Year 12 Valedictory - 2011

Luke 8:16-18

No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lamp stand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.

Pay attention to how you listen…

The gospel speaks of a lamp and a lamp stand and light.

Jesus, the Word of God, the Light of the world, is, of course, the lamp of God. God did not put him ‘under a jar’ or ‘under a bed’, as the gospel says, but put him on a lamp stand, on the Cross, so that his light would be seen by all.

Jesus is ‘the Word of God’. If you find that difficult to process just think of how, not a long time from now, many of you will be married and beginning to have children of your own. The word of your love for your wife, for your husband, will become flesh. You will be able to hold up your infant and say to your spouse: This is my love for you – made flesh.

Jesus is God’s word of love – made flesh – a Word which continues to be spoken to the world through the Church and her Sacred Scriptures.

Pay attention to how you listen…

The great Trappist monk Basil Pennington used to say that each of us was ‘a kind of listening’. He said that our ability to listen is determined by the totality of everything that has been a part of our lives since we were born. Our whole life has had a role in shaping the listening that we are.

And so, as things are spoken I can hear only those things which fall within the ‘bandwidth’, so to speak, of my listening.

If I am a very ‘set’ person, very rigid in my ideas and convictions and my ways then that is all I’ll get; all I’ll ever get.

But if I am a person open to the whole truth, then my listening will expand over the years, my ‘bandwidth’ will increase and I myself will grow.

Pay attention to how you listen…

But I must add that not every word is worth listening to. Some words will try to steal from you and then: even what you seem to have will be taken from you.

Make a habit of listening to the Word of God made flesh – his word alone enriches, matures, gives wisdom, peace, joy and life.

I met a young man in the United States some years ago who had experienced in his life most of the things parents pray their kids will never experience. We became friends and I advised him to make a daily habit of reading Scripture, as I was and am in the habit of doing. He wrote me a year later: I have read the bible every day and it’s putting me back together again.

So let me end by proclaiming again those wise words from Scripture: Pay attention to how you listen…

1st Sunday of Advent - Year B

Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1.3-8; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:33-37

Advent is not so much about waiting for the Lord with our noses pointing to the future, as about being ready for the Lord in the here and now.

The present moment is the only moment we have; it is a gift handed to us by the future and immediately reclaimed by the past. We cannot stockpile the present.

When Jesus comes it will be in the present moment; he will not come in the past nor will he come in the future – his coming is always now - because that is the only moment in time in which we exist.

Seen from our earthly perspective as people who live in space and time - only our now, like a portal or a wormhole, is open to the eternity in which God exists.

However, for God things are very different. God lives in an eternal now and our past, present and future are all equally present to him.

If God does not live in time, neither does he live in space. Time and space are as much created realities as trees and possums. Just as this world will one day come to an end, so will time and space and then there will be only eternity.

So the question Advent poses us is not will you be ready but are you ready – here and now? In other words, you will only be ready for the Lord when he comes if you are ready now.

As we all know, the man of today’s gospel is Jesus who lived among us on earth in time. He is ‘travelling abroad’ (ascended into heaven) but he will return. His return will be unexpected and decisive. No one knows the day or the hour of his coming which will be for all a moment of irreversible judgment. So, what Jesus says to his disciples and to all is simply: Stay awake.

This command of the absent Master is not, of course, a call to mass insomnia; but then, how are we to understand it? What does it mean to stay awake at all times, to be on our guard seven days a week, every week?

The gospel tells us that the man who has ‘gone abroad’ has left his servants (that’s us) in charge: each with his own task. Luke (12:43), speaking of this God-given task informs us: Happy that servant if his master's arrival finds him at this employment … . Therefore, to be ready for the Lord, awake, on our guard, is to be occupied now with the task which the Lord has given us.

Brother Lawrence, in his famous book The Practice of the Presence of God, makes it clear to us that each moment of each day God is to be found in the tasks to which he has called us. At the moment you are in this Church completing the weekly assignment the Lord has given us all to do: to worship him in and with the community of believers. Later on you will be back home and perhaps you will relax with members of the family and God will be there with you. Relaxing is very much a part of the ‘task’ God has given us to do.

The trick, of course, is knowing when and where we should be at any particular time of the day. This may require a bit of serious prayerful reflection. Occasionally I have seen young mothers at morning Mass and wondered who is looking after the children as they prepare for school. Sometimes those who are deeply involved in hobby activities have very untidy houses or feed their family a staple diet of takeaways. Others spend hours and hours occupied with one or other interesting pastime but have no time for helping out in the community.

It is not easy to be in the right ‘space’ at the right ‘time’. It requires honest, and sometimes courageous, discernment. And even when we get it right and find ourselves there, just where we should be, and at the right time, when we should not be somewhere else, we need to remember to do the what is required of us.

How many of us turn up to work on time but don’t do an honest day’s work? I find it easy enough to go to my prayer place every day at the time I should – but I don’t always find it easy to actually pray, especially when interesting distractions present themselves.

Every second of our life is pregnant with the possibility that the Lord will return. If there is anything we know about that moment it is that it will be unexpected. We must be ready. We must be at our employment. And if he arrives at 2am, hopefully he will find us fast asleep – on our guard, staying awake.

But as for the servant who says to himself, "My master is taking his time coming", and sets about … eating and drinking and getting drunk, his master will come on a day he does not expect and at an hour he does not know. The master will cut him off and send him to the same fate as the unfaithful. (Luke 12:45-46)

Christ the King - Year A

Ezekiel 34:11-12. 15-17; 1 Corinthians 15:20-26. 28; Matthew 25:31-46

The grand title of the Solemnity we celebrate today is Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King.  It takes a little while to let the full meaning of these words sink in – Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King – King of the Universe!

But what a shock the very first words of our celebration! - words which the Church places on our lips in the Entrance Antiphon: The Lamb who was slain… .

With the very first step we take to celebrate the great feast we are stopped dead in our tracks, stunned! Our Lord and Universal King is … the Lamb who was slain!

We Australians have some idea of what it means to have a king because we have a Queen. She is the Queen of Australia. Impeccably well-spoken and impeccably well-dressed she visits the various countries in her realm where gentlemen bow to her and ladies courtesy. Wherever she goes she rides in expensive limousines or in even more expensive royal coaches drawn by beautiful horses. Although today the Queen ‘rules’ her kingdom as little more than a figurehead it was not so long ago that the royal family ruled with absolute authority.

So, to call Jesus a King, even a Universal King, is not really a great difficulty for us. It just means that instead of ruling the British Empire he rules the whole universe. No problem! And what’s more, the gospel we have just read cooperates obligingly in reinforcing this traditional idea.

Centre stage, just as one would expect, there is ‘the throne of glory’ to which the Son of Man will come ‘in his glory’, escorted, unsurprisingly, by ‘all the angels’. He will take his throne and ‘all the nations’, every single human being ever born, will be assembled before him to be judged. Everything as it should be!

[The language of the Jerusalem Bible translation is wonderfully subtle. The nations will not just assemble, they will be assembled. We get a little bit of that sense of reluctance many will experience in coming before the great King as well as the power of the irresistible decree which commands their presence.

And they will not just be assembled; they will be assembled before him. The sheep belong to the shepherd and now, at long last, they will assume that proper relationship to him which human freedom frequently chose to ignore. And it will be precisely that relationship to the King which will constitute the substance of his judgment.]

But here we are in for another shock, or rather, we are in for the first shock all over again. The King will not pronounce judgment against us because we have failed the hungry, the thirsty, the lonely and the naked; he will pronounce us guilty because we have failed him! Not ‘they were hungry’ but ‘I’ was hungry!

In so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me – not to one of the least of these ‘subjects’ of mine but  to the least of these ‘brothers’ of mine -  not ‘you did it for me’ but ‘you did it to me’. It’s beginning to look as though we might need to radically rethink our understanding of Christ as Universal King.

It is, of course, the shepherd who calls the lambs and the goats to assemble before him. Jesus is king according to the Davidic model of shepherd-king. The beautiful image from the first reading sets this image firmly in our minds: As a shepherd keeps all his flock in view when he stands up in the middle of his scattered sheep, so shall I keep my sheep in view. Jesus truly is a ‘true shepherd’ to his sheep.

When the wolf approaches what does the true shepherd do? He becomes a sheep! No, more! He becomes a lamb.  He draws the wolf to attack him, rather than his sheep, and he becomes ‘the Lamb who was slain’.

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, became one of us and died in our place. In so far as the wolf did this to me, the shepherd, he did it to you – and as I rose from the dead, so did you.

Perhaps now we are a little closer to glimpsing the astonishing identification the shepherd makes with his sheep. If Jesus allowed us to be torn to pieces by the wolf in his flesh and to rise to new life in his resurrection, is it any wonder that he now considers any act of love towards us as love shown to him? In so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.

Jesus Christ is not just Lord, or King, he is our Lord, our King; he leads us from within ourselves; he is truly among us. We have been transformed into him, without ceasing to be ourselves – that is why we must love one another ... because it is the way he has loved us.

33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time - Year A

Proverbs 31:10-13. 19-20. 30-31; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30

To open the pages of a bible is to find oneself transported into a world, our world, created by God and ruled by God. This world, our world, is populated by an endless variety of characters: angels and demons; men and women and children, the good and the bad, foolish people and wise people, noble and despicable.

Many have names we easily recognise: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Saul and David, Jesus and Peter, James and John. But there are also lesser known figures like Hagar the Egyptian slave girl and her son Ishmael, Abimelech and Ephron, Rahab and Gideon. And then, of course, there are the fictional characters like, for example, those who appear in the parables of Jesus: the three servants of today’s gospel or the ten bridesmaids of last week.

The reason I mention all these people and the scriptural landscape they populate is that each one of them is presented to us not primarily for their human achievements but in terms of their relationship to God. It is as though we are privileged to see them as God sees them; through his eyes.

There are no, or at least few, blurry characters in the Bible, about whom we are left to wonder – they are clearly either for God or against him, good or bad. Some, like Judas, begin well but end badly while others, like Mary of Magdala, start off badly but become good.

Indeed, this seeing of the biblical persons through God’s eyes is an enormous help to us. It is as though we had first row seats in the school of wisdom and understanding. As God himself said to Samuel (1Sam 16:7): God does not see as man sees; man looks at appearances but God looks at the heart.

For us there is a triple effect in all this. We get to see the heart of the biblical characters ‘from the inside’ as it were; we get to see our own hearts in the same light; and most importantly, we get to know God.

When God says through Samuel (1Sam 13:14) that King David is a man after his own heart, it is the heart of God that is unveiled to us.

When Jesus tells , as he does in today’s parable, that a man is a ‘good-for-nothing servant’ who is not fit for the kingdom, he is revealing to us the workings of his own heart and showing us what he will look for in us. In other words, he provokes in us a kind of mini-judgment which we pass on ourselves. It is as though, if only for a moment, we see ourselves alongside those servants, under the scrutinising eyes of God.

If we confine ourselves, then, just to the gospel readings of the last three Sundays of the liturgical cycle we see they have at least four striking elements in common: a judge, a judgment, a reward and a punishment.

What we are dealing with here is what we traditionally call The Last Things – death, judgment, heaven, hell – or more precisely, the moment of our death, our judgment and our sentence. If we wish to make this really personal we might point to ourselves and say: my death – my judgment – my eternal sentence.

In a very real way it is possible to say that the whole of the Sacred Scripture is presented as a huge stage, with the spotlight of God’s judgment shining on the multitude of characters who act out the drama of sacred history.

Last Sunday the wise bridesmaids entered the wedding hall because they were ready while the foolish bridesmaids found themselves excluded. This Sunday two servants are rewarded for their faithful service while the third one is cast out. Next week the sheep will enter the kingdom of joy while the goats will go away to eternal punishment.

To read these parables attentively we cannot help but ask ourselves the question why. Why were these people rewarded or punished? What was it they did, or did not do, which caused them to be pleasing or displeasing to God?

To answer honestly is always to implicate ourselves; the parables are a mirror.

Do I take the demands of the Kingdom seriously enough? Do I ensure my flask of oil is always full? What is the flask of oil? What does it represent? What is the lamp?

Today we ask: What am I doing with the gifts God has given me? Have I put them in a hole in the ground? Am I a useful servant or an unprofitable one?

Am I preparing for the Master’s return and the moment of accounting?

Next week we the gospel draws us to see ourselves either as sheep or goats. We cannot seriously and honestly meditate on this parable without taking our place with one side or the other, remembering, of course, that it will be the Son of Man seated on his throne of glory, who will make the final judgment. Are we ready? Do we feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the lonely?

One unalterable fact remains for every person created by God, the question will be asked one day; a judgment will be made one day. Better for us to prepare today for what we will not be able to change tomorrow.

'Call no one on earth your father...'

'Call no one on earth your father...'

Some find this saying of Jesus rather perplexing despite the fact Jesus is clearly not speaking literally.

A protestant minister once told me adamantly that he could not call me 'Father' and quoted this very verse. I asked him what his people called him and he replied 'Pastor'. This, of course, means Shepherd, in Latin, so I asked him if he would not agree that we have only one Shepherd 'and he is in heaven'?

Even the English word 'Mr' is derived from the word Master.

In a parish I supplied in recently a parishioner asked me what I preferred to be called: Father or John? I reflected for a moment and answered 'Father'. She screwed up her face disapprovingly and said 'Don't you think that's .. um .. putting yourself on a pedestal?'

Her car was behind her, full of what I assumed were her grandchildren, and I asked her if they called her grandma or Bev (not her real name)? She was taken aback and energetically replied 'No, they call me Nan!' And so I asked her 'Don't you think that's putting yourself on a pedestal?' To give her credit she immediately saw (and accepted) my point.

Thirty-two years ago I gave up a very satisfying life as a secondary school teacher to become a spiritual father to God's Catholic people. All I can say is that I am grateful to all those who acknowledge and remind me of this fact by calling me 'Father'.

And, as one parishioner recently told me, 'When we call you Father we remind you of your responsibilities towards us.'