Thirty-first Sunday (Year B)
(Deuteronomy 6:2-6; Hebrews 7: 23-28;
Mark 12: 28-34)
Catholics and Christians
generally today are not wholly at ease with those supremely important words of
Our Lord:
The first of all the commandments is: 'Hear, O Israel,
the Lord our God is Lord alone. You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all
your mind, and with all your strength.'
They are not wholly at ease with
those words because, broadly speaking, though they recognize their
unquestionable character, being perfectly clear and simple; and also their
indisputable authority, being Our Lord’s direct answer to a question of
absolutely supreme importance in Israel and for the salvation of mankind;
nevertheless, they are not at ease with them because they quite clearly expect,
call for, and even demand, that we not only agree with them but that we
sincerely and seriously work at them:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.'
As sincere Christians and -- as
many would humbly say of themselves -- ‘ordinary human beings’, they want to
engage in good actions, actions which do good and promote what is good: actions
that -- as far as possible – prevent and counter, thwart and redress, evil, both for the good
of individuals and the benefit of society.
Intentions not, indeed, always possible or even realistic, but
nevertheless mysteriously comforting and satisfying: ‘I tried my best’; ‘I did
what I could’.
A commitment to personal prayer,
on the other hand, they are inclined to regard as being wasteful of time in
which opportunities for important good works are lost for
ever. Indeed, when provoked in some degree,
they even seem to have and to cherish at the back of their minds, so to speak,
the secret conviction that what they consider to be overmuch prayer is a
somewhat selfish and reprehensible exercise, nothing better than physical
laziness or spiritual vanity and self-seeking:
Mary sat beside the Lord at His feet, listening to Him
speak. Martha, burdened with much
serving, came to Him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left
me by myself to do the serving? Tell her
to help me!’ (Luke 10:39s.)
In the letter to the Hebrews from
which our second reading was taken we find frequent mention of the words ‘High
Priest’ in relation to Jesus:
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly
calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus,
who was faithful to Him who appointed Him.
Now the office of High Priest was
supremely important for the Chosen People because, as we are told in the letter
to the Hebrews (5:1), he was their uniquely appointed and acknowledged representative
before God; and since Israel had only become the Chosen People -- and an
independent nation -- by the gift and grace of God, Israel’s continued national
existence and prosperity as God’s Chosen People, was seen to depend upon her
right relationship with the God Who had made her His own:
Every high priest taken from among men is appointed
for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and
sacrifices for sins.
As you know, that right
relationship did not endure, Israel sinned against her God and was ultimately
punished, being destroyed as an independent nation and superseded as God’s
Chosen People; and that fatal fragility of Israel in her relationship with God
had been mirrored or manifested in the very person of the High Priest, for
again, the letter to the Hebrews in our second reading, told us that:
The law appoints as high priests men who have
weakness.
However, the author then
immediately goes on to add, that, for the future, that situation would be
remedied by God’s oath:
The Lord has sworn and will not change His mind… You are a priest forever;
an oath which came after the law:
appoint(ing)
the Son who has been perfected forever.
He was perfected because,
as Son, He was completely one with God the Father in His divine nature; and perfected
forever in His humanity through His Passion and Death on the Cross followed by His glorious
Resurrection, whereby He now lives in human flesh at the right hand of the
Father, continually interceding for us through all ages. He is the perfect High Priest because He
loves the Father supremely as the only-begotten Son, and because He was, as
man, made perfect by the love with which He bore, for our sake, His personally
unmerited and immeasurable sufferings.
It was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by
whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of
their salvation perfect through sufferings. (Hebrews 2:10)
Love and obedience before God the
Father is the supreme key to the perfection of the incarnate Son as our High
Priest, and the whole of Jesus’ life on earth was one of continuous union of
love in mind, heart, soul and will, with His Father for our salvation. He was, He is, the perfect, and our sublime,
High Priest.
The High Priest in Jerusalem
offered bloody sacrifices before God on strictly limited ceremonial occasions
in the Temple; but most of the time he was occupied in political negotiations
and dealings with the Roman occupying force.
Jesus made no deals with those in power, neither with the Romans, the
Herodians, nor with the Temple authorities; He ‘negotiated’ exclusively with
His heavenly Father by means of total and most loving obedience together with
constant and most intimate prayer, all culminating in the one sublime sacrifice
offered by the Son on Calvary and accepted by the Father in the glory of the
‘third day’.
In that way the supreme
importance of prayer to God was established for all ages among the new People
of God. And since, as St. Peter tells
us, the new People of God are a priestly people being members of the Body of
Him Who is the High Priest of our confession, we too are consecrated first and
foremost to prayerful union with the Father expressed in the words of Our Lord
we began with:
The first of all the commandments is: 'Hear, O Israel,
the Lord our God is Lord alone. You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all
your mind, and with all your strength.'
As a man endowed with a divine
mission and given little time by His fearful and unscrupulous enemies, Jesus
deliberately sacrificed countless opportunities to do external good works:
people were looking for Him and He moved on, frequently avoiding the crowds; He
imposed silence both on devils who would fearfully reveal His true majesty and
on many former-sufferers grateful to Him for their cure. Generally speaking, He had to be sought out
by those who looked for healing and, when found, needed to be convinced of, and
persuaded by, their faith. On the other
hand, however, Jesus was, at all times and in all circumstances, communing with
His Father, and He emphasised this personal and private relationship by often
seeking solitude, in order to give Himself more urgently in prayer -- both avid
and humble -- to His Father.
We can, therefore, surely
recognize how wrong it is to think that Christianity is, first and foremost,
concerned with doing worldly, physical, visible, good to people; wrong, because
our aim has to be one with Jesus’ proclaimed destiny:
(giving) glory to God in the highest and (bringing)
peace toward men of goodwill.
Peace with God, that is, oneness
with God that leads to eternal life; the salvation that God the Father wills to
confer on all mankind in response to the intercession of Jesus, our heavenly
High Priest, together with that of His priestly people here below.
Influenced by the world around
them, many people want tangible success in their practice of religion: they
want to be seen, or at least to see themselves, achieving something; and, often
enough, they find prayer, which produces no immediate or tangible results,
difficult and unrewarding; and this lack of “success” easily brings with it a
certain distaste for what is regarded as the “nothingness”, the “dryness”, the
“uselessness” of prayer. This reaction
is, of course, the result and sign of a deep rooted selfishness common to us
all in one form or another, for prayer is first of all God centred: it is
homage to, appreciation and praise of, God; it is not something entered into
for our own immediate satisfaction and pleasure, indeed, it is a most important
step in the practice, demanded of us by Jesus, of dying, with Him, to
ones-self. And since Jesus not only
died to self but also rose again to glory in God, where that native selfishness
is done to death by a sincere and persevering approach and response to God in
prayer, that prayer is indeed able to develop into a supreme delighting in
God.
Jesus intercedes before His
Father as the only-begotten, beloved, Son, as we heard:
He is always able to save those who approach God
through Him, since He lives forever to make intercession for them.
Here, you will I trust, notice,
that the second commandment mentioned by Our Lord has not been forgotten:
You
shall love your neighbour as yourself.
The fact is, People of God, that
it is impossible to love the Father in spirit and in truth and then to fail to
love one’s neighbour. Modern Catholics
and Christians need to learn anew how to appreciate the supreme importance and
power of prayer, and the true value and ‘quality’ of work inspired, sustained,
and fulfilled by prayer to God, for such prayer rightly gives all glory to God
whose wisdom alone secretly and subtly guides and enables the worker, while His
mercy graciously and appropriately prepares the recipient, all in accordance
with the angels’ song (Luke 2:14):
Glory to God in the highest and peace toward men of
goodwill.
Those who side-step the
difficulties of prayer and concentrate on the perceptible rewards of good
works, are not only trying to put the cart before the horse and, consequently,
sometimes finding themselves blundering where angels fear to tread, but they
can also easily harm themselves by slipping into the trap of vain glory either
by seeking human appreciation for, and approval of, their labours, or else by
imagining that they themselves are doing the works on which they set such
store.
True prayer, however, often
involves the painful awareness of our own emptiness and need of God, only
occasionally being sweetened by a passing experience of God’s great goodness. Nevertheless, for the disciple of Jesus,
aridity and difficulty in time devoted to prayer -- especially in prayer of
praise and thanksgiving – can gradually result in a joy and inspiration, a peace
and strength, that show themselves, secretly indeed, but yet convincingly
enough: as though the One Who would not endanger our prayer with open favours,
does not hesitate to comfort and confirm us mysteriously by a certain awareness
or secret sense of His presence in ordinary circumstances as well as in moments
of personal suffering and special striving:
He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one
who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love
him and will disclose Myself to him.
If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My
Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our abode with him. (John 14:21,
23)
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