Ss. Peter and Paul, 2024

 

(Acts 12:1-11; 2^nd. Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16:13-19)

My dear People of God, we are invited today to give thanks to God for the gift of the Faith with which we have been blessed; to thank Our Blessed Lord for establishing His Church on the foundation Rock of His Good News proclaimed by Peter and Paul, and the Apostolic College; and finally to express our gratitude for the personal witness given by both Peter and Paul in Rome.

In the infant Church there were certain people who claimed to have knowledge of some teachings of Jesus hidden from the general body of disciples, teachings which only those could learn who had been specially initiated by rituals of a secret nature.   For such people, the faith of the simple Christian was only the beginning; the first step indeed, but not, of itself, enough for a deeper understanding of, and closer union with, God. 

All who contested the very idea of such secret doctrines did so stating that:

The authentic Christian teaching is for all Christians,  and can be found by all, in the Scriptures as understood and proclaimed by Mother Church.

The faith taught publicly today by Mother Church is guaranteed by the fact that it is based on, and in conformity with, the traditional Church teaching originating with the Apostles themselves and handed down through the unbroken line of their successors.  

In that way it was made clear that the fullness of the authentic teaching of Jesus is open and available to all disciples, in His Holy Christian and Catholic Church.

You must remember that in the early centuries of the Church there were no printed books; what books there were had to be copied by hand and were very expensive to buy.  Moreover, there were few roads, and the best of them could only facilitate transport by horse and wheeled carriage; transport by sea was very slow and open to attack by robbers or pirates.   All this meant that the church in each city or town generally preached what it had received at the beginning of its establishment from the wandering teachers who first came –at great personal difficulty and danger,  indeed, even despite public persecution -- to proclaim Christ to them and baptise them in His name.   Those itinerant  teachers were well known and accepted as authentic disciples of Jesus; but those with the greatest authority were, of course, the twelve Apostles themselves.   Those Churches founded personally by an Apostle, or those where an Apostle had been active, were specially respected;  above all, however, those churches whose Apostle had not only worked among them but was buried in their midst, were shown the greatest respect, and their tradition of faith was recognized as being most sure.  Examples of these could be found, for example, at Antioch in Syria, at Philippi, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica.  Nevertheless, even among these “super” churches with “surer” faith because of the founding and/or originating apostolic presence and witness, even among these, there was one which stood head and shoulders above all others, and that was the Church at Rome, where both Peter -- the Rock on which Jesus had said He would build His Church -- and Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles P/personally chosen by the glorified Jesus, had both worked and, indeed, suffered martyrdom for their unflinching witness to the truth of Jesus.   If any Church could remain free from heresy, if any Church could preserve the teaching of Jesus in its purest integrity, it had to be the Church at Rome.  Moreover, all wanting to know the fulness of Jesus’ authentic teaching would find it proclaimed more fully and surely in the apostolic churches, and above all, again, in the Church of Rome, the treasurer and custodian of the unique legacies of both Peter and Paul.  That true faith in Jesus and His teaching was known as the Christian Faith, and that Faith was intended by Jesus to be proclaimed to all peoples and churches throughout the known world, spearheaded by the Apostles, and Paul the specially designated ‘Doctor of the Nations’.  That is why the ‘Christian Faith’ also came to be called the ‘Catholic – which means ‘universal’ – Faith’, because all Christian churches were called, and aspired to teach the doctrine of the apostolic churches, above all the doctrine proclaimed by Peter and Paul – Christian and Catholic -- at Rome. 

Dear friends in Christ, many former Catholics and Christians now rejoicing in a faithless secular society, claim to be creating a better and more fulfilling world-experience for people.  They seek to do this by borrowing from the French Revolution ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ luminaries … proclaiming a likeness to what a modern biographer of Robespierre has termed his ‘Fatal Purity’, a purity uniquely able to separate and destroy even the closest of former friends and associates.   That ‘fatal purity’ of such modern doctrines concerns the nature and development of humanity; and their effect on its social nature is being manifested again in our days.  Modern lapsed Catholics and Christians, and others rejecting Christianity out of hand, borrow heavily from Jesus’ teaching, which they adapt to their own agenda, and as a result we have ever-increasing gender obfuscations, abortions, suicides, and mercy-killings, along with ever more distressing occurrences of children’s mental-health difficulties; all of which arise from modern ideas about and practice of, that sublime Christian virtue of LOVE!!

Our modern secular evangelists like to sound, appear, and show themselves, as good and compassionate people.  And, to cover-up their ignorance of the depths and beauty of human nature as God made it, they use of words well-known from Jesus’ teaching and abuse them to sell the central aspect of their doctrine which is, that no one is excluded from the ‘good things’ they offer, because there is no such thing as sin.   And the apparent closeness of their aspirations with Jesus’ teaching is a sham because they themselves are absolutely against any God -- even so lovable a God-become-man as Jesus -- having any authority over them in their own personal and private lives and decisions.

Dear Catholics and Christians, in our present world of change and uncertainty, where the Faith is openly denied and Tradition derided, we should be both grateful for, and proud of, the blessings we have received: the supreme blessing and gift being that of the one, true, Faith guaranteed by Peter and proclaimed by Paul; the inviolate Faith -- Christian and Catholic -- preserved in and revealed by  the one true Church of Christ through the power of the indwelling Spirit of Holiness and Truth bequeathed to her by her Lord and Saviour.

Here, however, we should take care lest we inadvertently cause the reformation cry of ‘Popery’ to revive; for, although we most wholeheartedly respect, revere, and honour, the Pope, and obey authentic Papal teaching; nevertheless, we do not serve the Pope.  We serve only Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, and we should take care lest enthusiasm for, or after a meeting with, any particular Pope should lead one – and even episcopal conferences are not be excused in this respect -- to splash around servile words of praise, as if they were right expressions of their authors’ Catholic devotion.

Dear Catholic and Christian friends, give great and heartfelt thanks today for the blessings brought us by SS. Peter and Paul and consigned in Mother Church’s treasury of worship, grace, prayer and praise.   Deo Gratias!  Alleluia!!  

12th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Job 38:1, 8-11; 2^nd. Corinthians 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41)

You will recognize the connection between our readings today if I just set before you a short passage from all three.

In the first reading from the book of the prophet Job you heard:

The Lord said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, here shall your proud waves be stilled!'

Just as the Lord of all creation controls earth’s oceans, in like manner did Jesus calm the troubled waters of the Sea of Galilee:

Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.

 Moreover, He calmed not only the tumultuous waters but also the hearts and minds of His anxious disciples, as exemplified by St. Paul in the second reading:

The love of Christ impels us, so that (we) might live no longer for ourselves but for Him Who died for our sake.

Or again in a more famous passage from his letter to the Romans (8:38-39):

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Peace rests on power; and, complementing the calmness of the Lord sleeping in the stern of the storm-tossed boat, was His divine power whereby, on waking, He instantly stilled the raging waters.

Now, these Galileans, His first disciples, would need, later on in their Apostolate, to have the calm strength of an unshakeable faith to which those later words of St. Paul bear witness. For, just as only the omnipotent power of the Lord of all creation could calm the primeval surge of earth’s oceans, so too, only self-committing faith in, and self-forgetful love for, Jesus, as the Lord and Saviour of mankind in Whom:

            The whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9),

can confer that sublime strength which brings true peace and abiding joy to the human soul despite all the tribulations of life in a world which is under the power of Satan and the repeated attacks of his fallen  angels.

In the Gospel story the disciples were as yet immature in their faith, and the situation in which they found themselves was very serious, indeed, it was  life-threatening:

A great windstorm arose, and waves were breaking into the boat so that the boat was already filling.  Jesus was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. They woke Him and said to Him: Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?

Now the ocean was, for the Israelites and the neighbouring civilizations, the realm of Chaos.  As we read in the story of creation from the book of Genesis, before God created either the heavens or the earth:

Darkness was over the face of the deep (Gen 1:2);

and the greatest threat to man and to the world was that they should slip back again into chaos, be overwhelmed by those dark waters.  And, indeed, did not their own history tell them that it was through wind and overpowering waters that the Lord had overturned the chariots and horses, and drowned the troops, of the pursuing Pharaoh when Israel was being led safely out of Egypt (Exodus 15:8-10):

With the blast of Your nostrils the waters piled up; the floods stood up in a pile; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.  The enemy said, 'I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my hand shall destroy them.'  You blew with Your wind; the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.

As Israel became less and less faithful to her covenant with the Lord, she was repeatedly punished for her many failings; and these troubles and trials, this punishment and pain, was pictured by the psalmist as the looming threat of chaos (Psalm 124: 2-5):

If it had not been the LORD who was on our side when people rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive when their anger was kindled against us; then would the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters.

Those traditional memories and fears were deliberately used by Our Lord to teach the Apostles what sort of faith they should have in Him.  For the psalm I have just quoted where the great fear was that the swollen waters would overwhelm them ends as follows:

Blessed be the LORD, Who has not given us as prey to their teeth.  We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped.

The wind over the waters causing the storm had been of Our Lord’s choosing for it was He Who had suggested that they should cross over the sea to the other side,  He had chosen the circumstances that would test His disciples; and, as throughout the history of Israel, God’s punishments and testing had never been for their ruin but for their education and betterment, similarly here, Jesus was testing His disciples in order to strengthen and confirm them.  If they would respond with trust in the Lord as the psalmist had done, great would be their reward; but even their failure could nevertheless serve as a lesson that would bring enduring blessings if they would learn from it.

The disciples’ reaction to their situation was perfectly natural and normal, and all those who have ever been in a small rowing boat on stormy waters will appreciate their alarm.  They were found wanting not because they had been afraid of the imminent threat that their boat might capsize but because they cried out to the Lord without due confidence and trust, so that their words were little better than cries of panic.   Jesus therefore:

Woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Quiet! Be still!"  The wind ceased and there was a great calm.  Then He asked them, "Why are you terrified?   Do you not yet have faith?"

Time was short for Jesus; soon He would have to give the supreme example of confidence and trust under the pressure of mortal torment and soul-destroying abandonment saying:

            Father, into Your hands I commend my Spirit.

The time was coming too when these disciples so close to His Heart would have to follow where their Lord had gone, and therefore it was imperative that they should start to learn the lesson that would prepare them to overcome the world with Him.

This is in accordance with what St. Paul had in mind when, in our second reading, he wrote to the Corinthians:

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.  

Dear People of God, Jesus wills to be our strength and our peace, that strength and peace which alone can enable us to find the true joy of life; and for that to happen we have to turn to Him in all our needs and with all our aspirations and hopes.  However, we must be found using not merely conventional words nor adopting non-committal, provisional, attitudes, but with deep personal sincerity and self-commitment based on divine promises not human expectations:

For the love of Christ controls us; He died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for Him who, for their sake, died and was raised.

We must try to live no longer for ourselves, following our own ideas, seeking our own satisfactions, trusting and serving number one; we must endeavour, more and more, to put Jesus first in our lives: trusting and hoping in Him, following and serving Him in all that we try to do (Psalm 27:14):

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!

11th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2^nd. Corinthians 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34)

St. Paul, speaking in our second reading today:
 
WE ARE ALWAYS OF GOOD COURAGE;  for we walk by faith, not by sight.  YES, WE ARE OF GOOD COURAGE …  we make it our aim to please Him;

reminds me very much of our Blessed Lord Jesus’ words recorded by St. John in his Gospel (16:33)
In the world you will have tribulation; but TAKE HEART; I have overcome the world.

Actually, the two Greek words translated in the one case by ‘We are always of good courage and in the other by ‘take heart’ are very closely related, so we do well to understand the dictum of St. Paul in accordance with those words of Jesus, because Paul was a Personally chosen disciple of the Lord, and he most certainly did on many occasions –  more  indeed than any of the other apostles -- suffer for Jesus with great courage. His faith and trust in the Lord urged him to ‘take heart’ in whatever adverse situation he might find himself; and that faith and trust, that ‘taking heart, is most certainly what Paul wanted to teach and encourage in his converts, who were being called daily – in accordance with the words of Our Lord quoted above -- to face up to the pagan power of Rome and give witness to the Lord Jesus as true and faithful disciples.  

And what tribulation there is to be found in our world today, dear People of God, for all who are committed disciples of Jesus!!

I will not speak of wars and rumours of wars, of which there are many that are  serious; nevertheless, I do want to highlight the tribulation in the hearts of so many Catholics and Christians, all of them with so much potential for good as disciples of Jesus, but, of whom, far too many have sadly been turned aside from ‘being of good courage’ in Jesus by the solicitations of that despair which abounds in our world and which is at the heart of all the excitement and lust for immediate pleasure and power, and the blatant evil so easily accepted in our days of religious indifference..
Today, change – even disintegration -- is continual and seems to have ever-greater momentum, sweeping aside what had previously seemed established and inviolable; and, as a result, many find it extremely difficult to maintain a reliable, trustworthy, life style, let alone  an abiding  faith in an unseen God.

In such circumstances the temptation is great -- especially for the young and the needy -- to grasp, seize, what the world offers here and now, before it disappears, before it is lost without their having tasted of it.! And how alien such a world portrays our Christian religion and Catholic faith which teaches us to commit ourselves wholeheartedly to, and learn to find our total joy and peace in, promises given by Jesus, which seem to be only empty, pie-in-the-sky promises, for those denizens of our brave, new, world unable to even conceive of spiritual blessings!

Dear People of God, when power and influence can be, and frequently are, bought by money; when multitudes are swept along by popular tides of mindless enthusiasm when rights are proclaimed -- many of them quite ludicrous -- and responsibilities ignored; when might is right and popularity cannot be challenged; when people are cajoled and led astray by preachers of holiness-without-commitment, and addicts of faith-without-obedience; THEN, would-be-disciples of Jesus find it difficult to  hear and recognize the soul-calming voice  of the unseen, but all-seeing and all-powerful God Who created us.  And in such a situation, it is vitally important for us-who-believe to hear, and take heart from, the concordant voices of our Lord Jesus and His most faithful disciple St. Paul in today’s readings:

These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
We are always of good courage, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.

The believer - Paul went on to say - is confident by reason of his faith: he trusts in the goodness of the God he already knows; and is well-pleased, to look forward to and hope for, the promises of ‘the Friend’ he serves, the Lord and Saviour he seeks to please, and  longs above all to love, wholeheartedly:

We walk by faith not by sight, and we make it our aim to please Him.  For we must all appear  before the judgement seat of Christ
 
Now, that Christian trust and contentment is pictured in Our Lord’s first parable today:
The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how.  
The sower does not know how the planting he has made develops to fruition: he continues to play his part, however, by waiting for the Lord and trusting in Him, before ultimately reaping the resultant harvest.

Dear People of God, too few supposed ‘sowers’ of God’s word, too few such preachers of Jesus’ Gospel, seem to know how to wait for the Lord and trust in His word!  So many ‘high-ups’ -- for example, in the ‘intellectual’ German Church corrupted by power-pence and personal pride -- want to ‘adapt’ Catholic traditional, centuries-long  Apostolic teaching, to the ‘needs’ of  certain ‘modern’ and most-important members of the flock of their pasture -- the providers of their ‘power pence’, the Deutsch Mark! -- who apparently find themselves in moral situations never before known, experienced, thought of, or even imagined, before the German hierarchy ‘discovered’ their proliferance. 

Dear People of God, what, moral, sexual, situations were not experienced in pagan, all- powerful, world capital, Rome; were not thought of in homosexual Greece and Athens;  have not been imagined by exotic potentates all over the world and throughout the ages??  Why are today’s so learned  German leaders (said, by the way, in a popular dictum , to go down deepest but come up dirtiest!) so willing to accept those modern situations supposedly unknown to, and unforeseeable by, the Lord and Saviour of mankind, Our Lord Jesus  Christ!!

Jesus gives special emphasis to trust in and contentment before God in His second parable,  where He no longer speaks of ‘scattered seed’  but of  one single mustard seed, the smallest seed of all.  Telling us that, the initial apparent insignificance of any work intended for God’s glory and His people’s well-being is NO HINDRANCE to the final realization of God’s plan; that a seed so very tiny  can indeed grow into the biggest shrub of all; and that what Jesus requires in all those who would serve Him is patient humility.

So, there we have Jesus’ teaching for all who would serve Him in today’s almost disastrous world: just two little,  complementary, parables, recommending two absolutely essential virtues, life-qualities,  for all who aspire to be His Christian and Catholic disciples today.  Do what you can – however small it may seem;  wait patiently, trustingly, confidently, humbly, for the most Holy Spirit, God’s GIFT, to bring about – in His time – that work of God you want to see effected.

Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land, and befriend faithfulness.  Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart.   Commit your way to the LORD, trust in Him, and He will act.   He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.  Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.        (Psalm 37:3-7)

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.  Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.

I have said these things to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation.  But TAKE HEART, I have overcome the world.       (John 15:19-20 & 16:33)

10th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Genesis 3:9-15; 2^nd. Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1; Saint Mark’s Gospel 3:20-35)

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, Jesus said in today’s Gospel reading words both puzzling and encouraging:

            Whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.

‘Whoever does the will of God‘ seems such an impersonal criterion; whereas ‘my brother and sister and mother’ are words so personal and friendly.  Of course, as you surely well know, we become brothers and sisters of Christ when He, by His baptismal Gift of the most Holy Spirit in Mother Church, draws us to Himself and so enables us to be nourished with His heavenly food: a food which is not assimilated by the recipient, but which, on the contrary, assimilates us to the  One thus giving Himself to us in Holy Communion.  In that way  we become not only His own brothers and sisters but also -- and most wonderfully -- adopted sons and daughters of His heavenly Father.

As regards becoming His ‘mother’  that also is understandable in a Eucharistic context in the sense that Christ is – so to speak – ‘conceived in us’ through baptism and then lives in us and grows gradually to maturity by His ever-renewed ‘gift of the Holy Spirit’ in each fruitful reception of Holy Communion.

Nevertheless, for Jesus, the ultimate and supremely decisive criterion of a true and acceptable disciple is, one ‘who does the will of God’, and that is because   Jesus spent His whole life on earth doing the will of His Father for our salvation.  Therefore all who aspire to become disciples of Jesus  must sincerely seek, intend, aspire, to ‘do the will of God’ as explained by Jesus Himself.

You will have noticed that Jesus’ words to describe a disciple of His, speak of a brother, a sister, and mother; but there is no mention of ‘a father’.

Dear People of God, the relationship of Jesus on earth with His Father in heaven was so mysterious, so intimate and so imperious, that even Our Blessed Lady was, so to speak, ‘at a loss’, even ‘all at sea’, with it at times, as we learn from the occasion when she thought it right to reprove her Son Who had remained behind in the Temple at Jerusalem unknown to herself and Saint Joseph.  At that time Jesus’ answer totally puzzled her:

            Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s house?

Those words ‘ in My Father’s house’ can also mean, about my Father’s business and they thus offered to one so contemplative as Mary something she would ponder  over. Indeed, something she would ultimately treasure when her Son finally left her and went with His disciples to preach His Good News to the people.  She  could most certainly understand and would be most humbly proud to know that on leaving her He was walking alone, wholeheartedly -- ‘about His father’s business’ – all the way to Calvary.

So, brothers and sisters, dear fellow disciples in Christ, Jesus words:

            Whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother,

are both heavenly and earthly words, perfectly befitting Him Who is God-become-Man for men: they are heavenly words of companionship, ‘Whoever does the will of My Father’, and of God-pleasing  personal love, where ‘My brother and sister and mother’ are meant as true expressions of spontaneously  human love, which is firmly established upon a deep personal relationship,  not  founded on the shivering sands of carnal passion.

‘Doing the will of God’ was the aim of the Law under the Old covenant.  St. Paul discussed that question of the role of the old Law and his teaching is admirably summed up by the late C.H. Dodd in one of his early works:

‘Every individual of the human race is so entangled in the general “wrongness” that he has no power left to himself to avoid committing acts which, whether he knows it or not, add to the sum of wrong.  To know these acts are wrong does not prevent him from doing them, but it does imprint upon his conscience, in the indelible characters of shame and guilt, the contrast of good and evil.  It brings “sin” home, from being a general state of the human race, to be a conscious burden upon the mind of the individual.  And Paul sees that it is a great advance to have discovered sin in one’s own heart as guilt.  Only the man who is conscious of his guilt can be saved from the sin of which he is guilty.’

That ‘saving from sin’ comes to us, of course, through the death of the only sublimely Perfect Man,  His Resurrection and Ascension, His bequeathed sacrament of Baptism; and today, our own efforts to conform our behaviour to God’s will in all circumstances ... all of which serves, to quote Saint Paul (Ephesians 4:12-13):

To equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent  of the full stature of Christ;

or, in simpler words, to become truly adopted sons and daughters of God the Father.      

I do not want to keep you unduly, dear fellow disciples of Jesus, but I also would like to encourage your continued  thinking about today’s Scripture readings; therefore, just notice that our first reading centred on God the Father:

The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”.

Our second, on God the Son:

He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus … so do not lose heart.

And our third reading, centred on the Holy Spirit:

Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.