Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C: Only our soul matters

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You may be familiar with the work of the Monty Python comedy troupe, and if you’re young enough to not be, it may be worth an hour or two on Youtube exploring what previous generations found themselves chuckling away at.

One of their most famous sketches involves a man returning a freshly bought parrot to a pet shop; as it turns out that the parrot is, to be blunt, dead. Much of the humour in that sketch comes from John Cleese’s expertly delivered litany of British euphemisms for death, in his attempt to convince the shopkeeper that the purchased parrot is, again to be blunt, most definitely dead. Some of his phrases are crudities: he’s a stiff; he’s kicked the bucket; he’s fallen off the twig. Some are socially sanitised phrases to avoid the ‘d’ word: he’s passed on; he’s no more; he’s bereft of life. Still others are much closer to a religious understanding of death: he rests in peace; he’s shuffled off this mortal coil; he’s gone to join the choir invisible.

In today’s Gospel Jesus puts words into the Father’s mouth in his parable. Words which include an ominous euphemism for the man’s death: “This night, your soul is required of you.” That would be a very dark phrase to add in to Monty Python’s list; but it gets to the heart of Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel. When we are called to judgement, only our soul matters.

This past week I have been in Ireland, but before I left on Monday I attended the funeral of a former colleague. There was a good number of present and former staff there, and we were sharing stories and memories, as you do. One recurring thought that kept coming up in discussion was the sadness of a man who worked all his life, paid into his pension and so on, only to develop the symptoms which ultimately killed him, within a year of retiring. I was reflecting on that sadness on my drive to the West of Ireland and it dawned on me that it shouldn’t be thought of as sad – frustrating perhaps, but not sad. It is right and sensible to provide for ourselves, in working life and ahead of our retirement; but ‘our souls being required of us’ is not something that we need to fear if our souls are ready to go. There is a difference between seeking to provide what is just and fair for ourselves, and hoarding far more than is necessary. This is the real difference between simply ‘filling our barns’ and tearing them down and building newer, unnecessarily larger ones.

This all speaks of course of greed and at the heart of greed lies envy. We live in an age of advertising; where we attach something as simple as a certain shade of a colour, a certain sequence of musical notes, or a certain slogan to particular products. All of this makes us want, desire, or in a word used in all three of today’s readings, covet (which the first reading identifies as a form of idolatry). We begin to desire these earthly things even over that which is good for our souls. That is sin in its strictest sense – it causes our souls to turn away from God. And to say it again; when we are called to judgement, only our soul matters.

Greed and envy then are things to be fought against; and as we much about in Lent, the Church gives us three spiritual weapons with which to fight sin and the temptation to sin: prayer to orient our souls always towards God, and away from the distractions of the world; fasting to discipline ourselves in small things, so that we can be sure of our ability to resist more serious temptations; and charity to align our wills more closely to that of God, who himself is Love.

The catechism speaks most of that last as the most useful weapon against greed and envy. It says that: “envy represents a form of sadness and therefore a refusal of charity; the baptized person should struggle against it by exercising good will.”

Whilst in Ireland I went on pilgrimage for the first time to Lough Derg, which if you don’t know of it is a particularly ascetic three-day programme of prayer and of fasting. It involves a great deal of what might be seen as old-school Christian practices: isolation on an island; bare feet throughout; a single meal of dry bread and black tea; an over-night vigil without sleep; and literally thousands of meditative prayers, many said kneeling on bare rock. If that sounds terrible to you I would simply say don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Last Sunday Fr John told me, “you’ll either really enjoy Lough Derg, or you’ll really enjoy coming away from it!” It was a difficult, but massively fulfilling spiritual exercise, focussing on the first two weapons – prayer and fasting. As I drove back in the early hours this morning I was thinking where does the final weapon, charity, now fit in? What love is now going to be manifest in my life as a result? I don’t yet have an answer to that, but I will trust it to God; which brings me to my final point.

For a third time: when we are called to judgement, only our soul matters; but we are fooling ourselves if we think that we alone are in control here – like all good things, material and immaterial, the spiritual weapons of fasting, prayer and charity are rooted in, and draw their efficacy from, God’s good grace. As with all things, we must cooperate with God’s grace if they are to have value. Going without food is not fasting in a spiritual sense unless we intend the discipline to avoid sin. Saying the words of a hundred Our Fathers is not truly prayer unless we intend those words to be carried into heaven. Doing good works is not charity unless we truly intend the good of the other.

I will finish with a quote from St John Henry Newman, who it was announced last week will soon be declared a Doctor of the Church – a saint whose work has contributed points of crucial importance to Catholic theology and dogma. His point ties together the two ideas of rejecting the riches of the world and instead cooperating with God’s grace in the preservation of our souls. He wrote “Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes. One alone is true to us; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our need.” That One, brothers and sisters, is Almighty God himself.

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.

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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: 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.

A new year, a new hope

First Sunday of Advent 2022 (Year A)

All of my family either love, or have at some point loved, the children’s toy Lego. A few years ago, my wife and I took our children to Legoland Windsor to stay for a night in one of their hotels, as part of my daughter’s birthday celebrations. We didn’t tell the children where we were going or what for; we just bundled them into the car not long before dawn and headed off on the motorway. As we drove, the slowly lightening sky gave way to dawn and the children’s eagerness for the adventure grew. We kept the secret right up to the moment we pulled into the park and saw the sign topped by giant Lego bricks. At this point there was smiling and bouncing all round in the back seat, and as those who are parents will know, there is nothing better than seeing unadulterated happiness on the faces of your children. It was a very, very good trip.

That trip began a new year of my daughter’s life. Today, the First Sunday of Advent, we open a new year in the life of the Church. We begin in a similar way – we have been roused in the darkness and started onto our Advent journey. In the words of our second reading, ‘the night is almost over, it will be daylight soon.’ Nowhere is this beautiful analogy of darkness giving way to light clearer than in the Rorate masses of Advent. If you have the chance to attend one or more of these masses this Advent, I strongly recommend them. They take place in the darkness immediately before dawn, and if timed right one enters the church in darkness, with candles often providing the only light, and then leaves into the brightness of the winter’s morning.

Unlike the children though, we know the wonderful end of our journey: Christmas, certainly, and our great commemoration of the Incarnation; but in these first weeks of Advent, we consider in a particular way the coming of the Lord at the end of time. Our Gospel contains stark language from Jesus: ‘of two men in the fields one is taken, one left; of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left.’ Jesus is not suggesting a fifty-fifty split; he is explaining that there will be a suddenness to his return.

There is an old episode of the Simpsons, in which Bart explains to a minister that he was hoping to live a life of sin followed by a ‘presto-chango death-bed repentance.’ The minister argues that living a good life means he receives ‘full coverage’ in the event of a sudden death. It is the Simpsons, so it is all a bit blasé; but this is what we seek when we pray to avoid ‘an unprovided death.’ We are called in our Gospel and second reading to seek the ‘full coverage’ of a holy life, not just to avoid an unprovided death, but also to avoid being unworthy should the Lord return during our time on earth.

It is no secret that the early Church expected the Lord to return imminently – there is a satirical religious cartoon which portrays the Apostles running a book and taking bets on the date that the Lord will return before his feet have even disappeared into the clouds above them. The word imminent is an interesting one – its origin comes from a Latin word (mineo) which means to project over, or to overhang. The same root gives us the English word menace. In a sense the return of the Lord is menacing – it will come ‘at an hour [we] do not expect;’ and if we are not ready then yes, we should be concerned about that. But we can be prepared for it.

We can be Baptised; receive regular absolution in the sacrament of Confession; we can be with the Lord personally in Holy Communion and at Adoration. In the words of the Penny Catechism, the sacraments are ‘outward signs of inward grace.’ It is the graces received from the sacraments that allow us to ‘live decently,’ as St Paul describes it. We can put on the armour of Christ and bring about the world that Isaiah describes in our first reading; a world where ‘all the nations will stream… to the Temple of the God of Jacob.’

The first part of Advent is not seeking to cause an anxiousness in the faithful. It encourages us to reflect on what is really important as a Christian: our relationship with the Lord. To foster in our hearts his message and his promise to us; that we will one day ‘walk in the light of the Lord’ if we will but take up our cross and follow him.

As we begin this journey through the darkness of Advent, our anticipation and excitement will rise as we approach the celebration of the Incarnation. Let us also remember that we are journeying to the Lord’s second dawn too. As we make our worldly preparations, let us always conduct ourselves in such a way that we need have no fear of that day.

Collect from Mass on the First Sunday of Advent:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat

Christ the King 2022 (Year C)

The words Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat – Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands, are carved into the obelisk which stands in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican. That obelisk was placed there by Pope Sixtus V in 1586 as an eternal memorial to Christ the King.

Obelisks carried connotations of the divine from their earliest days. To the Egyptians the shape of what they called a tekhenu was reminiscent of the benben – the mound on which their creator god stood during the creation of the world; the living deity that was their Pharoah, and curiously, a bird which represented both the beginning and end of the world. Today’s second reading makes it clear that the Lord is eternal; “before anything was created, he existed.” He will be there too at the end of all things, the Lamb of St John’s Revelation. The Lord is the living God, “consubstantial with the Father” in the Holy Spirit. As such he is the fulness of revelation and the aim of human faith.

To the later Romans the Egyptian obelisks took on a different meaning. They were removed to Rome and erected as monuments to the victories of the god-emperors. The obelisk which stands in the Vatican carries an echo of this meaning even to this day. It was first transported to Rome by the emperor Caligula and placed outside the great circus he had built on the site where St Peter’s Basilica now stands. When it was moved in the sixteenth century to its current position it was exorcised and blessed as monument to Christ’s victory over even the most influential secular powers.

Today’s Gospel may seem an odd choice for today’s feast; but it has two important messages for us as we consider the sovereignty of the Lord. Firstly, it reminds us that Christ’s kingship extends far beyond what we can understand. His promise to the good thief that “today you will be with me in paradise,” is more than a promise of heaven. It shows the Lord’s authority to promise heaven. Anyone can say the words of a promise, but without the power to fulfil that promise, it remains only words. As Christians we take the Lord’s authority to fulfil his promise as an essential part of our faith – he is the Word made Flesh, Truth Incarnate; in the words of a hymn by Thomas Aquinas, “Truth himself speaks truly, else there’s nothing true.” Christ’s authority then, extends not just to the miracles and wonders he worked in our world, but unto the end of time and beyond, to the paradise which awaits all the faithful.

Secondly, the crucifixion is given to us today as a reminder that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him precisely because of the Cross. Even as mankind committed deicide, the greatest of sins, he felt nothing but love, offered nothing but redemption. His is not the kingship of a tyrant, ruling by fear and oppression, but one of charity and benevolence. As Catholics we understand every mass as making present the sacrifice of the Cross; at each Eucharist the Lord comes to us as his Body and Blood. As we attend mass this Sunday and behold the elevated host and chalice, let us share in the prayer of the good thief, “Jesus, remember me;” and be assured that in his divine majesty, he will.