HOMILY 7th SUNDAY OF THE YEAR ('B')
2012
For many of us, the opening words of today's First Reading can be a real liberation. They can bring us a real sense of a burden being lifted. Isaiah voices the very striking and surprising words of the Lord God: 'No need to recall the past, no need to think about what was done before.'
For many of us there will be events in the past – things we've done – things done to us – things we've said or even just thought – that it's very painful to remember. When they come to mind we perhaps wish we could just turn the clock back to before we did or said or suffered what causes us such grief.
In a few days' time, Lent begins. So often, Lent is presented to us in such a way that the call to penitence, to repentance, to 'saying sorry', seems to demand we go back over our past; that we almost wallow in the past. Or if it's not quite like that, at least in Lent we're liable to feel we have to try to 'make up' for the past; and of course all such efforts only serve to stir up memories and feelings that drag us down and most likely get us stuck again in old attitudes and a deep sense of hopelessness.
The words of Isaiah in today's First Reading are words we particularly need to hear before we enter into our observance of Lent: 'No need to recall the past, no need to think about what was done before'. And then too, the Lord's words that follow: 'I it is, I it is, who must blot our everything and not remember your sins'. And we find this same truth about God's desire and God's power to set us free from the past and transform the past in today's Gospel. Jesus tells the paralytic to get up and 'move on' (as we would say): 'Get up, pick up your stretcher and walk.' And by the same token he forgives the man his sins: 'My child, my boy, your sins are forgiven'. The paralysis of the past is over – the physical paralysis and also the spiritual, mental and emotional paralysis that being stuck in past sins always means.
With today's News-sheet I have included some suggestions about going to Confession – which is such an important part of our preparation for Easter: Confession not as a wallowing in the past, but as a very simple, frank acknowledgment of our need to share in the freedom God wants us to enjoy – the freedom of the life and love of God the Holy Trinity: that we may know in the depths of our hearts the truth of those words of St Paul: 'For freedom Christ has set us free'. (Galatians 5, verse 1)
This weekend we begin in our Parish a Week of Prayer for Vocations; especially vocations to the Priesthood and the Consecrated Life.
But that is a prayer that may not come at all easily to some - maybe to many. The difficulty arises, of course, from the disappointment, shock and disillusionment people have felt following the revelations of abuse of children and young people by Priests and Monks and members of Religious Congregations. In the light of these cases, for some people prayer for vocations seems to be asking too much of them. That is a response that I am sure we must respect, while keeping those who feel this way very much in our prayers this week.
What I want to suggest now, though, is that, if we are to share in this Week of Prayer, we must recognise that our prayer needs to be informed by the fairly distinct needs of three groups of people:
first, those who have some inkling, however vague, that God may be calling them to the Priesthood or Consecrated Life;
secondly, those currently in Seminaries or Novitiates;
and thirdly, those in their first three or four years in the Priesthood or as Professed monks or nuns or religious.
At each stage, the needs and issues tend to be rather different; but in every case, the needs and issues touch very deep levels of heart and mind. And precisely because of this, it is prayer – bearing one another's burdens in prayer – that is more helpful than anything else that we can do.
For those who think they may be called to the Priesthood or Consecrated Life, the struggle is often on these lines: is it a genuine call from God? - or is it a deep-seated, almost selfish desire on my part to get an identity for myself; to work out what I want to be? For example, thinking of today's First Reading, what is my real motivation for feeling drawn in some way to share in the life and work and witness of Jesus the Prophet - Jesus who finally fulfilled the promise of God in Deuteronomy to raise up a prophet for his people? Working out whether it's God's call or me deceiving myself is very hard...
Then those at Seminary or in Novitiates, a question that is very difficult to settle is: 'Am I able to live this kind of life?' In particular, commitment to celibacy for life takes time to come to terms with. The struggle goes very deep and others' prayers are sorely needed in order that an honest answer may be reached.
And then thirdly, those recently ordained and those recently professed often suffer an initial, disorientating shock on finding out what they have let themselves in for. Nearly always, life in the Parish or Diocese – or life in the 'cut and thrust' of full community life – may mean choosing all over again: saying 'Yes' again, but at a far deeper level than before. But out of this choosing again there can come the conviction and the capacity to 'speak with authority' in the name of the Lord.
How we pray this week will be different for each one of us. But I hope that what I have tried to say shows that it will cost time and effort: to use Cardinal Newman's phrase, it is a real work of 'heart speaking to heart'.
HOMILY: 3rd SUNDAY OF THE YEAR 'B' 2012: (WEEK OF PRAYER FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY)
Today's Gospel tells us of Jesus calling Simon and Andrew, James and John to join him in the work of proclaiming the Good News of God's love. Today's Gospel is from St Mark; but both St Luke and St Matthew tell us of the same event: four fishermen called by Jesus to be 'fishers of men'. It is the beginning of the Church.
It's possible to make this claim – that here we see the beginning of the Church – because of the word that St Luke uses to describe the bond that unites Peter with the others in their small fishing business. James and John, we are told, are koinonoi of Simon. They form a small business together; a koinonia. In this setting, the word of course refers to a secular business: a business partnership, with shared property, shared values, shared work. But it becomes something quite new – a new partnership, a new 'communion', we would say, when Jesus, as it were, takes it over, by calling these fishermen to be with him and to share in his mission to the world: to be the first members of his Church, which will finally be a world-wide koinonia, a world-wide communion.
It is this understanding of the Church as 'communion' – koinonia – which the Catholic Church has always held to; and which is of key importance in our Catholic understanding of what 'Christian Unity' must mean. We meet up with this word again in the Acts of the Apostles. We read in Chapter 2 that the first believers, the primitive Church, persisted, persevered in 'the Apostles' teaching and koinonia (fellowship or communion), the breaking of bread and the prayers'. In the Acts of the Apostles we see what the Church is; we see the path of her development in history – a communion endowed with the Holy Spirit, united in prayer and centred on Mary and the apostles – spreading out from Jerusalem even as far as Rome; 'communion' here meaning both Eucharist (communion with Christ) and communion with one another.
Again, in the early days of the Church, we hear from St Paul in his Letter to the Church in Galatia, how Peter,James and John – the three 'pillars' of the Church, as St Paul describes them – extended to him and Barnabas 'the right hand of fellowship, communion (koinonia)', because they recognised they were all of them of one heart and one mind in their teaching and in their practice, in truth and love.
And then, finally, in the First Letter of St John, we are given to see the full meaning and significance of this 'communion' (koinonia): St John writes: 'so that you may have communion with us; and truly our communion is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.' There is one bond of communion: between believers, between believers and Christ and between Christ and the Father. And this bond is concrete, visible, tangible, sacramental: 'We declare to you', St John says, 'what we have heard, what we have seen, what we have looked at and touched – concerning the Word of Life'.
The restoration of this divinely-given communion among all Christians – and nothing less than this! - must be our goal as far as Christian Unity is concerned: visible, tangible communion in the concrete reality of the Church, founded on Peter and the Apostles, in faithful, historical continuity: a personal, sacramental bond with Christ and with one another. Nothing less will do!
HOMILY: 2nd SUNDAY OF THE YEAR ('B')
2012: DAY OF PRAYER FOR
PEACE
In many churches – Catholic, Anglican and others – a prayer for peace will quite likely be used today that I am sure will be familiar to some of you. The prayer was written by Francis Paget, who was the Anglican Bishop of Oxford very early in the 20th century. It is found in many prayer books, across the Christian denominations. The prayer begins:
'Almighty God, from whom all thoughts of truth and peace proceed, kindly we pray thee, in the hearts of all men the true love of peace...'
It is certainly a very fine prayer. But in its opening line it begs the question that diplomats and statesmen nearly always have to grapple with. Certainly 'all thoughts of truth and peace' proceed from God. But for us here on earth, bringing truth and peace together – giving full and proper weight to both truth and peace in the resolution of war and conflict and civil strife - this raises problems that are often almost intractable and sometimes at least seem to be totally intractable.
We have an example of this in terms of a current legal battle concerning events in Northern Ireland during 'the troubles': the legal battle about the release or non-release of what were regarded as confidential interviews with terrorists on both sides by Michael Maloney, the Director of the 'Boston College Project' in the U.S.A. Terrorists from both sides agreed to talk about what they had done, on the understanding it would be totally confidential throughout their own life-times. The idea was to provide information for historians in the future – and especially as a help towards understanding why completely ordinary people came to commit appalling atrocities. But last year the Police Service of Northern Ireland applied to the United States government (Boston College being a Catholic University in the U.S.A.) for access to this material – and in particular in relation to the kidnapping and murder of a young mother, Jean McConville, in 1972. And then over Christmas - three weeks or so ago – the College was ordered to open its archives to the U.S. authorities. Now those authorities have to decide whether to make the interviews available to the Northern Ireland Police.
This is where the unbearable tension between peace and truth comes in. Key figures in the Northern Ireland Peace Process – men and women who worked often with great skill and courage to advance the cause of peace - may well be implicated in these Boston College interviews. So to release the content of these interviews could even now, many think, most seriously de-stabilise the measure of peace that has finally been achieved in Northern Ireland. On the other hand, truth might seem to demand that those who kidnapped and murdered Jean McConville (and many others) should at long last be brought to justice. It is altogether a terrible dilemma – and one that, in one form or another, hovers around nearly all attempts at reconciliation and peace-making all over
So, always, our prayer must be that peace may prevail; but equally our prayer must be that truth may prevail; for God is the source of both truth and peace. On this Day of Prayer for World Peace, what we can do is to pray above all in terms of St Paul's dictum about 'bearing one another's burdens' (Galatians Chapter 6, verse 2): offering our prayer in a spirit of sacrifice, seeking ourselves to bear something of the burden of those who are called to the impossible task of balancing the claims of truth and and the claims of peace.
HOMILY: THE SOLEMNITY OF
THE EPIPHANY 2012
The scene of the Magi offering gifts to the radiant Christ-Child has inspired countless artists, sculptors and craftsmen. The Magi are drawn to offer their best; and then in their turn the artists, sculptors and craftsmen offer their best, honouring the Infant who reveals the divine glory.
And now we ourselves likewise offer our best today, in worship and devotion, to our God who has revealed himself: 'God in man made manifest', as the Epiphany hymn has it. We do our best to make our celebration of Mass as fine as possible; and we try to keep our inner eye fixed on the glory of the Lord, who is worth everything we can give him.
But the Feast of the Epiphany is a also a call to us not only to offer our best in church. With the Magi, we offer our sacrifice of praise and adoration, contemplating lovingly the glory of God during Mass. But the Epiphany is also an inspiration to us, to extend the giving of our best – our worship and praise – into all aspects of our life. This aim we find as it were 'encapsulated' in one of the Chapters in the Rule of St Benedict. St Benedict admonishes his monks that the same spirit of worship, sacrifice and loving contemplation of God must inform all our everyday actions and activities. The Chapter in question is that entitled 'The duties of the Cellarer' (the Cellarer being the monk in charge of the goods and provisions of the monastery). St Benedict writes: 'He (the Cellarer) will regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the Altar, aware that nothing is be be neglected.' What St Benedict is saying is that the humblest saucepan or spade or axe or whatever it may be, is to be treated with the same care and respect as the precious chalice and paten and other sacred vessels used on the Altar in the celebration of Mass.
The Swiss theologian,Hans Urs von Balthasar, who was Pope John Paul II's favourite theologian, sets out the same insight in his book 'Prayer'. He puts it like this: 'The man who is filled with the spiritual law of Christ, as he goes to his daily work, will see it in the same sober terms as Holy Scripture does, yet he will be aware that the earth and its toil is joined, seamlessly, to the work of heaven.' Von Balthasar continues, making the very obvious point that 'practically and psychologically, the effect of the Church's liturgy fades as the day proceeds and the world's work is for the most part remote from it.' But he goes on to point out that, if our basic attitude – what 'makes us tick', we may say – is a genuinely deep faith in and love for God – 'the spiritual law of Christ' – then life can be much more 'all of a piece'; and the work of God in the realm of the Church and the work of man in the everyday world can and will come to be bound into an ever firmer unity.