5th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Isaiah 58:7-10; 1Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16

Jesus came to show us the face of God. Jesus is the face of God. When we contemplate Jesus we contemplate the face of God.

Jesus tells us many things about himself which help us to understand him. For example:

• I am the good shepherd.
• I am the vine.
• I am the bread of life.
• I am the way, the truth, the life.
• I am the gate of the sheepfold.

But every word Jesus speaks about himself is also a word about us. Every time he tells us who he is he tells us who we are.

• I am the good shepherd - you are the sheep of my flock.
• I am the vine - you are the branches.

Like when he asks: Who do men say I am? - Simon answers: You are the Christ. Jesus replies: And you are Peter ... the rock ...

Or when Saul is thrown to the ground and asks the Lord: Who are you, Lord? Jesus says: I am Jesus and you are persecuting me.

I am - you are ...

Today, in the Gospel Jesus tells us two more things that we are:

• salt of the earth.
• light of the world.

Salt does two things - it preserves and it gives taste.

When Jesus says that we are the salt of the earth this is what he means.

• We must preserve the earth - i.e. save it from corruption.
• We must give taste to it - i.e. improve its flavour - make it acceptable.

We are meant to stop the earth from going bad. We are meant to do what salt does, to inhibit the growth of the those things which cause things to spoil.

We could and we should reflect seriously on this analogy. It seems to me that there is a huge flourishing of disturbed, violent, perverted behaviour in the world at the present time. Just look at the cases before the courts in our country.

The Internet has made the proliferation of pornography of all kinds possible. What was once underground and under control has now come into the open and is aggressively ‘spoiling’ or corrupting the world. Violence is everywhere, especially in our hospitals and abortion clinics. We could go on and on.

A major reason for all this is that good people do nothing. The National Catholic Life Survey has made many things clear, but most frighteningly that Catholics, by and large, do not pray. The salt has lost its flavour. It is no longer capable of preserving.

Jesus also says we are the light of the world. By itself light is no good. It is only good when it shows us something other than itself. That is what Christians are called to do - to live lives that show the presence of God in the world. If we do not do this there is darkness and, without doubt, the world is today in deep darkness in many ways. We Christians must ask ourselves if we are giving out light.

Finally, I said earlier that when God tells us about himself it is always something about ourselves too. This works in reverse. When he tells us about ourselves he is at the same time revealing himself to us. What does he tell us about himself when he says: You are the salt of the earth ... the light of the world?

He is telling us about himself here because we are his light, his salt. He is telling us that he is counting on us. He has made us sharers in the coming about of His kingdom.

What good is salt if it has no flavour, or a light which cannot challenge the darkness?

Unlike real salt and real light which are dead, material things, we are living salt and living light. We can change. We can regain our flavour and we can rekindle our light.

This is my deepest wish for every Catholic community: that we may rediscover the things that make us salt for the world and that we may regain our brightness as Catholics.

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Matthew 5:1-12

My small Sunday Missal introduces today’s Mass as follows:

Our NothingnessYes, we can celebrate today our nothingness in the eyes of the world because God has looked on our humility and lowliness and given us the wisdom, virtue and holiness of Christ. He alone is our boast.

That’s not a bad little introduction and it’s completely accurate.

In our liturgy today we do indeed celebrate our nothingness, firstly as the people of God and, above all, our own personal nothingness, a reality, a truth, a freedom, a treasure each one of us must discover for himself if we are ever to call ourselves mature Christians.

We need to make a distinction, however, between the nothingness of being without social status, talent, education, riches or power (what the world thinks common and contemptible) and the nothingness we discover ourselves to be when standing in the presence of God.

From the awareness of this interior nothingness Zephaniah counsels us in the first reading to seek the Lord in humility and lowliness. The psalmist, too, acknowledges the power and love of God from out of his own nothingness with the insistent cry: It is the Lord .. It is the Lord .. It is the Lord.

St Paul includes himself in his proud declaration to the Corinthians that God has chosen those who are nothing at all to show up those who are everything; while Jesus lovingly speaks God’s word to the crowd, the same crowd for whom he was sorry, because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd … mere nothings. (Mtt 9:36)

And so we really shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge our nothingness – not, as wannabe Christians often do, in a glib surface fashion - but in a profoundly honest testimony to the way we experience our deepest selves before the love and justice of God.

Our nothingness can be called a place, deep within us, deep within our heart and mind. It is a place to which we need to find the path. It is not a frightening, dim, morbid reality of our existence but a place of encounter and hope; it is the place in which we look for and come face to face with God because it is the place in which God waits for us. For this reason it is the place we go to pray.

We make our way down into our deepest centre, past whatever gifts we may possess, ignoring whatever social standing we may have, ignoring all that we think we have achieved in life, deeper and deeper we go until we come to that place where we are nothing. In that place we will find God, in that place he will listen to us, in that place he loves us and his love makes us someone.

So we see that the only way to become someone is to draw close to the Lord, to his grace. But let us understand: we bring our nothingness to God not in the way that a car owner brings his wreck to the garage so that the mechanic can work on it and restore it to the owner in good working order so it can go its way. That’s not how we come to Jesus. We are not like a sick man leaving the hospital having been cured of his disease. We come to Jesus in our nothingness and he doesn't take that nothingness away, he just fills it with himself.

Isn’t this the wonderful thing about the Consecration at Mass? Here are the disciples all sitting around the table of the Last Supper, not just the Twelve, but all the disciples of all time, past and present and future, all sitting around the table with the Lord, all sitting there in their nothingness. And the Lord says over the bread: This is my body, and over the wine: This is my blood.

Then he gives the bread, his body, to the nothings and they become filled with him, they become like him, and the blood of Christ begins to flow through them, through their nothingness, and they are strong.

God loves our nothingness because it is the only place where he can give himself to us. When we are close to him we are strong; when we leave him we return to our emptiness and we are weak.

Every Christian should look forward to that great day when God will definitively, once and for all, fill our nothingness with himself. Let us be ready – gentle, humble, just and willing to forgive and let us never let go of our beloved nothingness.

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Isaiah 8:23- 9:3; 1Corinthians 1:10-13.17; Matthew 4:12-23

I appeal to you, brothers, for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, to make up the differences between you, and instead of disagreeing among yourselves, to be united again in your belief and practice. From what Chloe's people have been telling me, my dear brothers, it is clear that there are serious differences among you.

In my opinion there is nothing more demoralising and destructive going on in our Catholic Church today than division, and it’s everywhere. Division causes peace and joy to evaporate and replaces them with tension and squabbling. The great temptation, of course, is to try to paper over the serious differences tearing our Church apart but clearly that’s not working.

Recently an article appeared in the quarterly magazine of the National Council of Priests of Australia (which represents no small percentage of Australia’s clergy). This article was written by a priest. It condemned Pope John Paul as ‘out of touch in scripture and limited in theology, a bad listener.’ Pope Benedict and Pope Paul VI were similarly rubbished. This priest slated the ‘theologically limited’ Roman Curia as well as our present bishops whom he sees as ‘low on creativity, leadership, education and even intelligence.’ He dissents from various key teachings of the Church, calling them ‘policies’ and consistently refers to the vocation of priesthood as a ‘job’. All in all, and without exaggeration, this article was enough to make one cry. What was totally lacking was love for and trust in the Church.

The next article, by another priest, aimed to demonstrate that missing Mass was not a big deal and should not worry us much. ‘In none of Jesus’ teachings do we find exhortations or commands to participate in weekly services of worship,’ he confidently asserts, as though Holy Mother Church had never existed.

Indeed, Chloe’s people were right: My dear brothers, it is clear that there are serious differences among you.

The ‘serious differences’ are really a profound crisis of faith. Catholics are unbelievably confused about the Faith. It seems all has boiled down to ‘opinions’ rather than obedience.

There is continual and deliberate spreading of errors in every segment of the Catholic Church by large numbers of priests and laity. The interior disunity of the Church is a bleeding sore which no one seems willing to stem. What a disaster! And what suffering for those Catholics who know the Faith and who know how things should actually be in their parishes!

Almost entirely gone is any notion of sin and so there is a general acceptance of those who habitually live in sin and there are many who do so. Confession has all but disappeared as a result of the confusion caused by disobedient priests who illicitly used the third rite of Reconciliation for many years. All this has resulted in parishes with great attendance at the parish barbeque and negligible numbers seriously living the Christian life, which has been reduced to ‘doing jobs at Mass’ and engaging in social activity around the parish.

As a priest committed to orthodoxy in faith and morals, in liturgical worship, obedience to Rome and especially, love for the Church, I meet with extraordinary opposition from priests and laity who are strangely angered and even scandalised at me. I believe it is because these priests have somehow come to believe that they have been commissioned to change the Church while I, and many like me, have clung to the apparently outdated notion that we should be letting the Church try to change us.

Pope Paul VI, one year before his death, said: There is a great uneasiness, at this time, in the world and in the Church, and that which is in question is the faith … What strikes me, when I think of the Catholic world, is that within Catholicism, there seems sometimes to predominate a non-Catholic way of thinking, and it can happen that this non-Catholic thought within Catholicism, will tomorrow become the stronger. But it will never represent the thought of the Church. (The Secret Paul VI by Jean Guitton, pages 152 and 153)

From prison Paul wrote to implore the Ephesians to preserve ‘the unity of the Spirit’ so that they would not be ‘carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness in practising deceit.’(Eph 4:1.14)

To Timothy he wrote: The time is sure to come when, far from being content with sound teaching, people will be avid for the latest novelty and collect themselves a whole series of teachers according to their own tastes and then, instead of listening to the truth, they will turn to myths. Be careful always to choose the right course… . (2Tim 4:3-5)

Be careful always to choose the right course! This is not advice; it is a warning - a warning on which depends our relationship with Christ and his Church and, therefore, our eternal future.

Many orthodox priests are anguished by the present state of our Church. Pope Paul VI rightly foresaw that it would become worse in succeeding years. I call upon you, my friends, to be equally concerned and to make every effort you can to learn the Faith and live the Faith of the Catholic Church and to resist anyone, anywhere, who attempts to pervert or misrepresent it.

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Isaiah 49:3.5-6; 1Corinthians 1:1-3; John 1:29-34

What is your dream? Do you have one? What are your hopes for the future? What are your plans for yourself and your loved ones? Most people have a dream; big or small, elaborate or simple, short term or long term. Ask a young person and they will often have not only a clear goal for their life, some even have it all mapped out in the most precise detail; they have a blueprint for achieving their plan.

My own casual observations lead me to imagine that people look at their future in one of two ways. Watch little Billy in the schoolyard. He clears a patch of ground under a tree and with a stick traces out a road. Along the way he puts little buildings, a school, a petrol station, his own house. Then he spends his time driving the roads he has built, stopping to refuel and make repairs to his toy car which he then parks in the garage at his imaginary home.

Little Bobby has another approach entirely. He drives his car all around the playground on a road which only he can see. He stops every now and then to clear obstacles or turn invisible corners and parks his car wherever his fancy dictates.

Billy lives according to what I call the blueprint model. Many people live their lives this way, especially in their relationship with God. They see themselves as God’s little car which he drives along the predetermined roads he has made for them. All they have to do is make sure they don’t take a wrong turn and spoil God’s plan. These people will say ‘God has a plan for me’ and they ardently beg him to reveal it to them.

People like Bobby live the free range model. They believe God doesn’t mind where they go because he is always with them, like a passenger, no matter which turn they take along the road. Bobby doesn’t ask if God wants him to be a dentist or a vet or a cook, he knows that God will be with him no matter which choice he makes, provided it is within God's law.

A good argument can be made for each of these models and we can switch to them at various times in our lives according to the issues we’re facing. Undoubtedly God does have a plan for each of us. It is, as the Penny Catechism used to say, that we: know him, love him, and serve him, here on earth and be happy with him for ever in heaven. As well, Jesus' answer to the Pharisees: You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind … You must love your neighbour as yourself (Mtt 22:37-39). That’s quite enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you say?

And yet, for some of us, God also has what might be called a blueprint, a special means for achieving his plan. To the prophet Jeremiah he intimated: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you came to birth I consecrated you; I have appointed you as prophet to the nations (Jer 1:5). Isaiah, too, was called and sent (Is 6:8). And St Paul in today’s second reading makes it clear to the Corinthians that he was: appointed by God to be an apostle.

Some of us God chooses in a particular way so that his plan for all may be fulfilled. When this happens he intervenes with special helps and charisms so that his plan will not fail. He sends an angel to warn Joseph of Herod’s evil intentions and warns the wise men to return by a different way. He assists John the Baptist by revealing to him that: the man on whom you see the Spirit come down and rest is the one… .

Our liturgy today is full of evidence of God’s tireless initiative in achieving his plans for us:

• your watchful care
• orders all things
• your loving plans
• you have nourished us
• given wine in plenty

And there is ample evidence of our awareness and longing for God’s initiative:

• hear our prayers
• show us the way
• help us to embrace your will
• give us the strength to follow your call

People are generally very busy trying to make something of themselves; God is infinitely busier working at their project than they are. For each of us God has a plan; for each of us the blueprint is Jesus. To those extraordinary individuals for whom God has a special task he will give an unshakeable call. We need not worry; just keep praying. He will make it all clear.

In the scroll of the book it stands written that I should do your will (Responsorial Psalm), but if you should call me in a special way: Here am I, Lord.

Don't leave Rome without it.

The Baptism of the Lord - Year A

Isaiah 42:1-4.6-7; Acts 10:34-38; Matthew 3:13-17

No single word or line of the Old or New Testament can tell us all we need to know about Jesus. That would be like saying we can sum a person up in a word or sentence. The best we can do with a few words is give someone a label. For Jesus we might say Redeemer, Saviour, Son of God, or Word of God, but this does not exhaust his identity. These titles are merely doorways into the mystery of a God who chose to come among us as a man.

The revelation of who Jesus is comes to us through the Church in Scripture and the living Tradition. St Jerome claimed that ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ, and we might add that ignorance of the Tradition is also ignorance of Christ. And ignorance of Christ is, unavoidably, ignorance of God.

In order to know Christ we must immerse ourselves in both Scripture and Tradition.

To know Christ! This is the greatest joy we can experience; it is heaven. And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.(Jn 17:3) To know Christ is the aspiration of all our longing and prayer and good works. It is, in fact, the purpose of our life.

Pope Benedict’s recent exhortation Verbum Domini refers to Sacred Scripture as a divine pedagogy. This is a very helpful phrase. It means that in the Sacred Scripture God teaches us about himself. The entire Scripture is a great big lesson on God.

God’s teaching is contained in his wonderful act of creation, in the history of the Chosen People, in the history of mankind, and in the words of the prophets. That is why we always read from the Old Testament as well as the New Testament at each Sunday Mass. God’s divine pedagogy, begun in the Old Testament, comes to completion in the New, in Jesus, the Word made flesh, who came to accomplish the Father’s will and so redeem us.

Perhaps now we can understand more clearly how essential it is for a Christian to know the Scriptures. It’s not an optional extra for people who are ‘inclined that way’, it is an essential prerequisite for knowing the God we profess to worship.

The first reading from Isaiah claims our attention immediately. The words are inspired by God: Thus says the Lord; Here is my servant… . The divine pedagogy continues, adding brushstroke after brushstroke to the portrait of the mysterious figure of the Messiah.

The One who is to come is a servant; he has come to serve. Above all and firstly, Jesus is the servant of the Father: I have come from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of the one who sent me. (Jn 6:38) Jesus did not choose to come, he was chosen and sent. To be sent means that we have some service to perform.

Jesus came also to serve us. He came to set us free from sin and, in a few weeks, as we see Jesus hanging on the Cross groaning under the weight of our sins we will clearly see how he is truly a servant – washing us clean in his own servant blood.

Isaiah expresses the service of Jesus another way. He mentions three times that he is sent to bring true justice to the nations. No wonder his coming caused such upheaval. Jesus is himself the true justice he brings to the world. He is the truly just man. No wonder so many saw him as a revolutionary upsetting the established order of things. Could you live with such a man?

No wonder Jesus is the delight of his Father’s heart: No sculpture or painting can capture this beauty because it is a beauty within: Without beauty, without majesty (we saw him), no looks to attract our eyes, says Isaiah in another place. (Isa 53:2) The Father contemplates his Son – endlessly, joyfully. The face of Jesus is the face of his chosen one in whom his soul delights.

Jesus is delightful to his Father’s heart because the Father has endowed him with his own Spirit. Jesus is the work of the Father through the Spirit which ‘upholds’ Jesus. The Father looks beyond the physical face of Jesus into his inner depths and sees there all the beauty that He Himself is, the beauty of God.

Jesus speaks with the voice of God and acts in the same way that God acts. The Father Himself goes on to explain this through the prophet Isaiah: He does not cry out or shout aloud, or make his voice heard in the streets.

Jesus is a man of gentleness and peace. He is not noisy and aggressive, self-assertive, domineering. He is a man of humility and meekness: He does not break the crushed reed, nor quench the wavering flame. No one would be frightened of him, no one would run from him. He is a man of deep respect for and patience with others; always ready to wait for their response to his love.

He has come to open the eyes of the blind, to free captives from prison, and those who live in darkness from the dungeon. How wonderful he is! He never grows tired of our weakness or our failures. He never turns his back on us. He seeks to liberate us from the consequences of our sins.

Today God the Father himself presents his Son to the world: As soon as Jesus was baptised he came up from the water, and suddenly the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming down on him. And a voice spoke from heaven, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on him.’