Solemnity of Peter and Paul, apostles - Year A

Acts 12:1-11; 2Timothy 4:6-8.17-18; Matthew 16:13-19

Perhaps you remember seeing a war movie about a professor in Germany who was thought by the Nazis to have anti-Nazi leanings and so they kept an eye on him in his lectures. One day he drew a triangle on the board and made a map of the German political system and Hitler was on the bottom of the triangle. This got him into trouble and he was taken away. They asked him why he put Hitler on the bottom and he told them it was because the future of Germany rested on his shoulders.

This is a good example of the meaning of the word hierarchy even though this professor’s hierarchy was drawn upside down.

I remember also a conversation I had with an Anglican friend in a former parish of mine. He was actually the pastor of the Anglican parish. We were good friends and often discussed our mutual problems. This day we were discussing recent developments in the Anglican Church when women were first being ordained as Anglican priests. It was causing huge upheaval in that community and he said to me with great sadness: You know, we're tearing ourselves apart and we have no one to stop it.

Isn’t that interesting? We have no one to stop it. I quietly thought to myself: Thank God we do!

My friend was not lamenting the fact that there was no one willing to use his authority to stop the bickering, he was lamenting the fact that there was no one in the Anglican communion who had the authority to stop the bickering. There was no single authority who had oversight and power to do anything about the destructive dispute which is still going on today, except now it is centred on women bishops and practising homosexual clergy.

How glad we should be in the Catholic Church that Christ gave us someone who could stop the fighting! The Pope, the Holy Father, the Supreme Pontiff, the Successor of St Peter, the Universal Shepherd of the People of God, the Vicar of Christ has this total and vitally necessary power. People rail against it, complain about it, disobey it and try to destroy it, but without the Pope and his authority the Catholic Church and, I daresay, the world would soon be reduced to rubble.

Do you remember what Vatican II had to say about this power of the Supreme Pontiff? In paragraph 22 of Lumen Gentium we are told: In virtue of his office, that is as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church, the Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the Church. And he is always free to exercise this power.

The Pope has full, supreme and universal power over the Church and in exercising this power the Holy Father does not have to get permission from the bishops or even to consult them, and because this power is full and absolute there is no appeal against it.

Lumen Gentium, in the same paragraph, goes on to explain that the college of bishops also has this same power over the Universal Church provided the Pope is always included among them as the head – and never without him.

The bishops can exercise this power only with the consent of the Pope - For our Lord placed Simon alone as the rock and the bearer of the keys of the Church, and made him shepherd of the whole flock ... .

This college, insofar as it is composed of many (bishops), expresses the variety and universality of the People of God, but insofar as it is assembled under one head (the Pope), it expresses the unity of the flock of Christ. Many bishops under one Pope.

It would come as no surprise to those of you who know me to hear that I thank God for the gift of the papacy and that I love the Holy Father. He is the means by which God gives unity and order to the Church. I thank God also for the college of bishops. How blessed we are here in the Archdiocese of Sydney to have a bishop such as Cardinal Pell and his assistant bishops! We are the envy of many other places in Australia and around the world.

Today is also the feast of St Paul, a great bishop of the Church. He was the Apostle to the Gentiles, the non-Jews (that’s us). From a persecutor of the Christians he became a preacher of the Gospel, an extraordinary turnaround. His ministry too was extraordinary and is clearly described in Acts and in his own Epistles.

Paul, like Peter, was an exceedingly humble man but ready at any time to use the authority Jesus had given him. He taught the Faith wherever he went, courageously preaching and faithfully passing on only what he had received and adding nothing of his own. He was meticulously careful in this and if he ever did give his own opinion about something he scrupulously made it clear that this was coming from him and not necessarily from the Lord.

Paul tirelessly set up new churches all over Asia Minor and finally gave his life for his Master in Rome where he was beheaded.

Today we celebrate the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. If we believe what the Church believes it is because the Faith received from Christ was lived, preached and safeguarded by them. It is a marvellously great gift for which we should be deeply grateful and this gratitude can be shown by our readiness to live it and hand it on to our children and to all in our lives.

12th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year A

Jeremiah 20:10-13; Romans 5:12-15; Matthew 10:26-33

A martyr is one who gives his life for Christ and his Church.

In every age the Church has brought forth many martyrs - men, women, and children - who surrendered their lives rather than deny the Master.

These Christians chose to accept being thrown to the lions, crucified, beheaded, burned, frozen, starved, drowned, shot, hanged, and tortured to death in a multitude of ways. Especially in our own day there are many martyrs and Pope John Paul II spoke of the last century as being the 'century of martyrs'.

The whole world admires a martyr.

Martyrdom is the ultimate gift of self. [Remember how we said last week that human sacrifices are the ultimate sign of our refusal to give self - so we sacrifice someone else?]

Martyrdom is the ultimate proof of sincerity - a kind of 'certificate of authenticity'. It is the ultimate testimony to the belief that there is a higher good than our own human life; that our own human life does not have a value higher than human integrity and, above all, the love and the will of God.

Martyrdom is the ultimate test of faith and, fortunately, we are not all called to make it. My favourite understanding of martyrdom is that it is really heroic submission to the truth.

However, heroic submission to the truth which ends in death does not usually begin there. A martyr is usually one who for many years has been actively and courageously living the truth day by day. As the highest manifestation of faith martyrdom has to be 'trained' for.

The word martyr means witness - one who testifies by his death to a value or a truth which is greater than his life. We need to remember that the driving force for martyrdom is always love - red-hot love! A martyr is one who can be said to be burning with love for Jesus Christ and his Church.

Jesus is the greatest martyr, the greatest witness. He lived the truth from the beginning of his life and ended by giving his life for it, the truth his Father sent him to bring to the world.

The moment of decision came for Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. It was night. He had suffered his dreadful agony and now stood with his Apostles who had fallen asleep. Judas and the cohort armed with swords and clubs arrived and Judas approached and kissed him. Jesus stood his ground. Notice that? Jesus stood his ground. He didn't run, he didn't hide. He knew his moment had come - the moment of truth.

Judas stepped back and Jesus said: Who are you looking for?

Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus said I AM - the great I AM which God spoke to Moses when he asked God what his name was.

Jesus didn't say, 'Oh, he went that way. If you hurry you might catch him.' No!

Jesus said 'Yes, I am he. I am the one you are looking for. Let these others go.'

The great moment of truth. Each one of us, without exception, has such moments of truth.

• Are you a Catholic?
• Do you believe in contraception?
• Do you believe in abortion?
• Do you believe it's ok to live the gay lifestyle?
• Do you believe women priests should be ordained?

A Mormon friend of mine once asked a Catholic: Do you believe in women priests? and when the Catholic replied: Yes, my friend said: Then you're not much of a Catholic because I happen to know the Catholic Church teaches that women cannot be priests.

You see? The non-Catholics know! They know when a Catholic is witnessing to his faith - and they know when a Catholic is betraying his faith.

There, in the quiet of the garden, in the dark, Jesus was asked who he was. It was a moment of choice.

Jesus made his choice - I am He - a choice filled with the consequences with which we are all familiar.

To finish off, let's look at what Jesus says to those of us who find that moment of truth is suddenly upon us.

• Your answer will one day become public.

For everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear.

• Do not be afraid of the here-and-now consequences.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul ... why, every hair on your head has been counted. So there is no need to be afraid.

• Be afraid for the future consequences.

... the one who disowns me in the presence of men, I will disown in the presence of my Father in heaven.

11th Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year A

Exodus 19:2-6; Romans 5:6-11; Matthew 9:36 - 10:8

In the spiritual life, one of the tactics God uses to bring a man or woman to himself is to deprive them of the great project that stands between them and himself. Of course, this so called great project is only great from our limited human point of view. God, who sees things as they really are, is generally not impressed by our ventures.

Once I did a retreat conducted by Sr Briege McKenna, a rather famous nun, who conducts retreats for priests throughout the world. In a private interview she said to me: Fr John, it’s not what you can do for Jesus, it’s what Jesus can do through you. In other words, it’s not your project that matters, it’s his.

We all have our projects in life; they may be big or small. Some individuals spend their life trying to make a billion dollars, or getting to the top of the power-pile at work - others are happy spending their life on their vegetable garden or their house. I know people whose project has become their grandchildren, or their sport – golf, tennis, lawn bowls.

A project is something we occupy our life with – something which takes our prime time. It may be a worthy project or an utter waste of time. Sometimes it can be a number of projects - it doesn’t matter, so long as it keeps us occupied, striving, mesmerised – and too busy for God.

So sometimes God, because he loves us and because he wishes to draw us to life, separates us from our beloved project. He has many ways of doing this but whichever way he chooses the end result is that we find ourselves, often for the first time in our life, standing quite alone.

At first this can be a painful, difficult, even frightening experience. So often we define ourselves in terms of our projects and when we lose them we often go into mourning and ask ourselves – who am I now? – and we feel like we have somehow entered a vast, dry, featureless desert.

All this is precisely what God did to the Hebrews. He took them away from their slavery in Egypt, their big project, so they could come close to him.

Thomas Merton, in his book Thoughts in Solitude has this to say about the desert: 'The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men.'

The desert is valuable to God because it’s of no use to us. We can’t do anything there except, of course, be with God.

'The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit.'

God put the Israelites in a place which was so barren and inhospitable that it could be called a ‘project-free zone’. Only then was he able to reveal to them his project.

And what was God’s project? It was that they should love him, and that they should show this love by obeying him.

'The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had travelled directly to it. God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness…'

For forty years God kept the 12 raggedy tribes of Jacob wandering in the desert. They had been slaves in Egypt for so long they had come to believe this was who they really were.

God knew this false idea could not be reversed overnight and so he journeyed with them in the wilderness, feeding them and giving them to drink. He gave them a law which they began to learn to obey there and a form of worship with which to honour him – and all the time promised them a land of their own – the Promised Land.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob formed his People in the desert and gradually gave them a sense of being, not slaves, but his – his People, a royal People, a chosen Race, a Nation set apart – and entirely the work, the project, of God.

Some people are naturally drawn to the wilderness. The Desert Fathers made their home there and allowed themselves to be formed by God through prayer, penance, and daily work. They were like all the holy ones of history. They made the transition from doing a project for God to allowing themselves to become the project of God.

Let me conclude by quoting Thomas Merton one more time: 'The desert is therefore the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself.'

Isn’t that beautiful? To be nothing but himself! Surely this is the greatest project of them all – to be nothing but ourselves! Merton’s full sentence reads: 'The desert is therefore the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself – a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his Creator.'

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Hosea 6:3-6; Romans 4:18-25; Matthew 9:9-13

Open the Sunday Readings for any week of the year and one is flooded with words and images and thoughts. Our readings today are no different.

• That arresting opening sentence which invites our longing: Let us set ourselves to know the Lord.

• The wonderful natural images - dawn and light, clouds and dew, showers and spring rains and earth.

• The exasperation of the Lord as he listens to the empty resolutions of his fickle people: What am I to do with you, Ephraim? What am I to do with you, Judah?

• The unerring judgment with which the Lord throws those natural images back in the faces of his over-confident people: This love of yours is like a morning cloud, like the dew that quickly disappears.

• And then, in an aside to the reader: This is why I have torn them to pieces by the prophets, why I slaughtered them with the words from my mouth.

• The Gospel startles us with Matthew's instantaneous response to Jesus' command to follow: ... and he got up and followed him.

• The unintentionally self-disclosing question of the Pharisees: Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?

• And Jesus' multi-layered response to their pride: It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick.

Only when we have read and re-read and absorbed these two readings do the various issues settle into a focus which permits us to hear the urgent and almost distressed entreaty of God: What I want is love, not sacrifice; knowledge of God, not holocausts.

Jesus repeats the appeal of his heavenly Father: What I want is mercy, not sacrifice.

These words are the sharp point of the arrow of God's revelation to us today. For all their seeming trust in the Lord the people are, in fact, known for their failure to trust and obey God. Their vacillation is the stuff of legend. Even now their so-called repentance is shallow and capricious. They want to restore the sacrifices and take up again the rituals of holocaust. God's response to their resolutions is a sad shake of the head: What am I to do with you?

If we are reading these passages attentively we should at this stage feel a creeping discomfort as we begin to sense that God is not speaking only to his Chosen People and that Jesus is not just challenging the Pharisees.

Somehow we all know that we must make atonement to God for our sins and show our love for him. The people knew that too. The notion of making sacrifices as a sign of their love was instinctive and yet, as they offered sheep and goats and bulls and cows and bushels of wheat and barley, they knew that what they really should be offering, the only real gift, the only acceptable gift, was themselves. Everything else was just a substitute.

Pope Benedict says in one of his books that the most extreme example of this giving of things to God is human sacrifice. This is the clearest and most horrific example of our refusal to give ourselves. And so we give someone else.

In this sense the Chosen People were exactly like us. They gave things to God and God said, 'But I want you.' And we are like that. We will give anything - cans of food, clothing, toys, money, so long as we can avoid giving ourselves.

How do we begin to give ourselves?

To give ourselves to God begins by showing a willingness to keep his commandments. The one who loves me is the one who keeps my commandments.

I think you will agree with me readily enough that we all, or at least most of us, avoid giving ourselves to God. What would you say if I suggested that this is why we all, or most of us, find love so difficult? It’s because we all know that love ultimately leads to giving ourselves. We cannot avoid it. That is why God calls for our love - because it leads us down the path of self-donation and at the end of this path he is there, waiting to receive us.

It is not a long path. The saints tell us it can be travelled in an instant - instant holiness! Love takes us there in an instant.

It's funny how we fear what we want. Peter wanted it but denied the Lord when it was offered. He was unable to give himself totally until the last moments of his life. But how gloriously and completely did he then succeed! His secret was love.

We, no less than Peter and the whole company of the saints, are invited and called to give ourselves to God in love. It begins, as I have already said, with keeping his commandments. How simple, how practical and, with his grace, how possible!