31st Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

Wisdom 11:22-12:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10

It’s not always easy to respond to the readings at Mass after hearing them read only once. We may be preoccupied with something going on at home, we may have hearing difficulties, the microphone system in the church may not be working, or there just might be a screaming child right under our nose. However, despite all the difficulties, it is vitally important that we get to hear the readings at each Mass.

Some parishes print them on the parish bulletin so we can follow along with the readers while others show them on the overhead. The best guarantee, of course, that the readings don’t just pass us by is to have read them at home before Mass. A slowly growing number of people are doing this. All you need at home is a Sunday Missal.

When we read Scripture we usually find that a word or phrase or image will capture our attention. For me this week it was a ‘moment’, the moment when Jesus reached the spot under the tree and looked up. I found myself happy to just sit and ponder the beautiful face of the Lord.

And don’t ask me exactly why it was that little moment which fascinated me. Was it the loving gaze in the eyes of the Lord looking up at Zacchaeus - or maybe his gentle smile? Or perhaps just wonderment at the goodness of the Divine Shepherd who comes to seek out the poor lost sheep even in the branches of a sycamore tree!

The Scriptures will speak personally to us; to each one of us in a different way. They will speak words of love, of forgiveness, of correction or perhaps of warning. The word of God knows us and understands us and speaks to us with gentleness and power, wounding and healing.

I can only imagine how this Gospel might have spoken to you.

Perhaps you were struck by the word ‘senior’. Zacchaeus was a senior tax collector, important, a boss, a CEO. Maybe you are one too, with many people looking up to you. You might wonder if you would have the humility to put your status at risk, as Zacchaeus did for the sake of the Lord.

Perhaps it was the word ‘wealthy’ which impressed itself on you. How wealthy are you? Perhaps you are very wealthy like Zacchaeus who gave so much of it back to the poor. Maybe you are wondering about your relationship to your wealth, wondering whether you own it or it owns you?

What about that thought-provoking little word ‘short’. Zacchaeus was short, too short to see over the crowd. The crowd is always ‘taller’ in some way than we are, isn’t it? Each one of us, and I do mean each and every one of us, is ‘short’ in some way – looks, talent, intelligence, health, and so on. Maybe we are sad or angry about this, depressed, or even jealous. How do we handle our ‘flaw’, our ‘deficiency’? Zacchaeus accepted it and didn’t let it hold him back – he climbed a tree.

Maybe it was the word ‘tax collector’ which drew your attention. Tax collectors were despised in Israel because they worked for the Romans and added their own percentage to what they collected. The Romans didn’t mind, so long as they got the required amount. Perhaps you thought about your own job or profession. Do you make your money in an honourable way? ‘Should I be doing this work? Do I do it honestly?’ Possibly there are some kinds of work a Catholic shouldn’t do.

Maybe you thought to yourself ‘Well, I am senior, wealthy, and tall, and have an honourable job but I am still not satisfied. If something came by which had the potential to fill this emptiness in my heart I would climb a tree too.’ And maybe you thought of senior and wealthy Zacchaeus who climbed a tree because he was anxious to see what kind of man Jesus was.

You may not be up a tree but you might be ‘up a creek without a paddle’. You might be in a seriously difficult time of your life and it may even be your own fault. As you saw Jesus stop under Zacchaeus’ tree you might have offered an anguished prayer and cried, ‘Jesus, I am in trouble, come and find me too! I am lost come and help me!’

The Gospel speaks to each one of us the word we need to hear. Perhaps when you read; They all complained when they saw what was happening. ‘He has gone to stay at a sinner’s house’ they said – you suddenly recognised that you too are a habitual complainer; that you too have a nasty habit of judging others, especially those you believe to be sinners. Then you might find yourself praying ‘Lord, thank you for showing me myself. Thank you for holding up the mirror of your holy word so I can see myself more clearly. Help me, Lord, to stop being a judge over others; help me not to complain about others.’

Zacchaeus’ desire was fulfilled – he got to see what kind of man Jesus was – and, as a bonus, got to see what kind of man he himself was, but he had to make an effort, he had to climb a tree.

What is our next step? What tree can we climb so that we can draw closer to the Lord? What is God asking of me? What must I do, or stop doing, to find salvation?

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

Ecclesiasticus 35:15-17,20-22; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14

The Pharisee of the Gospel stands tall in the Temple of God, full of his own importance. He speaks to himself about himself full of himself. The word ‘I’ is used five times. We look on uncomfortably and listen to his disconcerting bragging and we get a sense of the extent to which this man has lost not only the sense of who God is but also the sense of who he is.

The publican at the back, not daring to raise his eyes, somehow reassures us. He acknowledges himself to be a sinner and he recognises God as merciful. All in all we can say, ‘He’s got it right.'

Contemporary culture, like the Pharisee, has mostly lost its sense of God. This loss is of critical importance because man is made in God’s image and likeness, and we can only know ourselves and how we should act when we know God. The more we lose the sense of God the more we lose a sense of who we ourselves are.

As Pope John Paul II used to remind us, the vacuum left by the loss of the presence or awareness of God is then filled by man who tries to replace the loss of God with himself, and soon every man becomes his own God, choosing for himself what is right or wrong. Man can now create his own reality, but whose reality will prevail? The strongest, of course, and the strongest will tell the rest of us what is right or wrong.

Inevitably we end up with the ‘tyranny of force’ or the ‘tyranny of Man’. Instead of obeying God’s plan we are forced to obey another man’s plan. And so instead of life being defined in terms of love it becomes defined in terms of a huge power struggle. Might is right!

We lose at the same time the sense of our identity as human beings and our sense of moral truth. The Pharisee in the Gospel had entirely lost the sense of his own sinfulness. How can this have happened to him, right there in the Temple? The answer is - bit by bit, step by step.

The loss of the sense of God can happen in the Church too, and many think it has already happened in the Western Church. Man has stepped into the vacuum.

For instance, today we think Mass is all about us, me, my needs and my feelings. We forget that Mass is, in the first place, all about God; our service, our worship of God. And so we stop going because ‘I don’t get anything out of it; I don’t like the singing; I don't like the priest.’

So we priests change the Mass to suit ourselves and our parishioners; we try to put smiles on everyone's faces. I was attending a Mass with a friend, a Sister, and we were both amazed at how, during the homily, the priest managed to induce a sort of coma in the congregation. Sister leaned over to me and whispered 'Palliative care.'

Fortunately the 'puppet Gospels' have gone, and so have the 'rock Masses'. But there is still so much joke telling, secular music, entertaining Powerpoint presentations, and 'applause' on any pretext. The rationale is: 'If they won’t come for God they might come if we make them feel good.'

We go from silliness to silliness and end in sacrilege. Many will applaud the novelties but not everyone. The thoughtful members of the congregation will shake their heads and lower their eyes with embarrassment or chagrin.

As the people lose the sense of what they are about at Mass they, too, try to fill the vacuum. Mainly they begin by talking a lot - before Mass, after Mass - even during Mass. Have you noticed how noisy our churches have become? The churches are now 'our' house, not God's house.

I had a housekeeper who, when I met her, had stopped going to church. She was an extremely intelligent and sensitive woman. She said, ‘Father, I constantly had the sense we were worshipping ourselves’.

And noise is not the only symptom of our loss of the sense of God. It was Pope Benedict XVI who coined the phrase ‘ecclesiastical occupational therapy’. He was trying to define the attitude that many were beginning to develop which saw the Church as a place to 'exercise their gifts’ rather than as a place to worship God. And so our churches have become not only places of noisiness but also places of busyness and constant movement.

There’s a fine line between a community worshipping God and a community celebrating itself. Perhaps the Pharisee standing before God celebrating himself is a helpful image for us to contemplate. And perhaps the publican, humbly asking forgiveness from God, is a good image upon which each Catholic community could base its renewal.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

Exodus 17:8-13; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8

2567 ...Man may forget his Creator or hide far from his face; he may run after idols or accuse the deity of having abandoned him; yet the living and true God tirelessly calls each person to that mysterious encounter known as prayer. (CCC)

God calls us as he called Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall: Where are you? God calls us so that we may ‘walk with him’. That’s a rather nice way of putting it, don’t you think - to walk with him? This kind of prayer is lived by many humble people in all religions but in the drama of our daily Christian lives it is ordered to an ever-growing communion with the Trinity – to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.

Jesus is, of course, our model for prayer. In his relationship to the Father we discover all that prayer is, its source, its power, its necessity, its characteristics.

After their sin Adam and Eve, when they heard God approaching, hid from him. How many of us do not do the same? We avoid prayer not only because we are too busy, we avoid it because we know it is a meeting with God. The most recent National Catholic Life Survey confirmed this for us once again; by and large Catholics do not pray.

And yet, I imagine that few Catholics would say that prayer is bad or unnecessary, in fact, I am convinced that practically all of them would acknowledge its importance and betray a niggling desire, if not an explicit intention, to pray more. Perhaps the teenage Jesus points to this pervasive awareness when he tells his parents: I must be in my Father’s house.

Indeed, Jesus’ simple affirmation is very profound when applied to our subject.

• Prayer is really the communion of a child with its Father and this, in thought, word, and deed. In other words our prayer is always ‘filial’ prayer; the enduring call of a loving Father to his loving child.

• Secondly, we are called to be in our Father’s house, to live there; it is our proper home. To reduce Christian prayer to those well-known moments when we ‘say a prayer’ is to impoverish it entirely. Our moments of prayer must always embrace the daily conduct of our life; we must live our prayer.

Understandably, since the sin of Adam and Eve, and as we become aware of our own personal sins, we can begin to develop a sense that we are somehow excluded from the Father’s house. However, this does not remove from us that deep-rooted other sense we have that ‘I must be in my Father’s house'; that there is the only place we will be truly happy.

Those of you who practise Lectio Divina will readily recognise that your daily opening of the book of Sacred Scripture is in a very real way like opening the ‘door’ to the Father’s house. We enter this door and find ourselves, as it were, in the lobby where we sit and read, meditate and pray. It is a gift of this prayer, the gift of contemplatio, that the Triune God himself will, at moment of his chosing, come to be with us. And if we are not always graced with such a visit we can always say with St Peter: Lord, it is wonderful to be here.

The more our lives become oriented to being in the Father’s house the less we desire to live in the world and the more happily we begin to withdraw from its ways. Jesus often withdrew to a quiet, lonely place in order to pray. Solitude is the great friend of prayer because in solitude we eventually find the silence in which God speaks.

If there is an absence of prayer in many Catholic lives it is often because of the lack of solitude and silence. In busy families it is difficult, almost impossible, to find either of these realities. In fact, one can grow so accustomed to always being with others and having one’s head filled with noise that solitude and silence can come to seem unpleasant, even frightening. Yet, I know of extraordinarily busy couples who have simply legislated periods of both solitude and silence in their lives in order to spend time in prayer. The fruit of their efforts is apparent in the quality of their marriages and in their responsibilities as parents, but most of all in the heavenly wisdom which makes itself a part of their lives.

One of the joys, and challenges, of my life at present is that I have been obliged to live in many different houses over the last few years. I’ve grown accustomed to accepting that each home has a different routine and 'rhythm' and that my challenge is to do my best to fit in. To live ‘in my Father’s house’ requires similar adjustments.

Jesus’ prayer, arising out of the depths of his humble heart, sought always to open him to the accomplishment of the will of his heavenly Father. That is what true Christian prayer is meant to be – a seeking out of the will of God. Many of us pray in a way that seems to be trying to change God’s mind about something in our lives so that we can go on living ‘in our own house’ whereas true prayer teaches us how to live in his.

I consider the greatest prayer Jesus ever spoke was: Father, not my will but yours be done, and I believe, furthermore, that the Father will never refuse this prayer. In his will (in his house) is every good, if only we had eyes to see and hearts to trust.

Oh, before we finish, we’d better acknowledge what Jesus teaches in today’s Gospel about prayer: Pray continually and never lose heart.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

2 Kings 5:14-17; 2 Timothy 2:8-13; Luke 17:11-19

Naaman was a well-respected and successful army commander to the king of Aram and although he was a pagan he was pleasing to God. This fact is worthy of consideration. God has friends everywhere – among Buddhists, Anglicans, Hindus, Moslems – and even among Catholics.

Naaman would have cut a fine figure; army commanders are not usually drawn from the ranks of geekdom. He was probably tall and powerfully built, a man to be admired and perhaps, even, to be envied. But, as Hollywood has taught us, even the rich and famous are tarred with mortality, and so was Naaman.

Unfortunately for Naaman somewhere along the line he had contracted leprosy and this, understandably, made him somewhat desperate. Leprosy was not like the flu or a bad head cold; it was a terminal disease.

Now on one of their raids, the Aramaeans had carried off from the land of Israel a little girl who had become a servant of Naaman's wife.

What a wonderful dramatic effect! There stands the army commander Naaman and on stage walks a little girl, a servant, a Hebrew slave. Aren’t God’s ways mysterious?

Not only does God choose to speak to us in totally unexpected and unforseen ways but he does so through the most unlikely people; the conqueror of cities is saved by a lowly serving maid.

Somehow another young Hebrew comes to mind, Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. He, too, was a servant and he, too, quite providentially came to the aid of his captors.

Then again one thinks quite naturally of the wedding feast of Cana at which the wine disastrously ran out. Who could have anticipated that it would be Mary, one of the guests, who would see a way out of this impossible situation? His mother said to the servants, 'Do whatever he tells you'. (John 2:5)

The little girl said to her mistress, 'If only my master would approach the prophet of Samaria. He would cure him of his leprosy.' You can almost hear her saying, ‘Go to the prophet and do whatever he tells you.’

And then, when Egypt needed saving Pharaoh said to the people: Go to Joseph and do what he tells you. (Genesis 41:55)

The thread connecting each of these incidents is the simple and binding command: obey the word.

So off goes Naaman. He takes with him all that he thinks he will need to purchase his healing - ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten festal robes. Poor Naaman, he does not yet understand the goodness and mercy of God which money cannot buy!

So Naaman came with his team and chariot and drew up at the door of Elisha's house.

The learning curve immediately becomes steeper; the prophet doesn’t even bother coming out to meet the great commander but via his messenger gives him a simple command: Go and bathe seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will become clean once more.

Do you get the picture? Believe and obey! That is the secret of God; that is the secret of healing and life.

But Naaman is still not on God’s wavelength. He is still thinking in worldly terms and feels humiliated. He wants a little respect from the prophet; he wants a personal healing session with a little hocus pocus, with chanting and hand-waving. All he gets is an order.

To Naaman the notion of just believing and obeying made no sense: Surely … the rivers of Damascus, are better than any water in Israel? Could I not bathe in them and become clean?' And he turned round and went off in a rage.

Once again the wise word which brings healing comes to the great man through his servants who approach him and say: My father, if the prophet had asked you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? All the more reason, then, when he says to you, "Bathe, and you will become clean".

[At that time Jesus exclaimed, 'I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.' (Mtt 11:25)]

All Naaman has to do is believe and obey.

So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, as Elisha had told him to do. And his flesh became clean once more like the flesh of a little child.

With the healing of his flesh Naaman comes to faith in the one true God. Not only is he healed but, like the leper in today’s Gospel, he is saved.

'Now I know' he said 'that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel … your servant will no longer offer holocaust or sacrifice to any god except the God of Israel.'

Naaman believed the word of the prophet and obeyed. That is when faith becomes effective. Surely this is a lesson for our own lives too. This world has no shortage of faith but a critical shortage of those who ‘obey’ their faith.

Let’s always remember:

It's not medicine until you take it.
It's not a parachute unless you open it.
It's not a song till you sing it.
It's not faith until you practise it.