a desire to desire - or if that isn’t there - a desire to desire to desire – then the truth today’s liturgy is inviting us to see is that we cannot enter the kingdom of God. But having said that, it is important that we reflect a little more on what this all-embracing forgiveness is like, and to illustrate this I would like to consider a case that has been in the News so much recently and about which there has been considerable disagreement, the case of Jon Venables.

And the first thing to say about both Jon Venables – and we can all agree on this - is that what he did was truly horrific. And the gospel command to forgive does not diminish this or water it down in any way. There has, however, been a good deal of debate about the extent to which a ten year-old can be held either morally or criminally responsible for his actions. As has been pointed out over and over again these boys were themselves children when they killed James Bulger and only in the last few days the children’s commissioner for England and Wales has stirred even more controversy by saying that they should never have been tried in an adult criminal court. I even heard someone say on Television the other night that had they committed this crime in Finland, they would have been sent back to school within weeks and given the chance to get on with their lives. But there is nothing in the gospel for or against that particular approach just as there is nothing in the gospel to suggest that children should not receive appropriate punishment when they do something wrong. I have never experienced the presence of a forgiving God more powerfully than I did every week in Kilmarnock prison during the years I was chaplain there, but I have also met a handful of men there who, in my judgement, should never be let out given the danger they would be to others. But on the subject of children, I was impressed by these words from this week’s New Statesman magazine. ‘The age of criminal responsibility’ it said, ‘should be at least twelve. Most parents do not treat ten year olds as responsible adults. They do not allow them to walk around the town unaccompanied, stay at home alone, hold unsupervised parties, play with matches or take sole charge of younger children. The statute book – on subjects from alcohol to paid employment – is full of laws that regard young people as impressionable, irresponsible and vulnerable until they are much older than twelve.’ Or as another writer put it, ‘If they can commit an adult crime at ten, let them vote at ten.’

All of these points, of course, can be and have been debated and it is perfectly possible for Christians to disagree on them. But there are other forces at work in the Jon Venables story which can have no place in the heart of any Christian. They are the vindictiveness, the hatred, the desire to do him harm, the instinct to hound this young man and pursue him all his life because of what he did when he was ten, the lynch mob mentality encouraged by papers like the Sun and others, the refusal to even consider the possibility that he and others are capable of redemption. These things are totally incompatible with the following of Jesus. We may feel them. We have, after all, no control over our feelings at the moment when they surface spontaneously within us. But what we feel and what we choose to do are two different things. Who knows what Jesus felt at the human level as he hung on the cross? What he said, however, was, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And so the big question for us today is not how we feel about Jon Venables, but can we pray for him. Because until we can do this for him and for others like him we cannot enter the kingdom of God.

But I would like, today, to add a personal note to today’s homily. We all have people in our lives whom we struggle to forgive. Mine, however, is the Catholic Church itself. For forty years as a priest I have argued at meetings against the clerical structures which underpin the current tragedy of child abuse in Ireland and elsewhere. Often I have felt like a voice crying in the wilderness and have been accused of being a stirrer or trouble-maker. And so now, as the full scale of what has been going on becomes clear, years of anger are surfacing in me. When I see the Pope on TV I want to punch his face. I take a twisted kind of pleasure in watching bishops in Ireland suffer and would be happy if they were all forced to resign. Sometimes I hate the Church to which I belong. And so, on this day when Pope Benedict’s letter of apology is being read in every church in Ireland, I invite you to pray for him, for the Church, for me and above all for the victims of paedophile priests everywhere. And if we have really understood Jesus then we will pray for the abusers too.

BIDDING PRAYERS

We pray this weekend for all those who have been the victims of child sexual abuse by priests, religious and other people within the Church. But we pray, too, for the courage and openness we need to look at the causes of this abuse and address them so that this evil does not happen again in the future. And what has become abundantly clear is that the root of this scandal is power and the abuse of power. And so we ask God for the wisdom we need to recognize the profound changes required to deal with this....Lord hear us

The demands of the gospel in relation to forgiveness could not be more radical. No-one is excluded from God’s forgiveness and to the extent that we refuse to forgive others we cannot look upon the face of God. But there are times when forgiveness is almost impossible for us. The anger and resentment are too deep and the hurt too great. And so we ask God to stir in us a desire to be able to forgive, or even a desire to desire it, which one day will grow into forgiveness itself ......Lord hear us

Not to be able to forgive becomes a cancer which eats away inside us. Those who are gripped by such a condition often live deeply unhappy lives where the constant bitterness they feel becomes a cloud hanging over everything they do. Those, on the other hand, who can forgive even great evils, become an inspiration to those around them, as we have seen over the years in Northern Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere. And so we ask God to raise up in the world many more examples of such forgiveness.......Lord hear us

In the first reading today the prophet speaks of how there is no need to recall the past. God, he says, is doing a new deed. And so we pray for people in the world’s most troubled places where, as a result of constantly recalling the past and reliving old battles, peace seems completely unattainable. There can be no more tragic example of this than the Holy Land itself, the very place where God lived among us and died on a cross for every human being. And so we pray for peace and forgiveness there............Lord hear us

In today’s Gospel, the woman caught committing adultery is humiliated in front of everyone. And this weekend, as happens every weekend, someone somewhere will have his or her sexual indiscretions exposed to full view by the gutter press. And so we pray for them. We pray for the moral maturity we need not to even read such things and the courage, where possible, to speak out against them, remembering those words of Jesus: ‘Let him who has not sinned throw the first stone.’...........Lord hear us

The woman in the gospel, like millions of other women down through the ages, was exploited and abused by men. This abuse, too, is rooted in the traditional power men have claimed over women and which remains as big an evil today as it has ever been. And so we pray for women who live with male violence; women who are trapped in prostitution; women who are the victims of human trafficking; women who are caught up in psychologically harmful abusive relationships; and many others.......Lord hear us

THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT

In last week’s homily, I invited you to reflect on how, in both the story where the Covenant is sealed by cutting animals in half and in the story of the Transfiguration, the role of Abraham and the three disciples, was to say nothing, do nothing and let God be God. And I invited you to see in this a reflection of something fundamental to a life of faith. We saw how, at the heart of all primitive religion lay the notion – still very much with us today – that by performing religious actions we can somehow please God and even persuade him to do what we want, one obvious manifestation of this in our own day being the idea that saying certain prayers a certain number of times in a certain way will somehow make them ‘work’, along with the fear that failure to do so might cause something terrible to happen. This, along with things like not walking under ladders or ‘touching wood’ are pure paganism and a constant reminder to us that our pagan past is still quite recent in historical terms and our emergence from it far from complete. Another example of it is the way so many people, when something bad happens, start telling themselves it must be a punishment for something they have done wrong, an idea that Jesus knocks firmly on the head in this week’s Gospel. This is a relic of the pagan notion that the gods were often hostile and apt to lash out in anger, religious mumbo- jumbo that has nothing to do with genuine faith. The simple truth is that we don’t have to do anything to please God. He already delights in us, loves us with a love beyond our understanding and there is nothing we can do to either increase or diminish that love.
But, of course, that raises a question which I posed at the end of last week’s homily and promised to deal with in this week’s. And it’s a very simple one. If God loves us the way I say he does and if nothing we do or don’t do can increase or diminish that love, then what’s the point in being good? Why live a Christian life at all? Why come to Mass and do all the other things that go with being a Catholic or a Christian? Well, as I indicated last week, the answer lies in the concept of a free and loving response and to help us understand what that means I take you back to today’s first reading where Moses meets God in the story of the burning bush.

And what we see there is something very different from the primitive religion we spoke of a moment ago. In this story, God calls Moses by name and reveals himself to him. He tells Moses his own name, which in the context of the time in which the passage was written – some 2500 year ago - meant that he was entering into a relationship of some intimacy with Moses. And it’s this movement from gods who were unpredictable, fickle and often hostile, to a God who reveals his name and speaks to us as one friend speaks to another that marks the shift from religion to faith. The relationship we are called to have with God is not a Master/Servant relationship based on fear and obedience but a relationship of friendship and intimacy based on love. And, of course, that changes everything. People who love each other don’t need rules and regulations. Those of you who are parents didn’t feed your children because the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights says that they have a right to be fed. You didn’t not abuse your children because it is against the law and you would go to prison if caught doing it. What people who love each other do is done, not out of obligation, but as a free and loving response and only those who relate to God in that same way ever really know what faith, as opposed to religion is.

In the Catholic Church, for example, there is still a rule which says that we should go to Mass on Sunday. That has never changed. But for the man or woman of faith it’s an irrelevancy. He or she does not go to Mass because there is a rule about it. The word Eucharist means thanksgiving and the person who inhabits the world of faith rather than religion goes to Mass, not because he is afraid he will somehow go to hell if he doesn’t, but because she has begun to experience the depth of God’s love and so freely comes together with the rest of the Christian community to celebrate that love, express their gratitude for it and work together for the coming of the kingdom. And one of the obvious reasons for the dramatic drop in Mass attendance in recent years has been that, as the power of the law and the fear of hell have faded, many people have found that they had no other reason for being there and so, not unnaturally, have stopped going.

In the field of morality, too, we are entering a stage in history where the moral decisions we make will depend less and less on rules beyond ourselves and more and more on this kind of free and loving response. In his very first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est or God is Love,Pope Benedict reflects on the German philosopher Nietzshe’s claim that Christianity, with all its commandments and prohibitions, has poisoned sexual love and turned to bitterness the most precious thing in life. He even acknowledges, in a most un-pope-like turn of phrase, the widely held view out there that the Church – and I quote - ‘blows the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the divine.’ And quite simply the Church’s moral teaching, whether on sexual matters or any other matter, will only work when it’s stripped of all those prohibitions, all those ‘thou shalt nots’ and is presented in such a way that people begin to see that, far from being about preventing us enjoying ourselves, it’s about what leads to genuine happiness through just living, respect for other people, control of the worst aspects of human nature and freely choosing to be everything that is best about ourselves. Only when people can see that, stop living out of ‘thou shalt nots’ and embrace a free and loving response to what makes sense because they can see it is true will the values of the Gospel take root in our society.

The we will witness the end of religion and the beginning of the final stage of humanity’s great journey of faith into the inner life of God himself.

BIDDING PRAYERS

We begin our prayer this week by holding up before God all those people who, in an age when the power of the Church’s law over what we do has diminished and the fear of punishment for not keeping that law has faded, have lost their reason for attending Mass and so have stopped coming. We ask God to lead us through this moment in our history to a new place where we learn to understand the Eucharist in new ways and so have new and deeper reasons for taking part in it...........Lord hear us

Our pagan past still haunts us and influences the way we think. Underneath what passes for faith lies a dark past which has its roots in our most primitive fears and anxieties. And so we ask God to free us from the superstition and magic which are mixed in with our Christianity,and in particular from the absurd and deeply unchristian idea found in today’s Gospel, and so common among us still, that when something tragic happens in our lives, we are being punished for something we have done wrong..........Lord hear us

The idea that millions today have about Churches is that they are against things: against drink, against sex, against having fun, against enjoying ourselves. For many, going to Church is associated with dullness, boredom and a long series of ‘thou shalt nots.’ The last thing they would expect is to find a ‘holy’ person in a pub. But at its heart Christianity is deeply joyful. At its best it is not against things but for things. Above all, it is for life in all its fullness. And so we pray that the world will come to see this.........Lord hear us

Young people in particular have grown up with very negative experiences of Church. The materialistic, consumer-driven world they inhabit seems to offer so much more than faith, which seems dull and boring in comparison. Conned by powerful commercial forces out to exploit them for profit, many seek the happiness they long for in places which can never deliver it. The result is deep, thinly disguised unhappiness in many. And so we pray for them today that they will discover in time the rich world of faith............Lord hear us

On Wednesday evening we have an important meeting for parents in the parish who want to teach their children about the love of God and introduce them to the world of personal faith. These parents are the primary educators of their children and all anyone else can do, whether it be the school or the parish community, is help and support them in this work. And so we pray for the parents and families involved and ask God to bless this week’s meeting and show us the way forward together...........Lord hear us

On Thursday,we have the first of three discussion evenings before Easter. There is a great need for adult education in faith if we are to be able to offer to the modern world a Christianity which is authentic and makes sense in the people of our time. The hope is that over the next few years we will offer in the parish a whole variety of different opportunities to grow in knowledge and understanding and we pray for the courage and commitment we need to embrace these opportunities.........Lord hear us