2nd Sunday of Lent - Year B

Genesis 22:1-2.9-13.15-18; Romans 8:31-34; Mark 9:2-10

Imagine you have just built a church, an immense, wonderful building. It is all finished and has never been used. All the furnishings are in place, the pews, the confessionals, the baptismal font, the altar, the pulpit, tabernacle, the priest’s chair, the paschal candle. All is ready for the first Mass.

You stand at the main door and look down the carpeted aisle between the pews and survey the architectural splendour of this new building and marvel at the beauty of the sanctuary and its decorations, each one more striking than the other. And then you ask yourself: What is the most important item in this building? What is the most sacred? What is the most essential?

The answer is, of course, the altar. Indeed, one might say that a church building is to all intents and purposes not much more than a house for the altar – and, of course, for the people.

Altars are as old as humanity; they seem to have been around from the beginning. When Cain and Abel made their offerings to God it is probable they placed it on an altar. We are not told this explicitly but we can suppose they did; probably a rock or a heap of rammed earth.

Noah, too, built an altar for God and offered burnt offerings there.

Sometimes I take the primary children of the parish school for a tour through the church and if they ask me I tell them: An altar is a place where we put things we want to give to God. And that’s not a bad working definition of at least one of the functions of an altar – a place on which we sacrifice to God.

When God appeared to Abram at Shechem Abram built an altar there ‘for God who had appeared to him.' (Gn 12:7) This is slightly different from using an altar for sacrifice.

Abram built an altar to mark the spot where God had revealed himself. I can easily picture him doing this. It is like lovers carving a heart in the tree under which they had that picnic at which he asked her to marry him.

Abram moves on from Shechem. We are told (Gn 12:8): From there, he moved on to the mountainous district east of Bethel, where he pitched his tent, with Bethel to the west and Ai to the east. There he built an altar to God and invoked the name of God.

Now I find that rather interesting! First God speaks to Abram who builds an altar to mark the spot and then, at another time and in another place, Abram builds an altar because he wants to speak to God.

Perhaps a second definition is presenting itself: An altar is a point of communication between God and man. This seems to be confirmed by what happens later (Gn 13:3-4): By stages he (Abram) went from the Negeb to Bethel, where he had first pitched his tent, between Bethel and Al, at the place where he had formerly erected the altar. Here Abram invoked the name of Yahweh.

The altar which holds our attention today is the one Abraham built on the mountain of Moriah. On this altar he was going to place something he wanted to give, or more precisely, something he had been commanded to give to God, namely, his only son Isaac.

But it was not only his son that he placed on that altar. He placed there also his humble recognition of God’s sovereignty; his obedient worship, not to mention his own broken heart.

Perhaps definition number three now proposes itself: An altar is a place on which we place our love for God and on which God places his love for us.

The altar in our cathedral church is a beautiful one. At every Mass we set there bread and wine; our offerings. The little white disks of bread lie on a golden dish and the wine is poured into a golden chalice. Still they remain pretty ordinary as offerings. Indeed, humanly speaking, the gold might be even more attractive than the bread and wine.

But the very poverty of these offerings underscores the fact that, when all is said and done, we have nothing worthy of God. We certainly cannot give him something he hasn't got; something he needs. Nevertheless, we bring what he has asked us to bring and we humbly place it on the altar - and God makes a switch - like he did to Abraham, replacing his offering with one of his own.

Through the words of the priest the gifts are transformed - transubstantiated, actually; they become the Body and Blood of Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. Our difficulty recognising him is the same one those who met the Lord 2000 years ago had: ‘Can this man really be God?’ Today we say, ‘Can this bread really be God?’

Yes, it is. We believe that at the moment of consecration the gifts of bread and wine become Christ himself. If you don’t believe this you are not a Catholic.

And these gifts have now become worthy of God who cannot refuse, cannot resist the gift of his own Son. As the Father welcomes his Son he welcomes also those who offer him.

That’s what we are here to do, so let’s get busy.

1st Sunday of Lent - Year B

Genesis 9:8-15; 1Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:12-15

The first command of Jesus’ public ministry is not forgive, serve, or even love - it is: Repent.

Of all the words he could have chosen it was this word, this challenge, this command which he spoke – Repent! Without preamble it refers us to the reality of sin and our need to deal with it decisively in our lives.

This call is addressed to every human being in the world, even those not yet born, and so it is a universal call, predicated on the solid understanding that everyone is a sinner needing redemption.

What’s more, it is a timeless call; it will never be changed. It is not a suggestion or a negotiable ‘ambit claim’. ‘Okay, so you find repenting a bit difficult, let’s try making it pray or, preach the gospel, or join a service club and do good work in the community.’

No, it is, and always will be – Repent, turn away from sin!

It is a universal call but also deeply personal – addressed in the first place to me – and only then to others. It comes from the lips of the Master who stands before me, hands on my shoulders, gazing into my eyes saying – John, the time has come, the kingdom is close at hand, repent!

The second command is: Believe the Good News. The second makes the first desirable, necessary and possible. It calls for us to move from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from death to life.

Repent and believe the Good News! It is a call from God to enter into communion with him, into the everlasting joy and peace of communion with the blessed Trinity itself.

To speak the words of repentance is easy enough; even to confess to a priest is not terribly difficult. It is the believing which, surprisingly, is the harder part. Jesus himself called believing ‘work’. When the people asked him: What must we do if we are to do the works that God wants? Jesus answered: This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent.

Believing is hard work because it inescapably includes works, the works of faith. As St James tells us (2:17.26): Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead; and again: A body dies when it is separated from the spirit, and in the same way faith is dead if it is separated from good deeds.

So when Jesus says we must believe he also means we must do the ‘works’ of believing. To put it into colloquial language: Walk the walk if you want to talk the talk! Live what you believe! Or yet again: Faith becomes real only when it is act-ualised!

Let me ask you – Is there some other way of getting from Melbourne to Darwin than by travelling? Can we believe ourselves there? No, of course not. The pilgrimage of faith is exactly like that – step by step, Mass by Mass, Confession by Confession, prayer by prayer, loving deed by loving deed.

God told Abram (Ex 12:1-2): Leave your country, your family and your father's house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation. Abraham believed totally, but he still had to set out on the journey of belief; he still had to cover the distance; he still had to perform the ‘works’ which made his faith real. Abram put his faith in Yahweh, who counted this as making him justified (2:6).

Last Wednesday our Christian journey brought us once again to the edge of the desert, the wilderness. We have to cross it; we have no choice; the Spirit himself requires it of us as he required it of Jesus whom he ‘drove .. out into the wilderness’.

The journey will take forty days (not including Sundays). To make this journey we must pray, fast, and give alms – and again, we have to do this in a way that is real.

These three spiritual ‘exercises’ have the goal of setting us free from attachment to sin, fulfilling the first of Jesus' commands: Repent! They also have the effect, if done seriously, of strengthening our belief in God and in the Good News – Jesus’ second command.

We take pleasure in many things in our lives – coffee, sweets, TV watching, music, talking. These are legitimate pleasures. And it’s a funny thing how depriving ourselves of legitimate pleasures like these can impact on our attempts to be free from our illegitimate ones. We might call it a kind of earth-based Purgatory which we voluntarily enter; a time of ‘purging’ ourselves in order to accept a new freedom to love God and neighbour.

Jesus made his journey courageously, perseveringly, lovingly. Let us pray in our Mass today that we will be graced by God to do the same.

Ash Wednesday - Year B

Joel 2:12-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6.16-18

Lent is a time of prayer, fasting and abstinence.

What is fasting? It can mean many things but traditional Christian fasting is a day or more on bread and water. Of course, diabetics, the sick, the elderly and people on a special diet should not fast. But for the fit and healthy fasting means bread and water.

More people than you realise have already been making a habit of doing this. It’s hard but not too hard; some days it’s harder than others.

What happens when you fast?

You go without - you get annoyed - you are being purified in soul.

• At breakfast you feel pious and holy.
• At lunchtime you say, ‘This is not so difficult!’ but you quietly wonder if the bread would be nicer toasted, or maybe wholegrain would be better?
• At tea time you are amazed at how unsatisfying bread and water can be and you think of margarine or peanut butter or cheese.
• At bedtime you wonder if it’s worth reading till midnight just so you can have a cup of coffee and a chocolate.

So what I’m saying is that fasting on bread and water is a fairly difficult but manageable penance. And it’s a funny thing – those tasty bits of food you think about on a fast day – they somehow don’t seem all that good the next, when you can have them.

Fasting is a penance and prayer which gets you deep down.

By the way, if you haven’t fasted before and you are a coffee or tea drinker – drink a cold glass of coffee in the morning and before you go to bed – to prevent a headache.

Why should we fast during Lent? [Some people fast every Friday of the year.]

Jesus says in the Gospel: The time will come … then they will fast.

Given the world situation is seems pretty clear; it is time to fast.

How can fasting help?

• It is a powerful prayer – pleasing to God. By fasting we give glory to God as we make a prayer with our mouth and our body.
• We do battle with evil habits. Fasting is invasive of our comfort zone, our routines. By depriving ourselves we open ourselves to God’s grace. We cannot change ourselves but God’s grace can change anything and everything.
• We bless our community by joining with others. We grow in awareness of others, especially those who have less.
• We begin to love ourselves more. Fasting brings joy to our hearts and makes it easier to forgive ourselves for the sins that are ours and to forgive others for the hurts they cause us.
• We experience ourselves more deeply and grow in self knowledge. We come to see just how attached we are to our comforts, to pampering ourselves. We experience our neediness, our weakness, our selfishness, our impatience. We come to see how afraid we are to step outside our normal way of life to do something a little more difficult for God.
• Through fasting we begin to create within and around ourselves an atmosphere, a climate of peace.

7th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

Isaiah 43:18-19.21-22.24-25; 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Mark 2:1-12

It is greatly troubling to a wife when her husband won’t acknowledge his illness. ‘Go to the doctor, please go to the doctor’ she begs; or, ‘I’ve made an appointment with the doctor for Tuesday, please keep it. He wants to see you.’

It is greatly troubling for a father when a son will not acknowledge he is doing something wrong, something that will lead to unhappiness for him, something which may lead to tragedy.

It is greatly troubling for a child when a parent’s behaviour, perhaps drinking, gambling, violence, or just plain absence is causing ever deeper anxiety and insecurity in the family.

And it is greatly troubling to God when his People’s hearts grow cold; when they begin to see his presence in their lives as a burden – and to shake it off, like the unwanted advances of a stranger, to go their own way – the wrong way.

How humiliating for God this must be, to have his love rejected by his own creatures; the work of his own hands! The prophet Micah allows us to imagine a kind of helpless bewilderment in God’s grief: My people, what have I done to you, how have I been a burden to you? Answer me (6:3).

The word ‘god’ has its roots in the ancient Indo-European word ghuto - meaning: that which is invoked or called upon.

It is the delight of the lover to be called upon by the beloved. Indeed, it is the essence of love to be always waiting upon the beloved: ‘I am here for you, always, day and night, always.’

But Israel no longer turns to her God. It seems that this presence of the One who has led them out from their slavery in Egypt into the freedom of the Promised Land, and who now longs for their love and their trust and their obedience, is just too much for them, and they turn away: Jacob, you have not invoked me, you have not troubled yourself, Israel, on my behalf.

To fail to invoke the Creator who exists to be invoked is a crime indeed – a crime of unimaginable proportions – a crime which denies God in the cruellest possible way. No wonder the Church declares it a mortal sin to deliberately fail in our obligation to attend Sunday Mass.

Moreover, those who imagine that they can turn from God to some other good are dreadfully mistaken. When we turn from God we turn from the light. When we turn from the light we embrace the darkness, and in the darkness there is no salvation.

An empty seat in the church belongs to someone; someone who has not ‘troubled’ himself. If an empty seat is an offence to God, a rebuke to God, a humiliation for God, what must we say about an empty church? And what must we say about an entire nation which has thrown off the burden of belief?

God himself is the victim of our selfish obtuseness, and yet he comes to our rescue. He knows there is no other help for us in heaven, on earth, or under the earth than himself.

I it is, I it is, who must blot out everything and not remember your sins.

When we find ourselves saying ‘Why am I the one who always has to bite his tongue, to give way, to be understanding, to smile?’ let us be grateful; we are being given a privileged opportunity to identify with the very heart of God’s mercy, whose name is Jesus.

It is at those moments we can invoke the one who waits to be invoked; acknowledging his incomprehensible goodness, and unlocking our lives to his lordship over us. In this way we gradually become what we believe. In this way Jesus is gradually formed in us and our discipleship becomes real.

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

Leviticus 13:1-2. 44-46; 1 Corinthians 10:31 – 11:1; Mark 1:40-45

Where did the leprosy go? We are told in today’s gospel that ‘the leprosy left him at once’ and he was cured. So what happened to it? Where did it go? And since leprosy in the Scriptures is supposed to be an image of sin we might well ask the much more important question, ‘Where does sin go? When Jesus forgives sin what happens to it – does it just evaporate?’

Leprosy does to an individual physically what mortal sin does spiritually. It makes him unclean, it makes him ugly, it cuts him off from the community and, finally, it kills him. Likewise, mortal sin makes the sinner unclean, ugly, cut off from the community and spiritually dead.

The Book of Leviticus (13:38-39) has this to say: A man infected with leprosy must wear his clothing torn and his hair disordered; he must shield his upper lip and cry, “Unclean, unclean”. As long as the disease lasts he must be unclean; and therefore he must live apart: he must live outside the camp.

The only way a leper could remain alive was to beg people to throw him money or leave him food. If anyone was silly enough to touch a leper they would contaminate themselves and would themselves be excluded from the community for a certain number of days, after which the priest would examine him and, hopefully, declare him to be clean.

So the leper in the gospel was way out of line in approaching Jesus; he should not have come anywhere near him because he was, in fact, ‘excommunicated’. That he dared to come within arm’s reach was the height of impertinence.

If you want to … you can cure me.

The leper had come to Jesus and fallen to his knees. Now he was pleading for a cure. His words are subtly ambivalent, almost suggestive of a challenge to the compassion of Jesus, but confident of his power.

Neither disease nor sin is part of God’s plan and Jesus immediately felt sorry for him. He had come to restore, to heal, to make whole and without hesitation he does the unthinkable; he: stretched out his hand and touched him.

Of course I want to ! … Be cured! And the leprosy left him at once and he was cured.

Perhaps we can see in this incident a kind of reverse of the miracle of next week’s gospel about the paralytic (Mk 2) who was let down through a hole in the roof. To the paralytic Jesus said: My child, your sins are forgiven; and then, when the scribes were scandalised he said: I order you: get up, pick up your stretcher, and go off home.

And we might well ask the question Jesus asked the scribes: Which of these is easier: to say to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven" or to say, "Get up, pick up your stretcher and walk?"

The physical points to the spiritual just as the spiritual points to the physical and we may well ask whether the leper’s sins were not forgiven, just as his body was made whole.

Jesus sternly orders the man not to speak of Jesus’ part in this healing but to go and show himself to the priests who would examine him and declare him clean. (Is this not what a priest does in the sacrament of reconciliation?)

Instead the man speaks of his healing freely and spreads the story everywhere. We might well wonder if the poor man shared Jeremiah’s (20:9) experience of: a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not bear it. Perhaps if he had remained silent in obedience to the Lord’s words: the stones would have cried out (cf. Lk 19:40).

At any rate, the consequences for Jesus are serious; he is now known to be ritually unclean because he had touched the leper and he: could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived.

So who’s the leper now? It is Jesus who bears the punishment of this disease. He becomes a leper without leprosy – as he became a sinner without sin – so that we might live.

Ours were the sufferings he bore, ours the sorrows he carried. On him lies a punishment that brings us peace, and through his wounds we are healed (Is 53:4-5).