February 2013
GOSPEL COMMENTARIES
1 February
Mk 4:26-34
Jesus said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,
and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does
not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full
grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because
the harvest has come.’ He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God,
or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the
ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and
becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the
air can make nests in its shade.’ With many such parables he spoke the word to them,
as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he
explained everything in private to his disciples.
For ‘kingdom’ say ‘presence’. Then read it again. “The presence of God is like this: a
man scatters seed upon the soil. Whether he is asleep or awake, be it day or night, the
seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how.” The seeds of awareness of God are in us.
They will not suddenly leap into the air, bypassing all stages of growth, and fill the grainloft to the door. Instead they will lie in the damp earth, lost and forgotten, seeming dead.
But the miracle of life is happening there where no one can see and no one can
understand or explain it. Then one day the most vulnerable part appears just above the
ground. It has no defences, it doesn’t find itself in a glasshouse; it is exposed to
everything that could happen to it…. That's life. Only love could take such risks.
In this parable Jesus says that the presence of God is like that. Now, for ‘presence of
God’ just say ‘God’. God doesn’t appear with flashes of lightning and claps of thunder.
God appears slowly, microscopically, humbly, tenderly…. “The kingdom of God does not
come with observation,” Jesus said (Lk 17:20); “nor will anyone say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or
‘There it is!” And still, like advertisers, we never stop trying to make the brand
recognisable. (You have to wonder how the poor man of Nazareth would react to
clerical motley.) The part of a disciple is to wait, to listen, to have the wise humility of the
earth, and to have faith and hope and love.
2 February [Presentation of the Lord]
Lk 2:22-40
When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought
him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord,
"Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord"), and they offered a
sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves or two
young pigeons." Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man
was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy
Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see
death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into
the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was
customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,
"Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my
eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel." And the child's
father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon
blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the
rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts
of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
The Law is mentioned three times in this reading: everything is being done “according to
the Law.” Jesus appears as fully within the Law; everything is being done the right way;
he is fully identified with the Jewish people, or as a commentator with a lot of hindsight
put it, “completely immersed in humanity.” Very well, if there is to be hindsight, then let’s
see this child as a grown man put to death in accordance with the same Law. But can
you still see the eight-day-old baby once you have mentioned his death?
What else is mentioned three times in this reading? The Holy Spirit. But remember, this
is the Old Testament Holy Spirit. It is not yet the divine Person of the Christian Trinity. It
was the undifferentiated Spirit of God that hovered over the waters at the beginning of
creation (Gen 1:2). The new Spirit would take people right out of the embrace of the
Law.
Sometimes it can be a good thing to try and set aside some of our hindsight. When
hindsight gets in before sight itself, it can blind rather than illuminate. We have to give
Jesus time to grow up – not only in himself but in us.
It took an old man, Simeon, to discern the new thing that was happening. And the old
woman, Anna, is also aware. They are wonderful examples of the clarity that can be
found in old people. Every night of life the Church’s Night Prayer repeats Simeon’s
canticle. “Now, O Lord, you can dismiss your servant in peace....” It is deeply
meaningful. Every day is like a short lifetime, and nightfall reminds us of approaching
death. The end is therefore not to be dreaded as something we have always excluded
from our consciousness, but welcomed as a fulfilment – much as the body welcomes the
prospect of rest and sleep.
3 February [4th Sunday in Ord. time]
Lk 4:21- 30
Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me
this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown
the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'" And he said, "Truly I tell you, no
prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. But the truth is, there were many
widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six
months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of
them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in
the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the
Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up,
drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was
built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them
and went on his way.
In the gospels we often see people suddenly opposing Jesus very soon after they had
been acclaiming him. They go along with him for a while, thinking that he is part of their
dream - party to their dream - but soon they discover that he is not. Their dream is
everyone’s dream: that “we” are superior to all others. There is a built-in contradiction in
this, but it doesn’t seem to wake us up. In today’s gospel reading Jesus disappointed
the dream of his own townsfolk, so they tried to throw him over a cliff. He praised
foreigners and pagans, and that could not be allowed to stand.
I heard a wise word the other day: “You can never get enough of what you really don’t
want.” Deep down you don’t want it because it doesn’t satisfy any real hunger in you.
The reason it doesn’t satisfy you, you imagine, is that you are not getting enough of it; so
you multiply it. But multiplying it does not satisfy you; it only multiplies your disgust.
What you need is a different diet. This is true not only of bodily food, but of mental and
spiritual food as well. Trashy novels will never fill your heart and soul, no matter how
many you read. Spirituality without the edge of truth will disgust you in the end.
Jesus can be relied on to disturb our dreaming, if we allow it. The problem is that we
cling desperately to our dreams. We have to see and admit that much of our waking life
is a succession of dreams. We see the world largely through language: through
descriptions that we have heard, through thoughts and memories, through fears and
hopes, some of which may be partly our own, but most of which we have wholly caught
from other people. Language is like an updraft of air that can lift us right off the ground.
It takes a great deal of effort to stay down. Animals do so effortlessly; we have to keep
on striving.
We can even use the words of Jesus as a way of remaining asleep. “People are just
thirsting for the truth, Father!” said a contemplative nun to me, laying her hand on her
heart, dimming her eyes, and inclining her head to one side. I soon discovered what she
meant by the truth: a tiny cluster of nervous, rigid cant-phrases, with no life and no power
to give life. Anything that fell beyond that narrow beaten track she called ‘New Age’.
She is not representative of her kind, thank God, but all over the world there are millions
of people clinging to dreams and calling them divine revelation. The test is not the words
we repeat, but the kind of life we lead. “It is not those who say to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, who
will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father in heaven” (Mt
7:21).
4 February
Mk 5:1-20
They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he
had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit
met him. He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with
a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he
wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to
subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always
howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran
and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to
do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’
For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ Then Jesus asked
him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ He begged
him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there on the hillside a great herd
of swine was feeding; and the unclean spirits begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us
enter them.’ So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered
the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank
into the lake, and were drowned in the lake.
“My name is Legion.” Another translation has ‘Mob’. ‘Mob’ suits a madman: it conveys
the sense of being invaded by chaotic forces (legions are all discipline). Which madmen
does it suit especially? All of us! A good way to read the Scriptures is to put oneself in
the shoes of everyone in the story.
It is certainly a dramatic story. In his book, Why I am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
brought up this story to support his claim that Jesus was not a perfect man. The
philosopher was focusing on the pigs and the fate they met at the hands of Jesus. But
there are other characters in the story: in particular, a deeply troubled human being. St
Jerome thought there must have been two thousand demons, since there were two
thousand pigs. One demon one pig. The text doesn't quite say that. Never mind: no
one could be so interested in demons – or in pigs, for that matter – as to keep an exact
tally of them. No one, that is, except Tertullian (3rd century), who wrote: “Even the
bristles of the pigs were counted by God, just as were the hairs of the heads of the just.”
That would have consoled Bertrand Russell. He was certainly partial to pigs: he was no
vegetarian, and probably never came face to face with a pig that wasn’t cooked. Ninetynine years of bacon and sausages would account for quite a large herd of pigs, possibly
even two thousand; and all of them suffered more gruesome deaths than their distant
relatives in the story.
Mark’s focus is the sorely tormented man. It is a story full of symbolic meanings. Every
element is significant. The story is full of unclean things. Demons, of course, were
unclean. Jews could not touch a dead body or a tomb without becoming ritually unclean
(this is why sepulchres were whitened; because of their greater visibility, people were
less likely to bump into them accidentally); but this man even lived in the tombs. Pigs
were regarded as unclean animals, and would never be found in Jewish territory. In
addition, Jews had a great fear of water; they were no sailors; for them the sea was the
abode of Leviathan, the monster of the deep. So the possessed man was surrounded
and invaded by vile forces.
By the end of the story the demons have left the man and taken up residence in the pigs,
the most appropriate place for them; and the pigs have plunged into the water to join
Leviathan. Meanwhile, the man is “clothed and in his right mind,” and is told by Jesus to
go home to his family and friends. Everything has returned to its proper place.... If it
were a film we would see Bertrand Russell seated at home enjoying his breakfast.
5 February
Mk 5:21-43
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered
round him; and he was by the lake. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named
Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little
daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be
made well, and live.’ So he went with him.
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman
who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much
under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but
rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd
and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’
Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of
her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about
in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see
the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ He looked all
round to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came
in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her,
‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say,
‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ But overhearing what they
said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ He allowed
no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they
came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping
and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a
commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him.
Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were
with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her,
‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ And immediately the girl got up and
began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with
amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give
her something to eat.
The Old Testament took thousands of years to unfold, but the events recounted in the
gospels unfolded in just a couple of years. Mark’s gospel in particular leaves an
impression of breathless haste; it is like a child telling a story. Many sentences begin
with “And”; he often uses phrases like “straight away”, “and immediately”; he uses the
‘historic present’ (“Jesus says to them,” not “said”), which gives a feeling of urgency. He
also ‘sandwiches’ events, adding to the feeling of urgency: in today’s reading, for
example, Jesus healed the woman while he was on his way to save the little girl. There
is an urgency about the whole gospel that makes it quite clear it is not just for reading; it
is for doing.
Coming back to the beginning of the passage: look at the synagogue official.
Synagogue officials differ – or rather their circumstances differ. In Lk 13:14 we saw an
angry one: he was angry that Jesus healed an old lady on the sabbath. But in today’s
reading we see one who “threw himself at Jesus’ feet and asked him earnestly” to heal
his little daughter who was dying. It would be wonderful if we knew that it was the same
official! There is nothing like a crisis to restore our humanity: not any kind of crisis but
one of the heart. Any crisis that only challenges your mind is not deeply challenging; you
are not really open till your heart is open. Your real inside is not your mind but your
heart. Culture and travel and training can open your mind, but that isn't much. You are
not open till your heart is exposed. As soon as the official had a sick child he ceased to
be an official and became a father.
In both stories there is a child. The words Jesus spoke to the little girl in the ‘outer layer’
story are quoted in Aramaic, his native language: talitha kumi, “little girl, get up!” The
New Testament is written in Greek, but the writers kept just a few words in Hebrew and
Aramaic: for example, the last word in the Bible, maranatha, and Abba! And talitha
kumi, an expression of great gentleness and tenderness. It must have been as
distinctive as his prayer; they remembered it forever in its own language. Talitha kumi.
6 February
Mk 6:1-6
He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the
sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded.
They said, "Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to
him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the
son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his
sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him. Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets
are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their
own house." And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a
few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went
about among the villages teaching.
“They took offence at him.” What was his offence? His background was the same as
theirs; he was just like them: “Is not this the carpenter?” But he had not remained in the
role the village had assigned to him. Villages can be intensely conservative places. The
word ‘conservative’ is in itself a good word: to conserve is to keep intact, to guard. But
everything depends on what one is trying to conserve: the best or the worst. Because of
the human capacity for self-deceit, we can use a fine word to make mean things look
good. In the reaction of the villagers to Jesus a narrow village mentality showed itself.
The smaller the society, the more controlling this narrow spirit. “Beneath the charm of
the rural town or village, there often lurks a lethal intolerance.” Nazareth was such a
place. People who have known you all your life see you as the child you were, even
when you are a middle-aged man or woman. They see where you came from and they
remember all your youthful mistakes. If they are villagers they also want to make sure
you are not getting above yourself; “who does he think he is?” This is a sort of envy, or
perhaps something more primitive: a tribal spirit. It tries to destroy you, or at least to
discredit you, if you are not just like everyone else.
So we are safe if we don’t live in villages? Unfortunately no. A whole section of society,
or even a whole society, can lock itself into a village mentality. Listen for the worst
accents of the village in some television programmes; look for them in the printed media.
There we can see, for better and for worse alike, the global village.
The terrible fact is that it works. It tied Jesus's hands: “he could work no miracles there”
(v.5). It is a frightful thought that we have the ability to prevent miracles. The villagers
wanted to keep him within his limitations: he was a carpenter and the son of a carpenter.
But elsewhere the gospel says “he broke through their midst and went his way” (Lk
4:30). We have to break through the midst of many things in order to become adult
Christians. Many people, even in the Church, will try to keep us in a pre-adult state.
Yes, Jesus said we must be like children: we must have their qualities of simplicity,
honesty, freshness…. “Like children,” he said. We must be adults who are like children,
not children who are like adults.
7 February
Mk 6:7-13
He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority
over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff;
no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two
tunics. He said to them, ‘Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the
place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave,
shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.’ So they went out and
proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil
many who were sick and cured them.
There are many ways to approach a text, just as there are many sides from which to
approach an object. We could approach today’s reading as follows. What's an extra
tunic for? It is for tomorrow. What is a bag for? It is for carrying things that I will need
tomorrow. What is money for? It is for tomorrow’s food and shelter.
But “Now is the time,” Jesus said. To live intensely in the present is to be less worried
about the past and the future, and that enables us to be less preoccupied with
possessions.
What we think of as the past is a memory trace, and the future isn't even that (it is a
projection of the past, a projection of a memory trace). These, like the moon, have no
light of their own; any light they have is a reflection of the light and power of the Present.
We think of time as originating in the unimaginably distant past and flowing forward into
the present and beyond us into the future. Could we not reverse that image? Time
originates now, it wells up into existence in the present moment and flows away into the
past. Time flows backwards! This moment is the Big Bang! Take nothing for the
journey – because you have already arrived!
Many people are cheated of life by their love of money. Money is many things: it is your
love of things, your escape from people, your security against death, your effort to
control life…. People who can't love people start loving money. When anyone comes
too close they want to push them away, in case they ask for money. People who love
money become like things: dead, closed. For people who love people, money can be a
means; but for people who love money, people are just a means. Love becomes a
means, even prayer becomes a means: their prayer is for more money.
8 February
Mk 6:14-29
Some were saying, ‘John the Baptist has been raised from the dead; and for this reason
these powers are at work in him.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a
prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’ But when Herod heard of it, he said, ‘John,
whom I beheaded, has been raised.’
For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in
prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her.
For John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ And
Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod
feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.
When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. But an
opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and
officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias came in and danced,
she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, ‘Ask me for whatever
you wish, and I will give it.’ And he solemnly swore to her, ‘Whatever you ask me, I will
give you, even half of my kingdom.’ She went out and said to her mother, ‘What should I
ask for?’ She replied, ‘The head of John the baptizer.’ Immediately she rushed back to
the king and requested, ‘I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a
platter.’ The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests,
he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with
orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head
on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples
heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.
‘Herod the Great’, five times married, and father of the Herod of this story, had the
dubious distinction of having killed everyone he ever loved; there was a saying, “It is
safer to be Herod’s pig than to be his son.” Still, this son survived somehow, and
continued the family tradition of lust and cruelty. Innocent people die at the hands of
such people: the Holy Innocents at the hand of the father, John the Baptist at the hands
of the son.
Josephus, the 1st-century Romano-Jewish historian gave an account of the incident in
today’s reading, filling in further details. Herod’s wife, whom he repudiated in favour of
his own brother’s wife, was the daughter of Aretas, king of Petra. Aretas took a dim view
of this and waged war on Herod, and destroyed his entire army. Eusebius (c. 260-340)
wrote: “He suffered this calamity on account of his crime against John.” Today we would
be more conscious of what all those soldiers suffered for Herod’s drunken bravado.
“I had John beheaded, yet he has risen from the dead!” Don’t be surprised; he has
inevitably risen. If you want the truth to sprout, cut off its head. It will grow twenty
heads. This was Herod's experience. However, because of his misdeed and his guilty
conscience it was not a pleasant one for him. John was his bad conscience. John rose
up again before him like a ghost, not like a resurrected being. He cannot be beheaded
again; it is impossible to behead a ghost. That phantom pain will be with Herod for the
rest of his life. But wasn’t there forgiveness for him? Yes, but he was a tyrant and didn’t
know that word.
What’s in this reading for people who are not tyrants? What could we possibly have in
common with Herod? Read what St John Chrysostom said about that. “Do not make
this cold reply: ‘What does it matter to me? I have nothing in common with him.’ With the
devil alone we have nothing in common, but with all humanity we have many things in
common. All partake of the same nature with us. They inhabit the same earth. They are
nourished with the same food. They have the same God….. Let us not say then that we
have nothing in common with them.” We have to stand in the shoes of every character
mentioned in the New Testament.
9 February
Mk 6:30-34
The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He
said to them, "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." For
many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away
in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and
recognised them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of
them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them,
because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many
things.
Today we see the Twelve returning from their mission (see Feb. 7). Obviously they were
the worse for wear. He told them they needed to rest: to rest and to be silent.
He himself knew that same need. Scattered here and there through the gospels are
verses that tell us volumes about Jesus by their very silence. "When daylight came he
left the house and made his way to a lonely place" (Lk 4:42). Another is Mk 1:35, "Very
early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a
solitary place, where he prayed." See also Lk 5:16, "He would always go off to some
place where he could be alone and pray." And Lk 6:12, "He went out into the hills to
pray, and he spent the whole night in prayer to God."
“The apostles had no time even to eat.” That sounds more like today. There are things
that never change, despite all the change we see in our world. We need rest and
silence. Have you noticed that watching TV doesn't really relax you? At the end you
usually feel just empty and wasted. Rest, the art that the animals practise to perfection,
is one that we have to learn all over again.
The nature of the mind is to postpone. When that obviously doesn’t get us anywhere we
say, I mustn’t be going fast enough. So we go faster. This may be the origin of the
fascination with speed. We are running away from ourselves. Self-knowledge is almost
impossible in this atmosphere. In the time of Jesus a bullock-cart was the fastest means
of transport. What would they think of the speed with which we live?
10 February [5th Sunday in Ord. time]
Lk 5:1-11
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was
pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the
lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one
of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the
shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished
speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a
catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught
nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they
caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signalled their
partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats,
so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees,
saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with
him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and
John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do
not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their
boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
Among the many books written by Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), one stands out as an
enduring little classic, The Wounded Healer. For those who knew him, this book is
especially powerful because, without expressly intending to, it describes so well the man
himself. It was because of his own wounds that he was able to touch the lives of so
many people. “By his wounds we have been healed,” St Peter wrote of Jesus (1 Peter
2:24). However, there was a different reaction to Nouwen’s book from a fundamentalist
Christian who reviewed it and announced that a Christian minister should not come
before people as a wounded healer but as “a prophet of God and as a helper in their
afflictions.” These different reactions show a gulf between Christians that is probably
deeper than most of the issues that divide Christians Churches.
Are you helped by someone who defines himself as a helper? Can you feel cared for by
someone who defines himself as a prophet? If the Christian life were only a matter of
external prescriptions, then probably yes - in the way that you can get help from an
accountant or a lawyer. But since it touches the innermost places in us - the very
springs of our thoughts and actions - this approach is less than helpful. From Nouwen,
a contrasting approach (in Out of Solitude): “When we honestly ask ourselves which
persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of
giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch
our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a
moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and
bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the
reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares…. By the honest recognition
and confession of our human sameness we can participate in the care of God who
came, not to the powerful but powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take our
pain away but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each
other and form a new community."
In the first reading at today’s Mass, God’s call made Isaiah aware of his own weakness
and unworthiness, exactly as Jesus’ call to Peter made Peter blurt out, "Go away from
me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" If Christians do not carry the precious knowledge of
their own weakness and sinfulness, then all their attempts to help you are nothing but an
ego-trip: by ‘helping’ you they are feeding on your strength and making you weak; by
‘loving’ you they are seeking ways to snare you and make you dependent on them; by
‘caring’ for you they are preening their own image. (And by the way, do those
televangelists remind you too of Pro Wrestlers?)
Back to Henri Nouwen: "We tend to look at caring as an attitude of the strong toward the
weak, of the powerful toward the powerless, of the have’s toward the have-not’s….[But]
the word ‘care’ finds its roots in the Gothic ‘Kara’ which means lament. The basic
meaning of care is: to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with.”
11 February
Mk 6:53-56
When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat.
When they got out of the boat, people at once recognised him, and rushed about that
whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And
wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces,
and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it
were healed.
Today's reading stands in strong contrast to tomorrow’s. Today Jesus is among his own
people, the Galileans; they recognise him and flock to him. But tomorrow a delegation
from Jerusalem, the Judaean capital, will arrive, and from there the hostility of the
religious leaders will begin. It will lead to his death.
A preacher known to me was boasting after he got a standing ovation for one of his
sermons. It had gone to his head. But a friend of his helped him back to reality. He
said, “There’s something odd here, isn’t there? Jesus preached and they crucified him;
you preached and they gave you a standing ovation!”
Popularity is a fickle goddess: the crowd that cheered “Hosanna!” for Jesus was crying
“Crucify him!” a few days later. Jesus experienced both reactions; the rest of us, with
few exceptions, would settle for just Hosanna! Popularity looks like glory, and it is a kind
of glory: someone called it “glory’s small change.” There is the personality type
described as ‘the pleaser’. Such a person will never challenge you; they rely too much
on your good opinion of them. But it backfires; most people would prefer that you said
what you thought. “He more had pleased us had he pleased us less.”
12 February
Mk 7:1-13
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem
gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled
hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat
unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and
they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many
other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the
Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the
tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied
rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, “This people honours me with their lips, but
their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as
doctrines.” You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’ Then
he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to
keep your tradition! For Moses said, “Honour your father and your mother”; and,
“Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” But you say that if anyone
tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban” (that
is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother,
thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And
you do many things like this.’
Here they are: the scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem. They are not bringing their
sick, like the Galileans in yesterday’s reading. So they are not vulnerable, they don’t
have to bother about love. That clarifies their minds so that they can think about the law.
Immediately they find fault and go into the attack. Shallow, Jesus called them: more
concerned with external regulations than with the inner reality; more concerned with law
than with the heart (in the Scriptures the heart is a symbol of the whole inner life of a
person).
Briefly, the word ‘corban’ means ‘gift’. Anything brought to the Temple treasury was said
to be ‘corban’ and could never again be put to secular use. Now, a rebellious son might
say to his parents, “Any benefit or enjoyment you might have by me, I now declare
‘corban’!” It meant that he was no longer bound to help or support them in any way! “So
it frequently happened,” wrote St Jerome, “that while father and mother were destitute,
their children were offering sacrifices for the priests and scribes to consume.” Jesus
raged against this. “You abandon the commandment of God [the commandment to love
and honour your parents] and hold to human tradition [corban].” For all their talk about
God, religious lawyers can't cope well with God. God seems too concerned with
individuals, and is therefore unpredictable. Love just muddies the pitch for lawyers.
It is pleasant to rail against these Pharisaical customs, but in the end I have to enquire
what my own similar customs are.
13 February [Ash Wednesday]
Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
‘Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you
have no reward from your Father in heaven. ‘So whenever you give alms, do not sound
a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that
they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But
when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that
your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in
the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell
you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and
shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in
secret will reward you. ‘And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites,
for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you,
they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your
face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret;
and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
How can you expect to breathe in if you refuse to breathe out? An anonymous ancient
Christian writer has this: “You who have offered nothing to God, what do you expect to
receive from God?” Breathing is a kind of giving and receiving. We know at once when
we begin to suffer from a disease of the respiratory system: asthma, bronchitis,
emphysema…. But there is the spiritual counterpart of these diseases: the inability to
give and receive freely.
‘Nowhy’ is a word I have never seen written till I wrote it now. It is a word we used as
children. It was useful when explaining to parents our reason for doing the things we did
for no reason. “Why did you do that?” “Nowhy!” If ‘nowhere’ is an accepted word, why
not ‘nowhy’? Others have invented similar words when they needed them: such as
‘nohow’. But it is a word that could have a big future; it has a wider use than we made of
it in childhood. For example: Why do you help people? Nowhy. Why do you do good?
Nowhy.
Here I bring in Meister Eckhart in support. “If you should ask a good person, 'Why do
you love God?' - 'I don't know - for God's sake'. - 'Why do you love truth?' - 'For truth's
sake'. - Why do you love justice?' - 'For justice’s sake'. 'Why do you live?' - 'Indeed I
don't know - I like living!'” It would have been simpler just to say, Nowhy.
Doing something for a reason sounds like good business practice and common sense,
while doing something for no reason sounds rather shiftless and irresponsible.
Advertising is serious business, we know; and it is all about projecting your product and
your image – being seen. But Jesus said that if you do good in order to be seen doing it,
then “you have had your reward.” In other words, that's all there is to it; your action has
no substance. As the ancient writer put it, “What is done to be seen by others is poured
into the wind…. What is human praise but the sound of the whistling winds?” Your solid
reasons and your good sense amounted to nothing.
But didn’t Jesus say on another occasion, “Let your light shine before others, so that
they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:16)? How
do we square this with today’s reading? The anonymous writer I mentioned above
comes to clarify it for us. The Lord doesn’t want us to become invisible, he said, but
wants the light to come from the right source. “Every good thing becomes better when it
is hidden by us but revealed by God.... and it is God who will reveal things at the right
time.” A saint is not a ‘personality’ but rather a kind of ‘transparency’. If we all lived from
beyond our egos we would all likewise be transparent.
Lent is a time to start all over again with this difficult work: to be free of the tyranny of the
ego. Why? Nowhy.
14 February
Lk 9:22-25
"The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief
priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised." Then he said to them
all, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their
cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those
who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole
world, but lose or forfeit themselves?
Suffering looms large in the Christian faith. This is no surprise, because it looms large in
every kind of life. The task for us Christians is to ensure that our attitude to it remain
Christian.
St Paul called Christ’s cross “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:23-24),
while the world around us calls it foolishness and a stumbling-block. St Thomas Aquinas
was asked where he got all his wisdom. "At the foot of the cross of Christ," he replied.
There, contemplating the life and death of Jesus, he found a wisdom that went beyond
human wisdom.
Wisdom is described in the Scriptures as "reaching mightily from one end of the earth to
the other" (Wisdom 8:1). In Jesus we see this as no abstract thing, but as a lived
experience. He reaches mightily from one end of the human scale to the other, and
beyond. He so identified with us that St Paul could say he not only shared our suffering
but became sin for us: "For our sake God made the sinless one into sin," (2 Cor 4:21).
And at the other end of the scale: "Through him we have access to the Father" (Eph
2:18).
We have two ways of living with suffering: we can take it on our shoulders and try to walk
with it; or we can just sit down under it and feel like victims. No one suggests that either
way is easy. If it was easy it wouldn't be suffering. Our instinct is to run away from
suffering, and when we can't escape from it, to treat it as an enemy that has defeated us;
then we run the risk of becoming full of complaints and self-pity. This is the harder way:
harder for ourselves and for everyone around us. The wisdom of the Gospel is quite
different; it tells us to face our suffering, not to treat it like an enemy but like a friend, to
learn from it, to let it draw us away from self-centred thoughts and feelings, and
ultimately to see it as a sharing in the Passion of Christ.
"People who have not suffered, what do they know?" said Henry Suso, a man who
suffered more than most in a century (the 14th) that suffered more than most. Here is his
statement in context: "There is nothing more painful than suffering, and nothing more
joyful than to have suffered. Suffering is short pain and long joy. Suffering has this effect
on the one to whom suffering is suffering, that it ceases to be suffering. Suffering makes
a wise and practised person. People who have not suffered, what do they know...? All
the saints are the cup-bearers of a suffering person, for they have all tasted it once
themselves, and they cry out with one voice that it is free from poison and a wholesome
drink."
15 February
Mt 9:14-15
Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast
often, but your disciples do not fast?" And Jesus said to them, "The wedding guests
cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come
when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one sews a
piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a
worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins
burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh
wineskins, and so both are preserved."
Then the disciples of John came to Jesus, saying, ‘Why do we and the
Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘The
wedding-guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The
days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.’
It seems there was a certain amount of rivalry between the disciples of John the Baptist
and the disciples of Jesus. The fourth gospel plays this down by ending John’s career
before Jesus’ began, and by having John say: “He [Jesus] must increase and I must
decrease” (3:30). What is interesting is that the gospel writer felt the need to do that. In
today’s reading we catch a glimpse of that rivalry. So did John Chrysostom, who wrote:
“It was likely that the disciples of John the Baptist were thinking highly of themselves as
a result of John’s suffering.... So Jesus put down their inflated conceit through what he
said.”
Rivalry is a very human thing, and many people see it even where it isn't. If Chrysostom
is right, John’s followers were rather proud of the fact that their hero was a martyr. I
can't imagine Jesus being party to the rivalry, but I can well imagine his followers.
Instead of joining in the potlatch, Jesus spoke about joy.
He did not make a religion of hardship, yet he never avoided pain or sorrow. Joy does
not come from avoiding; on the contrary it is possible only when we have gone into the
heart of our pain and sorrow. If we avoid the process nothing happens; we will have to
continue all our lives to avoid it. That way there is no joy, only endless desperate flight.
Happiness can be manufactured to some extent, just for short periods; but joy is a stroke
from beyond. Joyless religion may be the profoundest denial of God. If there is no joy in
it, it is all your own work, so what need have you of God? If the Resurrection is not
visible in you, you are preaching death without resurrection. One of the fruits of the
Spirit is joy, and it is mentioned next after love in St Paul’s list, “love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22). If
you had no love in you, you could hardly claim to be a Christian; likewise joy (and all the
others).
16 February
Lk 5:27-32
After this he went out and saw a tax-collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he
said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up, left everything, and followed him. Then Levi
gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax-collectors
and others sitting at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes were
complaining to his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax-collectors and
sinners?’ Jesus answered, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those
who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.’
When I was a child the only publican I knew was Molly Looney, the owner of the local
bar, and I was always a bit wary of her because of what I had heard about publicans in
the gospel. But a ‘publican’ in the gospels means a tax-collector. Cyril of Alexandria (5th
century) gave no quarter to those tax-collectors: “Levi was a publican, a man greedy for
dirty money, filled with an uncontrolled desire to possess, ignoring justice in his
eagerness to have what did not belong to him. Such was the character of publicans.”
That was rather harsh, given that he didn’t know Levi personally; he only knew the type.
Thinking in types is always unfair: it gives the impression that you are thinking about
people, while in reality you are thinking only about a concept. Then the individual is
made the bear the whole weight of the type.
Had Jesus been thinking in types he would never have approached Levi (or Matthew, as
he is called elsewhere). Thinking in types was alien to him; he made friends with people
of every type. It would be strange if the Word became flesh, but stopped short of taking
the final step: mingling with the common people, all of us, even tax-collectors. In today’s
reading there was not just one tax collector but “many”.
It was inevitable that the Pharisees too would arrive on the scene. These Pharisees
needed those tax collectors. The name ‘Pharisee’ means ‘Separated’: their special
righteousness separated them from the common people. Naturally they needed those
others to be different: otherwise they themselves could not be ‘Separated’. It was
essential for the Pharisees that there should be lots of tax collectors and sinners; it is
essential for some ‘good’ people that there should be great numbers of ‘bad’ people. But
how disconcerting it always is to find Jesus among the bad!
17 February [1st Sunday of Lent]
Lk 4:1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the
wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during
those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, "If you
are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." Jesus answered
him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'" Then the devil led him up and
showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, "To
you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give
it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered
him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil took
him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you
are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his
angels concerning you, to protect you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that
you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put
the Lord your God to the test.'" When the devil had finished every test, he departed from
him until an opportune time.
John the Baptist had no questions about his own identity, even when he had been
thrown into the dungeon, this child of the desert. He sent word to Jesus, “Are you the
one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?'" (Luke 7:20). ‘Are we to wait for
another?’ He had doubts about Jesus but not about himself.
What are we to make of the temptations of Jesus? Were they real temptations? If they
were, then he was seeking to understand his own identity and considering different ways
of spending the rest of his life. If they were not, then the whole scene was only a
charade. It is not at all to doubt his divinity if we take the temptations seriously. He was
divine, but his human mind was human: that is, limited. The three gospels that tell of his
temptations link them with his baptism in the Jordan. He came to the Jordan as an
unknown carpenter, and the Holy Spirit came and “rested on him” (others are touched or
moved by the Spirit, but the Spirit “rested” on Jesus). He was catapulted out of his old
way of life; Mark says the Spirit “drove him out into the desert” (1:12). The Voice had
said to him “You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you.” To see how he was
going to spend the rest of his life, he had to have time to think and pray and struggle.
A temptation may come from the outside, but unless it goes to the inside it is not a
temptation. The first temptation was to be a material provider. This is a good thing to
be. How do you tempt a good person? – with goodness, because good people will not
take an evil bait. It is not so difficult to be a material provider, and in fact most people
can do it for themselves. But if Jesus had given in to this temptation, the work would
have absorbed him completely, distracting him from his real task. The next temptation
was to power. This is always a subtle one, and very easily rationalised. Any kind of
power will do. It was said of someone that he entered the priesthood in order to do
good, and did well instead. I can persuade myself that a position of power would give
me greater opportunities of doing good. Jesus avoided this trap too. The most
distinctive thing about him throughout his public life was his refusal of power. In the end
he made himself utterly powerless on the Cross. It is very moving to see that that choice
was not automatic, but conscious and deliberate. The third temptation, which cannot
have occupied his mind for long, was to become a celebrity.
Some scholars suggest that this gospel passage was a summary story; that is, that it
describes a process that went on throughout his life, rather than a single occasion.
Whether or not that is likely, it is certainly the case that these temptations are everpresent for the disciples of Jesus, the Church. Most of us would find it easier to buy
groceries for someone than to sit for hours and listen to their pain and confusion, or their
anger…. As for power and glory: that is a long story! We can imagine we are defending
the power and glory of God when in reality we are only defending the worldly power and
pride of the Church. The Church’s identity does not consist in titles and honours and
regal dress, but in following the poor man of Nazareth. We, the disciples of Jesus, the
Church, have to be driven into the desert again and again… until we understand
profoundly and embrace wholeheartedly the way the Cross.
18 February
Mt 25:31-46
"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on
the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate
people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will
put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at
his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared
for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was
thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I
was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison
and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw
you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when
was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?
And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will
answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are
members of my family, you did it to me.' Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'You
that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his
angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me
nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not
give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also will answer,
'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in
prison, and did not take care of you?' Then he will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as
you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go
away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."
Some people have a recurring nightmare in which they are being judged and found
totally wanting. Today's reading sounds just like such a nightmare. Earlier generations
of Christians thought about “that day” (dies illa) more than people want to do now. For
centuries they sang that austere sequence Dies irae (Day of wrath), meditating on that
ultimate scene of judgement.
It is impossible to evade the question of ultimate judgment, however you think of it. In
the sight of God what will my life amount to in the end? In the face of that ultimate
question we all feel naked and ashamed. Human beings have imagined a scenario
where they can start all over again: reincarnation. But the same question arises again
and again. This is not how the Judeo-Christian tradition sees it. In the words of
Qoheleth, “Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls,
there will it lie” (11:3). There is no coming back, as the rich man discovered in Jesus’
parable (Lk 16:19-31). These are grim thoughts.
But the point of this reading is not to divide the world into good and bad people (does
anyone fit perfectly in either of those categories?), but to make the point that in serving
one another we are serving God. Our ultimate destiny, the thing that seems farthest
away, actually hangs on the things nearest to hand, the most proximate: on how we treat
the Lord in “the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned.”
19 February
Mt 6:7-15
When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think
that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father
knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in
heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have
forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil
one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you;
but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
It is a great pity that many people still identify prayer with ‘saying prayers’. We do this
despite what Jesus said: "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the
Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.” We
have long neglected contemplative prayer, willing to leave it to people who live in
monasteries. But lay people are just as likely to feel the need of it as monks and nuns;
and this is now becoming evident all around us. Not finding any interest in it in their local
parish, many people began to look elsewhere for it; hence the interest in non-Christian
religions. But contemplative prayer is now being rediscovered in Christian circles in our
own time. However, Church authorities (with the exception of one Australian bishop)
have shown no interest in it. This is surely a major tragedy – perhaps even another
scandal – in the Church today. Leadership has been seen as administration; but the
crying need now is for spiritual leadership.
Has it ever struck you that in the Our Father, “the pattern of all Christian prayer,” there is
no mention of Jesus, his life, death or resurrection, nor mention of any of the Christian
mysteries? This absence suggests that it was his own prayer. In prayer he was seized
by one single awareness: the Father; he was not thinking about himself. When we pray
the Our Father we are not praying to him, but with him; we are praying his prayer. We
are so close to him that we do not see him. We are (so to speak) inside his head looking
out through his eyes and seeing, like him, only the Father and the world. We are praying
in him. All Christian praying is praying “in Christ.” The normal ending to every Christian
prayer is: “through Christ our Lord.” At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer we say,
“Through him, with him, in him….” All Christian praying is praying “in Christ.” Repeating
the words will bring us to the Holy Place, true; but by itself it will not lead us into the Holy
of Holies.
20 February
Lk 11:29-32
When the crowds were increasing, he began to say, ‘This generation is an evil
generation; it asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For
just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this
generation. The queen of the South will rise at the judgement with the people of this
generation and condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to
the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here! The people
of Nineveh will rise up at the judgement with this generation and condemn it, because
they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is
here!
The Book of Jonah is a delightful and amusing book – and short: only a few pages. The
introduction to it in the Jerusalem Bible calls it “a droll adventure…and its doctrine is one
of the peaks of the Old Testament…. Broadminded, it rejects a too rigid interpretation of
prophecy…. It rejects, too, a narrow racialism…. All the characters of this story are
likeable, the pagan sailors, the king, the populace, even the animals of Niniveh…. We
are on the threshold of the Gospel.”
A “droll adventure” it may be, but the drollery was lost on the early Christian writers.
Gregory Nazianzen (4th century) called Jonah’s antics “utterly absurd and stupid and
unworthy of credit, not only for a prophet but even for any sensible person.” Augustine
(5th century) said the book was a cause of “much jest and much laughter to pagans,” but
not, he thought, to Christians. Some of these sombre Fathers, however, could not avoid
being unintentionally amusing. Jerome (5th century) noted that when the sailors tossed
Jonah overboard into the sea “the text does not say they seized him or that they threw
him in, but that they took him, and carried him as one deserving respect and honour.”
And Cassiodorus (6th century) said that for Jonah the whale’s belly was “a house of
prayer, a harbour, a home amid the waves, a happy resource at a desperate time.”
Paulinus of Nola (5th century) alone made an insightful remark: “What a worthy prison for
God’s holy runaway! He was captured on the very sea by which he had sought to flee.”
That's how we all get caught: by our own efforts to escape from what we have to do.
Someone tried to persuade me that Jesus never laughed, since it is nowhere recorded in
the gospels that he did. Non sequitur. Laughter is so much part of being human that if
he had never laughed, that surprising fact would surely have been recorded. The
capacity for laughter – risibilitas – the mediaevals said, is so peculiar to humans, that it
could be a test of whether some creature was human. Hyenas and kookaburras only
make a noise that happens to sound like human laughter. Yet there are many instances
in Christian literature (in the Rule of St Benedict, for example) where laughter is frowned
on. They probably meant silly noisy laughter.
It is easy to imagine Jesus as a young man laughing at the antics of Jonah, and the
animals doing penance, and Jonah arguing heatedly with God (God: “Are you right to be
angry?” Jonah: “I have every right to be angry!”)
In today’s passage, Jesus uses Jonah as a headline for his own preaching. That's how
close we are to the Gospel. Don’t go to bed tonight without reading it!
21 February
Mt 7:7-12
"Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be
opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and
for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if
your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a
snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how
much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! "In
everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the
prophets.
Do we always think of ‘goods’ when we read, “Ask and it will be given you, search and
you will find…?” Are the Father’s “good things” always things? Is love a thing? Things
(gifts) can be signs and proofs of it, but it is not itself a thing. The Father’s greatest gift
to us is love, and all the other gifts are enticements to that greatest gift.
The French mystic Madame Guyon (1648 – 1717) wrote: “Do not stop at the graces or
gifts of God, which are only as the rays that issue from His face, but which are not
Himself; mount up to His very throne and there seek Him; seek His face evermore until
you are so blessed as to find it.” Psalm 104 says, “Constantly seek his face.” This is
also the advice of Meister Eckhart, and indeed of all the saints; and when you think
about it, it is just evidence of good breeding. There’s something chilling about a
business relationship that keeps human contact to an absolute minimum. The
commercial world can be a very chilly place. It would be tragic if some of that chill were
to enter into our relationship with God. I remember (vaguely I'm afraid) an essay by D.H.
Lawrence in which he poured scorn on a writer who was unwise enough to reveal the
details of his daily routine: “Rose at 6. Worshipped the deity. Ate breakfast.” That frosty
description was bound to draw the ire of Lawrence, a passionate writer if ever there was
one. And it made prayer look like another chore – like feeding the canary.
If we see God in that passionless way, we will be primarily interesting in what we can
get. “Some people regard God as they regard a cow,” said Meister Eckhart. “They want
to love God as they love a cow. Thus they love God for the sake of external riches and of
internal solace; but these people do not love God aright....” He didn’t say it just once.
“Some people love God for the sake of something else that is not God. And if they get
something they love, they do not bother about God. Whether it is contemplation or
rapture or whatever you welcome, whatever is created, is not God.” “Whoever loves
God for anything else does not abide in Him, but abides in the thing he is loving Him for.
If, therefore, you want to abide in Him, you must love Him for nothing but Himself.”
In that warmth, gift-giving and receiving make sense. Without it, religion is a coldhearted business.
22 February [The Chair of Peter]
Mt 16:13-19
Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples,
‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist,
but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But
who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the
living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh
and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are
Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail
against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on
earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in
heaven.’
Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350 – 428) commented: “Having said that Peter’s confession
is a rock, Jesus stated, ‘Upon this rock I will build my Church.’ This means he will build
his Church upon this same confession and faith.” This is the “key to the Kingdom of
heaven.”
When Jesus asked the disciples who the people believed he was, they gave him a list of
dead men: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or
one of the prophets.” All dead. Peter alone mentioned life: “You are the Christ, the Son
of the living God.” This is the key to the Kingdom of heaven. It is to see Jesus as “the
Christ, the Son of the living God.” He is not a dead man, he is living. There are many
who have an interest in keeping him dead: then he is controllable, predictable, even
saleable. But he is not dead.
The key is to see that he is everywhere: he is looking out of the eyes of the stranger and
the sinner and the outsider. A key can be turned into an instrument of exclusion and
control. But this key is meant to be the opposite: it is for opening.
Chrysostom: “He did not ask ‘Who do the scribes and Pharisees say that I am?’ even
though they had often come to talk with him. Rather, he asked, ‘Who do people say the
Son of man is?’ as if to inquire about common opinion. Even if the common opinion was
far less true than it might have been, it was at least freer of malice than the opinion of the
religious leaders, who were reeking of bad motives.” The latter, and their successors
throughout the ages, would like to see his tomb sealed, the heavy stone securely in
place for all time.
Let’s not say ‘they’; let’s say ‘we’. The Gospel is always about us, not about ‘them’;
Jesus spoke in the second person, he was not a social commentator or a journalist. The
heavy stone represents the past; we live too much under its weight; we interpret the
present not as something living and new but as something already dead and old. But
there are moments when the stone moves aside, even if only a fraction of an inch, and
we glimpse the living Christ, as Peter did. In such moments our faith is in living
continuity with his.
23 February
Mt 5:43-48
You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.'
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you
may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on
the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those
who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?
Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect.
An anonymous ancient Christian writer has this: “We are to love our enemies – not
because our enemies are fit to be loved but because we are not fit to hate.... If you hate
your enemies, you have hurt yourself more in the spirit than you have hurt them
materially. Sometimes you may not harm them at all by hating them; but you surely tear
yourself apart. If then you are benevolent towards your enemies, you have spared
yourself and them. And if you do them a kindness, you benefit yourself too.”
“Love your enemies,” Jesus said. It is a strange thing for a religious leader to say. Many
have said – sometimes in so many words – that we should hate our enemies, or at least
distrust them, look down on them, and have nothing to do with them. Religious hatred is
the worst of all; sacrilegiously, it borrows something from the infinity of God: it says that
your enemies are God’s enemies; it is unlimited and it settles in for eternity. But on the
lips of Jesus, "love your enemies" must have sounded, at the time, like saying black is
white, or evil is good.
You have two kinds of “enemies”, to be carefully distinguished. There are those whom
you regard as enemies, and there are those who regard you as their enemy. If you do
not regard the second kind as your enemies, they are not strictly your enemies; they are
so only in their own opinion. If you refuse to reflect back their enmity to them, you can
still be said to have opponents, but not strictly enemies. A real enemy is an alienated
part of yourself, and if you refuse to make that alienation you have no real enemy. Even
if the whole world hated you, you would have no enemies. Enmity grows by being
reflected, and if you stopped reflecting it, in a while there would be less of it in the world.
Usually we get into tangles of blaming and justifying and asking “who started it”; but all
this is futile. The only way to stop it is to stop reflecting it. Gradually the tangle loosens
and we are left with just ourselves, variously wounded and fearful. We are God's
boisterous children. To know that is to know some kind of love.
24 February [2nd Sunday of Lent]
Lk 9:28-36
Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and
James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the
appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they
saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were
speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter
and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake,
they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him,
Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings,
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah" – not knowing what he said. While he
was saying this, a cloud came an overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they
entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my
Chosen; listen to him!" When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they
kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
In all three liturgical cycles we have the strange story of the Transfiguration on the
second Sunday of Lent. What does it mean? The second reading is a kind of echo of
this gospel reading, and perhaps it gives us a key to open up its meaning for us. The
Lord, St Paul writes, "will transfigure these wretched bodies of ours into copies of his
glorious body." The Transfiguration, then – whatever we discover it to mean – is not
only about Jesus but about us. It is to make some discernible difference to us today.
There was the everyday Jesus who was well known to his friends; and then there was
the moment when they scarcely recognised him, so transformed – transfigured – was he.
Divinity shone through him, revealing depths that they had never imagined. Can this
happen only to Jesus? When the little girl was asked what a saint was, she replied
(thinking of the stained glass windows in the church), "A person who lets the light
through." Lovely – but is it only an image? Can it also be a reality? Could you and I let
the light through? We are probably far too aware of our wretchedness to think thoughts
like that. But it is just these "wretched bodies of ours" that are the material of
transfiguration, according to St Paul.
In a beautiful poem called The sunrise ruby, Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) the Sufi
mystic, imagines a girl asking her beloved,
'Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.’
He says, 'There's nothing left of me.
I'm like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight.'
There it is: in one way it is a stone, but in another it is a world of redness. This gives
some impression of what transfiguration might mean. When you are completely
absorbed and self-forgetful as you look at the sea, or at a sunset, or the night sky, or a
tree, you are still yourself, of course; but you are also more than yourself. At any rate
you are a kind of larger self, and not the small self that thinks before speaking, and
counts money, and always looks after his or her own interests.
But we would like to hear what Christian mystics have to say about it. Johann Tauler
(1300-1361) wrote the following:
"God fires the spirit with a spark from the divine abyss. By the strength of this
supernatural help the soul, enlightened and purified, is drawn out of itself into a unique
and ineffable state of pure intent toward God….This complete turning of the soul toward
God is beyond all understanding and feeling; it is a thing of wonder and defies
imagination….In this state the soul, purified and enlightened, sinks into the divine
darkness, into a tranquil silence and inconceivable union. It is absorbed in God, and now
all equality and inequality disappear. In this abyss the soul loses itself, and knows
nothing of God or of itself, of likeness to Him or of difference from Him, or of anything
whatsoever. It is immersed in the unity of God and has lost all sense of distinctions."
Sadly, this aspect of the Christian faith is not as familiar to many as it could be. We have
learnt to settle for less. Most people believe that the best things are not for them. But
we are all called to deep enlightenment and union with God. Does this mean that we are
to be somehow unreal and up-in-the-air? Hardly. Tauler and the people of his time had
to be intensely practical. But his words live for centuries beyond the time he uttered
them, because he was in touch with the living heart of our Faith. It is he, and the likes of
him, who will lead us to the heart of God.
25 February
Lk 6:36-38
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do
not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give,
and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running
over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get
back.
God’s mercy is infinite and unconditional. But isn't there some kind of condition built into
the phrases of today’s reading? “Judge not and you will not be judged.” “Forgive and
you will be forgiven.” “The measure you give is the measure you will get.” Don’t these
phrases suggest that if you do judge you will be judged; if you refuse to forgive you will
be refused forgiveness; and that God is only as merciful as you are? How are we to
understand this?
St Augustine was at his best when he was struggling with the most difficult passages.
“What do you want from the Lord? Mercy. Give it, and it shall be given to you. What do
you want from the Lord? Forgiveness. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Then later he
added: “Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given you: These are the
two wings of prayer, on which your spirit soars to God.” Our spirit is meant to soar, not
just to be lifted up like a stone. God's mercy, forgiveness, and generosity are not just
exercised on us; they are to exercise in us. By being merciful, forgiving and generous,
as best we can, we are receiving God’s gift rather than just being credited with it.
Think of it this way. If you cannot give you cannot receive either. The measure you give
is the measure you are capable of receiving. A saint would give you his or her life, but a
thief only wants to take from you. “With every creature, according to the nobility of its
nature, the more it indwells in itself, the more it gives itself out,” wrote Meister Eckhart. If
I refuse to give (or forgive), this shows that I have not entered into the human and divine
mystery of what we are. God does not limit mercy, forgiveness, and generosity; we do.
Finally, a comment from Cyril of Alexandria: “Why do you judge your neighbours? If you
venture to judge them, having no authority to do it, it is yourself rather that will be
condemned, because God's law does not permit you to judge others.” Then he quoted
psalm 129:3, “If you, O Lord, should mark our guilt, Lord, who would survive?”
26 February
Mt 23:1-12
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit on
Moses’ seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they
do, for they do not practise what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear,
and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger
to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their
phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honour at
banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the
market-places, and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for
you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for
you have one Father—the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you
have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who
exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
In many languages today the word ‘Pharisee’ is synonymous with ‘hypocrite’. This solid
reputation is probably due to the later part of this chapter of Matthew’s gospel: the
repeated phrase, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Jesus
acknowledged the value of some of what the Pharisees were teaching: “Do whatever
they teach you.” What he objected to was the discrepancy between this and their own
lives. They had made themselves interpreters of the Law of Moses (“they sit on Moses’
seat”), and were applying it without mercy. This was the reverse of their own stated
claim: to be as lenient, or as strict, with others as with themselves. They were imposing
the burden of the law on others while they themselves enjoyed precedence and
privilege. It is less the sinfulness of sinners than the hypocrisy of the pious that causes
people to abandon religion. Atheism is caused mainly by religious hypocrites.
There’s a story about a rabbi who gave money to a drunkard. When criticised for it, he
said, “Should I be more particular than God who gave me the money?” An authentic
religious person doesn’t judge the sinner but identifies with him, like Jesus queuing up
with sinners for John’s baptism of repentance (Mark 1:9). But fake religious people are
always judging; they exist on it. They are religious in order to be able to condemn
others. They haven't acknowledged their own sinfulness, so they project it onto others;
then all their fury is fuelled by a hidden self-hatred. Even when the content of what they
are saying is correct, everything they say is vitiated. I once heard an old man say to a
group of young priests, “If you don't love people, for God's sake don't preach!” You may
be able to express some true opinions, but you will not be able to “speak the truth in
love” (Ephesians 4:15). The very truth of what you say will blind you to the underlying
hatred. An anonymous 5th-century Christian writer said: “Mistaken laity may be more
easily set straight, but clerics, if they are evil, are almost impossible to set straight.”
Anyone who presumes to teach is inviting comparison with the historical Pharisees, and
is in the direct line of fire.
The Pharisees have long disappeared from history, but the Church has us reading about
them frequently in the Liturgy. Why? Because we haven't gone away, you know!
27 February
Mt 20:17-28
While Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside by
themselves, and said to them on the way, ‘See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the
Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn
him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and
crucified; and on the third day he will be raised.’ Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee
came to him with her sons, and kneeling before him, she asked a favour of him. And he
said to her, ‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Declare that these two sons of mine
will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.’ But Jesus
answered, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am
about to drink?’ They said to him, ‘We are able.’ He said to them, ‘You will indeed drink
my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for
those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.’
When the ten heard it, they were angry with the two brothers. But Jesus called
them to him and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and
their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes
to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you
must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to
give his life a ransom for many.’
Mark says that it was the James and John who asked Jesus for important posts in his
kingdom (10:37). But Matthew puts the blame on their mother! However, the cover-up
is transparent in the text when you check the original Greek. ‘You’ is both singular and
plural in English, but Greek makes it clear. “Jesus said to the brothers, ‘You (plural) do
not know what you (plural) are asking. Can you (plural) drink the cup that I am about to
drink?’” He was speaking to them, not to their mother. Furthermore, the others were
angry “with the two brothers.” John Chrysostom tried to steer around it by saying: “It
seems that both the mother and the two sons of Zebedee together came to him.” Nice
try.
The anger of the others reveals something else. Why were they not just amused, or
perhaps embarrassed for them? Their anger reveals that they had a personal stake in
the matter. They too saw themselves in the running for the top posts! This is all the
more absurd because Jesus had just been speaking about the suffering and humiliation
he himself was about to endure.
Today's reading, then, has the same theme as yesterday’s. The only difference is that
yesterday’s was about the Pharisees, but today’s is about the Apostles! If there is an
excuse for the two, it is possibly that they were very young and inexperienced, and didn't
have much awareness of what they were saying. An ancient writer saw it that way. “If
the Lord, when he had entered into his suffering, said, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this
cup pass from me’ (Mt 26:39), how much more would they have been incapable of
saying ‘We are able’ if they had known what the challenge of death was like?” Indeed,
he added, if the other ten had understood what they were all being called to, they would
not have been angry with the two: for they were being called to great suffering.
Chrysostom added that they seem not to have grasped the logic of Jesus: that the first
would be last. “James and John disgraced themselves by seeking the first place. That
puts them among the last.”
Through the ages, that logic – much more difficult than Aristotle’s – has been more
honoured in the breach than in the observance. Its implications have not fully sunk in.
There is still a culture of privilege, precedence and power in the Church. Has it ever
sunk in, in any age? The same ancient writer said, “If James and John were installed at
Jesus’ right and left, how could there be any room left for the rest of us?”
28 February
Lk 16:19-31
‘There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted
sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with
sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the
dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the
angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he
was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.
He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of
his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” But Abraham
said, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and
Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.
Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who
might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to
us.” He said, “Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father’s house— for I have five
brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of
torment.” Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to
them.” He said, “No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they
will repent.” He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will
they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” ’
Dives and Lazarus – Rich and Poor. We used to call the rich man Dives, but Jesus did
not give any name to this character in his story: ‘dives’ is just the Latin word for ‘rich’: a
translation of the Greek ‘plousios’. The poor man does have a personal name, Lazarus.
(As it happens, Jesus had a friend called Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary.) St
Augustine wrote: “Jesus kept quiet about the rich man’s name but gave the name of the
poor man. The rich man’s name was well known around, but God kept quiet about it. The
other’s name was lost in obscurity, but God spoke it. Please do not be surprised…. God
kept quiet about the rich man’s name, because he did not find it written in heaven. He
spoke the poor man’s name, because he found it written there, indeed he gave
instructions for it to be written there.”
The story tells us something about riches: the rich are inclined to define themselves by
what they own, not by what they are. Riches can clog up your inner being, so that you
do not know who you are. Then you look out from that place of not-knowing and you see
other people, but you do not really see them; you only see what they own – or do not
own. Others looked through the doorway and saw a poor man there; the rich man
looked and saw nobody. That is the subtlety of this story: the rich man was neither cruel
nor kind to Lazarus; Lazarus was invisible to him.
There is another rich man in the gospel – this time it was not a story but reality. When
Jesus invited him to follow, “he went away sorrowful, because he was very rich” (Mt
19:22). There is nothing quite like wealth for closing the ears and the mind, for
deadening the conscience. After a while it also closes the eyes, and like the rich man in
the story we no longer see the poor. That rich young man is never heard of again in the
New Testament. He might have become a greater apostle even than Peter or John.
Sahajananda, from outside the Christian tradition, wrote this about him: “The young man
became very sad because he was very rich. He identified himself with his riches....
Without them he had no existence. With these riches he could not enter into the kingdom
because the door to the kingdom is narrow. Not narrow in the sense of space, but in the
sense that only the essential aspect of our being goes through it; all acquired things
have to be left out.... This treasure can neither increase nor decrease. No thief can get
there and no moth can cause its destruction.”
The story of the rich man and Lazarus is not focused on Lazarus but on the rich man.
Focused on Lazarus it might mean: Put up with your lot now and you’ll be happy in the
next life; you’ll even be able to watch the rich man suffering. But no, the focus is on the
rich man. Jesus told this story to the rich, to their faces, as an accusation against them.
He told it to the Pharisees, who as Luke said, “loved money” (16:14). It has the same
import as Luke's version of the Beatitudes: “Alas for you who are rich!” (6:24).
BETWEEN OURSELVES
[Atheism]
Dear Mr O’Shea,
Your website was recommended to me by someone who likes to prowl around in such
places. But don’t take it that I'm one of your supporters. I put all religious beliefs behind
me many years ago. That doesn’t stop me from taking an interest in the religious scene.
You don’t have to be a player to be interested in sport. I take it you’re a religious guy,
since that's what your website is about. I now ask you the question I keep asking such
people: how can you still believe in God after all the evidence of science and, shall l say,
the evidence of common sense? I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Richard
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. How can religious belief survive such onslaughts?
Religious people are comfortable with soft arguments, but what do you do when you are
faced with tough arguments and searching questions? I don’t think you will want to try to
answer this question or to publish it but I think it’s good for you to hear it anyway. Carry
on with whatever it is you do. DM
Dear DM,
Thank you for your letter and for making things easy for me by having no expectation of
a reply. I'm glad you raised this fundamental question. I'm not at all sure I can give you
an answer you will find interesting or enlightening to any degree. But even if one or two
related matters are clarified, that will have been useful.
Thanks, as I say, for asking a hard question. I don’t think there’s a great difference
between an easy and a hard one: most questions are hard if you pursue them far
enough. Ours isn’t the first age to ask hard questions of religion, nor is it even
characterised by hard questioning; it is characterised much more by a lack of interest
and a dismissive attitude. You have to be very precise and very passionate to ask a real
question. Just think of Nietzsche in the 19th century: it is quite impossible to remain
unmoved or unchallenged by him. He was my favourite antagonist when I was a
student, and later when I taught philosophy. I came to prefer other philosophers, but I
never lost the excitement of reading him. He was the Mike Tyson of philosophy. I have
to tell you that religious people are not always cowering in fear of argument. Not at all because they have as much to learn from such arguments as the one making them;
perhaps more, if they are more passionately interested.
It is true that very many believers think of God as an explanation of the world and the
problems in human life. But this is not sensible, because God is an even greater
mystery than the world. Belief is not an easy option or a readymade answer to
everything. The problem of suffering, for example, is as great a problem for believers as
it is for atheists. Jürgen Moltmann wrote: “'If there is a God, why all this suffering?’ is
the fundamental question of every theologian too, from Job down to Christ dying on the
cross with the cry: 'My God, why have you forsaken me?'”
Arguments about God, when they clarify anything, usually do so negatively. I learn more
every day about the God I don’t believe in. I don’t know of any argument that proves the
existence of God. I would never rest the weight of my own faith on a philosophical
argument. I can hear you say that this is just moving the goalposts. I don’t think it is; I
never relied on such arguments, even when their validity was not being challenged. I
think religion is still relying on philosophical modes of thought and neglecting its real
subject, which is religious experience. You could read and argue all day about the taste
of a lemon, but you would never come to know it by that means. You could be told it is
not like the taste of an orange or an almond – and that is true – but no argument will ever
deliver the taste of lemon to you.
Everything in religion is meant to bring you to religious experience. It is not about
proving anything to you. God is not an object whose existence can be proved. More
simply, God is not an object – not even when you write it with a capital O, or with the
word ‘supernatural’ accompanying it. Religious experience doesn’t ‘grasp’ an ‘object’ in
the way that philosophical reasoning tries to do. Most of the attacks on religion treat it as
if it were a philosophy, or a system of morality or of social organisation. These are
secondary aspects, not the heart of the matter. Many of the attackers are working from
their own childhood or teenage understanding of religion, laying siege to positions that
have been abandoned by religious people. I find many of the attacks on religion tedious,
because they are saying things I already mostly agree with, but missing the real point.
Lest you think that this is just evasive action let me quote a couple of things written by
Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. If these were quoted without reference to Aquinas,
many people would believe they were written by an agnostic or even an atheist. They
are just a few of many such passages in his writings. (I quote them in translation;
excuse the exclusive pronouns.)
 Neither Christian nor pagan knows the nature of God as he is in himself.
 This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.
 The truths of faith, which can only be known completely by those who see the
essence of God, can be known by human reason only in similitudes, which are not
sufficiently clear to give comprehensive knowledge of that truth as if by a proof - or
as if understood in itself. Nevertheless, it is useful for the human mind to exercise
itself in such enquiries, inadequate as they are, provided there is no presumptuous
claim to complete understanding and proof.
 Our intellect speaks of divine things, not according to their own mode of existence for it cannot know them so - but according to the mode of existence found in created
things…. Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite.
 God is ultimately known as unknown, because the mind knows God most perfectly
when it knows that his essence is above all that can be known in this life of
wayfaring.
To anyone familiar with Christian literature these passages are in no way exceptional.
Many others Christians through the centuries have written in the same vein. I can give
you the references if you would like to check them. These passages illustrate, at the
very least, that religion is a much harder target to hit directly than is often thought.
Besides, it is impossible to be a neutral outsider to this question, because atheism
(unlike agnosticism) is itself a theological position. Heinrich Böll once said, “I don't like
these atheists. They are always talking about God.” Atheists have to attempt to say
what they understand by ‘God’ when they deny God’s existence. The very attempt to do
so makes them theologians and lands them in the company of Aquinas as quoted above.
You wrote: “How can you still believe in God after all the evidence of science and, shall l
say, the evidence of common sense?” Scientists today are in fact much less dogmatic
than they were, for example, in the 19th century. The few who go beyond scientific
method and attempt to pull down religion deserve the same amount of attention as
religious people who dogmatise about science. As for common sense: people say it is
not very common. But I think the problem with arguing from it is that it is far too
common: at different times it will support any position or its opposite. There’s really no
substitute for tasting the lemon oneself.
Even though arguments bring us nowhere, “It is useful, [as Aquinas said above] for the
human mind to exercise itself in such enquiries.” They purify religious belief, illustrating
what it is not, cornering it, forcing it to discover its own identity. This purification is ongoing because religious experience takes place in the human mess. The Word was not
made “clear and distinct idea,” but flesh.
I don’t know, DM, if you have read this far. If you have, I wish you the best, and I assure
you that your letter was welcome; and I would welcome more from you.
Donagh
JACOB’S WELL
MAKING CONNECTIONS:
A view from inside the Dominican Order
(from In Touch with the Mystery: a Spiritual Anthology, ed. By Daphne Dwyer,
Bradshaw Books, Cork, 1999)
I once met a Cistercian monk who admitted that he entered the monastery because he
loved jam. When he was a child his mother always used jams that were made in the
local monastery, and every jam-pot had the picture of a cowled monk on it. So from
earliest days he associated jam with monastic life, and loving one he was sure he would
love the other.
When he told me that, I found the courage to admit (after about thirty years) that my
subconscious reason for joining the Dominicans was that they were robed in white,
unlike the black-robed priests I had known and disliked in school. At some level or other
I thought they must be as different from those black ones as day from night.
I suppose God can use any bait in the bag, and they all work, in different waters. What
we call our rationality is probably a very thin crust on the surface of something strange
and immense...and yet human, because it is ours, it is us.
Would you put up with a minute’s word-chasing? Words are like people. Like us they
have an ancestry, and it is a pleasure to discover something interesting there from time
to time. Ballein, in Greek, means ‘to throw’, syn means ‘together’; so syn-ballein is ‘to
throw together’, and that is where we get the word ‘symbol’. Then dia means ‘apart’, diaballein is ‘to throw apart’, and that's where diabolos, ‘the devil’, comes from. The devil is
the force of disintegration, disconnection, alienation.... And he is the enemy of
symbolism. Why bring this up here? Because I think that being a Dominican has
something to do with making connections rather than disconnections - and not only
logical connections, but connections between everything.
It is a story that goes back to the 13th century. Dominic Guzman, a Spaniard, got a close
look at what Albigensianism was doing to people's minds and spirits in northern Spain
and southern France (in fact, throughout Europe in different concentrations). It was a
sect claiming to be Christian, but it held for two Principles: the good God, from whom
souls emanated “just as rays emanate from the sun,” and the Evil Principle, creator of
the physical world: the world of change and suffering, of degradation and death. The
Albigensians (who were named after the city of Albi) could not believe that one God
created both the Kingdom, where there is no place for evil, and this transient world
where evil abounds. They had a profound sense of the suffering and evil of the world,
and it drove them to this ultimate dualism or disconnection. Like them Dominic went out
on the roads, preaching, unlike them, the goodness of the material world, and of the
body, and marriage... all the things they disowned. To exclude something is to leave it
unredeemed, and Jesus came to redeem the whole creation: “From the beginning till
now,” wrote St Paul (whose letters Dominic knew almost by heart), “the entire creation,
as we know it, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Rom 8:22f). It is not a
write-off, it is the substance of the resurrection.
None of Dominic's sermons has survived - which is a good thing, I always think. With
the passing of the years, a founder’s every word is given a permanent importance that
the founder probably never intended. But we know what he must have been saying to
the Albigensians: that matter is not the enemy of spirit, that time is not the enemy of
eternity, that the physical world is not the enemy of the Kingdom. In modern language,
we would say he was preaching a holistic spirituality. And this emphasis is the deepest
instinct in Dominican spirituality; it is somehow in the bones of every Dominican (but well
hidden in some!).
I knew nothing of it when I presented myself thirty-eight years ago at the Popes Quay
priory in Cork. All I sensed was that the colour-code was somehow right. Nearly
everything in my suitcase too was white; the list specified it: socks, shirts, jumpers.... I
was entering a white world. Or rather a cream-coloured one - which is even more
archetypal. On the outside I would look like mother’s milk, but on the inside I was a
radiant green!
There was a distance of less than twenty miles between this new world and the world I
had left, but they might as well have been on different planets. The new world was full of
cream-coloured friendly beings who uttered mostly Latin. And so they continued to do
for some years, until “The Changes” (the Second Vatican Council). The leap from The
Changes to the present makes the other leap look so limited and local, so endearingly
naive, that our early days look like a strange place to us now, or some remote age. The
past has become a foreign country. Some older people continue to talk like exiles. I
knew an elderly community where the topics of conversation at lunch were always the
same three: The Troubles (the Irish war of Independence and the subsequent civil war),
The Emergency (that unruffled word in Ireland for the Second World War), and The
Changes. They had lived through all three wars, but only in the third had they been out
at the front.
Five years after entering the Order I was sent to Switzerland to continue studies, and to
Italy for the same purpose three years later. The Dominicans are a world-wide family of
about seven thousand priests and brothers, about thirty thousand nuns and sisters (nuns
are cloistered), and many times that number of lay people. It is always pleasant to meet
members of the Order from other countries, people unknown to me before; it is
something I have always enjoyed. This person is entirely unknown to me, and yet there
is a tangible bond; it is a very satisfying combination of the known and the unknown.
Even now, when there is much more diversity than before, this warm bond is always
there. It is hard to put words on it. ‘Family spirit’ would do, but you would have to think
of a huge family, a very uncontrolling and friendly one.
My first job was teaching philosophy in a seminary for diocesan priests in England. I
was the only Dominican on the staff at that time, but there was one the previous year,
and another two years before. By my time they were beginning to compare us. During
the course of the year several people - staff and students - remarked to me how alike
we were. This surprised me greatly, because I was more conscious of the differences
between us; and I had heard it said that while Jesuit formation produced character,
Dominican formation produced characters! When I asked why they thought us alike, the
answers boiled down to two things: “You have the same kind of God!” they said, “and
you have the same attitude when things go wrong.” One could hardly imagine two more
basic headings: God and providence. In fact these probably simplify in the end to just
one heading: God. Sometimes outsiders can see the spirit of a family - or an Order better than insiders can. Insiders feel it in their bones, or mostly they don't feel it at all,
because it has become completely ordinary for them.
We don't ‘package’ our spirituality in the way that many other groups do. It is extremely
difficult to put experience into words; this is why there are so few poets in the world: it is
a real translation. It is easy, on the other hand, to put theoretical positions on paper: in
fact nothing is easier, because they already exist principally on paper. I think St Dominic
would be very surprised at the expression, ‘Dominican spirituality’. His passion was to
preach the Gospel and to establish a gospel way of life for preachers. Very much later,
in the 19th century - the age of nationalism - with the restoration of religious Orders in
France, each religious Order seems to have become obsessed with having its own
spirituality; it was a kind of nationalism on a small scale. This self-conscious slant
continues in our own time, and is even accentuated in ways that remind one of nothing
so much as the ‘branding’ of products in the commercial world. There are books in
which each chapter is a study of a particular brand; and the brand-names (until recently
at any rate) were still those of religious Orders: Benedictine, Franciscan, Carmelite,
Jesuit.... That must leave diocesan clergy and lay people wondering if they have missed
the last bus. But there was often a special one put on at the end for their benefit: ‘the
Spirituality of the Secular Priest,’ or ‘the Spirituality of the Laity.’ And there always have
to be newer brands (that's the nature of branding), so we have ‘Celtic spirituality’,
‘Creation-centred spirituality,’ and so on. Whatever helps, helps of course! And one
‘brand’ may open a door for someone that other brands keep firmly closed or make
invisible. But in my own opinion it would be wiser not to pay a lot of attention to the
brand, and to concentrate simply on unfolding the Gospel in our own experience and in
our own context. “Today we speak the language of experience,” wrote St Bernard in the
12th century. They are wise words in any age, and they are in fact being taken greatly to
heart in our own.
After I had been teaching philosophy for six years in England and Ireland it began to
undermine me (which is what philosophy does best). Also at that time (the 70s)
numerous confrères were abandoning the priesthood and religious life. The Changes
were not just changes within a game, so to speak; for many they became changes to a
different game. Somehow I survived, thanks to a large-minded superior who allowed me
to train as a potter! Pottery, I see in retrospect, was a means of reaching back to
something lost: the connection with the earth and the body. It saved my life, in many
ways. I threw myself into the restoration of some old buildings in Ennismore (a retreat
house in Cork) and set up a pottery and meditation centre there. All that physical labour
was a great relief after years of academic life; it was an attempt, in its way, to “speak the
language of experience.”
If we don't speak the language of experience we speak as spectators, by-standers,
commentators... in other words, outsiders. The commentator’s voice, the voice from the
outside, is given extraordinary authority in our age. One paragraph from a journalist, a
psychologist, a theorist of any kind, is thought to debunk any amount of first-hand
experience. I found clay to be a wonderful medium for exploring in the other direction. It
activates your own resources and helps you to learn a greater sensitivity through the
body. It can do this because it registers every touch with mirror-like fidelity. I found that
it opens a new door to meditation. Every summer for twenty years I have been giving
these ‘Potter retreat-workshops’, and at each one I am amazed again at what it can bring
to the surface for people. Clay is a wonderful substance for simplifying us. We are too
clever by half, too rational and too evasive. Try to express in clay your fears, your love,
your pain, your hopes.... You will find it impossible to put in any evasions, any
qualifications, any ‘subordinate clauses’. Clay is just a main clause. To say something
in clay is to make a direct statement and leave it there. In its simplicity it is like the cry of
an animal. In John's gospel a desperate man said to Jesus, “Sir, come down before my
child dies!” (Jn 4:49). It must be one of the most basic prayers of any time or place.
There isn't a human being in the world who could fail to understand it. Even the animals
and birds would pray like this if they could talk. Sometimes our religious sensibility
becomes so polite and tame that we can't even believe in it ourselves. Prayer or
meditation has been called “an hour of truth”, but it can become the place where we tell
the most barefaced lies.
If we had space I could tell many stories of connections that clay has helped people
make in different parts of their being. I feel that this work is in continuity with the healing
of the Albigensian disconnection that Dominic was attempting for the people of his time.
Almost any medium can be used to help heal the disconnections in ourselves and in our
world. At present I do a lot of writing…. It is like putting a message in a bottle and
throwing it out to sea. Sometimes you get a reply, and it comes as a surprise, because
you generally forget what you did before. I remember a letter from a Venezuelan sailor
who said one of my books was a companion to him for many months when he was on
the high seas in every sense. It touches you deeply, not because you think you did
something useful, but for nearly the opposite reason: something useful happened of
itself, without any reference to you, some moment of grace happened for someone
unknown to you. Our best moments are when the ego is set aside and we are drawn
beyond ourselves into some unknown region….
With everyone in the world we await the millennium in silence. Is there a long view? At
the turn of a century, people usually like to paint mental pictures of the future; but this
time (have you noticed?) almost no one feels confident enough to make any serious
predictions at all, even in small matters. If this is strange at the turn of a century it is ten
times more strange at the turn of a millennium. This time the future is a bigger mystery
than ever: it is not only unknown, it is unthinkable.
We may not be able to think the future, but with other sentient beings we are able to feel
the present. In stark contrast to thirty years ago, the western Church today is wearing a
sad grey face. There have been great scandals, and a consequent loss of morale. But
many (even most) of those crimes were committed decades ago when everything looked
fairly good on the outside. Consequently there is a feeling abroad that clergy and
religious cannot be trusted any more. This is a very deep wound, and it is being borne
by every priest and religious. Years ago, when I was a student in Switzerland, Charles
Davis left the Church, saying it had been “losing its soul to save its face.” His was a
famous case, because it was one of the first, and it occasioned a great deal of soulsearching at the time. What can we say now, thirty years later? Now that the Church
has lost a lot of face, there is hope that it can save its soul. There are some among the
clergy (and the laity) who harden their face instead, taking up rigid unfeeling positions,
with a kind of ‘take it or leave it’, ‘in yer face’, attitude. “Good riddance!” wrote a priest in
the Irish Times in reference to some Catholics who had left the Church. A lay person
wrote in reply, asking pointedly what that priest made of the parable of the Prodigal Son,
or the parable of the Lost Sheep, or the parable of the Good Samaritan. Could the Good
Shepherd have said “good riddance!” to the lost sheep? Shepherds, according to
Jesus's use of the metaphor, typically go after “the weak, the sick, the wounded, the
strayed and the lost” (see Ezek 34). There is still the urge to save face. It is a measure
of our distance from redemption.
When we emerge from this crucible we will be a deeply humble, even humiliated,
Church. We may know more then about compassion, about powerlessness, about
seeking the lost rather than defending the secure: in a word, we may know more about
spirituality than about ideology. From being itself more deeply immersed in the mystery
of dying and rising, the Church will be better able to mediate to us the Paschal Mystery,
the dying and rising with Christ. The laity will have come into their own, and they will
bring a new vitality and practicality to the Church. But these are prayers, not predictions.
Ultimately we are at the mercy of God, and that is the right place to be.
I travel to many countries, in every continent, giving courses and retreats. It has
something to do with belonging to an international Order. It is usually hard work. There
are climates that are pure pain when you are not used to them, and there are strange
diets and strange diseases; there is always some degree of culture shock. And when
they bring you from so far away they have high expectations of what you can do: that is
the severest pain of all, when you know nothing but your own limitations. All the same, it
is a great adventure to travel far from home. It is full of interest, and it gives a wide
perspective on the Church. And that is useful thing in our present state. In many
countries, especially in Asia and Africa, the Church seems younger, somehow, and
simpler: full of hope and joy (and young people). There are problems everywhere of
course. But it is not problems that deaden us; it is we ourselves in the problems, as
Johann Tauler, a Dominican mystic of the 14th century, put it.
If making connections is so important for spiritual health, then at present we need to
make as many as we can. There are always connections and reconnections to be
made:
- within our own being: with all the sources of our energy (Albigensianism is not dead
yet);
- with our past, so as not to disown it and be left floating adrift in a world without
direction;
- with the earth itself and the creatures we share it with. The Albigensians despised the
world in a theoretical way, but we actually destroy it: we poison the earth and call it
progress; and anyone who kills animals for fun we call a sportsman.
- with one another in ever deeper and more human ways, to beg God to heal in us “the
sore that no one can cure: a lack of heart.”
- and above all with God, the source, the centre. Without God everything and everyone
is lost property.
It has been a wonderful life, so far. I have nothing to lament but my sins.
Donagh O'Shea
WISDOM LINE
FRANÇOIS FÉNELON
The soul, in the state of pure love, acts in simplicity. Its inward rule of action is found in
the decisions of a sanctified conscience. These decisions, based upon judgments that
are free from self-interest, may not always be absolutely right, because our views and
judgments, being limited, can extend only to things in part; but they may be said to be
relatively right: they conform to things so far as we are permitted to see them and
understand them, and convey to the soul a moral assurance, that, when we act in
accordance with them, we are doing as God would have us do. Such a conscience is
enlightened by the Spirit of God; and when we act thus, under its Divine guidance,
looking at what now is and not at what may be, looking at the right of things and not at
their relations to our personal and selfish interests, we are said to act in simplicity. This
is the true mode of action.
Thus, in this singleness of spirit, we do things, as some writers (writing from experience)
express it, without knowing what we do. We are so absorbed in the thing to be done, and
in the importance of doing it rightly, that we forget ourselves. Perfect love has nothing to
spare from its object for itself, and those who pray perfectly are never thinking how well
they pray.