Sunday Homilies from Australia

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

2012-01-26T13:42:00.006+11:00

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; 1Corinthians 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28

…he went to the synagogue and began to teach.
…his teaching made a deep impression on them…
…he taught them with authority.
…a teaching that is new…
…with authority behind it…

It must have been wonderful to see Jesus heal the sick. It must have been astonishing to see him cast out devils. It must have been awesome to see him raise Lazarus from the dead. Nevertheless, if I had a choice, I would like to have been able to see and hear Jesus teaching.

In Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, it was that short snippet of Jesus at table with his disciples at the Last Supper, just before his passion, which moved me most. To be honest, it gave me goose bumps. The apostles were seated round him, listening, eyes glued to him. His voice was gentle, confident and clear. He was teaching them.

There are two kinds of teachers: those who teach facts and those who teach truth. A mathematics teacher or a chemistry teacher might be said to teach facts, while Jesus, and his Church, her bishops and priests, teach truth. The Bible, now that we are on the subject, contains many facts, however, its overriding interest is in teaching truth.

A good teacher of the facts knows how to place the seed of knowledge into the minds of his students; a good teacher of the truth knows how to place the seed of truth not only into the minds but also into the hearts of his pupils.

But there is a complication. A good teacher is nothing before those who have closed their minds and hearts to him. Even the Lord was powerless before the stubborn refusal of the Pharisees to open themselves to his teaching. How often have I not experienced this in my own life. I recall vividly the absolute disbelief I felt when a parent approached me after school one afternoon (a Catholic secondary school) accusing me of teaching her children that abortion was a good and acceptable means of birth control. I couldn't believe it! Was I that bad a teacher? Fortunately I discovered afterwards that the reason was nothing to do with the quality of my teaching.

Jesus experienced this I’m-not-going-to-listen-to-a-word-you-say phenomenon long before I did, and it cut him to the heart.

A good teacher, apart from the quality of all that goes to make up a good teaching style, like clarity of voice and presentation, understanding of the ability level of his students, and so on, must believe in what he is teaching. He must be one with what he is teaching.

Parents cannot teach their children that honesty, discipline, forgiveness, or Sunday Mass is important if their own lives witness to the contrary. Children are very quick to spot a phoney and will most often judge the truth they are being taught by the integrity of the one who is teaching them.

Precisely here do we come to the astonishment good people felt before the teaching of Jesus: his teaching made a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority; and it was an authority he drew from both his humanity and his divinity.

We humans are a unity of various elements including the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, physical, psychological. But in none of us are these elements perfectly integrated. Therefore we find intellectual giants who are emotionally crippled, or psychologically damaged individual who are heroic saints.

This lack of integration or congruence was not the case with Jesus. His human integrity was flawless. Of Jesus we could say that he was truly whole, one with himself, seamlessly fused into human perfection.

What’s more, Jesus’ moral life was perfectly one with teaching. Jesus believed the truth he taught; Jesus lived the truth he taught; Jesus was the truth he taught. No wonder the poor demons could not resist his word – the word of God spoken by a perfect man – hypostatically united to the perfection of God.

Hebrews 4:12 fittingly describes the teaching of Jesus as the word of God which: is something alive and active: it cuts like any double-edged sword but more finely: it can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit, or joints from the marrow; it can judge the secret emotions and thoughts.

And so it did. The Pharisees rebelled at the truth and sought to destroy him; while the tax collectors and prostitutes welcomed him and were saved.

And what about you? Do you welcome the truth?

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

2012-01-19T22:03:00.003+11:00

Jonah 3:1-5.10; 1Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

The simple, clear, decisive message of all three readings today is that there is little time left for conversion; little time before we die and find ourselves standing before the judgment seat of the Lord.

Jonah preaches: Only forty days more …

St Paul writes: …our time is growing short.

Jesus proclaims: The time has come…

The true object of this critical shortage of time is conversion; your conversion, my conversion. Indeed, when we say ‘time for conversion’ we often overlook the ambiguity. Time and conversion go together; time is precisely for conversion – a gift from God which affords us an opportunity for conversion.

But how are we to understand the idea of conversion? What is it, really? Many think it simply means stop being bad and start being good. This answer has undoubted merit but it seems to me there is a more complete way of understanding conversion, and that is to see it as entering into a personal relationship with Jesus.

Simon and Andrew, James and John are pictured in the gospel with charming, and yet powerful, simplicity. They are fishermen. Simon and Andrew were casting a net in the lake; James and John were in their boats mending their nets.

And what was Jesus doing? He was just walking along.

Actually it’s quite a strong picture of daily life by the Sea of Galilee, and, despite the interval of 2000 years, a rather easy scene to equate with our own working lives. We all know what it is to be busy with our work, regardless of what that work may be.

Simon and Andrew are out in the boat casting their net in the sea to catch fish. The net and the boat are their ‘tools of trade’. They are concentrating, focussed, absorbed – they are ‘making a living’. James and John are sitting in their own boat which is pulled up on the shore. They are with their father; mending their nets. As they work they chat.

Boats and nets are such useful things to possess. They enable Simon and Andrew to go out onto the water to catch fish and bring them safely to shore. Inside the boat they can work in relative comfort and some degree of security.

However, if the two would-be apostles own the boat we might also say that the boat ‘owns’ them. Fishermen are tied to their boats and, we could almost say, ‘caught’ in their own net. They cannot do without either.

And it’s true of our own lives too. A truck driver may own a huge, beautiful Kenworth, but there is a sense in which we can say that it in turn owns him. Though the firm offers us a living we are all ‘property of the firm’.

So now along comes Jesus. He has already begun to proclaim the Good News from God: The time has come and the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News. In other words, he has already given the first half of the answer to the question ‘What is conversion?’ – in other words, turn away from sin and believe in the gospel. Now he completes the answer by saying: Follow me.

God does not just command us to ‘be good’. This would be a cruel command because he knows, and we know, all too well that we just can’t be good; we lack the power. We don’t have what it takes. Sure, we can from time to time ‘do’ a good thing, but to ‘be’ good, to become good, is beyond our reach.

That is why Jesus spoke those words to Simon and Andrew: Follow me and I will make you into fishers of men.

I will make you …

In discipleship is given the power for conversion, for transformation.

Simon and Andrew at once left their nets. They are now free; free to follow. Likewise James and John who left their father in the boat with the men he employed, and went after him.

The gospel today is in a way the Gospel for Dummies. Mark dramatises the call of Jesus, the leaving, and the following which are essential elements of conversion.

And so we find ourselves back at my preferred definition of conversion which is: to enter into a relationship with Jesus. This is the challenge to which we are called to respond today. We cannot make substitutions. Jesus didn’t say to the four future apostles ‘Be good’; he said ‘Follow me’.

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

2012-01-13T17:23:00.005+11:00

1Samuel 3:3-10.19; 1Corinthians 6:13-15.17-20; John 1:35-42

Life is full of arrivals and departures. No sooner do we reach our end than we’re summoned to set out anew, perpetual travellers, seeking the promised land of this or that friendship, the ideal job, a longed for promotion, the perfect spouse, a house of our own, the first child or, even, retirement. And, of course, there are those among us whose ‘home’ button on their spiritual GPS is firmly set to heaven.

To find one’s vocation in life is no small ‘arrival’. How many young men and women out there are wondering, sometimes with a nagging anxiety, whether they will ever find their purpose in life? Youth can be a very trying time.

To experience a particular call from God, a vocation, is to experience one of God’s greatest blessings. A religious vocation is primarily a call to adventure, and the image of journeying to the promised land is not altogether inappropriate.

I used to wonder a great deal about the infinitely patient and subtle way God has of calling some individuals to such a life, but with a listening, humble ear the message usually finds its target.

In my own case I used to ask God, as I struggled with the ‘call’ I imagined came from him, why he didn’t just come out and ask. Why not just somehow make the call once and for all, clear as a bell?

Strangely I found the Lord’s words in Exodus 23:30 very helpful. God was giving instructions and promises with respect to how the Israelites were to enter the Promised Land. At one point, referring to the warlike occupants of the land he tells the people: I shall not drive them out before you in a single year, or the land would become a desert where, to your cost, the wild beasts would multiply. Little by little I will drive them out before you until your numbers grow and you come into possession of the land.

Yes, of course, little by little, one yes followed by another yes, until knowledge and strength and confidence and faith and trust in the Lord grow to a point where we can have the courage to accept that we are being called and then, what we are being called to.

Naturally enough, in every vocational call God always ‘arrives’ first. Young Samuel, in the first reading, is lying down in the sanctuary of the Lord. Jesus, in the gospel, is very conveniently passing by the place where John and the disciples are standing. God always makes the first move. The next is ours; we must say Yes! Jesus waits for our response before he makes the next move, just as the Israelites had to capture the each town, before they could move on to the next.

Samuel answers the voice which calls him. He not only says: Here I am; but he gets up and runs to Eli. No wonder he deserves a second and then a third summons from the Lord. Eli eventually understands what is going on and points the way forward for Samuel.

John the Baptist too, points out the Lord for his disciples: Look, there is the lamb of God.

Hearing this, the two disciples followed Jesus; and because they responded the Lord was able to make the next move:

What do you want?

Rabbi, … where do you live?

Come and see.

So they went and saw .. and stayed with him the rest of that day.

Invitation – response – new invitation – new response, and so on, and so on … ‘til the promised land is reached.

Note also how the Lord uses others in helping both Samuel and the two future apostles on their journey. It’s a lesson for us too. We should not be slow to accept the advice of discerning and proven spiritual guides if it promises to lead us to the Lord. That is why we read the sacred Scriptures in all our sacramental celebrations.

Just listen, for example, to the wise and holy advice of St Paul in the second reading: Keep away from sex outside marriage…you should use your body for the glory of God. St Paul is speaking God’s words; words which seek our response. Perhaps for those whom the Lord is calling to a vocation as priest or religious – the adventure begins here.

The Epiphany of the Lord - Year B

2012-01-06T22:05:00.006+11:00

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:2-3.5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

In the Church we speak of the ‘ministry of presence’, and rightly so. The presence of a convent of holy religious, for example, just by virtue of their presence in a parish can make an enormous difference. It is as though they mysteriously change the atmosphere, the air quality of the place. And it’s amazing how people will find their way to the convent door. There may be no star rising and halting over the roof but word soon gets round.

This miracle of presence is very much in evidence in the Christmas gospels. Jesus doesn’t do anything at all; he just arrives. Nevertheless, everything is different; the whole world has changed. We could almost say that the rest of the Scriptures, indeed the rest of human history, is really nothing more than the story of what individuals and groups do in response to this ‘presence in our midst’; a presence which ‘discovers’ us.

Today’s gospel is a microcosm – a miniature – of that drama.

The divine Infant has entered the world and now rests peacefully in his mother’s arms. Perhaps it would not be altogether wrong to recall here the words of Isaiah: He does not cry out or shout aloud or make his voice heard in the streets…(42:2).

Jesus has been sent by the Father in accordance with the Father’s plan and it is the Father's will to make the Child known: …a joy to be shared by the whole people Lk 2:10).

But observe how the Almighty goes about this. He sends an angel to announce the birth of the Redeemer first to some poor shepherds in a field watching over their sheep in the dead of night: And suddenly with the angel there was a great throng of the heavenly host, praising God and singing: 'Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace to men who enjoy his favour (Lk 2:13-14)'.

Heaven opens its splendour and delivers its glorious message to a handful of nobodies. It’s as though the entire spectacle of Sydney’s New Year’s Eve fireworks were to be presented to just three or four individuals. A modern marketing manager would say to the Father, ‘Step aside, Lord, I’ll show you how to get your product out there.’

The Father’s next ‘grand move’ seems, humanly speaking, even more puzzling. By the guidance of another heavenly manifestation, this time a star, he draws three pagan astrologers from the East (Iran?) to the house where the infant Jesus is to be found with Mary and Joseph. Just three men from a foreign land!? Again we have the same ‘cosmic’ proclamation made to a tiny group of individuals.

To make matters worse, the wise men stop off at Bethlehem and alert precisely the wrong person to the birth of the ‘King of the Jews’. Herod is terribly troubled by the news and, typical of so many with vested interests, sets out to eradicate what he perceives as the threat.

What we see in this snippet from the life of Jesus is, in fact, a miniature of the drama of salvation which is to unfold, and which is still unfolding, among us. It is as though God has ‘sketched’ the outlines of the painting, outlines which the fulness of time will colour in.

And so, from the Epiphany event we learn a few truths:

The Father is presenting the world with his only Son, born of the Virgin. He is indeed ‘King of the Jews’, as the wise men call him, but only when he is ‘exalted’ on the Cross will the title take on its most accurate meaning.
The Father has a plan to make his Son known to the world. It is a sovereign plan; which, despite all resistance, will be fulfilled. Herod may plot but God’s purpose will be accomplished– the wise men will simply return ‘by a different way’.
God sees the heart. The presence of God’s Son on earth will reveal what lies in the hearts of men. The Magi who travel to seek the divine child travel in a line as straight as their hearts; while Herod shows himself to be evil. He is the precursor of all those throughout history who will oppose Jesus in one way or another, trying to expunge him from the earth.
God has come for all men. The Magi were pagans, perhaps even astrologers, and were invited to find and worship the Lord of the Universe. He was revealed to them and before him they fell to their knees and ‘did him homage’.

And at this point let us allow the spotlight to shift from these humble truth-loving and truth-seeking hearts to ourselves. What about us? What is our reaction to God’s presence in our midst?

We need go no further than his presence in the Eucharist. What is our … ‘position’; what stance do we take towards the Lord here present not only ‘among’ us – but ‘before’ us – in the tabernacle? How do we relate to his presence in the Scriptures; in the priest? And how do we relate to his presence in those gathered in his name?

In all four of those presences it is truly him; truly the same Lord as the Magi found.

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God - Year B

2011-12-30T22:08:00.011+11:00

Numbers 6:22-27; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

Some years as a member of the Legion of Mary has inscribed on my heart the beautiful antiphon of the Catena Legionis which is said every day by Legionaries. It reads: Who is she that comes forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in battle array?

These words are borrowed from the Song of Songs (6:10) and the liturgy applies them to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The demons are terrified of this woman, they run from her and, as the exorcists tell us, they dare not even pronounce her name. To them she is terrible as an army set in battle array; she makes them quake in fear. Do you know why?

The Jerusalem Bible translation is intriguing and helpful: Who is this arising like the dawn, fair as the moon, resplendent as the sun, terrible as an army with banners? Yes, an army with banners; and on each of these banners blazes a word abhorrent to Satan – humility, obedience, love, mercy, recollection, purity, peace, compassion, adoration, faithfulness, light. On and on it goes … and Satan flees in terror.

Another arresting aspect of this delightful line from the Song of Songs is the almost haunting question ‘Who is she…?' with which it begins. This question has drawn Christians down the centuries to deepest contemplation while the Church herself strives to penetrate the mystery of God’s action in this humble maiden who gave birth to the Redeemer.

Who is she? The first answer to this question is: She is the Mother of God. It is her Motherhood, the greatest of her privileges, which attracts to Mary all the other graces associated with her; chiefly – her Immaculate Conception, her perpetual Virginity and her Assumption into heaven.

The second answer to this question must always be: She is my Mother, too. If Mary can be set among the stars, standing on the moon and clothed with the sun, in recognition of her cosmic status as Mother of the Saviour, she can be as easily set on a dusty road in Galilee, pushing open the door of her cousin Elizabeth’s house, or standing under the Cross of her agonising Son. Mary knows us; she knows our name and our needs and does not hesitate to 'stoop' to our necessities.

Mary is the Mother of Jesus and she is our Mother too; this is the rôle God has assigned to her and for this reason, because she is an essential part of God’s redemptive plan, we honour her not out of a kind of ‘optional’ devotion but from the heart of the Catholic Faith. Devotion to Mary does not start ‘in us’ but in God's Will.

If we wish to sing the praises of the God who saved us we must sing the praises of Mary through whom he chose to do so by making her the Mother of the Saviour. If only this were better understood, especially by those so-called ‘mature and adult’ Catholics who no longer desire to know her and honour her.

Some years ago I had the pleasure of standing at the top of Niagara Falls watching the thundering waters pouring over the cliffs into the depths below. To me it was an image of how grace pours into Mary’s soul, freely and abundantly, making her the Mother of God.

But these waters did not just pile up below; they flowed out for the benefit of others, for your benefit and mine. Mary does not hoard grace; she passes on to her children what she receives from God because she is truly our Mother.

This ‘letting go’ of Mary included even the God-given gift of her divine Son. If St Paul can say: Since God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up to benefit us all, we may be certain, after such a gift, that he will not refuse anything he can give (Rm 8:32); then surely we can say: ‘Since Mary did not spare her own Son, but gave him up to benefit us all, we may be certain, after such a gift, that she will not refuse anything she can give.'

All that Mary receives from God she passes on to us, to the extent that we are willing to receive and respond to these gifts of grace. Even here she comes to help us. As she formed Jesus in herself so she will, if we ask her, form him in us.

Let me conclude in a very practical way. If you really wish Mary to be your Mother on your journey through life, so that you may reach heaven your goal, then don’t get into bed tonight, on this first day of the New Year, without having given yourself to her to be her child. Kneel down and say, ‘Mary, all that I am and have is yours. I belong to you. I am your child. Please be my Mother and keep me safe for heaven.’

Christmas Mass of the Day - Year B

2011-12-25T09:52:00.007+11:00

Isaiah 52:7-10; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of one who brings good news…

Good is always beautiful – and that’s why the Good News is beautiful. And the beautiful Good News makes beautiful the one who bears it. This is what Isaiah meant when he said those fascinating words: How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of one who brings good news…

Beautiful … feet …on the mountains …

The feet, of course, belong to Jesus, who brings and who is himself – the Good News.

He comes to us from God, from heaven. His human feet which touch the earth are the feet of God. What a mystery!

Isaiah had prayed (63:19): Oh, that you would tear the heavens open and come down…

And now he is here.

In our imaginations we gaze … and ponder. It is only the humanity, the feet, we see; the divinity is hidden. How clever of Isaiah to use this image!

And how tempting to use of Jesus the words of the Song of Songs: How beautiful are your feet in their sandals; or to do as the ‘woman who had a bad name’ (Lk 7:38): She waited behind him at his feet weeping, and her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them away with her hair; then she covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the ointment.

In this woman the whole of humanity finds a poignant expression of the love and devotion to which we too are called. How beautiful are the feet of God!

John the Baptist spoke with profound humility, in fear and trembling: I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals.

God had revealed through Isaiah that heaven was his throne and earth his footstool (cf. Is 66:1).

No wonder there were so many who threw themselves down before his feet.

The demoniac who: Catching sight of Jesus from a distance, he ran up and fell at his feet…(Mk 5:6).

Jairus, the synagogue official, who came up: and seeing him, fell at his feet…(Mk 5:22).

The woman healed from a haemorrhage: came forward, frightened and trembling because she knew what had happened to her, and she fell at his feet….(Mk 5:33).

The woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit who: came and fell at his feet….(Mk 7:25).
And after the resurrection: the women came up to him and, falling down before him, clasped his feet (Mtt 28:9).

And no wonder Satan, full of jealousy, tempted the Lord Jesus: I will give you all these…if you fall at my feet and worship me (Mtt 4:9). How easily applied to Satan the words of Prov 6:18: a heart that weaves wicked plots, feet that hurry to do evil…

Poor Satan! Did he not realise what Paul was later to make so clear about the Lord: He has put all things under his feet and made him, as the ruler of everything…(Eph 1:22).

Yes, indeed, he has put all things under his beautiful feet; feet which Satan, in a last ditch effort to stop them bringing the Good News to the world, would incite the Jewish elders to nail to the cross.

But all to no avail. Satan might more easily have stopped the sun from rising, that sun of which Zechariah spoke when he foretold that the Father: Will bring the rising Sun to visit us, to give light to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace (Lk 1:79).

Yes, when all is said and done we see that it is really all about ‘our’ feet. As Jesus washed the feet of the Apostles at the last supper he commanded them: If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you should wash each other's feet (Jn 13:14).

With these words Jesus gave us our mission: you should wash each other’s feet.

Satan as he does even today, tried his hardest to impede the spread of the Gospel.

So, following his instructions, he threw them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks (Acts 16:24).

Our Mass usually ends with the words: Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord. These are the Lord’s own words spoken now through his Church; words which we should take not just as a command but as a promise of power.

Let us go, then, as St Paul says: wearing for shoes on your feet the eagerness to spread the gospel of peace (Eph 6:15).

Christmas Vigil Mass (for children) - Year B

2011-12-20T18:12:00.003+11:00

Isaiah 62:1-5; Acts 13:16-17.22-25; Matthew 1:1-25

Today I’d like to direct my thoughts to the young people here.

When I was a teenager I remember watching a movie about a spaceship which landed on earth. An alien came out carrying a box on his chest. He walked down the steps from the spaceship carrying this box and soldiers were ordered to shoot him – and they did.

Later on they discovered that in the box was a cure for cancer! Can you imagine, a cure for cancer? But it was too late; they had killed the alien and now they couldn’t open the box.

What do you imagine God would give to humanity if he came to us from heaven with a gift? Would it be a cure for some horrible disease, or a way to stop tsunamis or earthquakes?

Well, of course, God has come down to earth and he has given us a present - not possessions or money or health – but a Baby – a human baby who is also God!

God gave us a baby:

firstly, because he doesn't want to frighten us and no one is frightened of a baby. How often does he say in the Christmas story ‘Do not be afraid’? To Zachariah, to Mary, to Joseph, to the shepherds. God says ‘Do not be afraid’.
secondly, because every baby is a promise of new possibilities, a new future - this baby especially, because heis the future. Baby Jesus wants to take us to our future where all our dreams are realised.
because every baby is a sign of love; this is the secret of babies; babies are made by love. It is the love of a mother and father which causes a baby to come into the world and, in the case of Baby Jesus, it was the love of the blessed Virgin Mary which cooperated with the love of God himself.
because a baby knows how to just be - without ambition, without plans - just to be happy. In this way babies show us what it will be like for us in heaven - just happy to be there together, in our Father’s house.
because every baby is innocent and totally accepting of us – non-judgmental. A baby does not compare us to other people but takes us just as we are because they are innocent themselves and happy to be themselves – and especially this baby because he is Innocence.
because every baby is powerless – weak, helpless, vulnerable, dependent. That’s why we are happy to accept this baby, because it needs us to give it a home.
because every baby, but especially this baby, is an invitation to friendship; this baby wants to be our friend; to be loved by us.

Let’s think a bit more about this invitation to enter into friendship with Jesus.

Because Jesus is so attractive we want to be friends with him; in fact, we want to become like him so that our friendship will become more and more solid.

That’s why Baby Jesus is so endlessly fascinating. He captures our heart because he is everything we would like to be, everything we are meant to be.

Once we are friends with Jesus our parents can relax; they have no more worries about us because with Jesus as our friend we are safe.

Friendship with Jesus gives meaning to our lives. It’s what we were created for. ‘To know him, love him, serve him … and to be happy with him forever.’

Dear parents: this relationship is not easy – it’s not a game. You can’t play at it at Christmas and Easter Time – it won’t work that way.

Friendship with Jesus is demanding, we have to work at it – it is a total commitment – you can’t turn it off and on. For a Catholic it means coming to the Eucharist every Sunday and celebrating with Jesus’ other friends. It means being ready to say sorry in the sacrament of Reconciliation when necessary. It means daily family prayer and good works.

You, dear parents, will have to answer for how you gave your child an opportunity to come to know Jesus. You have a serious responsibility which you took on when you asked for Baptism for your child.

Jesus is not someone else’s baby – he is ours; we can’t hand him back – he claims us. We can’t pack him up in the cupboard after Christmas like the plaster baby in the crib.

Friendship with Jesus calls us to change our ways, our habits, our life; it calls us to be different from the world. It makes us grow on the inside and gives healing to our own woundedness. Jesus makes us whole again. He gives life and peace – already here on earth but especially in heaven. That’s where we can all truly say, ‘Merry Christmas!’

Archbishop urges lapsed Catholics to just leave the Church

2011-12-13T14:12:00.001+11:00

In response to

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4th Sunday of Advent - Year B

2011-12-12T15:19:00.001+11:00

New Page 1

2Samuel 7:1-5.8-12.14.16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

As Christmas approaches what troubles you most about the world? About our culture? About your family? About yourself? As a year comes to a close and a new year begins, what troubles you most about the future? We all have plans for the future. Our anxiety about the future is that something is going to come along and wreck our plans.

Today’s readings tell us one very important thing. God has plans for us and nothing will wreck his plans. The way to real peace in our hearts is to make God’s plan our own; to make a conscious decision to relinquish our own plans for our life and to let God’s plan rule. As the Lord’s Prayer says: Thy will be done.

King David conceived what he thought was a wonderful plan; he was going to build a house for the Lord to dwell in. He had it all worked out.

God hears of David's wonderful plan; he is aghast: It was I who took you from the pasture and from the care of the flock to be commander of my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you went, and I have destroyed all your enemies before you. And I will make you famous …

Will you build me a House? No! If there’s any building to be done, it will be done by me!

If God does not build the house, in vain do the builders toil… (Ps 127:1)

God's plan is to build David into an everlasting house, a house which will stand for ever; a house from which will be born the Messiah.

You see how our plans are nothing beside those of the Lord. They say that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

God has a Master Plan which began with creation and was first revealed to us in the Garden of Eden; a plan of salvation involving a Woman and her Offspring. We see this plan swing into action with the opening words of today’s gospel: The angel Gabriel was sent by God… .

Sent by God – yes, it is truly his plan – and as we listen we hear it unfold for us: You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David; he will rule over the house of Jacob for ever and his reign will have no end.

You are to conceive … you must name him .. he will be great … he will be called … the Lord God will give him the throne … he will rule .. his reign will have no end. Do you recognise the sharpness and clarity of the angel’s message? Do you sense the non-negotiable, unstoppable, irresistible thrust of God’s plan?

The Holy Spirit will come upon you … and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the childwill be holy and will be called Son of God.

As it was promised, so it will be, and so it is. Truly, nothing is impossible to God.

And so we read: The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

Lots of proper nouns here – Gabriel, God, Galilee, Nazareth, Joseph, David, Mary – a plan foreknown and prepared before anything was created; realised in time, and set in the mortar of obedient love.

Mary’s plan had been to live a single life in the service of God but she immediately yielded to his plans: I am the handmaid of the Lord … let what you have said be done to me.

Mary’s womb becomes a Temple more beautiful and lasting than any Temple we could possibly build; God’s plan is always a living plan, constructed from the lives of his children.

In the face of newspaper headlines which daily threaten disaster and doom we should rejoice that there exists for us the possibility of throwing away our finite and fragile plans and surrendering to the beautiful and eternal plan of the Almighty.

Let us not forget the words of St Paul: and you too, in him, are being built into a house where God lives, in the Spirit (Eph 2:22).

And again: there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens (2 Cor 5:1).

3rd Sunday of Advent - Year B

2011-12-07T10:46:00.001+11:00

Isaiah 61:1-2, 10-11; 1Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

Today is Gaudete Sunday; JoySunday! It is a day for considering all that we as Christians can rejoice aboutand, of course, when all is said and done our greatest joy, our only final joy, is our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

This truth can be expressed in many ways and so I asked a few people how they would express their joy and here area few of the answers I got.

"I rejoice because God is lookingfor me. I sometimes feel like I imagine Stuart Diver must have felt whenhe was buried all that time in the avalanche in the snow fields; helpless,doomed, alone, cold and desperate. He must have been so glad to hear the noiseof the people looking for him. The Scriptures tell me, and so do the prayers ofthe Eucharist, God is looking for me. He has sent his Son Jesus to find me. Ilie there trapped in all the weakness of human life and I long to be rescued and to see the face of my rescuer. I know he will find me one day; he will come for me and save me. Not everyone has this longing for him or thistrust in him. I rejoice that I have been granted this gift."

"I rejoice because he is near. This is exciting! He is not far away. He is near because my stay on earth,however young I am, will soon end. Death is not a falling asleep, it is awaking up. And he is near in his Second Coming. He has promised and I believehis promise. This gives me so much joy. Many people do not have the gift of this senseof meaning in their life. They wait for death. Christians wait for life andlife is coming; it is near."

"I rejoice because he is here. Asthe Scripture says: He stands among you. Jesus is in our world but heis not recognised. He is here already among us actively working to saveus in all sorts of ways. What a gift this presence is! He is also present in my heart, in my life."

"I rejoice because He is myRedeemer, my Saviour. He will save me from all those things I am so afraidof - my weakness and sinfulness, Hell, Satan, death. He is my Saviour andhe is stronger than any other person or thing. He is Lord of all and has power overall. I rejoice that my God is THE God and that in Him I am safe."

"I rejoice that I am a member ofsuch a big lovely family, God’s family. Whenever I meet a catholic whobelieves as the Church believes I am immediately at home. I click with thatperson, we are friends. We understand each other - we ‘love’ each other."

"I rejoice that I have a gift togive God that is worthy of him, the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist. I knowthat when I give this gift to God it is pleasing to God and it expresses mylove for God in a way that God accepts. The Eucharist is the gift that Godwants me to give him and it is the gift I want to give him."

"I rejoice that I have a place toconfess my sins where he is waiting for mewith the priest. He always forgives me. He understands me. He is gentle withme. He helps me. I rejoice in this sacrament because it gives me a new start.It is God’s mercy at work on my behalf."

"I rejoice that I know where I amgoing in life. My life is a journey and I know it’s destination. So many peopledon’t know where they are going. I do. And I have all the help I need to getthere from the Church and from the sacraments."

"I rejoice that Jesus has takenthe one thing I don’t like about life i.e. suffering and made it into akind of treasure for me, fuel for my relationship with him. He could have taken anyaspect of human life and turned it into this treasure but he chose suffering. Iam so glad that I have found joy in suffering. I never thought it was possiblebut it is. He has given it meaning because I find him there."

2nd Sunday of Advent - Year B

2011-12-02T13:02:00.001+11:00

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Isaiah 40:1-5.9-11; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

Isaiah declares: Here is the Lord coming with power …
St Peter says: So then, my friends … do your best to live lives without spot or stain so that he will find you at peace.
St Mark tells us: A voice cries in the wilderness proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

No one has ever thought of a better way of preparing for the Lord’s coming than by the confession of sin: All Judaea and all the people of Jerusalem made their way to him, and … they confessed their sins.

The call to repentance will not come from the busy, pleasure-seeking, money-making world; it comes as a clear, unambiguous call from Christ through his Church to the recollected, uncluttered places within our heart. There is no doubt about it, no confusion; it is the simple call the Gospel makes to all of us today, “Repent and confess your sins.”

So today, let us together examine our consciences and resolve to go to confession if we recognise our guilt.

1. I am the Lord your God. You shall not have strange gods before me.

Do I pray to God every day?
Have I thanked God for His gifts to me?
Did I engage in superstitious practices, such as palm reading, tarot cards, ouija boards or fortune telling?
Do I seek to surrender myself to God's Word as taught by the Church?
Have I ever received Communion in a state of mortal sin?
Have I ever deliberately told a lie in confession or have I withheld a mortal sin from the priest in confession?

2. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Did I take the name of God in vain?
Did I curse or take a false oath?
Have I been angry with God?
Have I wished evil upon another person?

3. Remember to keep holy the Lord's Day.

Did I miss Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation through my own fault?
Do I fully participate at Mass?
Did I fast and abstain on the prescribed days?
Do I do needless work on Sunday?

4. Honour your father and your mother.

Do I honour my parents?
Did I disobey my parents or lawful superiors in important matters?
Have I neglected my duties to my spouse and children?
Have I given my family good religious example?
Do I try to bring peace into my home life?
Do I care for my aged and infirm relatives?

5. You shall not kill.

Have I had an abortion or encouraged anyone to have an abortion?
Have I physically harmed anyone?
Have I abused alcohol or drugs?
Did I give scandal to anyone, thereby leading them into sin?
Have I been angry or resentful?
Have I harboured hatred in my heart and desired revenge?
Have I mutilated myself through any form of sterilization?
Have I encouraged or condoned sterilization?

6. You shall not commit adultery.

Have I been faithful to my marriage vows in thought and action?
Have I engaged in any sexual activity outside of marriage?
Did I use artificial means to prevent conception?
Have I been guilty of any homosexual activity?
Am I careful to dress modestly?

7. You shall not steal.

Have I stolen or wilfully damaged what is not mine?
Have I returned or made restitution for what I have stolen or damaged?
Do I waste time at work, school or at home?
Do I gamble excessively, thereby denying my family of their needs?
Do I pay my debts promptly?
Do I seek to share what I have with the poor?

8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

Have I lied?
Have I gossiped?
Have I spoken behind someone else's back?
Have I been insincere in my dealings with others?
Am I critical, negative or uncharitable in my thoughts of others?
Have I broken confidentiality?

9. You shall not covet your neighbour's wife.

Did I wilfully entertain impure thoughts, or commit impure acts, alone or with others?
Did I wilfully look at indecent pictures, watch immoral movies, or read immoral books or magazines?
Did I engage in impure jokes or conversations?

10. You shall not covet your neighbour's goods.

Am I jealous of what other people have?
Do I envy the families or possessions of others?
Am I greedy or selfish?
Are material possessions the purpose of my life?
Do I trust that God will care for all of my material and spiritual needs?

Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, through his Church, is calling us to repent and, if necessary, to confess our sins now! Let us be humble and wise and follow his call.

Year 12 Valedictory - 2011

2011-11-26T15:01:00.001+11:00

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, butput 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 toprocess just think of how, not a long time from now, many of you will bemarried and beginning to have children of your own. The word of your love foryour wife, for your husband, will become flesh. You will be able to hold up yourinfant and say to your spouse: This is mylove for you – made flesh.

Jesus is God’s word of love – made flesh – a Word whichcontinues to be spoken to the world through the Church and her SacredScriptures.

Pay attention to how you listen…

The great Trappist monk Basil Pennington used to say thateach of us was ‘a kind of listening’. He said that our ability to listen is determined bythe totality of everything that has been a part of our lives since we wereborn. 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 thingswhich fall within the ‘bandwidth’, so to speak, of my listening.

If I am a very ‘set’ person, very rigid in my ideas andconvictions 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 mylistening will expand over the years, my ‘bandwidth’ will increase and I myselfwill 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 whohad experienced in his life most of the things parents pray their kids willnever experience. We became friends and I advised him to make a daily habit ofreading Scripture, as I was and am in the habit of doing. He wrote me a yearlater: I have read the bible every dayand it’s putting me back together again.

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

1st Sunday of Advent - Year B

2011-11-26T13:43:00.001+11:00

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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)

So long ...

2011-11-19T00:10:00.001+11:00

Dear Reader,

I'm taking a break from this blog. It seems I've blogged myself to a standstill. I'll take it up again when I feel I might have something to offer. Thanks for your past support through comments and emails. I'll leave the blog up in case you find it useful. Peace.

Fr John Speekman

The Communion of Saints?

2011-11-14T14:43:00.001+11:00

The Church Triumphant

The Church Suffering

The Church Dissident

Christ the King - Year A

2011-11-14T14:26:00.001+11:00

New Page 1Ezekiel 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 lifein 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

2011-11-09T11:09:00.002+11:00

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Proverbs 31:10-13. 19-20. 30-31; 1Thessalonians 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 callThe 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...'

2011-11-02T09:10:00.001+11:00

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.'

32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-10-31T12:00:00.000+11:00

Wisdom 6:12-16; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13

There are five words in the Gospel today which present us with a very simple image of the most critical moment in all human destiny.

Those five words are: ...and the door was closed.

The image is simple enough - a closed door. Since the bridesmaids who came later could not get in we can assume also that the door was locked, or perhaps it had no handle on the outside.

That door is the most important door in the whole of existence, it is the door to the wedding banquet, to the Kingdom of God - the door to heaven.

But this image of a door is also the image of a decisive moment:Those who were ready went in with him to the wedding hall and the door was closed.

We may wonder, does the door of heaven make a noise when it closes? Does it close with a thunderous, frightening, once-and-for-all bang? And, if heaven is a place of light and joy, when the door closed did it leave all those on the other side in darkness and in deep silence? We can only wonder.

The whole purpose of the parable is to get us thinking about the choices we make during our life which prepare us for that moment when the door closes - choices which will make sure that we are on the right side of the door.

Surely one of the lessons of this Gospel is that once the door is shut, it won't be opened again, for anyone.

When God invited Solomon to ask for any gift he desired he asked for wisdom! - wisdom to run his kingdom. Would you have thought of asking for something like that? 'Gosh, Lord, I do have a huge mortgage, and those credit card bills, and then, of course, my health problems, my kids, and I would like a good holiday - but no, Lord, I know what I want - give me wisdom.'

We thrill at the compelling image, which emerges from the heart of the first reading, of wisdom energetically roaming the streets searching for those who are searching for her.

We can apply to wisdom what St Augustine said of God: You would not be seeking him if you had not already found him.

So in the time remaining let's look at the first reading. There are two characters on stage: Wisdom, and the one who values her.

Those who want Wisdom:

love her
look for her
desire her
watch for her
think about her
are on the alert for her
are worthy of her

It's pretty obvious that these people really do value wisdom because the search for her seems to preoccupy them.

Wisdom herself:

is bright
is readily seen
is readily found
is quick to anticipate
makes herself known
is sitting at your gates
walks about looking for those who are worthy of her
graciously shows herself
comes to meet [those who seek her]

What does all this tell us?

We obtain wisdom by wanting her.
Those who want wisdom go looking for her.
Wisdom wants to be found and gives herself readily to those who seek her.
Those who receive her desire her even more.

So eager is wisdom to give herself to us that in order to remain 'foolish' we practically have to fight her off.

What is wisdom? What good is wisdom?

Wisdom is a gift of God.
Wisdom helps us ‘understand’ God, ourselves, others, and the world.
Wisdom helps us to make the right choices.
Wisdom allows us to see things the way God sees them.
Wisdom is ‘understanding fully grown’.
Wisdom is a sharing in the thinking of God. [The wise person thinks like God.]
Wisdom brings us closer to God and makes us more pleasing to God.
Wisdom makes us better at teaching others.
Wisdom leads us to heaven; it keeps us ‘awake’ to God.
Wisdom ensures that we are on the right side of the door when it shuts.

Look at the amazing soul who is ‘thirsting’ for God in the Psalm.

I long for you.
I thirst for you.
I gaze on you.
I speak your praise.
I bless you.
I lift up my hands to you.
I remember you.
I muse on you.
I rejoice in you.

Wisdom is something we ‘choose’ like the five bridesmaids did. Having chosen it wisdom becomes second nature to us.

We can also reject it like the other five bridesmaids did. And then we remain condemned to a foolishness we ourselves cannot see.

I don't know if there really is a door but I do know there really will be such a moment, such a moment of truth; I pray that when it comes, we may all find ourselves together in the wedding hall - for all eternity.

The Five Luminous Mysteries

2011-10-27T22:20:00.003+11:00

We were talking about intentions for each mystery of the Rosary and how we don't really have any for the Luminous Mysteries. I have made up my own:

1st Mystery - For those who have prayed for me.
2nd Mystery - For those for whom I've promised to pray.
3rd Mystery - For those who have asked for my prayers.
4th Mystery - For my enemies.
5th Mystery - For the Holy Father.

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-10-24T14:49:00.002+11:00

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Malachi 1:14 - 2:2. 8-10; 1 Thessalonians 2:7-9. 13;
Matthew 23:1-12

Not many priests will feel comfortable with the readings today; they are aimed directly at us, though every word could be applied in some way to the laity too.

About five hundred years before Christ God delivers, through the prophet Malachi, several clear reproaches to priests who:

don't listen to God.
don't glorify God.
have strayed from the way.
have caused many to stumble by their teaching.
destroy the covenant.
have not kept to God's paths.
have shown partiality in their administration.

These recriminations are gravely serious. One can hear the anguish, the hurt, and the righteous indignation of the offended King, and that fact alone should make every priest tremble. To break faith with the Lord, or as God puts it, 'to destroy the covenant' is no small thing.

A priest is called to 'listen to God'. When Jesus called the Twelve he called them firstly: to be with him(Mk 3:14), and consequently this is a priest's first vocation; to be always with the Lord.

It goes without saying that to be with someone is to listen to that person. Listening is the first casualty of a disintegrating relationship. We have probably all had the experience of drifting from the person at the other end of the telephone line to what is happening on the television screen, and it's rather embarrassing to be caught out.

God is complaining that the priests had stopped listening and were therefore no longer with him, and consequently were no longer able to 'glorify' his name.

The Lord declares that his priests: have strayed from the way …and … not kept to God's paths. If the shepherd does not keep to the right path what are we to expect will happen to the sheep? The Lord spells it out for us: You have caused many to stumble by your teaching.

These words from God, I am speaking personally now, stop me dead in my tracks. To teach in God's name is a terrible responsibility as well as an astonishing privilege which should be exercised with the utmost seriousness. Indeed, a priest is ordained precisely to preach the gospel and to celebrate the sacraments worthily, and so to build up communion in Christ.

Can you imagine the calamity it would be for me to suddenly see that I had 'strayed from the way' of God's truth and 'caused many to stumble'; that I had preached what the people wanted to hear rather than what Christ wanted them to hear. I could think of few other things which would cause me greater shame before God.

Without the slightest ambiguity the Lord pronounces sentence on the guilty: I will send a curse on you and curse your very blessing. In addition God will make those priests: contemptible and vile in the eyes of the whole people… . We all know that when salt loses its flavour it is thrown out and trampled upon.

Jesus, too, points out to the Scribes and Pharisees that they have betrayed the covenant because they do not live the message they preach. In fact, they use their position as leaders to advance their own egos and win prestige for themselves.

Thank God for St Paul and the example he gives of true ministerial zeal. He labours in preaching the gospel and lives it with integrity. The understanding Paul has of his care for the Thessalonian community is of a mother 'feeding and looking after her own children … eager to hand over … not only the Good News but our whole lives'. What a contrast to the Jewish leaders who 'do not practise what they preach!'

And thank God for the Thessalonian community which, on hearing the message of Paul, immediately accepted it for what it really is, God's message, and not some human thinking … . Therefore the message of faith was a 'living power' among them.

The clear light of God's word still searches even today the hearts of priests and people alike.

Do we priests preach and live the message handed on to us by the apostles to the Church or do we change it and cause people to stumble?

And do you, the people of God, accept that message from the Church without changing it, or make it into 'human thinking' and thereby cause it to lose its power?

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-10-17T12:00:00.000+11:00

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Exodus 22:20-26; 1Thessalonians 1:5-10; Matthew 22:34-40

'I get so lonely I could die.'

These lyrics from the well known song Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley may speak to our own life experience. Indeed, there's something logical about putting loneliness and death in the same sentence.

Man is made for relationship. He is who he is because of who he loves and whom he is loved by. The philosophers would say that man in relationship is a human person; man alone (without a sense of loving or being loved) is only a human being, i.e. a human who merely exists.

Man is made for love. The guests in Heartbreak Hotel know this only too well. Without love human life loses its meaning and becomes alienation which gives birth to the words: I get so lonely, I could die.

How important then to listen carefully to Jesus' words today: You must love… .

They are framed as a command but are actually an analysis of what gives human life its fundamental significance.

A careful reading of the first three chapters of the book of Genesis will show that in the beginning, from the moment of our creation, God established us in four relationships. These relationships are part of the very substance of our human lives: our relationship with God, with our self, with others, and with the natural world. These four relationships shape the very path we must walk to reach our destiny and therefore, thanks to our fallen human nature, constitute the decisive stumbling blocks on our journey.

It is in our relationship to God, to our own self, to others and to the natural world, wounded but redeemed, that we now live out our daily lives as disciples of the Lord. How important, then, that we get them right, because it is so easy to get them wrong!

It may come as a surprise, for example, to hear a married couple say, 'We have always loved God more than we love each other.' Or for a father to say, 'My first love is for my wife, and only then for my children.'

Obviously there is much more to say in order to finetune exactly the hierarchy of love I am attempting to assert here. But the truth remains that we can get our relationships wrong all too easily and cause, thereby, significant disorder in our own life, and in the lives of those who form our relationship network.

I love to hear engaged couples telling me they have decided to live chaste lives until marriage because they 'want to be faithful to God!' These couples have got it right. They have put God before themselves; they are in a right relationship with him and therefore, with each other.

You must love the Lord your God … this is the greatest and the first commandment.

And when they marry this couple will be in a right relationship with their children who have a right to be born within a loving, stable, committed and secure marriage.

To get the order of our love relationships right is to bring about the 'order of God's love'. St Ignatius sometimes used this beautiful phrase. It is an order which brings peace and life, health and fruitfulness.

The greatest and first commandment is to love God. How? With all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second commandment is to love our neighbour. How? As yourself. This is the divine vision and plan according to which we were 'put together' in our mother's womb.

It is a great tragedy to meet individuals who live as though they understood the first and only commandment to be: I will love my self with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my mind. Let us pray to be preserved from this catastrophic corruption of our true nature.

Next week each of the three readings affirms what we sometimes forget - that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the one Father. The love we have for our self is the definition, the template, of the love we should have for each other, and there must be no exceptions.

As we have just heard in the first reading today we must not molest the stranger because we ourselves were once strangers in the land of Egypt. We must not be harsh with widows or orphans or the Lord will make our wives widows and our children orphans. The consequences of breaking the bond of love between ourselves and our neighbour are severe.

Christian warfare is fought on the battlefield of relationship. Let us examine ourselves in the light of the great commandment of love, and allow the Lord's words to be both encouragement and correction for us.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-10-10T12:00:00.000+11:00

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Isaiah 45:1.4-6; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5; Matthew 22:15-21

The Pharisees are not happy.

Jesus has just told (last week) a parable about a king who had lovingly prepared a wedding feast only to discover that those who had been invited refused to come. The Pharisees knew Jesus was speaking about them and they were not happy.

To add insult to injury the parable suggested that the gentiles, the non-believers, the 'dogs' were to enter the feast instead of them. How absurd, how impossible, how unthinkable! So there they go, stalking off, angry-faced and bent on revenge.

What Jesus encountered, of course, was their blindness. The Pharisees had absolutely no idea who Jesus was and were somehow unable even to recognise the holiness and truth of his words and deeds. Jesus appeared on the horizon of their deep conviction they had everything worked out and challenged them so radically that it became for them a question of either clinging to their identity or of acknowledging his. Clearly they opted for the former.

We might remember here the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman: If you only knew what God is offering and who it is that is saying to you: Give me a drink… . The Pharisees would have done well to recall the response of faith that woman made to the Lord.

So we are told: The Pharisees went away… . They left the company and presence of Jesus and went away - never a good idea!

Judas, too, left the company of the Lord and look what happened to him. To leave the Lord is always a big mistake; to remain in his presence is a guarantee of all things good.

They went away to work out between them... . How foolish they were, and how confident of their own powers and resources! They were suffering from the same distressing mentality so prevalent today. It's called the we-can-fix-it mentality and it's everywhere: politics, medicine, psychology, technology, finance, and even religion.

These poor unfortunates had such a serious dose of the disease that they thought, can you believe it, that they could 'fix' Jesus.

They put their heads together and came up with a plan: to trap Jesus in what he said. In other words, they were going to 'trap' the Word of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Word through whom the whole universe was created!

Confident of success, and yet anticipating the remote possibility of failure, they didn't bother confronting Jesus themselves but sent their disciples to him, together with the Herodians, another group who wanted to do away with Jesus. It is typical of cowards, as well as criminals, that they fire their bullets from the guns of others.

And so step one of their grand strategy is to flatter Jesus, to awaken his ego and cloud his thinking.

Flattery, of course, is not praise, and certainly not worship. So lavish is their fawning that even the most conceited of us would be put on our guard. The impregnable humility of the Master recoils at once from their hypocrisy.

Ironically, every word of flattery they speak to Jesus is the truth, but so full of pretence and blindness are they that on their lips the word of truth becomes evidence of their malice.

Tell us your opinion, then.

Oh dear! Are they serious? Are they really asking the Son of God for his 'opinion'? Has no one told them that Jesus does not have opinions; not a single, solitary one?

Opinions belong on this side of the gulf which separates us from absolute truth. They may be our most treasured possessions, flaunted and paraded, but they in no way oblige God, or in any way hinder the proclamation of truth.

You hypocrites! Why do you set this trap for me?

The response from Jesus is strong and uncompromising but it is not an attack. Jesus is not 'name-calling' for he has not come to condemn but to save, and every one of his utterances intend this loving purpose.

Let me see the money you pay the tax with.

Withunbounded compassion Jesus takes these hypocrites by the hand and leads theminto their own trap so that he might show them the 'escape route'. They had setbefore him what was basically a political problem to which they hoped Jesuswould and could give only a political answer. Instead the Lord reminded themthat all human problems and issues could be answered only in relation to thejust light of God.

Their question to the Lord, meant to disconcert him, hadperplexed them too; it was a hot issue of the times. Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

Jesus' unexpected response releases them from the snare they had set for him so that, hopefully, they might be open once more to the much more crucial question of his mysterious identity.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-10-03T14:21:00.000+11:00

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Isaiah 25:6-10; Philippians 4:12-14; Matthew 22:1-14

Do you remember how last week God lovingly prepared a vineyard on a fertile hillside? He dug the soil, cleared it of stones, and planted choice vines … built a tower, .. and dug a press…(Isaiah). What care God took! In fact God said: What could I have done for my vineyard that I have not done?

This week God lovingly prepares a marriage feast: a banquet of rich food, a banquet of fine wines, of food rich and juicy, of fine strained wines (Isaiah). What a feast! …my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, everything is ready (Matthew).

Note that: Everything is ready! The vineyard is ready for the harvest and the feast is ready for the guests - and so God sends his servants.

Incredibly the tenants of the vineyard seized the servants:thrashed one, killed another and stoned a third. Those who were invited to the feast ignored the servants and some even thrashed and killed them.

Last week God asked for what was rightfully his and found himself rejected; this week he offers what is rightfully his to those he loves and finds himself contemptuously spurned.

Last week he was disobeyed; this week he is humiliated.

The marriage feast, of course, is the kingdom of heaven. The servants are the prophets, the greatest of whom is Jesus, and those who were invited are the Chosen people, represented particularly by their leaders.

The disconcerting question which baffles us is 'Why would they refuse?' Why would people so comprehensively, so completely and maliciously refuse to enter the Kingdom so lovingly prepared for them?

The Scriptures are littered, so to speak, with the sad memory of those who failed for all sorts of reasons to enter the Kingdom, beginning with Lucifer, the angel of light, and his demons.

The elder son in the parable of the prodigal son would not enter the feast because his pride was stung by his father's generosity to his wayward brother. It becomes clear that his relationship with the father had always been that of slave, rather than son. And since he was the more obedient 'slave' he felt he was worth more.

The five foolish virgins failed to enter because they had not taken the Kingdom seriously enough. They had not adequately appreciated the greatness of the gift and so had not adequately prepared. The door was shut in their faces.

The householder just fell asleep and the judgment which unexpectedly sneaked up on him like a thief, found him not ready.

Fornicators (those having sex outside marriage), adulterers (those having sex with someone else's husband or wife) or practising homosexuals, were found unfit for the Kingdom.

Those who hear the word of God but do not keep it will not be recognised by the Lord and will not gain entry into the Kingdom. When they knock on the door they will hear the Lord say, 'I do not know you.'

The goats, those who showed no love or mercy towards their neighbour, and consequently showed no love towards God, will be cast out into the darkness and not be permitted to enter the Kingdom.

Those who will not wear the wedding garment, in other words, those who lack the necessary dispositions for entering heaven will be cast out.

The busy, those preoccupied with worldly concerns, those who build their houses on the shifting materialistic sands of power, pleasure or possessions, who worship money rather than God, who try to 'save' their lives rather than 'losing' them in the service of the Lord are not worthy of the Lord and cannot enter the Kingdom.

Let us remember that the invitation God gives us is to the king's feast. We are invited to a wonderful communion with God and with each other. The Sunday Eucharist we celebrate on earth is a rehearsal for this eternal banquet. That is why it is so important. It is here, at each Mass, that we are slowly transformed and sanctified for the moment we are called to take our seats at the marriage feast in heaven. It is here, at each Mass, that we are strengthened to live the kind of life God looks for in us.

When we refuse God who has prepared a place for us in his house he does not punish us, we punish ourselves. We miss out on all he has made ready for us. We miss out on the 'party', the feast and have to spend eternity outside the Father's house, in the dark. That would be hell, wouldn't it?

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-09-26T16:25:00.000+10:00

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Isaiah 5:1-7; Philippians 4:6-9; Matthew 21:33-43

A vineyard wakes to new life in Spring. Tiny buds appear on the bare branches and before long the whole vineyard is a blaze of delicate green soaking up sunlight and air. Deep in the soil the roots drink in the rain and search for the minerals needed to form the rich fruit of the harvest. The vineyard belongs to the Master. It is to his glory that it yields a bountiful harvest.

You are the vineyard. Yes, you! And me!

One day the Master will send his servants, the angels, to gather in the produce of the vineyard. That will be a day of intense joy for some and a day of shame for others.

Yes, we are the Master's vineyard. And the vine he wishes to grow in us is Christ, his Son. This is the harvest he desires to find in us on that day. To put it simply we must 'bear' Christ in ourselves; Jesus must become himself in us so that all may become one in him. What a wonderful thought!

Through Baptism Jesus was 'planted' in us. Through the other Sacraments (Confirmation, Eucharist, Holy Orders, Matrimony, Anointing of the Sick) his life, his presence, is strengthened in us. Through Reconciliation we are restored to this life should it be weakened or destroyed by sin. The Master has thought of everything and he looks forward to the harvest.

Still there is more we can do: prayer, penance, almsgiving, fasting, spiritual reading, service of neighbour, evangelisation of our culture. The tenant's work is never done.

In the time remaining I wish to be very practical and offer you an implement, a 'gardening tool', for your work in the vineyard. It is a Bible.

Not so long ago Pope Benedict said '…I would like in particular to recall and recommend the ancient tradition of "Lectio divina": "the diligent reading of Sacred Scripture accompanied by prayer …" If it is effectively promoted, this practice will bring to the Church -- I am convinced of it -- a new spiritual springtime.'

Prayer is real 'labouring in the vineyard' and lectio divina is a form of prayer as powerful as it is simple. It is a really good 'spade' or 'hoe'.

Without prejudicing any other form of prayer I'll try to give a glimpse, just a glimpse, of this ancient method of prayer which, coincidentally, solves many of the problems associated with daily prayer - like the question of distractions, routine, what do I do? what do I say? - and so on.

A Bible is the word of God. This fact is basic. When we read Scripture God is speaking. We don't need visions or locutions because here God is speaking.

The word of God is also, and at the same time, the action of God. Everywhere we read: God said ... and so it was. In the Bible the word of God continues his work and goes on creating, healing, loving, strengthening, forming, comforting, correcting and disturbing us.

Where the word of God is, living, active, powerful, God himself is not far away, in fact he is truly present.

When we read the Bible we are looking for the Lord and, if we are faithful to our daily reading, we will most certainly will find him. He will open our eyes to his presence and cause us to realise that, in fact, he is never absent.

Let me give you a simple image. You're on a railway platform waiting for the train. Are you really waiting for the train? No, you are really waiting for the arrival of the person who is on the train. It would be silly if the train pulled in and we all stood around admiring the train and ignoring the passenger.

Admiring the train is what's called Bible Study. Lectio Divina is searching for the passenger. And you know which passenger I mean, don't you?

The Bible is also like a huge house occupied by a vast number of the most interesting and wonderful (for the most part) people you could ever meet. In this house live Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Sarah, Joshua, Saul, David, Rebecca, Esther, prophets, kings, judges, men and women and lots of children.

Do you know these people? You should. They are the ones who preceded us in the faith and as we watch them living out their faith, with all their difficulties and trials and human weaknesses and fears we quickly come to realise that their lives are our lives - they are our elder brothers and sisters - that we are really looking at ourselves. As they learn about God, so do we. As they experience his love and mercy, so do we. As they hear the word of correction, so do we.

Have you ever been with Adam and Eve under the tree being tempted by the serpent? Have you ever stood with the People on the shores of the Red Sea trapped between the waters and the angry Egyptians? Have you ever celebrated the second Passover - in the total peace and safety of the 'desert of Sinai' in the wonderful 'twilight of the evening'?

We end with a thought from Psalm One:

Happy the man who ... finds his pleasure in the Law of Yahweh, and meditates on his law day and night. He is like a tree that is planted by water streams, yielding its fruit in season, its leaves never fading ...

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-09-19T12:00:00.000+10:00

New Page 1Ezekiel 18:25-28; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32

St Paul is writing to the Christian community in Philippi, a community which he himself founded. In fact, this was the first Christian community in all of Europe.

St Paul is writing from prison in constant danger of death. His tone is fatherly and pleading, serious, concerned and inspiring. He is addressing the community about something much deeper than itself; he is speaking about communion, what he calls: our life in Christ.

We can easily imagine him sitting in his prison at a rough table writing on a sheet of parchment. He has already been writing for some time and little by little he begins to be absorbed in what he is writing. Once more, in his mind's eye, he stands among his beloved brothers and sisters in far away Philippi and opens his mind and his heart to them. He speaks to them of the life and love and Spirit they have in common: their life in Christ.

Hearing his letter today two thousand years later we ourselves are quietly drawn back through the ages until we, too, find ourselves standing side by side with the Philippians listening to what Paul has written and conscious that we, too, share their life in Christ. We recognise this life which is offered undiminished to every man and woman of every age who seeks to become a disciple. Truly it is: our life in Christ.

The origin of this life is, of course, the Blessed Trinity. If we are in communion with one another it is because we share in the communion of love that possesses the Trinity - Father and Son, in the Holy Spirit. It is the Father who sent his Son, born of a Virgin, to draw his people into communion with him through the gift of the Holy Spirit won for us through his passion, death and resurrection.

For Paul this communion is the prized possession of the Christian community and must be valued above all and preserved at all cost and so he pleads with them to reflect on it: If our life in Christ means anything to you …

The beating heart of communion is exactly what St Paul says - our life in Christ. When we are in communion we share in the very life of God or, as we used to say, we are in the state of grace.

Just as the life of God in us is a saving reality so the absence of that life, through grave sin, is a reality which leads to eternal loss and, in normal circumstances, can only be restored through the sacrament of Reconciliation.

Though our being in communion is an invisible, spiritual state it does manifest its presence externally in a very clear way and this is precisely Paul's preoccupation as he speaks to the Church in Philippi.

He instructs his people that to live in Christ should mean also behaving, thinking, and loving like Christ. He calls them to be united in their convictions and in their love; to have a common purpose and a common mind.

Again, this brings us to the basic question of the source of the communion he desires for his people. How can the Philippians who, like us here in this church (with all our different backgrounds, needs, personalities, educational standards, and so on), be united in their convictions? How can they have a common purpose and a common mind? Or to put it more boldly: How can they all (and we) become like one another?

His answer to these questions is daring and liberating: In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus. I repeat: In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus.

Is this not the evangelising challenge of the present age as it was for Paul two thousand years ago. This is your challenge and mine - to surrender our opinions, our minds to Christ and to accept his teaching, his mind.

Communion is much more than a feeling; it is an objective reality based on the truth revealed by Christ to and in his Church. Regrettably we have had painful examples of what happens to those who break communion by holding convictions which are at odds with those of the Master. Look at what happened at St Mary's in Brisbane! And what do you think will happen to those three hundred Austrian priests who are dissenting from the 'mind of Christ' and destroying communion?

Let me finish by recalling St Paul's plea and even daring to make it my own: be united in your convictions and united in your love, with a common purpose and a common mind. That is the one thing which would make me completely happy.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-09-12T12:00:00.000+10:00

Isaiah 55:6-9; Philippians 1:20-24.27; Matthew 20:1-16

Last week the Gospel laid bare for us the roots of forgiveness. We discovered that it is difficult and, most often, impossible, for us to forgive others when we haven’t yet appreciated how much we ourselves have been forgiven. This week the Gospel is about goodness, about generosity. We discover that it is difficult to be generous to others when we haven’t yet appreciated how much we ourselves have been given.

Last week, the servant who was forgiven a huge debt could not find it in himself to forgive his brother servant a small debt. Somehow he had missed the experience of being forgiven which is where we learn to forgive others.

This week the servant who was given a full day’s work and a full wage is jealous of his brother because he has missed the experience of being generously treated himself. It is from the knowledge of generosity bestowed upon us that we learn to be generous with others.

We can be like those servants who worked hard all day - and we have - we have laboured hard. All those Masses we’ve offered - our Reconciliations - our prayers - our donations to the needy - our forgiveness of those who hurt us - our faithfulness in marriage - sacrifices for the kids. We have been faithful and we have laboured hard.

Trouble is, bit by bit, we can come to believe we deserve more than others. When God is generous to the sinner, especially one who has hurt us, we can come to resent it. Deathbed repentance is not always popular with us Christians. We resent his generosity to others because we fail to see his generosity towards ourselves. So we envy others - their popularity, good looks, intelligence, possessions, their partners in marriage, their fame - and we say: 'How come they got all that? How come God seems to have given them more than me? Surely I deserve more?'

OK, so why is it that in the 1st Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass we pray: Do not consider what we truly deserve … ? In other words: Do not give me what I truly deserve ….

On the one hand 'Surely I deserve more'; on the other hand, 'Do not give me what I truly deserve.'

What’s going on here?

Surely I deserve more! The fact is, however hard we’ve worked, we have really done nothing more than our duty and all that we have received is pure gift; we have deserved none of it.

Joshua 24:13 reminds us: I gave you a land where you never toiled, you live in towns you never built; you eat now from vineyards and olivegroves you never planted. We would do well, as a matter of fact, to thank God for the great gifts he has given us which enable us to serve him in the first place!

Do not give me what I truly deserve! The true Christian can see what he truly deserves and asks God not to give it to him, so let’s not ask God for justice or we’re all 'gonners'. Let’s ask for mercy, forgiveness and generosity and then let’s be merciful, forgiving and generous to others.

At the end of last week I mentioned that if you have a problem forgiving, pray for the gift of forgiveness, and make an inventory of all that God, and others, have had to forgive you for.

At the end of this week I advise that if you suffer from jealousy, make an inventory of everything God, and others, have given you, and you will find it much easier to be generous with others.

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-09-05T12:00:00.001+10:00

Ecclesiasticus 27:30 - 28:7; Romans 14:7-9; Matthew 18:21-35

In the Church today there are two groups of people:

Those who believe we should forgive because otherwise God won't forgive us.
Those who believe we should forgive because God has already forgiven us.

I'll say that again.

In the Church today there are two groups of people:

Those who believe we should forgive because otherwise God won't forgive us.
Those who believe we should forgive because God has already forgiven us.

Each one of us here would do well to ask ourselves which group we belong to.

It is my belief that the first group is by far the larger and that there are very few people in the second. And it is also my belief that the challenge facing most of us today is that of moving from the first group into the second - of coming to see that we must forgive because we have already been forgiven.

What are the consequences of belonging to the first group?

Well, in the first place it is much, much harder for them to forgive.

Why is this?

It is because for them, forgiveness is an act of will and not an act of love. They say to themselves: I must forgive or I won't be forgiven. These people have to force themselves to go through the motions of forgiveness. For them, forgiveness is a duty.

Let me clarify this with a story. An elderly friend had a sister-in-law with whom he didn't get on well at all. She had hurt him badly and let me tell you it was for him a major problem in his life. As a Christian he knew he had to forgive. You see, at that stage he was in the first group; forgiveness was a duty.

Much against his natural desires he would include this woman in all the family gatherings and do his best to make her feel welcome in every possible way. Invariably, however, there would be friction and sometimes angry words. Another failure and he would feel even more guilty!

To cut a long story short it was after my friend had an experience of deep personal conversion of his own, culminating in a wonderful moment of the celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, that he confided to me that he had finally been able, from the depths of his heart, to forgive his sister-in-law. He was so happy! And again, without going into the personal details, it was obvious to me he had moved out of the first group into the second.

The second group finds it far easier to forgive because they are given power to forgive, and they get this power from the experience of themselves being forgiven.

Why should the servant of our parable today have forgiven? Because he himself had been forgiven. The trouble, apparently, was that somehow he had missed the experience of his own forgiveness. He wasn't paying attention! And because he missed the experience of the huge debt he himself was forgiven he was not able to forgive others. How sad!

If we, in the first group, find it difficult to forgive others, if we have in our lives someone we can't forgive - a husband, a wife, a son or daughter, an in-law or a friend, or maybe a real enemy - then, without doubt, we should return to the experience of being ourselves forgiven our sins. It's in that knowledge, in that experience, that we will get power to forgive. We must go to God in prayer and stand before him in all our sinfulness, all our unloveability (through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault) and hear God say to us (personally), 'You deserve eternal punishment - but I forgive you.'

The world today needs reconciliation so badly. Psychologists say that so many of us just can't be healed from our anxieties, our fears, our guilts and depressions, because we simply refuse to forgive. And we refuse to forgive, like the servant in the Gospel, because we don't yet realise how much we have been forgiven.

It has been said that when we refuse to forgive we burn the bridge that we ourselves have to cross to get to heaven.

So let's keep our sins before our eyes, not in a morbid way, but so that we can rejoice in the depth of God's mercy and love for us. Then, when our neighbour sins against us we can pass on to him the forgiveness in which we ourselves already rejoice.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-08-29T12:00:00.000+10:00

New Page 1Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

If your brother does something wrong…

Jesus is speaking here to his disciples about correction within the community of believers. The manner of this correction is aimed at preserving communion even if, ultimately, the offender refuses correction and shows himself to be outside the communion of the Church.

It is important to note immediately that Jesus is not just giving advice. Jesus well understands that even in the Christian community there can be individuals or groups who threaten communion, and since communion is the hallmark of the Christian community it must be dealt with sensitively, justly and firmly.

If your brother does something wrong go and have it out with him, alone, between your two selves.

This would appear to be an exceptionally simple and self-evidently sound instruction. I imagine there would not be a single person in this congregation who would disagree with it. And yet, I also wonder if it is not the least listened to instruction Jesus ever gave?

Remember that this counsel is aimed at only one thing – preserving communion – the larger communion of believers (which can easily be fractured by poorly handled disputes) and the ‘re-entry’ of the offending brother into that communion through repentance.

Therefore Jesus desires that we first of all approach our brother: and have it out with him, alone, between your two selves. Notice Jesus’ insistence: Go (to him)… alone ... between your two selves?

This ‘going’ is not always easy to do but we must remember it is our brother. We are going to speak with one who shares with us in the loving communion of the Church. He is family.

We have all experienced those who go stomping off to have it out with someone they are angry with, perhaps we have done it ourselves. Going to a brother is a very different kind of going than that. We go to present our difficulty to him in an honest, loving way and we listen with great openness to his response. We are alone and his dignity is respected (and should we prove to be the one in error then our dignity is respected too).

To do otherwise than follow this teaching of Jesus is fraught with dangers for our brother, the community, and for ourselves. Our brother has a right to dignity, to proper correction and to the opportunity to reform himself. When we act hastily in anger, or fear, or even self-righteousness we run the risk of depriving him of all this and of ourselves becoming even more guilty than he is.

Jesus is aware of the dangers of a false step in the very beginning of this process of correction and so, I repeat, he insists that we should go alone and speak with our brother.

Naturally this requires a certain degree of personal maturity and a great deal of true Christian love. The temptation is always to tell ‘others’; to get it out of our system. Unfortunately, what we tell others goes into the system and soon extraordinary damage can be done out of all proportion to the initial wrong.

Only when individual communication with our brother bears no fruit despite our best efforts should we ask that others become involved, and only when this, too, fails should we tell the community. It will then become clear to our brother that he has placed himself outside of the communion of the Church. We have then ‘had it out with him’ in the way which Jesus commands and in the way which preserves our innocence.

The practical implication of all this for us as individual Christians here today is the duty we all have to bring our behaviour into line with the gospel. All of us, including myself, have failed and still do fail from time to time in this matter of correction. If we are looking for some area of our lives in which we can improve we should take today’s instruction from Jesus very seriously. There would be a lot less gossip in our community and there would be many more deeper friendships because the truth is that we often build the strongest and best friendships with those who have corrected us in a proper way.

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-08-22T12:00:00.002+10:00

New Page 1Jeremiah 20:7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Gospel 16:21-27

The secular, godless, materialistic world has two great enemies – suffering and death. From these two calamities it seeks to be delivered by its many gods: medicine, technology, psychology, science, and so on. For a Christian things are very different. The worst thing that can befall a Christian is sin - and the eternal death it leads to and brings about.

Jesus begins to make it clear in the Gospel today that he is to suffer horribly, die, and then be raised up on the third day. Peter is apparently so shocked by the first two elements of this announcement that the third doesn’t register with him. He takes Jesus aside. Can you imagine that? He takes the Lord aside to set him straight, to change his direction, to give him the benefit of his impulsive, ill-considered response: Heaven preserve you, Lord … This must not happen to you.

We can’t blame Peter. Not a single one of us can blame Peter; he is reacting as we all react when the reality of suffering and death presents itself on our horizon: This must not happen!

It is so difficult for us to change our thinking about suffering and death because they seem to be so real, so tragic, so final. In their presence even Jesus wept (Jn 11:35). For the non-believer and the atheist, of course, they are final. No wonder euthanasia is so attractive to them. And why not? Why put up with suffering, and death, which leads nowhere, which has no meaning? If I didn’t believe in the God of Jesus Christ I would be lining up with them for that needle which painlessly ends it all.

Jesus rebukes Peter and puts his finger on the essential problem - Peter’s way of thinking: The way you think is not God’s way but man’s.

If this ‘way of thinking’ was an obstacle in Jesus’ path it must also have been so for Peter, and the lesson for us is certainly the same. Our human way of thinking can be an obstacle (skandalion, stumbling block) in our Christian journey.

Peter must have been absolutely mortified to have his Master call him ‘Satan’ and ‘a stumbling block’. If it had been me I would have asked the evangelists to leave out that bit as they wrote their Gospels, or at least to change it a little, to make it less … humiliating. But our marvellous Peter, our Rock, our ‘bearer of the keys’ is even more humble than he is impetuous. What a great example to us he is!

Jesus turns to his disciples and begins to teach them. You will have noticed that little phrase in the new translation of the Mass, just before the Our Father: At the Saviour’s command and formed by divine teaching we dare to say … .

Isn’t this the urgent need of our times, that disciples (you and I) be ‘formed by divine teaching’? Do you think the young rioters in the UK were formed by divine teaching? Or the young people who abuse their dignity with drugs and alcohol and sex; are they formed by divine teaching? Are the euthanasia advocates, or the abortion proponents, or the homosexual lobby formed by divine teaching? I think not.

The more important question, of course, is are you, am I, formed by divine teaching and how do we get to be so formed?

A Bible Christian will answer: When we think according to the Bible! A Pentecostal will answer: When we are listening to the Holy Spirit! A Catholic will answer: When we think like the Church! Christ is the head of his Church and we wants nothing more than to form our minds according to his. Consequently, if we are differing from Church teaching in a significant way, on a matter of essential faith or morals, we have not yet completed our formation; our mind is not yet the mind of Christ.

St Paul puts it neatly in our second reading today: Do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind. And our ‘new mind’, of course, will think like God, not like the world.

And so we come back to the subject of suffering and death. Jesus, who thinks as God thinks, has no problem with the thought that it is God’s will that he suffer and die, and rise. Naturally, as a man, Jesus would have felt the human emotions associated with such a terrible prospect as crucifixion. We all share those emotions with him.

But it was his grasp of the meaning of suffering in accordance with the will of God that lead him forward to his fate. Suffering is not ‘the cross’; suffering in loving union with the Lord is the cross. We must never forget this. We can, in fact, waste suffering. Suffering in a sick bed is wasted suffering unless the sick bed becomes a cross.

Suffering in union with the Master, in loving communion with the Master, is not only bearable but it is fruitful in peace and joy and strength and perseverance and ultimately in resurrection and life.

Let us never forget that we follow a ‘crucified’ Lord. It was in the Cross that his love found its greatest expression and ‘relief’. This miracle of transforming suffering has been discovered by many ordinary men and women of the past, and we pray that we may be among those who discover it in the present.

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-08-15T12:00:00.003+10:00

New Page 1Isaiah 22: 19-23; Romans 11: 33-36; Matthew 16: 13-20

The liturgy of the Word this week centres on a moment which irreversibly changes the world. Sacred Scripture is full of such moments, some obvious and memorable, others hidden to all but the serious student of the ways of God. They are potent moments of revelation in which we suddenly catch a glimpse of God at work, ‘caught in the act’ as it were, as he sets about changing history into salvation history. For us these moments are graced insights into the profound wisdom of all his ways.

Jesus asks the disciples a question whose answer will become part of the deposit of Catholic faith: Who do people say the Son of Man is?

Numerous opinions are reported and their diversity testifies to the fact that the people don’t really know. So the question is addressed to the disciples themselves: But you, who do you say I am?

Peter answers on behalf of the Twelve: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

I imagine Jesus would have left a moment of silence before he replied to Peter; at least some seconds to let the breathtaking enormity of the moment sink in. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.

There is a solemnity about this pronouncement by Peter which immediately reminds us of other similar moments like the Father’s words at Jesus’ baptism or at the Transfiguration: This is my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on him.

The pronouncements are similar because in each case it is the Father speaking: Simon son of Jonah, it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven.

And so this ‘moment’ is firstly a moment in which God speaks; a moment of truth.

It is also a Trinitarian moment revealing the action of the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of knowledge and understanding.

It is a moment which changes Peter. The heavy clouds of what seems like an almost habitual incomprehension suddenly part above the head of Peter and the divine spotlight beams down on him. He is enlightened with a power not his own and becomes the rock of the Church, the source of unity, the guarantor of truth.

Therefore this moment is also a moment of gift. In this world of uncertainty and confusion where men attempt to define right and wrong, truth and falsehood, and even the nature of human dignity by means of fallible legal processes, God gives us an unerring source of infallible truth and guidance direct from heaven. What a grace for mankind!

Peter becomes the rock on which the Church of Christ is built and the holder of the keys of authority. In that electric moment of divine communication we could apply to Peter the words of today’s reading from Isaiah: I invest him … gird him ... entrust him … and he shall be a father (a Holy Father).

What follows next is a lovely image which tells us so much about what it means to be, not only the Pope, but every bishop and priest. God says: I drive him like a peg into a firm place.

Peter becomes like a tent peg holding up the entire structure because it is driven into a firm place, which is the promise God makes to him. The nomadic Hebrews used to hang cups and pitchers from the rope held taut by the tent peg; it became a kind of ‘throne of glory’ for the family, as Isaiah says. If the peg were to loosen, all those who depend on it would fall and be destroyed.

But Peter is a rock which will never be moved; built on him the Church is indefectible: the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it. The whole Church depends on the firmness of Peter. It is our glory, the glory of the entire Church.

The moment of Peter’s first pronouncement of truth would be followed by many others.

We remember Pope Pius IX in 1854: The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.

We remember Pope Pius XII on 1^st November 1950 who declared: …by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

Let us thank God always for the gift of the Holy Father who upholds the Church in Jesus’ power and name and who, despite the human frailties he shares with Peter, his predecessor, gives us security in the truth and confidence in the Church.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-08-08T12:00:00.015+10:00

Isaiah 56:1,6-7; Romans 11:13-15,29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

As a hospital chaplain I was once called to the bedside of dying man in his seventies. His daughter kept vigil by his bed and clearly he had but a few hours of life left. She was not Catholic and neither was her father. Not a Canaanite woman as in today's gospel, but a pagan nonetheless. She asked me to baptise her father.

It was an awkward moment for me as I felt I might have been guilty of taking advantage of his helplessness by baptising him. 'He's had more than seventy years to be baptised' I suggested, 'isn't it a bit unfair to do it now when he is unconscious?'

'But he always wanted to be a Catholic, it's just that he could never bring himself to approach a priest. That's just the way he was.'

I was still reluctant. I had passed that bed a number of times over the days he was in hospital and had never been asked to baptise him.

Then a strange thing happened. The woman at the bed came and stood in front of me, looking into my face. 'Look,' she said, 'I'm telling you my father wanted to be a Catholic but because he was a dysfunctional kind of person he was never able to get round to it. Now I'm asking you to baptise him.'

My response took me completely by surprise. I felt a great surge of admiration, I could almost say love, for that woman. She had (verbally) grabbed me by my shirt-front and, full of the great desire she had that her father should now receive what he had always wanted, made it clear she was not about to take no for an answer.

The man was baptised and confirmed and passed away a few hours later. A few months later the woman knocked on the door of the presbytery and said, 'Now it's my turn to become a Catholic.'

Such episodes in a priest's life are very important, very meaningful. They set in train a process of reflection which can go on for years.

It was when we read the gospel of the feeding of the five thousand that this woman came back to my mind, and now again today. What caused me to think of her then were those twelve baskets of scraps left over from the meal. What was going to happen to them? Who was going to eat them? The children of Israel had been fed, their stomachs were full, so were those baskets of food left over to be just thrown away? Unthinkable!

In my mind's eye I saw those baskets and each of them had a sign "FOR THE GENTILES".

Indeed, the very existence of those scraps was a foreshadowing of the ministry to the gentiles; as were the stone jars of wine left over from the wedding feast of Cana. Talking this over with a friend he said 'That Canaanite woman was looking for those scraps!'

As the responsorial psalm sings today: So will your ways be known upon earth and all nations learn your saving help.

Further reflection on my ministry at the hospital leads me to appreciate how the presence of a priest in the wards every day, a priest wearing a Roman collar, is very much an echo of Jesus' presence in 'the region of Tyre and Sidon'.

Jesus must have known that to make himself present there, so close to pagan territory, would inevitably 'draw out' the pagans; and it could not have been a surprise when: out came a Canaanite woman from that district …

Jesus well understood that he was sent by the Father to the People of Israel as their long-awaited and promised Saviour. As he tells the woman: I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. What the woman did was make plain the truth that implicit in his mission was a necessary openness to the entire world. This fact needed to be firmly established in the minds of his disciples if the newborn Church was ever to undertake her mission to the pagans.

Besides, the woman's daughter was 'tormented by a devil'. Is the devil more interested in the pagans than the Lord? Does the Saviour of the world intend to save only the Jews, or the Catholics? Certainly not! If he came through the Jews he came for all the nations.

So:

Let the peoples praise you, O God;

let all the peoples praise you.

May God still give us his blessing

till the ends of the earth revere him.

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-08-01T12:00:00.007+10:00

1 Kings 19:9.11-13; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:22-33

A while ago I happened to notice this statement from Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI: We're finding it more difficult to dwell in a universe inhabited by unseen presences: the presence of God, saints, one another. Today's world is reduced to what is physical, what can be measured, seen, touched, tasted, smelled. We're mystically tone-deaf, all the goods are in the shop window.

These words struck a chord with me as I had been wrestling with the responses I imagined people would have to the Gospel of today - the Gospel of Jesus walking on water in the middle of a storm. I could hear the cynical chuckles, ‘Yeah, sure, walking on the water’.

Fr Ron was basing his thoughts on a book called Sacred Heart, Gateway to God by Wendy Wright. She was a struggling Hollywood actress, more of an agnostic than a believer, when, while killing time one afternoon in a Los Angeles library, she picked a book about St. Hubert to read about her husband's middle name.

At first she was fascinated by the descriptions of Hubert, a scholar, a bishop, and a diplomat. But then: I was chugging along just fine until I came to a description of Hubert's ability to bilocate.

For those of you who don't know what bilocate means it is the well-documented mystical gift of being able to be in two places at the same time.

The book Wendy was reading told very matter-of-factly how St Hubert had been able to be in North Africa and in Continental Europe at the same time. She goes on: Profoundly disoriented, I closed the book. I felt queasy. It was as though two subterranean tectonic plates had collided inside the structured universe in which I lived.

Wendy goes on to explain how this experience was repeated many times during the course of her journey into the Catholic Church as she discovered that reality is not merely physical and that the believer lives in a multi-layered world of hidden realities which science cannot reveal for us.

Let me give another example. On the eve of the Feast of Saint Vincent de Paul, July 19, 1830 St Catherine Labouré was awakened by a brilliant light and the voice of a child: Sister Labouré, come to the Chapel; the Blessed Virgin awaits you.

The child, it turned out was Catherine's Guardian Angel. He led her to the convent chapel to speak with the Blessed Virgin who gave her the Miraculous Medal.

I wonder how many of us stop to reflect on all this - apparitions, guardian angels, the blessed Virgin, miraculous medals? What an exciting world we live in! A world in which our mortal earthly lives are already in intimate connection with heaven, and of profound concern to those who live there.

Each one of us has a Guardian Angel. They are somehow here with us in this church right now, surrounding us. The Catechism has this to say: 336 From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession ... Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life.

And just so we don't miss the point it highlights for us that: Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God.

And if Guardian Angels can appear to us so can the Blessed Virgin, so can Padre Pio, and Mother Teresa and any other saint, or even a soul in purgatory, or even the demons from hell.

St John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests, used to receive frequent visits from demons. At first he was terrified but later in life he treated them with contempt.

Saint Faustina, the first saint of the Third Millennium often spoke with the souls in Purgatory who asked for her intercessory prayers, and what's more, she was shown hell and its terrible reality.

Yes, it's true that we believers live in a rich world. A world far richer and more interesting than Harry Potter's world of magic and goblins. His world is make believe - ours is real.

Fr Ron Rolheiser goes on to say in his article: What she (Wendy Wright) describes ... so brilliantly points towards something that is all but lost in our world today, namely, the fact that reality is more than just physical, that it has layers that we do not perceive empirically (with our senses), that these layers are just as real as the physical, and there is more mystery within ordinary life than meets the eye.

How is it that Padre Pio, and St Francis of Assisi, and Esperanza of Betania carried on their bodies the bleeding wounds of the Passion of Christ - the stigmata?

How is it that Therese Neumann could live for 50 years sustained only by her daily Communion?
How is it that the Curé of Ars could tell penitents the sins of their youth which even they had long forgotten?
How could St Teresa of Avila and St Joseph of Cupertino defy the laws of gravity and levitate during their prayer, in front of many witnesses?
And how could Jesus walk on water?

The purpose of the Gospels is to bring us to faith. As John says at the end of chapter 20 of his Gospel: These (the things Jesus did and said) are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name.

When Jesus came to the Apostles, walking on the stormy waters of the lake, it was so that they might believe. Jesus wanted his followers to believe that the loving care of God for his children can penetrate our physical world of little boats and stormy lives - and that there is ultimately no barrier between heaven and earth when faith is active.

Faith is our response to God and the Apostles responded in faith: The men in the boat bowed down before him and said, `Truly, you are the Son of God'.

Yes, what an exciting world is the world of faith! Nothing is impossible in that world, because nothing is impossible to God our Father, and we are his children. We have only to look forward to the next miracle.

And what is the next miracle?

Well, that bread and wine over there at the back of the church will be brought up and placed on the altar. The priest will speak over them the words the Lord used at the Last Supper - and the bread and wine will become the Body and Blood of Jesus - offered to the Father so that our sins 'may be forgiven' - and offered to us in Holy Communion so that we may become one with God.

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-07-25T15:04:00.016+10:00

Isaiah 55:1-3; Romans 8:35.37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

The fourteenth chapter of Matthew's gospel from which today's reading is taken is crammed full of issues and tensions and disturbing events not to mention the avalanche of complex human needs by which Jesus is assailed, and which, moment by moment, pile up over his head and threaten to entirely bury him.

Herod Antipas, a man enslaved by lust and human respect deals treacherously with John the Baptist and has him executed for speaking the truth. John, the precursor to the Messiah, humbly offers his life for the truth he was sent to speak.

Would Jesus have grieved more over the heroic death of his beloved John than over the craven betrayal of Herod? His heart would have been broken for both men and deep anguish would have penetrated into his soul.

Today we would be encouraged to take 'compassionate leave' from work and perhaps some weeks of counselling to help us cope.

Jesus, too, feels the need to withdraw, the call to prayer, and heads by boat to 'a lonely place' where he could be alone with his disciples but the people thwart his plans. Instead of rest and healing he finds 'a large crowd'.

Could you imagine reading: Jesus instructed the Twelve to go to the crowd and tell them that the Master had just had some bad news and wasn't feeling too well. He said 'Tell the crowd to come back in a few days so I can have some time out'?

Instead we read: So as he stepped ashore he saw a large crowd; and he took pity on them and healed their sick.

What would you call that? Generosity? Compassion? Self-forgetfulness? If this had been an exceptional occasion of putting the other first we might be content to call it something like generosity. 'Oh, remember that day, when he was looking for peace and quiet but the crowd was there instead; wasn’t he generous?'

It seems to me there must be another word for it, something to capture the mad extravagance of his total 'being there for me'.

Perhaps divine generosity is a better term. Divine generosity is not just something to thank God for; it brings us to worship him. It is a 'goodness without limits' perhaps best imaged by the twelve baskets full of scraps left over from the miracle which follows. They stand there in a heap, perhaps under a tree, tantalising the imagination much like the stone jars of wine left over from the feast at Cana.

Jesus is just like that. More … always more. Impossibly more! More patient, more forgiving, more loving, more understanding, more merciful, more self-giving - divine generosity - and with those capable of understanding I sink to my knees in adoration.

The crowds have received more than a free meal; it is a free meal pointing them to a fullness of life sustained by a food beyond their capacity to purchase. This was the burden of Jesus' entire mission - to lead them (and us) beyond the material to the spiritual - where true life is to be found.

Isaiah, in the first reading, cries out with the very words of God, imbued with a kind of desperate longing for our response: Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty; though you have no money, come! Why spend money on what is not bread, your wages on what fails to satisfy?

This impassioned invitation from the Lord himself is searching for ears capable of hearing and valuing it; for men and women, and children, who have somehow learned to pierce the gaudy brightness of this world's offerings and have glimpsed the eternal beauty and joy of the world beyond.

Money … wages … can buy food for this life; for eternal life we must draw close to Lord.

When the crowds have gone Jesus sends the disciples across to the other side of the lake and himself goes up into the hills to pray. He shows us the source of the strength and the integration of his inner, psychological life. Jesus lets absolutely nothing stand in the way of his prayer; not a busy day, not a tragedy, not the acclaim of a crowd, not even his death on a cross. Jesus, in fact, died praying.

Chapter fourteen goes on to describe how, just before dawn Jesus goes to the disciples walking on the waters of the stormy sea. The Twelve are terrified on seeing him and Peter steps out to go to the Master who must reach out a saving hand to stop him sinking.

When they reach the shore more crowds come to meet him and he must spend another day, teaching, healing, giving, pouring himself out. What a truly awesome Saviour we have!

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-07-18T12:00:00.010+10:00

1 Kings 3:5. 7-12; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13:44-46

Built into the word 'treasure' is the notion of something hidden - but also waiting to be found. I guess this is why the word treasure is so alluring; it's an invitation to adventure, to seeking.

Some would say the adventure itself is a kind of treasure; we learn so much from the journey.

Most treasure just makes us richer, it only 'incrementally' changes our lives. The treasure Jesus is speaking of changes everything; it is the greatest treasure in existence.

The man of the gospel finds the treasure (I wonder if he was looking for it?), and he hides it again. It seems the treasure belongs in the field and he can only own the treasure if he owns the field.

The man goes off happy. Look at the smile on his face and the bounce in his step! But where is he going? He's going off to sell everything he owns so he can buy the field. Can you believe it? Everything he owns!

There is another man in another gospel who is offered the treasure by Jesus himself. He too has to sell everything he owns but he doesn't, he can't. He goes away sad because 'he was a man of great wealth' (Mk 10).

Perhaps the difference was that the first man discovered the treasure for himself and had a personal experience of its beauty and worth, while the other was offered a treasure he couldn't yet see and therefore didn't understand. We can only hope that one day he would have the experience.

At any rate, it seems there is something about the treasure which judges a man; something which discovers the true orientation and 'attachments' of his heart.

The parable leaves us with various questions. What is the treasure, in fact? Is it enough to say that it is the kingdom of heaven? And what is the field? Why can the treasure not simply be removed from the field? And what was the 'everything he owns' that the man sold?

The beauty of Jesus' parables is that their content of truth can be expressed in many ways and at many different levels.

Some of you are familiar with the chasuble I wore at my ordination. It was made for me by a seminary classmate who was a master tailor in a former life and who is now a priest.

This chasuble has a simple image of a cross standing in a field. Buried below the cross is the treasure and from the treasure burst golden rays of light reaching heavenward.

The field, of course, is me, or you. The treasure is the reign of God, the Kingdom. To take posession of the kingdom (to let God reign in us) we have to take possession of ourselves, and that's where the cross comes in. We have to divest ourselves of 'everything we own', not always an easy task.

One of our most beloved possessions, I think, is the control we exercise over the direction of our lives, in other words, our plans for ourselves. We all have them. They are the pathways to the treasure we imagine we want. Our plans lead to the place where we think our happiness is to be found, and all too often our treasure, and the happiness we imagine it will bring, has little to do with God's plans.

The fulfilment of our plans usually depends on external circumstances; things have to go right. God's treasure is not like that. God's treasure is entirely within us and in order to reach this place we have to entirely abandon our plans. We have to surrender our plans to his, even when things appear to be going wrong.

The man in the gospel glimpsed the treasure and hurried off eagerly to set himself free from all that had now suddenly become worthless to him. It would be a wonderful thing if such a sea-change could be definitively made in a person's life with no second thoughts or clumsy stumbles. Unfortunately, the temptation to take back what we have given is always present; we are so attached to the earthly.

But then we are dealing with a God who understands all that, and who works with us so that our goal of total possession of both field and treasure may one day be realised.

Patiently, every now and then, at a time of his choosing he takes from us one or other little trinket, some little plan we had been hiding from him and clinging to. Each time he does so he gives us another opportunity to renew our commitment to both the journey and the goal.

It seems appropriate at this point to finish with a reminder especially to the young people here that God invites each one of you, as an individual who stands before him in all your freedom, to let him show you the treasure buried in the field of your true self, the place where your true happiness is hidden, and waiting to be found.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-07-12T14:38:00.005+10:00

Wisdom 12:13.16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43

The gospel parable today is about a man and his enemy.

A man ... sowed good seed in his field.

Notice that? - the seed is good and the field is his.

The man, of course, is Jesus; we all knew that, didn't we?

And we know Jesus doesn't sow seeds, he sows the word of God. This changes the picture immediately.

Now the image of a farmer walking up and down the rows of his field scattering seed is replaced by the image of Jesus tirelessly travelling Palestine sowing the word of life.

Another way of putting this is to say that Jesus is calling to communion.

We do well to reflect that the very foundation of human dignity is that we are called to communion with our Creator; no other life form, animate or inanimate, is called to do that.

The word of God which 'sprouts' in a human life draws that life into communion with the Blessed Trinity; into the same communion shared by the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.

What's more, it draws that life into communion with every other life which has allowed the word to grow within it. Together they become 'subjects of the kingdom'. No wonder the seed is 'good'.

Jesus is calling us to fulfilment, wholeness, peace and eternal life.

… his enemy came and sowed darnel all among the wheat …

Notice that? - the seed is worthless and the field does not belong to him.

The enemy, of course, is 'the evil one'; the devil.

The devil, too, is tireless. He sneaks around the world sowing poisonous seeds called lies; that is why he is called 'father of lies'.

Another way of putting this is to say that Satan is calling to alienation. He is calling us away from the very foundation of our human dignity, and therefore, from all possibility of happiness.

We already see that the evil one himself is alienated. He came in the dark, while 'everybody was asleep', and then he 'made off.'

If a man or woman opens themselves to the 'seed' of the devil and it 'sprouts' in their life they find themselves cut off from God and from all those who belong to the kingdom.

And don't make the mistake of thinking there will be communion among the 'subjects of the evil one' because there will be only alienation and hatred among his followers; even Satan hates his 'subjects'.

'In the beginning' God planted a garden, and then he planted his word in Adam and Eve. It was his word which defined them and, of course, this word was an invitation to communion: … of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat. (Gn 2:17)

Obedience to that word would preserve harmony and happiness and lead to everlasting life and, if they rejected the invitation, they would 'most surely die'.

The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made. (Gn 3:1)

You know the rest of the story. Satan sows his lie in God's field. Adam and Eve fall and become subjects of the evil one. The story should have ended there but God had another chapter to write.

It concerned another seed which one night, in another garden, surveyed the awfulness of the prison mankind had cast itself into, and was 'sorrowful to the point of death'. (Mk 13:24)

Knowing well the truth that 'unless the grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain' (Jn 12:24) this seed 'threw himself to the ground' and surrendered to the death which awaited him.

Three days later it yielded 'a rich harvest'.

Look again at our parable. We should not ask what is the seed Jesus wants to plant in us, we should ask who is the seed Jesus wants to plant in us? It is none other than himself: his life death and resurrection.

Only by saying yes can we become subjects of the kingdom of heaven.

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-07-09T13:15:00.002+10:00

Isaiah 55:10-11; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

I think that what we suffer ...

To speak of suffering is to speak of human experience. We all suffer and, at various times of our life, most of us suffer acutely. Even here, right now in this Church, in this particular congregation there are people suffering, and some intensely. Suffering is not just a matter of pain. There probably isn't anyone here undergoing unbearable pain at the moment but I'm betting there are people here experiencing terrible suffering:

a spouse, husband or wife, who no longer loves you
a son or daughter walking a road you see will lead to unhappiness, or worse still, destruction
children no longer practising the faith
the terminal illness of a loved one
unpayable bills
slavery to gambling, drugs, alcohol
serious divisions in the family

On and on it goes; there is suffering everywhere.

So what do you feel when you hear St Paul's: I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us. Is this just 'pie-in-the-sky' stuff, as Joe Hill claimed in his poem:

Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die?

Or is it, as Karl Marx claimed, an 'opium' which makes us docile?

My own experience is that deep down inside me there is a hope, a longing for, even a mysterious remembrance of a voice which has already spoken these words of St Paul to my heart. His words are certainly not foreign to me; they exactly fit into a space inside me which has been shaped from the beginning to give them a home. I do believe there is a 'glory' waiting for us, and a majority of human beings share this belief.

Gobbledegook? You make up your own mind. Ask yourself if somewhere within your own experience of life, and especially of suffering, you 'retain the hope of being freed'? Are you are 'groaning' inwardly, along with the rest of creation, in a kind of 'act of giving birth'; waiting 'for our bodies to be set free?' (Note, by the way, that we are not asking to be set free from the body; we are asking for our bodies to be set free.)

The point of all this is that St Paul is not attempting to smother the reality of our suffering with a promise, however consoling. St Paul is giving voice to a universal experience of transcendent hope which looks forward to a liberation into ultimate wholeness and fulfilment.

St Paul goes so far as to say that all creation shares this 'hope of being freed' with us. He is referring to the rest of the cosmos, the material world of inanimate objects, of plants and of animals. This view is totally in harmony with the Genesis account which sees the entire creation somehow sharing in the effects of Adam's sin. 'Cursed be the soil because of you', says the creator God.

Through Original Sin the creation somehow, through no fault of its own 'was made unable to attain its purpose.' But, with us, it 'retains the hope of being freed from its slavery to decadence (corruption).'

This is a deep reality St Paul is touching on, the truth of the intimate connection between humankind and the material universe. Not only are we actually made from the same 'dust' as the rest of creation but our human bodies, the bodies which defines us as individual persons, will eventually return to this dust. If our bodies are to be glorified so must the whole of the rest of the material universe be glorified, so that, as St Paul says, it may 'enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God.'

What a marvellous, marvellous truth this is. It means that when we, in the material body of which we are essentially formed, praise God - the rest of the world praises God through us. We give voice to dumb creation. And what's more, when we sin the guilt falls on the whole of the material world which sins through us.

We can see now why God said to Adam and Eve, 'cursed be the soil because of you.'

Creation awaits our salvation because our salvation will be its own.

As a final thought we might remember that the sower in today's Gospel sows the seed in the soil. This is not just metaphor. The gospel is not sown in our disembodied souls but in our embodied selves. The seed must grow in our bodies as well as in our souls. Our faith must be complete, embodied, incarnate, like the Master, who saved the whole cosmos by giving his body on the Cross.

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

2011-07-09T13:11:00.002+10:00

Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9.11-13; Matthew 11:25-30

Belief in God would soon die out if people did not experience him. This is why, try as they might, the enemies of God will never succeed in exterminating the Faith. Just when they think they are winning the battle, right under their noses, some of their own number suddenly admit that they have come to believe.

Even in our day, with the proliferation of those who believe themselves too mature, too enlightened, or too scientific to believe in the God we lesser mortals have surrendered our lives to, they discover to their horror that other atheists are experiencing conversion.

The mysterious fact is that people experience God - at home, at work, in church, in prison, in professional institutes and research laboratories, and everywhere else - because you just can't stop God.

There is a story that Napoleon, speaking to a cardinal, threatened to destroy the Church. The cardinal allegedly replied, 'We have been trying to do that for centuries and we've had no success at all.'

The mistake the enemies of Christianity make is that they think God is just an idea they can erase, discredit, supersede, destroy. But God is a living Person, three Persons, in fact. The idea of the Trinity is not just an idea, it is a living reality who reveals himself to those willing to enter into dialogue with him. This 'revealing' has the further consequence of drawing the willing into communion with him; a communion which delivers a confidence, a happiness and a peace which nothing else known to man can deliver.

In this context we do well to identify the difference between knowing something and experiencing something, or in this case, someone. Today's liturgy is full of examples of both these aspects of a healthy religious faith. Take for example the very objective way St Paul informs us that if we live unspiritual lives we are 'doomed to die' while if by the Spirit we put an end to the misdeeds of the body 'we will live'.

His words are undoubtedly true and instructive and important, but hardly likely in themselves to bring about a deep faith. It is only when we experience this dying and living in our own lives that our faith becomes full-blown.

Consider the kind of faith that can produce the exuberant words of the Responsorial Psalm:

I will give you glory, O God my King,
I will bless your name for ever.
I will bless you day after day
and praise your name for ever.

The Lord is kind and full of compassion,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
How good is the Lord to all,
compassionate to all his creatures.

These are the words of someone who has experienced them. They are not formulas or creeds or intellectual statements; they are the joyful outpourings of a heart moved by personal experience of the living God.

Let me ask you - when you hear the words of the psalm I've just quoted do you find your heart nodding in assent? Do you find yourself saying, 'Yep, that is so true! He is kind and full of compassion, slow to anger, abounding in love. How good the Lord is'? Are you able to join with the psalmist and say from the heart:

I will give you glory, O God my King.

I will bless your name for ever.
I will bless you day after day
and praise your name for ever?

Jesus was able to exclaim from out of the living and intimate experience he had of God: 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. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do.

And many times, as a hospital chaplain, I have been in the presence of Christian men and women whose extremity of suffering was shot through with inexplicable joy and profound gratitude to the Lord. Theirs was no merely notional faith, no dry intellectual assent; theirs was an expression of true communion with the God of compassion and love.

The Communion Antiphon today calls each one of us to approach the Lord in this very personal way: Taste and see the goodness of the Lord...

Taste … see … no one can taste for us, or see for us.

Jesus puts the invitation another way: Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.'

Those suffering men and women in the hospital had come to Jesus. Most probably they had lived their lives close to him for many years and now, in their painful suffering they experienced his abiding presence as more significant than their pain. They had learned from him and discovered that his yoke is easy and his burden light.

The Body and Blood of the Lord - Year A

2011-06-23T11:32:00.001+10:00

Deuteronomy 8:2-3.14-16; 1Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58

Modern man has a great love - the mind, or more exactly - his own mind.

The mind of modern man is sacred territory on which no other person may set foot and which he defends with powerful sentinels called opinions. Within this territory he dwells secure, luxuriating in the confidence his impenetrable fortifications afford him. Should an enemy approach, a piece of clear logic, a reasoned argument, or merely a wise thought, he can simply direct one of his innumerable sentries to completely disarm the invader with an invincible: But in MY opinion…

Insulating the mind in this way from all external threats has several wonderful spin-offs, the most significant of which is that it enables modern man to say: I am always right. An even more satisfying way of putting this is: I am never wrong.

Eventually, when this liberating conviction has totally taken charge of him he is ready for the great discovery: I can do whatever I want. And then finally, though he will never dare to utter the words, at least not within earshot of others, he will find himself silently mouthing, perhaps in the mirror: I am God.

An unfortunate and unavoidable negative about all this is that the actual size of the modern mind shrinks, and although it can vary from person to person, it is often reduced to no more than the size of a drink coaster or even, in some rare cases, a postage stamp. This shrinking is a necessary side effect of reducing reality to manageable proportions by denying those bits and pieces of it which make him uncomfortable. Actually, it's all about control; if you can't control it, it mustn't exist.

The main casualty of all this, apart from the horrible wound he inflicts on his own dignity, is that whole 'continents' of reality are excised from his awareness, and modern man finds himself occupying a tiny territory bordered at all points of the compass - by modern man. He begins, as it were, to live in a sadly impoverished world of his own creation whose horizons have shrunk to what he can understand and control.

All this would be sad enough if it didn't get even worse. The same dreadful process has been taking place in the Church. Many, many Catholics are now living in a sadly impoverished church of their own creation whose horizons have shrunk to what they can understand and control.

Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi; the Body and Blood of the Lord. As I sat down to prepare a homily I was struck by the awful truth that some of you would not accept a single word I said. During Mass this nags at me, tugs at the edges of my consciousness - that I am celebrating the sacred mysteries for people who don’t believe what they are celebrating. Are you one of them?

We have become so infatuated with the discoveries of science, with unproven theories which pose as fact, with technological and medical advances which distract us from our own vulnerable mortality that we have let go of the divinely revealed truths for which Christ died. We no longer walk the narrow way of faith in the footsteps of the Lord, but a wide, easy path laid out for us by man - by blind guides!

Betty doesn't believe in angels; John doesn't believe in hell; George won't accept indulgences; Mildred doesn't like the teaching on contraception; Fr Rupert rejects adoration of the Blessed Sacrament; while Fred rejects the Sacrament of Confession. But they all vehemently proclaim themselves to be good Catholics!

To be honest, I don't understand. What I do know is that they all live in a funny little church which is no longer capable of offering salvation. It's just a figment of their imagination. If they did what those who were unable to accept the 'hard saying' of the Lord did and just walked away, at least we would know who it is that we have to evangelise.

Science cannot touch the mystery which today the Catholic Church celebrates; a God who, at the consecrating words of the priest, becomes bread - the Bread of Life - bread which becomes God. Can you believe it?

As the Sequence for today's Mass proclaims:

This faith to Christian men is given -

Bread is made flesh by words from heaven:

Into his blood the wine is turned:

What though it baffles nature's powers

Of sense and sight? This faith of ours

Proves more than nature e'er discerned.

The Most Holy Trinity - Year A

2011-06-13T15:25:00.010+10:00

Exodus 34:4-6.8-9; 2 Corinthians 13:11-13; John 3:16-18

Everywhere in our readings today we find the Trinitarian formula which we Christians accept and celebrate as the basis of our understanding of the one true and only God.

Even before the priest reaches the altar the congregation is saying (Entrance Antiphon): Blessed be God the Father and his only-begotten Son and the Holy Spirit: for he has shown that he loves us.

Each of the two Opening Prayers expressly prays this formula ‘to our God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.

St Paul in the second reading prays: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

The Gospel Acclamation sings: Alleluia, alleluia! Glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit … Alleluia!

The Preface, the Communion Antiphon and the Prayer after Communion also explicitly mention the Trinitarian being of God while the final blessing at every Mass is always given ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’

But knowing and repeating the Trinitarian formula is not our problem - nor is understanding it - because we all know it is mystery and that mystery can never be understood. Indeed, in the very statement of what we do know about the Trinity is contained our helpless incomprehension.

What we most struggle with is its relevance. What difference does it make to my life that God is three Persons in one God?

The mystery of the Trinity can seem not only baffling but lofty and remote. It concerns the nature of God - his essence, his inner being, his identity in himself - and most of us are happy to leave it at that. And this would be a quite satisfactory response if it were not for one little detail - we are made in the image and likeness of God.

God, the Blessed Trinity, is a communion of love - the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father - in the unity and joy of the Holy Spirit. And this love is so great that it spills over, as it were, and seeks to give itself. This is why the angels were created; this is why we were created.

God's Trinitarian love is a love which seeks to give itself; or, in other words, God loves in order to give himself.

The key word here is give. So much does God love the world that the Father is ready to give his only Son who, in his turn, is ready to give himself to the Father('s will). The Holy Spirit of love overshadows the Virgin Mary who totally shares in God's self-giving love 'and the Word was made Flesh'.

Our Christian faith tells us that it is in the image and likeness of this love that we were created; it is built in to us, as it was built into the body of Jesus.

If you don't believe me, look at your own body. Is it not true that your body is made for 'giving itself'? Is not a man's body made so that he can give himself to his wife? Is not a woman's body made so that she can give herself to her husband? And in the divinely ordained giving of husband to wife and wife to husband, a new life, a new life! neither the life of the wife nor of the husband, an entirely new and unique life is 'given'.

SELF-GIVING is the fundamental nature of our being, of who we are and of what we were made for. The mystery of communion in the self-giving love of the Trinity is written into our very bodies so that we can never forget that 'giving ourselves in love' is the core meaning of our lives.

It is no digression from our theme to point out here that this is why Jesus gave his body for us. The crucifixion is a manifestation, the definitive manifestation, in human terms, of the nature of the inner Trinitarian life of God, because on the Cross Jesus first of all gives himself (in the body) to and for the Father, and only then to and for us.

In revealing himself, therefore, as the Son ready to die for the Father, he lays bare the nature of the love to which we are all called. And, given that we are human, it is only in the body that we are capable of this love.

Is it any wonder then that Satan has concentrated his greatest efforts on perverting the world's concept of the meaning of the human body? He has done everything he can to obscure our understanding of God's call inscribed in the very blueprint of our bodies. Satan knows that it is only to the extent that the communion of the Trinity is present in the communion of husband and wife, that there will be peace on earth.

Let me conclude by indicating some of the key intersections at which a husband and wife must pause, if they are to remain faithful to the truth of self-giving love written into their bodies.

The most obvious, and in some ways the most crucial, is the question of contraception. Here Satan offers what seems to be, at first glance, a solution to many human problems. However, at heart, contraception is not only a point of closure to God, it is a betrayal of both their love making and their integrity. Whilst the language of their love-making appears to be the language of self-giving and communion it is in reality, without the possibility of new life, a profound and corrupting lie.

Homosexual acts, likewise, can never express the love proclaimed by the complementarity of the human body which is made for the opposite sex. The love of a man or woman for a person of the same sex can therefore best be expressed, and even heroically expressed, by abstinence from any sort of sexual expression.

By now you will have recognised in what I have said the theology of the body of Blessed Pope John Paul II. He makes it abundantly clear that faithfulness to the Trinitarian love of God which gives form True joy and true life can only be found in the sincere gift of one person to another in accordance with the self-giving Trinitarian love in whose image we are all made. This is the way to personal happiness and fulfilment and also the way to peace on earth.

Pentecost Sunday Vigil Mass - Year A

2011-06-06T12:00:00.035+10:00

Joel 3:1-5; Romans 8:22-27; John 7:37-39

'If any man is thirsty, let him come to me! Let the man come and drink who believes in me!' As scripture says: From his breast shall flow fountains of living water.

Thirsty, drink, flow, fountains, living water, Spirit. Even the most distracted, preoccupied, or disinterested among us could not miss the point, and in case one of us did John adds: He was speaking of the Spirit …. .

Today I want to speak to you of the Holy Spirit and of one of the great sources, springs, wells of the Holy Spirit - the Sacred Scriptures – from which we can drink to our heart’s content.

However, we do well to recall, firstly, that the Holy Spirit is referred to in Scripture in other images too. Wind is a common one, as in the first reading from tomorrow’s Mass: they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven… . Fire is another common image for the Holy Spirit: something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire … .

But today Jesus is speaking of the Holy Spirit as water, as he did to the Samaritan woman at the well: If you only knew what God is offering … you would have been the one to ask, and he would have given you living water… (Jn 4:10). As we press on we could make the Samaritan woman’s ingenuous request to Jesus our own: ‘Sir, … give me some of that water… .

And, of course, Jesus has given us some of that water; he was born, suffered, died and rose to give us some of that water. He gives it superabundantly in the sacraments. He gives it, along with fire and wind, in our prayer time, when we ask him for it (..how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Mt 7:11). He gives it also in our good works and even in our sufferings, when we join them to his.

And yet the Bible is a place we Catholics rarely think of when we seek the Holy Spirit. St John of Fecamp calls it ‘a source of living water’. Rupert of Deutz confirms for us that this living water is indeed the Holy Spirit when he says that in Scripture we ‘drink from the fountain of divine knowledge’, and divine knowledge, as we know, is given by the Holy Spirit. As St Paul says: …the depths of God can only be known by the Spirit of God (1Cor 2:11).

Just to open the Bible is to 'unfurl my sails to the Holy Spirit' says St Jerome, using the image of wind or breath, while Archbishop Magrassi proposes that the prayerful reading of the Sacred Scripture will see, 'A blazing fire is enkindled in the soul, one that is capable of spreading.' The prophet Jeremiah feels the word like a burning fire shut up in his bones(Jer 20:9). The two disciples of Emmaus felt their hearts 'burning' within them as the Lord explained the Scriptures to them;

The Scriptures were written under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and can only be read and assimilated in the light and power of that same Spirit. This is why the Bible is a ‘living’ word. Just as God did not make the world and then go away, so the Spirit did not inspire the Scriptures and then leave.* St Gregory holds that just as the Holy Spirit touched the mind of the biblical authors so ‘he also (though not in the same way) touches the mind of the reader.’*

In the sacred pages of the Bible, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we come to know Christ, the goal of all our knowing. St Paul develops this by describing the Good News as ‘the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith’(Rm 1:16).

Salvation is the overarching theme of the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments together, and that salvation is none other than the person of Jesus Christ. But not only does Scripture speak of him, it causes us to ‘meet’ him.

Pope Benedict says in Verbum Domini No. 87: The documents produced before and during the Synod mentioned a number of methods for a faith-filled and fruitful approach to sacred Scripture. Yet the greatest attention was paid to lectio divina, which is truly “capable of opening up to the faithful the treasures of God’s word, but also of bringing about an encounter with Christ, the living word of God”.

In reading the Scriptures diligently and with faith we open ourselves up to ‘an encounter with Christ’, and isn’t he the real object of our ‘thirst’.

It is no surprise that the Scripture is an essential part of every Eucharist. Word and Sacrament always go together. Indeed, the Mass in defined by its two constitutive elements – the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist.

To be honest, my words today have no other purpose than to once again bring to your attention the crucial importance of making the reading of Sacred Scripture a normal part of our daily spiritual life. Jesus meets us and reveals himself to us in many ways but undoubtedly there is no more privileged and certain way than in the Scriptures.

*PRAYING THE BIBLE by Mariano Magrassi, Liturgical Press, page 22 ff.

Ascension of the Lord - Year A

2011-05-30T12:00:00.005+10:00

Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20

The eleven disciples set out for Galilee ...

Eleven is such a strange, awkward number. We might even call it a sad number. Twelve minus one. It’s like the smile of a Hollywood star – with a tooth missing. And the missing tooth is, of course, Judas the traitor, but not only.

In that same empty space the disciples can see their own infidelity and cowardice, not to mention their present incomprehension and uncertainty. They ran away when their Master was being crucified and one of them even explicitly denied him. In that space lies the incompleteness of their own faith and trust in the Lord; their own ‘absence’.

Perhaps this is why I imagine there is something gauche, and perhaps even a little stunned about these men. Watching them set out we might be reminded of Mark 10:32: They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem; Jesus was walking on ahead of them; they were in a daze, and those who followed were apprehensive.

Yes, the eleven were setting out. This, too, is worthy of remark. Jesus and his disciples were always setting out, and now that he has died, and is risen, his disciples are still doing it. For us who have followed the Lord for so many years this comes as no surprise. We well understand that ‘setting out’ is the hallmark of the Christian life. And when in old age or illness we are finally laid in that bed in which we will eventually draw our last breath we know that this is only another form of Christian ‘setting out.’

The disciples are heading for Galilee, back home to where it all began for them. They were heading for ‘the mountain’, which is Bible-speak for ‘they were going to meet God’. And they did meet him. As Matthew tells us : Jesus came up and spoke to them.

Most of them did what one would naturally do if one were to come into the presence of God: they fell down before him. Young John would have been among the first. He had always been the first to believe, even before Peter. When he looked into that empty tomb on Easter Sunday, at the cloths lying there: he saw and he believed (John 20:8).

But some hesitated. After all the teaching and the miracles and resurrection appearances they still were not sure. How honest the Gospels are about the Apostles’ slowness in coming to the fullness of faith! It’s almost a proof of their authenticity.

Also in the first reading Luke’s description of this final meeting of the eleven with their Lord demonstrates what we, with the benefit of hindsight, might even call the ‘obtuseness’ of the Apostles: Lord, has the time come? Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel? The mind-boggling silliness of the question might tempt us to shake our heads and look away but fortunately for us, for you and for me, in the embarrassing spectacle of the uncertainty and hesitation and slowness of the eleven, in the hole caused by that missing tooth, is found our own hope that there might just be room in God’s Church for us – poor, hesitant, half-hearted Christians that ‘some’ of us still are.

Jesus’ answer to his disciples betrays not a hint of the annoyance he clearly demonstrated on previous occasions. Perhaps he is consoling himself with the thought that the Holy Spirit will enlighten them in ten days’ time. Indeed, if we have been puzzling over the ‘poor eleven’ and suspecting that ‘something’s missing’, this surely must be the key to our disquiet; the Holy Spirit is missing! And when he comes all doubts will be resolved, all hesitation and confusion will evaporate, and all faintheartedness will give way to confidence and courage.

For the moment Jesus simply tells them that these matters are in the hands of the Father and it is not for them to be privy to his decisions. All they could do, and they did it, was to ‘look on’ and to ‘look up’ as the mighty plan of God unfolded before them.

Of course, Jesus himself is that plan, the plan of the Father. Jesus, the obedient Son, realises the plan of the Father with the power that his Father has given to him. Whereas the Father decides ‘by his own authority’, Jesus is careful distinguishes his own power as something that ‘has been given to me’. In John’s Gospel Jesus makes this explicitly clear when he declares (14:28): … the Father is greater than I.

The language of the first reading subtly refers to this power beyond Jesus in such phrases as ‘he was taken up to heaven’, ‘he was lifted up’, and ‘Jesus who has been take up from you’. The passive verbs direct our attention to the supremacy of God the Father who here acts on behalf of his Son.

Having perfectly fulfilled the plan of his Father Jesus is now able to announce that: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. As Jesus was sent by the authority of the Father so now he has the authority to send his disciples: Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations…

And as he leaves them he promises to be with them always; a paradox well known to the Christian!

6th Sunday of Easter - Year A

2011-05-23T12:00:00.001+10:00

Acts 8:5-8.14-17; 1Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21

It's really good to be able to sit in a comfortable chair in a room by yourself and read, meditate, and pray on the Sacred Scripture. This practice is called Lectio Divina and it is slowly becoming more and more common among the Faithful.

Today's first reading is a good passage to practise on if you are not accustomed to this spiritual exercise. The opening line, like the rest of the passage, is rather matter-of-fact and seemingly unremarkable: Philip went to a Samaritan town and proclaimed the Christ to them.

So we place ourselves in Philip's shoes and wonder what he must have been feeling as he entered that town. We should not rush this but, in a very relaxed way, do our best to enter into the reading. What would the town have looked like; how would he have gone about proclaiming Christ to them?

The people welcomed him. We are told they: united in welcoming the message.

Obviously Philip's fame had preceded him. They had already heard about the miracles he had worked and now they were to see them first hand. I wonder what that must have been like?

In my imagination I am present and try to see their reactions, listen to what they are saying, and try to feel what they would have been feeling.

Philip had a reputation; he had power, the power of the Gospel lived in him. I wonder where he preached to them? Where did he proclaim the Christ? Do the Samaritans have synagogues, or would he have done it in a public square or some other gathering point like a market or, perhaps, the gates to the city? It doesn't really matter what kind of a scene my imagination produces, as long as I remain faithful to the framework Luke gives me, I can flesh them out any way I want.

When my prayer time is finished I can keep some of those questions in our mind and maybe I can research them (Google them, perhaps), or discuss them with a friend who might know more.

Does this seem far-fetched to you? Well, don't laugh! There are many people around who find room in their head for questions like these which help them get closer to Christ; to understand better the message preached by the apostles and recorded in the Scriptures. These people are willing to give time and put serious effort into their spiritual lives. Instead of going down to the local shop to buy a newspaper to find out what's on the telly tonight these people will do a little bit of quiet Bible study in their spare time so that their daily lectio divina time becomes more and more fruitful, and the face of the Lord comes into sharper and sharper focus. What's more, their efforts to answer these questions raises them from the mundane, everyday concerns with which our lives are brimming, to an entirely more worthwhile level.

And we can imagine how excited people would have been hearing that the famous Philip was in town. They would have arranged the affairs of their day to somehow be able to meet up with him, to listen to him, to perhaps see a miracle, and then to perhaps develop their own faith and leave behind some emptiness, some fear, some sin.

It must have been very exciting to witness a miracle; perhaps several miracles. The talk, the buzz, to speak with the person who was healed. I once spoke with Sr Briege McKenna who was totally paralysed with arthritis and was miraculously healed. It was an unforgettable experience for me.

And then there's those other important people in this reading - the paralytics and the possessed. How would they have felt? Who were they? What was their reaction when they found themselves free? Did they praise God for this new freedom that had come into their lives?

And what about Satan? What would he have felt? The anger, the hatred, the humiliation of seeing himself expelled by a simple faith-filled Apostle. Hell would have been in turmoil. It would have been a strange and exciting time to be living in. And Satan would have been working frantically to try to recover lost territory, stirring up opposition, causing misunderstanding and confusion. For Satan it would have been a question of damage minimisation.

That would have been the invisible battle that was raging, one which other people couldn't see, and one which we can only try to imagine - the attempt to distort everything, the message, the miracles - to make accusations of trickery and arouse the pagans to reject the Good News.

Satan would have worked on their vested interests, their desire for the status quo to continue, and the misunderstanding caused by false rumours they might have heard about the apostles. Satan would have done everything he could to stir up as much opposition to the Gospel message.

But despite all Satan's efforts, the spirits still came shrieking out of many. Shrieking! This new power which they could not resist was wielded not by Jesus but by his simple followers. How humiliating for this proud opponent of God's divine plan for humanity!

If we have been generous with our time and generous in our efforts to really focus on the readings before us we will soon begin to discover a new joy, a new hope in our lives as the word of God finds, more and more, a place in our heart.

5th Sunday of Easter - Year A

2011-05-16T12:00:00.003+10:00

Acts 6:1-7; 1Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

Many of us ask the question: Can we make God sad? Can we make God happy?

We were told as youngsters, and we still are today, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that God in Himself, in his Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), doesn’t really need us for his happiness. And, of course, this is unarguably true. God made the world not for himself but for us; so that we might be happy. As the Penny Catechism teaches: so that we might come to know him, love him, and serve him here on earth and be happy with him forever in heaven.

But why did God make the world? The answer is that he made the world out of the overflow of his love and goodness. Not because he was bored, or conducting an experiment, but because he loved. God in himself is a communion of love in which the three divine persons, one to the other, give and receive the one love which defines their being. God did not need to make us for his happiness as God because in his Trinitarian communion of love he is all-sufficient and totally happy. This happiness could not and would not be increased by creating us.

But we must distinguish between God (the Trinity), and the man Jesus who is God; the second person of the Blessed Trinity, made man.

We might mention here that some people object to the title ‘Mother of God’ being used of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Clearly she is not the Mother of the Godhead, the Trinity, but she is the Mother of Jesus, the Son of God made man. Can you see the difference?

One of the things I like about the Catholic Church is her courage to push truth to the legitimate limits of its expression and to state even those challenging truths which other denominations do not dare to utter. When you stand with both feet on a firm foundation of truth only then can you dare to say what you might fear to say if you did not have the security of a total grasp on the truth.

The Church is not afraid to give Mary the title Mother of God because she deserves it; like the title: Mother of our salvation. Protestants wince at this but the Church gives her this title because she is the Mother of our Salvation, whose other name is Jesus.

We must distinguished between the Godhead which is eternally happy and whose happiness we cannot increase or decrease – and Jesus who is God.

So now we ask - can we make Jesus happy - Jesus who is God? And now the answer is yes. During his life on earth Jesus wept, rejoiced, became tired, got angry and experienced the normal human emotions; but he did not sin. Therefore, during his life on earth, we can say that people were able to make God happy in Jesus; to make God sad in Jesus; to make God angry in Jesus.

Jesus rejoiced when he found the sheep he was looking for, and when Peter told him he believed in him as the Christ. He was angry with the money changers in the synagogue and with the Pharisees. He was sad in the Garden of Olives; sad to the point of death, actually. He longed to eat the Passover with his disciple and sang after the meal. Was he pretending? No. These are real feelings from a real man who is truly God.

Today Jesus suffers and rejoices in his mystical body, in you and me. We all understand that he is no longer able to suffer in himself in his happiness in heaven, but we also know that his love still urges him to suffering in his body, the Church. This is truly a mystery and I won’t explore it further. Let me simply add that, as the saints teach us, love finds it’s deepest expression and rest in suffering, and Jesus therefore, Jesus, who still loves, still desires to suffer.

We tend to think of heaven as that place, or rather state, which God made for us so we can be happy, where he wants us to be so that we can be happy. But I think it is also a place where he wants us to be so that he, Jesus, God can be happy.

“I am going to prepare you a place .. so that where I am you may be also.”

Do you get the picture? Jesus wants us in heaven for his happiness as well as ours. He wants you there or there will be something missing – you!

The Cure of Ars used to say ‘My dear people, it is not easy to get to heaven, you must try very hard because if one of you doesn’t make it – it will spoils things for the rest of us.’

Does this mean that the happiness of heaven will not be perfect? Certainly not. The Cure is speaking in an earthly way. To the extent that Jesus is still truly present on earth in his Body, the Church, he is still capable of suffering and rejoicing and lamenting the loss of one of his sheep.

Let’s try very hard to get there, to be good, to love others, to forgive those who are hurting us, to offer up our sufferings in Jesus so that when we enter those pearly gates we will see the happy smile of God on the face of Jesus.

4th Sunday of Easter - Year A

2011-05-09T12:00:00.002+10:00

Acts 2:14.36-41; 1Peter 2:20-25; John 10:1-10

You will recall, perhaps, that in the first reading last week St Peter got up at Pentecost to preach to the crowds which assembled at the commotion caused by the coming of the Holy Spirit. This week we go to the end of that mighty sermon of St Peter and we get to see the response of the listeners.

But first, I think it is important to underline something about the quality and tone of St Peter’s words to the crowd. It would be a pity to overlook these.

Do you notice that St Peter speaks in a very confidently assertive or declarative way? As a friend of mine commented, ‘There are no subjunctives.’ In other words there are no ‘mights’ or ‘maybes’.

Good ‘ol Wikipedia tells us that in grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used … to express a wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred.

Peter declares ‘with a loud voice’: …the whole House of Israel can be certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ. There is absolutely nothing subjunctive about that!

Compare this to modern ‘feeling-sensitive’ language whose main aim is to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings (i.e. making them feel uncomfortable) rather than actually telling the truth.

St Peter didn’t get up and say ‘I guess that, in a way, you people might have, perhaps, treated Jesus with, maybe, a little greater kindness.’ No way! Peter says: this Jesus, whom you crucified… .

Go through every word Peter says and there is no hesitant, equivocating, politically correct ambiguity anywhere to be found: …the whole House of Israel can be certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.'

And why do you think Peter speaks like this? What is the point in expressing the truth of things in this stark and absolute way? Why couldn’t he have said ‘this Jesus, who was crucified’ or ‘this Jesus whom they crucified’ or ‘this Jesus whom evil men crucified’? Surely there were lots of ways of saying it so his listeners would not be put off. Today we ‘pad out’ our preaching with attractive little phrases that soften the truth so no one is uncomfortable, no one is ‘convicted’. And so, as one priest said, we ‘contracept’ our own preaching, making sure it can’t bear fruit.

There are two main reason for Peter’s rigorous statement of the truth. The first is that only when the guilt has been laid at the feet of the guilty, is repentance and forgiveness possible.

The second is that by expressing the crime, the sin, their guilt in its fullest dimensions is Peter able to show that the loving mercy of God will cover even that. Only by making clear the enormity of the sin is Peter able to demonstrate the even greater enormity of the mercy of God.

All this is a great, practical lesson for those who enter the confessional to confess their sins. If they minimise and obscure the seriousness of their guilt by using ambiguous or ‘subjunctive’ language with the priest they will inevitably deprive themselves of that joyful realisation of total forgiveness. Whether they understand it or not, there will always be lurking that ‘remainder’ of guilt which they refused to acknowledge and which now lingers vaguely in their consciousness.

The crowd responds with the same fullness with which Peter delivered his message; they were ‘cut to the heart’. Peter’s razor sharp words have caused them to see themselves in a new light; they have seen the truth about themselves; they have seen themselves before God as they really are – and isn’t this the entire purpose of the Gospel?

‘What must we do, brothers?’ they ask.

‘You must repent … and every one of you must be baptised …’ replies Peter.

Peter is not making a suggestion, he is not giving his opinion, he is not offering an invitation. Peter is declaring in the clearest way possible what everyone (from every nation under heaven) who wishes to reach salvation must do. In return they will receive forgiveness of their sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Peter called his generation ‘perverse’. Strong language but accurate, and equally, if not more so, descriptive of our own. We must cease blindly resisting the thought that all is well in our lives and that all is well in the world. If the violence, confusion and evil in the world is nothing more than an expression of what is in the human heart then we need to seriously face the truth of our own need to repent.

May we be like those who listened to Peter. They ‘accepted what he said … And that very day about three thousand were added to their number.’

3rd Sunday of Easter - Year A

2011-05-02T12:00:00.003+10:00

Acts 2:14.22-33; 1Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35

On the day of Pentecost Peter stood up with the Eleven and addressed the crowd in a loud voice: ‘Men of Israel, listen to what I am going to say … .’

It was important that Peter stood up with the Eleven, the whole Church, because the message he was about to preach was not his own - it was the solemn proclamation of the whole Church.

It was important also that this be done 'in a loud voice'. The Church must speak fearlessly and with unmistakable clarity.

And furthermore it was vitally important that this first declaration of the Gospel, of the Catholic faith, should have been made to the whole world. As Luke spells out clearly for us (2:6): Now there were devout men living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven … .

The Catholic Church is universal; that’s what the word catholic means. Therefore she wants the whole world to listen to 'what I am going to say'.

And how does Peter begin? As the Church always begins, with the word 'Jesus' - Jesus the Nazarene … .

A few miles away, on their way to Emmaus, a couple of disappointed ‘former’ disciples, in answer to a stranger’s question, begin their testimony with much the same words as St Peter: All about Jesus of Nazareth….

Actually, their story is remarkably similar in structure and content but these disciples lack two essential ingredients. Firstly they appear to give their account of events without any reference to the Scriptures and, secondly, they are not convinced of the resurrection. Without this dimension their story does not bring joy, encouragement or peace - only downcast faces. What’s more, it leads them away from the community of the Church, away from Jerusalem.

Indeed, they had heard rumours of the resurrection, some women from their group had gone to the tomb and seen a vision of angels 'who declared he was alive'. But these rumours were not enough. They needed to see, to experience the Risen Lord for themselves. As yet they were like those who had gone to the tomb after the women but 'saw nothing'. Their eyes had not yet been opened.

We can only imagine the manner in which Jesus spoke those words: 'You foolish men!' to Cleopas and his friend. I imagine it would have been in somewhat the same tone with which Jesus had chided Philip: Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and still you do not know me?

The problem here was that, although these two men knew the Scriptures, they didn’t understand them, and therefore they didn’t relate the events which had so disappointed them to the word of God. It was a classic case of St Jerome insight: ‘Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.’

St Peter, with the benefit of his Easter faith, on the other hand, now sees all that happened as completely in accordance with what scripture had foretold. He speaks of Christ’s resurrection using the words of Psalm 16. He refers to King David and the promise God had made him that one of his descendants would succeed him on the throne, and speaks also of the promised Holy Spirit.

Jesus sets about instructing the demoralised disciples and soon their hearts are ‘burning’ within them. Jesus shows them that all is as it should be and that the word of God had foretold everything from the beginning.

What Jesus actually said to the two men is not recorded. What we do know is that he brought them to understand and believe the scriptures and to grasp the truth that the passion of Christ was a necessary forerunner to his entry into glory.

But one further surprise awaited these men: While he was with them at the table, he took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognised him… .

What a shock! It had been Jesus all the time, the Risen Lord! He had shown them the ‘word’ and the ‘sacrament’ and then disappeared. Instinctively they knew there was only one thing to do. They must seek him in the ‘community’ and: They set out that instant and returned to Jerusalem.

There they found ‘the Eleven assembled together with their companions’ – the Church – which verified for them the Good News: Yes it is true. The Lord has risen … .

The disciples who had so forlornly walked away from the mystery had returned. They were home, in the only community on earth that knew Jesus had risen from the dead. Alleluia!

2nd Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday) - Year A

2011-04-25T12:00:00.010+10:00

Acts 2:42-47; 1Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

By coincidence a few weeks ago I was puzzling over what to say for Divine Mercy Sunday this year when a friend knocked at my door. I put my problem to him and his answer was interesting. He told me he had been to many Divine Mercy celebrations in his parish and the one thing he had never heard the priest speak about was the topic of indulgences. I promised him I would do my best this year and so here goes.

To understand an indulgence we have to understand sin. There are of two types of sin:

Firstly, the kind of sin that is so grave it deprives us of the life of God within us. We lose our friendship with God and become incapable of eternal life – and for this reason this sin is called mortal.

The second kind of sin is called venial. It wounds our relationship with God but does not deprive us of communion with him.

These words, mortal and venial, are not dreamed up somewhere in a Vatican office they are part of every person’s experience of sin. Every married couple know, for example, as does every young person in the school playground, that there are some actions they can do to their friends, or which their friends can do to them, which destroy friendship and some which only wound it. The same applied to our relationship with God.

So, if you want a working definition of sin you can say: Mortal sin destroys our relationship with God, venial sin weakens or wounds it.

Naturally, many questions remain to be answered on this subject of sin but we don’t have time to go into them here. Above all we remember that mortal sin is forgiven in face to face confession and venial sin is forgiven in various other ways – through a good act of contrition, at the penitential rite at Mass, through Holy Communion, and so on.

To understand indulgences we have to realize that sin has a double consequence.

Since mortal sin makes us incapable of eternal life we say that it carried with it an "eternal punishment" unless, of course, and hopefully, it is forgiven in the Sacrament of Confession. But every sin, even venial sin, has its corrupting effect within us which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory.

To give a simple example, I might decide I’m going to give up smoking or drugs. The decision I make is a good and wonderful decision but, generally, a huge battle will take place in the following months as my body and mind and will come to accept that it can no longer have the cigarettes or the drugs. Sin is like that.

We have within us a tendency or an attachment to certain sins. Try making a resolution to forgive someone who has hurt us. That’s the easy part. The battle to ‘become’ that forgiving person can often be long and difficult. What the Catechism is wisely saying is that if we don’t complete the process here on earth, the merciful God will give us time to complete it in Purgatory. I, for one, thank God for giving us Purgatory, when he does for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves, and removes every last vestige of attachment to sin in our hearts and minds, since nothing impure can enter heaven.

So we see that the eternal punishment of hell goes on forever; the temporal punishment of Purgatory comes to an end when the soul has been purified from all attachment to sin. There is a difference between having been forgiven for our sins and having been purified of those sins. Or again, there is a difference between having the guilt of sin removed and the punishment due to that sin remitted.

Take another example from daily life. Imagine a man or woman who had stolen money from their workplace for many decades, so that it eventually added up to a very considerable sum. One day they confess their sin. The guilt is removed but justice requires the money be repaid; the guilt is removed but the punishment remains. This money can be repaid here on earth, or, if this is not possible, real prayer and penance can be undertaken until eventually this ‘temporal punishment’ is remitted.

This is precisely where indulgences come in. An indulgence is a gift from the Church by which a person, who fulfils certain conditions and is properly disposed, gains a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to his or her sins whose guilt has already been forgiven.

We must not doubt that the Church has the God given power to do this. The treasury of Christ’s redemption has been put in her charge and she, like her merciful Master, shows mercy to us poor sinners by ‘indulging’ us in this way.

There are two kinds of indulgences: a partial indulgence or a plenary. A partial indulgence removes part of the temporal punishment due to sin and a plenary indulgence removes all punishment due to sin. Furthermore, we can gain indulgences for themselves or apply them to the dead.

So now you are going to ask, ‘Ok, so what are the ‘certain conditions’ we have to fulfil and what are the proper dispositions?’

The usual conditions for every plenary indulgence are:

1. sacramental confession, within abut 20 days before or after.

2. Eucharistic communion, preferably on the day, or the days before or after.

3. prayer for the intentions of the Pope (the prayers are not specified).

The specific conditions for the plenary Indulgence offered for the Feast of Divine Mercy are:

1. in any church or chapel, in a spirit that is completely detached from the affection for a sin, even a venial sin, take part in the prayers and devotions held in honour of Divine Mercy.

2. or, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament exposed or reserved in the tabernacle, recite the Our Father and the Creed, adding a devout prayer to the merciful Lord Jesus (e.g. Merciful Jesus, I trust in you!").

The Easter Vigil - Year A

2011-04-18T12:00:00.001+10:00

Romans 6:3-11; Matthew 28:1-10

When God made us he drew us from the depths of the immense ocean of his love. He set us on this earthly shore and invited us, by means of a deeply embedded desire for him, to freely return to him in love.

From the very beginning our existence, therefore, our deepest essence, was ordered to a relationship with God. Every tribe and nation from the very commencement of human history has somehow lived this truth and expressed it culturally as religious seeking.

God created us and established us in an inescapable relationship with him – inescapable because it is part of our very constitution, like our need for oxygen and water, sunlight and food.

And God saw that it was good.

When Adam and Eve turned from God they turned also from their own inner self as well as from each other. We could say they found themselves in dis-grace. Their destiny to return to God could now no longer be accomplished. They, and we, were doomed to live in a profound inner frustration which could never be resolved; made for union with God it was now no longer possible to reach him – ever.

The story of Adam and Eve's rejection of God was repeated many times throughout history. Every time God made overtures of love towards us we, so to speak, ran away:

… the more I called to them, the further they went from me (Hosea 11:2).

The correct word for this running away from God is sin. It started with Adam and Eve and it continues to this present day, in fact, it's everywhere. And strangely, as Lent made clear, just as, humanly speaking, the desperate awfulness of the Cross makes sense only when we realise that its victim is totally innocent, so too the ecstasy of Easter makes sense only if we remember that we are sinners.

If on every page Sacred Scripture reveals the incomprehensible love of God for his people, it also reveals their determined and reprehensible refusal to respond.

Awareness of sin doesn't put a damper on the joy of Easter, it is part of its essential glory, the very foundation of its victory. Those of us who suffer from the modern reluctance, even refusal, to allow the reality of sin onto the stage of the human drama, will inevitably find that their celebration of Easter is reduced either to a vague and impoverished notion of 'poor Jesus on the Cross', or to a hunt for chocolate eggs with the children and a big sleep in the afternoon.

Easter is all about what God should have done to us sinners but didn't.

What do you do with a dog who, despite your best efforts, refuses to obey you? Who even bites you? What do you do with a fruit tree that won't bear fruit? What would you expect God to do with a people who, century after century, continue to defy him to his face? What would you have done?

Easter is about what God should have done to us sinners but didn't.

We might put the dog down or pull the fruit tree out by the roots but God says: My heart recoils from it, my whole being trembles at the thought. I will not give rein to my fierce anger … for I am God, not man: I am the Holy One in your midst and have no wish to destroy (Hosea 11:8-9).

And so God himself, the heavenly Father, sent to us a man called Jesus born of a woman named Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. This man came to do the will of God his Father and to give him the loving obedience we refused him.

All that God had been looking for in the human race he finally found in Jesus; and finding it in Jesus he found it in mankind. Finally God’s yearning for a true relationship with his people was satisfied.

We killed Jesus; the most loathsome expression of our sinfulness. The passion and death of Jesus were the ‘test’ God had in store for him and we were the ones who put him to that test. God was taking our own evil and making it a part of his plan, to show us how much He loved us, how much we are worth in his eyes.

And now he is Risen! He has conquered death .. and in Him .. we have all conquered death. Alleluia!

Passion Sunday (Palm Sunday) - Year A

2011-04-11T12:00:00.006+10:00

Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Matthew 26:14 - 27:66

The Gospel of our Lord's Passion which we have just heard read began with these words: One of the Twelve, the man called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said: What are you prepared to give me if I hand him over to you?

It all begins with a betrayal. It has to begin with a betrayal. Jesus has done nothing wrong so the only way to get him is to betray him. And so he is betrayed, and by one of his own.

No one knows better how to betray than a disciple, one of the trusted inner sanctum. No one knows how to hurt the Church better than an ex-Catholic. St Bernadette Soubirous was once asked what frightened her most and, surprisingly, she answered, ‘A bad Catholic.’

Have you noticed that a seemingly disproportionate number of the world’s great villains of history are former Catholics? Our prisons are full of Catholics; men and women who, by and large, no longer take their faith seriously. They have let it all slip away from them.

What could Judas have been thinking? And all for thirty pieces of silver. What could he have been thinking? What drove him to betray the Master? He probably imagined he had some cause, some reason, but he doesn't seem to have thought it through.

Many Catholics imagine they are justified leaving: 'The Church has let them down; the priest was rude to them; the principal at the school didn't listen to them, all they want is your money....' But in the end, when all is said and done, it is betrayal of Christ. St Paul's words in other circumstances (Gal 5:4) can fittingly be applied here: You are separated from Christ ... you have fallen from grace.'

Everyone who turns away from Christ loses much more than he can ever hope to win. When Judas realised what he had done all his so-called 'reasons' came to nought and he went out and hanged himself. What unkindness from a priest, what hurt, real or imagined, from a fellow Catholic, could ever justify walking away from Christ?

When they handed him that money, from that moment he became a traitor; from that moment he looked for a way of handing him over. Judas was bought and paid for; no longer free. He had sold himself. He was a slave.

The Gospel sums it up neatly when it tells us that Judas 'went to the chief priests'; while on the other hand, 'the disciples came to Jesus.'

Judas asked 'What will you give me?' - The disciples asked what can we do for you?

Jesus, from whom nothing can be hidden, is fully aware of Judas' betrayal and he announces that betrayal to the Apostles, not only to let them know that his time is near but to give Judas a chance to repent. Instead of humbly thinking the matter through and recognising his mistake Judas continues to pretend: Not I, Rabbi, surely! Judas has made up his mind. He no longer loves the Master.

Jesus sets about celebrating the Last Supper and despite the now sinister and ugly presence of the betrayer in their midst there's a kind of unstoppable serenity in his words. He knows exactly what he's doing. Judas hears the words of Consecration but is unmoved.

The betrayal of Judas is a betrayal of the Eucharist. Every bad Catholic betrays the Eucharist.

Jesus speaks of Judas' betrayal in terms of the Scriptures and now, after supper, he speaks of his disciples' loss of faith 'in accordance with the Scriptures'. Peter and the rest of the disciples contradict him; they claim they will never lose faith. They contradict not only Jesus but also the Scriptures!

But let us hasten to acknowledge that every betrayal is redeemable. No one ever needs to be lost. The road back to Christ is open to all - to Peter, to the other disciples, and even to Judas.

Jesus must have felt very lonely at that table. On the one hand sits Judas who would betray him and on the other hand sit the disciples who would desert him. Even now they reject his prophetic word which is, even though they do not realise it, essentially a rejection of Jesus himself, the Word of God.

Judas has now left the community of the disciples. He has become the first bad Catholic. He has betrayed the fellowship, the community of the Lord, the Church.

But Jesus has a work to complete. He heads off to the Garden of Gethsemane, followed by his dazed and disheartened disciples. Let us go too, in all our weakness and hesitation. Perhaps we will, with the Eleven, learn what he wishes to teach us; to become what he wants us to become.