Homily for the Epiphany: We are the Magi of today.

Adoration of the Magi by Pietro Perugino

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The relationship between Christmas and today’s Feast of the Epiphany is complicated, but despite the appearance of wise men in many nativity plays, it is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that it is simply an extension of the Christmas story. In fact, in a very important way, Christmas and the Epiphany can be seen as opposites to one another:

Christmas emphasises the humanity taken on by the divine godhead in coming into the world. What could be more human than the tiny, helpless babe of Christmas night? Epiphany on the other hand reveals the divine nature of that child and the man he grew up to be. Adoration, sacrifice, miracles – these are things associated with God, not a human person. Even the word Epiphany means a revealing or an appearing. Today we are seeing the Christ-child in a new light. Christmas showed us the human baby Jesus, Epiphany unveils the Son of the God, the second person of the Trinity.

The readings today put the emphasis very much on the Magi who came to Bethlehem, but Sacred Tradition gives us three revelations to consider: The Magi, certainly; but also the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus revealed his divine power through the miracle of water being turned into wine; and the Baptism of the Lord, at which the three parts of the Trinity are revealed together.

At 12 noon: If you pay particular attention to the words of the first two verses of our offertory hymn you will see the emphasis placed on these three events.

But as today’s liturgy focuses on the revelation offered by the Magi, let us see what we can discern about them. The short answer to ‘what can a group of two thousand year old astronomers teach us about the Christian life?’ is simply ‘everything.’ But perhaps we should dig a little deeper into two aspects of this mystery.

One of the running themes through our readings is that of light: The first reading is a great prophecy of Isaiah: Arise, shine out, Jerusalem, for your light has come. The Gospel tells of the famous star that filled the Magi with delight. This light is a symbol of divinity, and it leads the Magi, eventually, to the humblest of circumstances. When they arrive and go into the place where the child is, we get none of the displays of knowledge or the talkativeness that they displayed back in Jerusalem. They know that they are in the presence of the divinity that the star was leading them to. They simply and silently fall to their knees, and worship him, and make an offering to him.

The second running theme is that of the revelation to the nations. These men were not Jews, yet they recognised the divine when they saw it and took news of what they had seen back to the lands they came from. They are the all who are assembling and coming towards God’s house in the first reading; they are the all nations who shall serve him from our psalm. They are what St Paul describes as the pagans who now share the same inheritance. In fact, they are us.

Two thousand years on we are the Magi of the world; and like them we are called to do two things. To take the first theme, do we recognise the divine when we see it? Do we recognise in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and in the tabernacle, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ? Do we truly experience the same divinity in this place, our chuches, that the Magi recognised in that infant in his mother’s arms? If we do, how can we do anything other than fall to our knees and worship him? We do not need to offer the symbolic gold of a king, the frankincense of a priest or the myrrh of the dead. We are asked for something far more profound. In the words of the carol: If I were a wise man, I would do my part, but what I can I give him… give my heart.

As for the second idea; do we take the light of the Gospel to the nations today? We do not need to be setting off for the Missions to spread the message of Christ. The Lord knows there is enough darkness in the world, even in our own country. So much so that it can sometimes seem hopeless to be a Christian in the modern world. But to go back to John’s Gospel from Christmas morning: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. We live in a privileged time, a sacramental age when our Baptism causes Christ’s light to shine through us. As we, or our parents, were handed our baptismal candle we were told that this light is entrusted to [us] to be kept burning brightly… keep the flame of faith alive. All we need to do is cooperate with the graces of our baptism and we can be a sign to the nations.

It is the time of year for resolutions and practicalities. Perhaps this year we can, every one of us, resolve to more fully appreciate the divinity of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament; could you arrive ten minutes earlier for Holy Mass, and take the time to kneel (if you are able) and worship him as the Magi did; or perhaps you could make a special effort to visit the Lord during a time of Adoration; or even commit to a regular time each week?

And what of sharing our light? I sometimes hear people say they are embarrassed about public expressions of the faith, even within their own families. The message of the Epiphany is: don’t be! I’m a big fan of St Therese’s adage to ‘do the little things well.’ So do that – the little things: leave the crib up until the Presentation on the 2^nd February; put that Child of Prague statue in the front window; bless yourself with a drop of holy water when you enter and leave the house; openly call to St Anthony when you’ve lost your keys; write and talk about the Epiphany blessing over your door. There are so many little things that we can do. Now me, or any one you, doing these things, won’t change the world. But if Kings Heath (and the Maypole) had 600-odd people all offering small acts of faith, and across the earth 1.4 billion people were doing them, what a wondrous light we could shine into the darkness; what a wonderful witness we could be the world. Even the wise men might not be a patch on us then.

Homily for the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: I want to be perfect!

*Workers in the Vineyard of their Master by Erasmus Quellinus*

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You may be familiar with the TV programme Gogglebox, but for those who aren’t the premise is that various videos are shown to groups of viewers, and their reactions are recorded. I can’t claim to be a regular watcher, but I would very much like to see a Catholic edition of Gogglebox, in which we get to see people’s reactions as they hear the messages of the Gospel for the first time.

I suspect today’s parable would be a hit on a programme like that. It’s hard not to find ourselves thinking ‘do you know what, fair play to the whole day’s workers for moaning – they had done the full day’s work after all.’ People on the show might be nodding their heads in agreement, only to find themselves with furrowed brows and perplexed expressions when the landowner calmly explains that those workers got exactly what was promised. The only thing that could be being criticised here is his generosity, and generosity’s a good thing, surely?

In a time when we are very aware of social justice, this parable really can seem unfair; but we need to remember that it is just that – a parable. The examples used in parables are illustrative – the message of The Good Samaritan is not limited to mugging victims, nor is the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids about the logistics of owning oil lamps. In the same way, we must not read an earthly sense of fairness into today’s message – the pay received by all represents eternal salvation, and what could we possibly hope for beyond that?

The first failing of the workers then, is that they see long-service as entitling them to more than those who took up the landowner’s offer at the eleventh hour. It would be easy to use the words of our first reading to explain God’s mercy as being a thought beyond our comprehension, but it is worth remembering here that Matthew was writing his Gospel for a Jewish audience; and as we heard in the Gospel of his Feast Day this past Thursday, the Jews generally were far from keen on embracing anyone that they did not believe was part of God’s chosen people. In fact, this parable is only recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, perhaps he intended it as a thinly veiled message that those who come to God through his Christ are just as entitled to his mercy as those who followed the Law of Moses. On our shorter time scales, of course, we must remember that having been Christian for a lifetime does not entitle us to more than a death-bed convert. There are no VIP rooms in heaven, and it would be vanity to hope for such.

This brings us neatly to the other failing of the workers in our Gospel – their selfish sense of their own value. Being made in the image and likeness of God, we do of course have an innate dignity and worth; but forces in today’s society have managed to corrupt this ideal. I love rugby and I’ve been watching a great deal of the World Cup in recent weeks. Many of the advertisements shown in those programmes are typical of exactly this corruption. One of them in particular barely advertises a product, instead it glorifies the message that as long as we are doing what we want to do, nothing else seemingly matters. This is not the Christian understanding of individual worth and value. We are called to embrace our distinctiveness, within the Gospel message; and then to place it at the service of others – St Paul understood this in our second reading. He longed to die and reach his eternal reward, but he also knew that, in his words, “living in this body means doing work which is having good results.” Those good results were most apparent in the lives of others, not in his own.

Another of those adverts is for the British Army, with its tagline “be the best”. But if you told me that I was the best person, the best Christian in this church this morning, I would not be pleased. To aspire to being the best means to embrace life as a competition with others, and as long as I am better than them, I can be happy. For the army it make sense as a slogan; in war being better than your opponent is what keeps you and your comrades alive. Being the best is enough in their profession. But you and I won’t get to heaven simply by trying to be better than everyone else.

To put it bluntly, being the best isn’t good enough; it isn’t what being a Christian is about. I don’t want to be the best. I want to be perfect – perfect enough to spend eternity in the presence of my God and Lord. With the grace of God I will get there; but I fully expect, like Gerontius in St John Henry Newman’s famous epic, that I will have to beg my guardian angel for the purification of purgatory when the time comes.

But that’s not me trying to ‘be the best;’ because I want that same perfection for every single one of you, from the youngest child who hears this to the oldest pensioner. And beyond that, I wish it and pray it for all of humanity in every age of the world. That is what it means to be a Christian. I can be me, and you can be you, but we can do it selflessly and still live the lives that God wants for us. Life is not a contest. We can, all of us, attain perfection, in this world or the next. And we know that we can do it because, in the words of the psalmist today:

            The Lord is kind and full of compassion…
            He is close to all who call him,
                        Who call on him from their hearts.

Homily for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: Creation itself obeys the will of God

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The recent success of the film Oppenheimer has drawn the public consciousness to some of the great, and at times terrible, discoveries of the first half of the twentieth century. Those discoveries of course, stemmed from attempts to understand a very base question of our existence: ‘what is stuff made of?’

The ancient understanding of the elements was of course very different to that of Oppenheimer and his contempories. In the time of Christ, the answer that everything is made of Earth, Air, Fire and Water (and later Ether) was broadly accepted among those who cared to ask such questions.

Water and Fire were understood as the extremes of the elements. Where Earth and Air were relatively passive, Water and Fire had the capacity to destroy and to take life. Water in particular had that reputation to the Jews – both for the disciples themselves and for the Jewish audience that St Matthew wrote his Gospel for. One might consider the Flood and Noah’s Ark in Genesis, the storm that turned back the prophet Jonah, or the destruction of Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea – these stories were well known. Yet all those familiar stories have something in common besides an awful lot of destructive water. They all make clear that the seas; the elements themselves; creation itself; obeys the will of God.

These stories were then reflected in the psalms that Jesus and the disciples would have prayed daily. Psalm 89 says: “Who is like you, LORD God Almighty? … You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them.” And in another psalm: “The LORD stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.” The word translated as LORD in both of those psalms refers the Holy Name of God; sometimes translated as I AM, in Greek ego eimi. Jesus’ use of that phrase is more often associated with St John’s Gospel, but it is exactly the phrase that Matthew records in today’s passage, translated for us as ‘It is I’. To the Jewish disciples, Jesus’ words identify him both as the man they know, but also as God.

Peter steps out of the boat, and with his eyes fixed on his friend, his friend who has just identified himself as God, walks across the water; but as soon as his mind is drawn from God by the wind and the storm, he begins to sink. The Lord reaches out to him and brings him back to the boat, at which point the wind and the heavy seas calm instantly. Creation itself obeys the will of God.

In all of this we can draw a multitude of analogies: Perhaps we recognise in the disciples’ boat the Barque of Peter – that ancient allegory of Mother Church herself. Perhaps we see ourselves as Peter, needing to keep our eyes on the Lord and avoid the distractions of the material world; or perhaps we see ourselves as one of the others in the boat, wishing we had Peter’s confidence in calling out and his faith in taking those first steps. Perhaps we feel ourselves sinking right now, and long for the Lord to reach out and lift us up; or perhaps we happily feel that the Lord has recently calmed the waters of our lives.

Regardless of where we might consider ourselves in that story, this final thought, I hope will be relevant. It stems from my reflections in the parish Lectio group last Monday morning; and as we reflected on this scripture the phrase that jumped out at me was: “In the fourth watch of the night.” That would be between three and six in the morning – the Lord had left them in their struggle against the wind from the evening-time all the way through to the hours before dawn. That was more than enough time to reach their destination on the far shore, had the weather been favourable, and yet they had done nothing but struggle on without him.

Sometimes we struggle, just like the disciples in the boat. Sometimes the Barque of the Church herself appears to be merely struggling along in a hostile world. Sometimes it can feel as though the stresses and worries of the world, even the very fabric of the world – the elements themselves, are conspiring against us. What today’s Gospel shows us is that the Lord will always be there for us in those trials. Not as we expect necessarily – the disciples’ did not expect to see him walking on the sea, perhaps not even as we would like him to be – the disciples could have done without that sleepless night fearing for their lives, I’m sure; but he will be there when we truly need him. All we need to do is endure the trials, the crosses, which in his wisdom he sends to us and be willing at the appointed time to cry out in the words of Peter: “Lord! Save me!” Because at those words he will surely reach out and bring us to safety, for nothing is impossible for him – even Creation itself obeys the will of God.

Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: What are you?

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Many of us will have experienced at some point what is best described as a corporate icebreaker. The sort of affair where a group of people have gathered, usually in a circle, and to begin to get to know one another each person is asked to speak in turn, with some generally innocuous details about themselves and their lives. Some people hate these tasks, some don’t mind them; I’ve never met anyone who admitted to actually liking them!

You’ll be please to know that I’m not going to go around asking anyone, but I would like you to try one of the common icebreakers in your own mind. Sometimes people are asked to try and describe who they are in five words; not a sentence – they can be unrelated words. But I am going to change one part. I would like you to think for just a few moments not about who you are, but about what you are. So let’s take a few seconds of silence: In no more than five words – how would you describe what you are.

—

Whatever words came to you in those few seconds, try to hold on to them in your minds.

I had a bit of time to reflect on that question in preparing for this homily, so I’m going to take myself as an example. The words I settled with are : I am a Christian, a Husband, a Teacher, a Father, and a Deacon. Of course, once we have our words in mind, if we are to share them then we have to settle on the order that we’re going to say them in. Perhaps just the order they popped into our heads? I gave mine in chronological order – I was baptised as a Christian as a baby; I got married when I was twenty; became a teacher straight out of university; a Father a couple of years later; and a deacon just under a year ago.

But what if we try to put our words into an order according to their importance to us? Try it in your minds with some of your own words. It’s difficult. It’s very difficult. In fact it’s so difficult that we may not ever be able to find an answer we are happy with. Is it more important to me to be a deacon or a teacher? A father or a husband? My wife and children heard this homily on Sunday morning and it led to a few interesting questions when I got home!

What we are presented with in today’s Gospel seems at first glance to be a very difficult teaching of Jesus’. He says “anyone who prefers father or mother… son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” Wow. What he’s saying is that whatever else we are, and whatever order of importance we might settle on for the other things, being his disciple, being a Christian, must come first.

What he’s not saying of course, is that we should not love being the other things too; but he does insist on our belonging to him first.

To understand these difficult lines we must remember that this person speaking, this man, Jesus, is the Word of God in the flesh. This is what we acknowledge in the Creed. We say also that “through him, all things were made.” All things, not just the concrete nouns, if you’ll pardon the grammatical term; not just the rocks and the air and the trees and the squirrels. All things – including ourselves; including our nature to procreate and raise children; to teach one another; to undertake marriage or to receive holy orders. All of that comes from him. In fact, there can be no word in your mind that cannot be traced back to him, because everything that you are, you are because of him and his plan for you.

So being his first is not a bad thing. Being his first makes us better at everything else. If you recognised yourself as an artist, you will be a better artist if you appreciate that the things you paint are his handiwork; if you are a nurse, you will be a better nurse if you see him in the face of every patient; if you are a scientist, you will be a better scientist if you realise that it is his creation that you seek to reveal.

For my part, I truly believe that I am a better husband, because I am his; I am a better father, because I am his; I am a better teacher, because I am his; and, frankly, I would be a pretty useless deacon if I was anything but entirely his.

In short, if the person of Jesus is anything at all to us, he must be everything to us.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A: The Woman at the Well

*Samaritan Woman by Paolo Veronese, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria*

One of the criticisms often levelled at the Catholic Church is that we do not read enough of the Bible. The length of today’s Gospel might suggest otherwise, and this was the shortened account!

[For the reader: A reference to the passage used is given at the end of this text.]

The criticism is not entirely unfair however, and while we will never embrace the sola Scriptura, Scripture alone approach of Protestantism, it is a fair question to ask – when and how do we read and reflect on the Word of God?

One approach is Lectio Divina, a process in which a piece of Scripture is read three times, with a period of reflection between each. It is all very contemplative, allowing a word or phrase to jump out at us; that is the word or phrase which we are then called to consider the importance of, for ourselves and in our lives.

Each person brings their own personality to this sort of reflection, and I find that my curious nature is often drawn to the little details: Why did the writer choose to include that – what is the importance of an often apparently trivial detail. When I was reflecting on today’s Gospel, my attention was drawn to a couple of things:

John’s Gospel wasn’t written by him personally, but by a community of his followers. Those followers would have memorised his stories and teachings word for word, after the Rabbinic traditions of the time; but why did John insist that they remembered that this meeting happened at the sixth hour, or include the snippet that “Jews, in fact, do not associate with Samaritans?”

It is no secret that the Samaritans had a long history of conflict with the Jews. They were the remnant of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, with the Jews being the remains of the Southern Kingdom. They had freely intermarried with non-Israelites, and as we hear alluded to in the Gospel, they worshipped God at this mountain, called Gerizim, rather than at Mount Zion – the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. Worse still, the Samaritans had opposed the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, and the Jews had destroyed the Samaritans’ Temple in turn. It’s safe to say that while the Jews looked down on the Gentiles – the non-Jews, they openly hated the Samaritans.

And what of this sentence “it was about the sixth hour?” The daytime was divided into twelve hours, so the sixth hour refers to the middle of the day, the hottest part of the day; and here was this woman alone at the well. Water would have been collected by the women in the early morning, when the day was cooler and the walk back to the city less arduous. So what was she doing there in all that heat?

Jesus Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well by an unknown artist, Church History Museum, Salt Lake City, USA

Another thing that often catches my eye with the readings at Mass is when I look at the reference at the top of the reading and there are verses missing. In this shortened version, what was said in verses 16-18, and 27-38? The first of those gaps is significant here – Jesus tells this woman something about herself that he should have had no way of knowing – that she had had five husbands, and was now with another man who was not her husband. This is why she calls him a prophet, and later says “he told me all that I have ever done.” It is also very likely the reason that she was disliked by the other women of the city, so much so that she had to come to the well alone at the sixth hour – in the heat of the midday sun.

This all adds up to a woman who was as despised as it is possible to be – excluded by her own people, and they themselves a people who had been shunned for centuries by Jews; Jews like Jesus.

And yet the Lord offers her, even her, living water and eternal life. There is hope for all of us, I think.

But she doesn’t just take from the Lord; she passes on what she has received. Think of those you consider to be credible sources of information – are any of them outcasts like this woman? I suspect probably not. Yet the zeal with which she spoke of the Lord when she returned home inspired those in the city to welcome him and to believe.

That same living water, that same eternal life, is offered freely to every human soul, to every one of us. All we have to do this Lent is turn to him, worship him in spirit and in truth, and he will grant us everything that he promised to the woman at the well; and what is more, we will be filled with the same intensity that caused her, an outcast of outcasts, to speak so fervently, and with such conviction, of the Good News of God.

Gospel Passage for the 3^rd Sunday of Lent, Year A, Shorter Form: John 4:5-16, 19-26, 39-42

Homily: Mary, Mother of God

Today we keep the octave day of Christmas, which in the Church’s calendar is given to Mary as the Mother of God. This title is very simple to say, but is arguably the most significant out of all of those given to Mary; so much so that it caused much discussion in the early Church.

Many of you will know that I am something of a pedant, and I will happily have an hour’s discussion over the use of a single word or comma. I suspect therefore that I would have greatly enjoyed the Council of Ephesus, at which two great characters of Church history battled it out over a single word. On one side was a character called Nestorius, who argued that Mary’s motherhood was simply linked to the humanity of Christ; so, without disrespect, she should at best be considered the Mother of Christ. On the other hand was St Cyril of Alexandria who pointed out that as Christ’s humanity and divinity cannot be separated, Mary was not only Mother of the human Jesus, but the Mother of God, in all his divinity.

As you can tell from the name of today’s Feast, and his sainthood, St Cyril won the argument, and Nestorianism was declared a heresy in the Church. This is why today the universal Church recognises the mother of that tiny child in the manger as the Mother of God; the same God who spoke to the patriarchs and prophets; the same God we hear speaking to Moses in our first reading.

St Paul tells us today that it is through the incarnation of Christ that we have all become adopted as sons and daughters of God. That of course means that we have become Mary’s children too. This does not in any way equate Mary with Almighty God, as some protestants would suggest. We revere Mary for her role as the first believer in, and the first adorer of, the Christ-child. In this she is the perfect image of all believers, but just like all believers her own salvation comes only through the grace of God.

But it is not Nestorian to remember also today the normality of Mary’s role in the childhood of the Lord. Jesus was God, but he was also a defenceless child. He had his mother, Mary, and his earthly father, Joseph. They loved him, and cared for him, and raised him; in a very normal and human way.

In the run-up to Christmas, I was lucky enough to go into one of my parish’s schools and decorate a Bambinello with my son. That baby is now in our nativity scene at home, where it will stay until Candlemas. After that it may be put away with the Christmas things, or it might go into his keep-sake box.

I suspect most families will have, somewhere in their house, a keep-sake box for their children. A gradually expanding collection of school reports, certificates and artworks. As important as they are, these physical objects hold value to us for the occasions that they bring to mind. Opening that box is a way of remembering those memorable times, some of which we might otherwise have forgotten.

The most important occasions, of course, it would be impossible to forget even if we tried. For those of us who are married, our wedding day is probably one. For those who are parents, the days of our children’s births will be others. Of course, such events may not always be positive; the loss of a loved one or the discovery of an illness can be just as memorable, albeit in a very different way.

Memories though, however vivid, are only ever in our minds; to truly reflect on them, on emotional and spiritual levels, we must use our hearts. This is what St Luke means when he says that Mary ‘treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.’ She knew that what was happening in that stable of Bethlehem was important. It was life-changing for her, as any mother knows, but it was more than that. This child was going to change the world. How, she did not understand; but her ‘fiat’ went far beyond simply carrying and birthing this child that an angel had called the Son of God; she was now the mother who would raise him. Theologians’ arguments aside, she was – and she knew she was – even in that humble stable, the Mother of God.

Some people prefer a sanitised view of the Christ-child and Mary’s care for him. The child described in the carols: ‘Christian children all must be, mild, obedient, good as he.’ The reality however must have been different: Christ embraced our humanity in everything but sin; so how did he tell Mary that he was hungry, or that his nappy needed changing? He would have cried, like any baby. How did he grow and learn all the things that everyone has to learn? He learned by asking his mother.

In contemplating this normality of the Lord’s upbringing I was reminded of a Catholic cartoon which goes around every so often on the internet with the title ‘Jesus prays the first rosary,’ or similar. The image shows a young Jesus looking up at Mary and tugging at her skirts while repeating over and over ‘mum, mum, mum, mum, mum…’ A very normal thing for a lot of mothers and their children.

[For those reading online a copy of this image is below]

We are the spiritual children of Mary, so we should have no fear of turning to her in our need just as the child Jesus did. And yes that means sometimes being that child and repeating ever more fervently ‘mum, mum mum!’

I think it is right today to finish by asking our Lady, our heavenly mum, to lead the saints and angels in intercession for the repose of the soul of dear Pope Benedict.

Mother of God, all Saints of God, come to his aid; Hasten to meet him, angels of the Lord. Receive his soul and present him to God, the most high.