13TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

Some of you may have read a book by David Lodge, published in 1980, called How Far Can You Go. Written as a humorous reflection on what it was like to be a young Catholic born in the 1950s and living through the sixties, it looks at how, during that period, traditional Catholic ways of thinking went through a time of immense upheaval and, through the experiences of the characters in the book, examines the effect these changes had on those who lived through them. And this idea was very much with me on Thursday evening as I sat watching the Summer Show at St Matthew’s Academy. Seeing the happiness on the faces of those young people was a real experience of God for me and as I listened to their screams of delight at the finale, I was so aware that the question How Far Can You Go – one every good Catholic boy or girl was familiar with in the 1950s – would mean absolutely nothing to them today. So what kind of world lay behind David Lodge’s question, which, just in case anyone is still wondering, was about sex, and what are we to make of the enormous changes that have happened in the intervening years? Well, there is a passage in the book which describes the Catholicism of my youth perfectly and I would like to quote it to you.

Many things, the author says, have changed, but the biggest change has been the fading away of a particularly Catholic way of seeing the world which – and here I quote directly from the text - “situated individual souls on a kind of spiritual Snakes and Ladders board and motivated them with equal doses of hope and fear and promised them, if they persevered in the game, an eternal reward. The board was marked out very clearly and governed by intricate rules. Heaven, hell, Purgatory, Limbo. Mortal, venial and original sin. Angels, devils, saints, and Our Lady Queen of Heaven. Grace, penance, relics, indulgences and all the rest of it.” the author’s point being that very few people believe in this vision any more and very few under fifty would even have heard of many of its elements. So what are we to make of this? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that those children in St Matthew’s on Thursday would not even know what the question ‘How Far Can You Go’ was about? Well, on balance, I believe it’s a good thing and in defence of that position would like to take you back to what St Paul was saying in the second reading.

As a former Pharisee who had spent too much of his life enslaved to the rigid system which was the Jewish Law, Paul believed passionately in freedom. And so when he says in today’s passage from the letter to the Galatians that now that Christ has freed us he meant us to remain free, he is speaking from the heart. The Law had been Paul’s equivalent of the Snakes and Ladders board the novel speaks of and after his encounter with the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus he wanted nothing more to do with it. Meeting Jesus had set Paul free and for the rest of his life his one desire was that others should come to that same freedom. As he said today: ‘When Christ freed us he meant us to remain free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery, by which he meant preferring the security of rule-keeping to the freedom of living according to the Spirit with the uncertainty, and therefore need to trust God rather than the keeping of rules, which genuine freedom involves. And that is why I believe that the ignorance in those young people of the rules and regulations which some of us lived by in the fifties and sixties is, on balance, a step in the right direction. But we still have a long way to go before we reach our destination, the mature, genuine freedom that Paul speaks of. And he says that himself in the passage. ‘But be careful,’ he says, ‘or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence.’ And, of course, that is exactly what has happened. We live in a world which has confused liberty with self-indulgence and the result is the ‘if it feels good do it’ society we live in with all the injustice, self-centredness and unfairness that goes with it. And so the question facing us is this: What is freedom without self-indulgence like, the freedom Paul speaks of and the freedom we are all called to?

Well, the classic way of putting it is that genuine freedom is not freedom from but freedom for. An example of freedom from would be what happened when the repressive Snakes and Ladders approach gave way to the permissiveness of the sixties. It was like letting a crowd of school children loose in a sweetie shop and what has happened in the Church and in society since then has not only been perfectly understandable but utterly inevitable. But now we are being called beyond that to something much more profound. When we live by law, we do the minimum to get by, like going to Mass on a Sunday or putting a pound or two in a SCIAF box. But when we enter the world St Paul is speaking about and discover the meaning of freedom for we discover a whole new dimension. Religion exists at the margins of our life. Faith which is freely chosen becomes our whole life. Discover it and it’s like moving from an old 15” black and white TV to a new 52” high definition 3D model.

And in the first reading this week we have a wonderful example of this. Challenged by Elijah to leave everything and follow him, Elisha slaughters his oxen and cooks them with a fire made from his plough. He is now free to go where God leads and as a result his story will be read by people for as long as human beings exist. In the Gospel, however, we meet two men who would like to follow Jesus but lack that freedom for. Like St Augustine who wanted to be pure, but not yet, they would like to follow Jesus, but not yet. They have one foot in the narrow world of religion and another in the rich world of faith and they lack the freedom to make the next step. And somewhere in there, I think, lies each one of us.

And yet it’s so important that we confront this challenge. Not just for our own sake. Not even primarily for our own sake. But for the sake of those young people I spoke about and thousands of others like them.


BIDDING PRAYERS


Many of us here belong to a generation which has lived through times of great change in the Church. Central to this has been the second Vatican Council which Pope John Paul II called the single most important movement of the Spirit in modern times. In calling it, his predecessor, Pope John XXIII spoke of opening up the doors and windows of the Church to let light and fresh air in and even now, more than forty years after the event, we pray for a real openness to this long and sometimes painful process....Lord hear us

Inevitably, the process of renewal in the Church has had its casualties. For some, the changes were too much to take and they walked away. For others the same changes did not go far enough and so they, too, walked away. And so we ask God to be with them all today and heal them of any anger or disappointment they still feel. And for ourselves, we ask God to give us the wisdom we need to understand the times through which we have lived and see the providence of God at work deep within them.....Lord hear us

Radical changes have taken place in the course of the second half of the 20th century, not just in the Church, but within society at large. The old certainties about what is right and what is wrong, about what is true and what is not true, have given way to uncertainty and confusion about so many things. The generations born into this world have often been left to find their way through the moral maze of life without any signposts or landmarks. And so we ask God to give them the guidance they need........Lord hear us

To leave law behind and experience the freedom St Paul speaks of in this week’s second reading is by no means an easy option. To abandon the security that goes with living according to law and begin to live by conscience and personal decision can feel risky. It means trusting God with our decisions without ever knowing for certain that they are the right ones. It will sometimes mean doing what is right rather than what the law says. But we ask for the courage and maturity we need to travel this road..........Lord hear us

In that second reading, St Paul tells us that, if we are led by the Spirit, no law can touch us. The whole of the law, he says, is summarised in a single command: Love your neighbour as yourself. This is why, in another place, he tells us that, if we love, we have kept all the commandments, an idea reflected in St Augustine’s famous remark: ‘Love and then do what you will.’ All these sayings belong, of course, to the world of faith rather than religion and we ask God to teach our whole parish what they mean.........Lord hear us

On Wednesday, we had the latest meeting about the religious education of children in the parish. The meeting was extremely well attended and the commitment of the parents and those who will support them in the months and years ahead was clear for all to see. And so we thank God for his presence at the meeting – which was almost tangible – and ask him to continue to guide us in the future, so that, having put our hand to this particular plough, we will be faithful to it and not turn back.........Lord hear us