25th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Wisdom 2:12, 17-20; James 3:16 - 4:3; Mark 9:30-37)

Dear Bothers and Sisters in Christ, today’s readings demand, I think, that we begin, beseechingly, with a Gospel question to Our Blessed Lord:  Teacher, which is the great commandment?  And now let us hear Our Lord Himself tell us the truth, the whole truth:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.

And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

And hearing the 12 noon BBC news today which told of such evil and suffering in our world, we must learn  from Jesus’ analysis of our human sinfulness.

Jesus was teaching His disciples and telling them, "The Son of Man is to be handed over to men, and they will kill Him, and three days after His death the Son of Man will rise."   But they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to question Him.

The words of Our Blessed Lord were surely clear enough, People of God, but the disciples seemed not understand what He was saying.  Why?  That can only have been because the disciples did not want to accept that suffering should come into the life of Him Whom they acknowledged as the Christ of God, the glory of His People Israel, and their own, much loved and even more revered, Lord and Master.

The same attitude is still with us today: many people are unwilling to accept that suffering can have any salutary role in their own lives as Catholic Christians, thinking it wrong that anyone living, or trying to live, a good life as a disciple of Jesus the Lord, should have to experience unjust and undeserved suffering. And consequently, when suffering does come into their lives, they  allow themselves to be easily scandalized, and frequently they turn aside from discipleship in a greater or lesser degree.

Jesus, however, alone knew the wicked depths of those whom He had come to save, and our readings today give us an insight into that wickedness of men (including ourselves, each in our own measure) which is so often unnoticed because it is diabolical in origin and unrelentingly deceitful in its purpose … is not the Devil the father of lies?

Listen to words from our first reading:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he accuses us of sins against our training … Let us test him …

The righteousness of Christ and the righteousness of authentic Catholic doctrine and Christian teaching, and that righteousness which is essential to all faithful Catholics is likewise ‘Inconvenient’: causing worry, annoyance, hindrance, to the today’s blatantly sinful Western society and our decadent Western world.

And yet there are so very many secular people professing to do good, even intending to do what they think is good  in their political and personal lives today; but, they reject the great and first commandment You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and they end up doing what they think is good! 

Some, following their predecessors who did ‘good things’ leading to the now-innumerable victims of abortion, today, want to lead the way to bring in their choice of ‘good things’ for the elderly, old, and the dying: beginning with legally-assisted dying.  If they were to go farther along that line, how many old people would be made to feel ‘inconvenient’ to young high-risers?  Oh yes, dear People of God:

            The fascination of wickedness obscures what is good … (Wisdom 4:12),

and our relatively prosperous Western society is,  as a whole, consciously, even deliberately, fascinated with wickedness, urgent to experience loathsome novelties, above all, those of a sexual nature: freedom to be and to do what you want is supremely desirable; a minimum of social restrictions alone are admissible; but religious restrictions are out of the question, because God -- for them -- is an unbelievable reality and an unacceptable idea.

Now, they do this because they have allowed themselves to become worldly in their thinking, as Jesus reproached Peter (Matthew 16:23):

Get behind Me, Satan! You are a hindrance to Me. You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.  

Having become worldly in their thinking, such people soon come to love nothing so much as themselves and their opinions.  As for Peter. challenged by Jesus at the very beginning of his worldliness, was -- ‘De gratias’--  humble enough to repent and grow in his love for Jesus to the extent that Jesus, before His definitive ascension into heaven was able to ask ‘Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?  Feed My sheep’ (John 21:15, 17)

Let us now see how Jesus persuaded His disciples to overcome their fears and change their ways:

They came to Capernaum.  And when He was in the house He asked them, “What were you discussing on the way?”  But they kept silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest.  

Jesus knew what had been going on -- quite literally, behind His back -- as He and His disciples had walked along, and He said to them all:

If anyone would be first he must be last of all and servant of all.  And He took a child and put him in the midst of them and taking him in His arms He said to them, “Whoever receives one such child  in My name, receives Me, and whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me”

In the ancient world children were thought little of, and frequently and publicly much abused.  Therefore, when Jesus took one such person, so insignificant and singularly unimportant in the eyes of the world, and said:

Whoever receives one child such as this in My name, receives Me,

He gave His disciples a picture that was so easy to remember as to be unforgettable, and yet at the same time one that offered them teaching of inexhaustible riches.

For the well-disposed and well-intentioned, above all for those small in their own conceit, even the least work is able to bring such a disciple to Jesus’ attention: for there is nothing too small, nothing too insignificant, which -- when done for Jesus’ sake -- does not bring such a disciple closer to his Lord, for God exalts the lowly and humble of heart. To be appreciated by the world, however, one has to be, or try to make oneself, noticeable, significant, successful, in other words,  one has to put on pride which separates, and can totally alienate  from the Lord whose prerogatives such people abuse.

They had walked the way to Capernaum but, on their arrival at the house, Jesus asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?”  He would appear to have been walking ahead and alone, and they had been following as a group.  Why?  There was, obviously, something very different about Jesus, nobody walked alongside Him, shoulder to shoulder, as His equal, His special companion, not even Peter.  There was a distance between the disciples and their Lord: not one of separation, but rather, one of reverence.  We can see the same attitude in another detail mentioned in the Gospel reading: for, we are told, that although the disciples did not understand His teaching concerning His future Passion and Death: they were afraid to question Him. HeHHhhhhhhHhhhh

 

Now this was not a fear such as we usually have in mind when we use the word:  for it was a fear which in no way hindered them from following Him wherever He went.  It was such a fear as rises in every humble human heart in the presence of the One who is far greater than they, the presence of the One of Whom Jesus spoke when referring to the Temple in Jerusalem, known and admired far and wide in antiquity, and whose very stones still fill modern engineers with admiration and amazement:

I tell you, something greater than the Temple is here (and He is speaking to you at this very moment).The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:6, 8)

Before such a One, only the blindness of culpable ignorance and devilish pride, or  the fascination of wickedness could have rendered the Apostles incapable of feeling and of appreciating an instinctive fear rising in their hearts in His presence.

People of God, we should never be ashamed to fear the Lord, for it is proof of the authenticity of both our appreciation of Him and our knowledge of ourselves.  However, let it be a fear like that of the disciples on the way, a fear which, far from repelling them,  drew them after Him, irresistibly, wherever He went: pray that you too may progress along their way of discipleship, experiencing a like, reverential, compulsion to follow Jesus ever more faithfully, ever more closely, even though it lead to your sharing in His sufferings.  Indeed, look beyond the disciples, and pray that your reverential fear may become ever more and more like the reverential love which Jesus Himself, our Blessed Lord and Saviour, had for His heavenly Father when He said:

You heard Me say to you, 'I am going away, and I will come to you.' If you loved Me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. (John 14:28)   

For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take It up again.  No one takes it from Me but I lay it down of My own accord. This charge I have received from My Father.  (John 10:17-18)  

I do as the Father has commanded Me, so that world may know that I love the Father. (John 14:31)

As you leave this Eucharist, dear friends in Christ, ask yourselves this question: Are YOU setting your mind on the things of God, or on the things of man??            

24th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Isaiah 50:5-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35)

We heard in the first reading a prophecy of Isaiah concerning the Suffering Servant, the Messiah, the coming leader who would deliver Israel from her bondage to sin.  He is known as the Servant because He would be totally obedient to the Lord the God of Israel, and totally devoted to His people.  He is better known as the Suffering Servant because it would be by His human sufferings -- pictured so graphically for us by the words of the prophet -- that He would fulfil God’s plans and purposes for His Chosen People, not by any triumphs of military prowess.  Moreover, since those sufferings would come His way as part of God’s will for Him – not as mere chance manifestations of human wickedness -therefore the Suffering Servant would be also be characterized by His constant attention to Israel’s God in order to know His will and walk His way in total and unfailing obedience:

The Lord GOD has opened My ear and I was not rebellious, I turned not backwards.

Having come to do His Father’s will, Jesus’ constant aim throughout His life was to hear, obey, and thus glorify His Father.  And this He showed, for example, when -- in today’s Gospel reading --- He so suddenly chose Peter as the foundation rock for His future Church because He, Jesus, recognized that it was His Father Who had just revealed the truth ‘YOU ARE THE CHRIST’ to Peter: “It was not flesh and blood which revealed this to you but My Father in heaven.”  Indeed, Jesus’ final and supreme prayer was that His own death would serve for the ultimate glorification of His Father:

Jesus lifted up His eyes to heaven, said, "Father, the hour has come.  Glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You.” (John 17:1)

Therefore, in order to show that faith of which St. James spoke so very simply in our second reading we must always, as disciples of Jesus, seek to hear, and respond to, God.  As you well know, faith is not something we are born with, it is our God-gifted, truth-full, response to the earthly witness of His beloved, only-begotten-Son-made-flesh, lovingly sent to convict the sinfulness of men’s mind and convert the weakness of their heart and will, to the beauty and strength of the Father’s true children, adopted in Jesus and empowered by the Spirit.

In the Gospel reading we were told that:

Jesus went on with His disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way He asked His disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  And they told Him, “John the Baptist, and others say Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.”  And He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”

Even Peter himself, as the first of those totally-committed disciples of Jesus uniquely called ‘fishers of men’, had -- like all of us -- originally needed to respond to the Father, as Jesus Himself tells us:

No one can come to Me unless it is granted him by My Father  (John 6:65);

and now he became the first to publicly recognize and confess Jesus as the Messiah, with those typically Petrine, decisive and uncompromising, words: YOU ARE THE CHRIST.

Peter was totally committed to Jesus  -- indeed, he loved Jesus more than any and all of the other disciples – and that loving and total commitment to Jesus was alarmed beyond measure when Jesus began to teach His disciples about His own forthcoming Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  Those words raised a question in Peter that he had never before needed to resolve: how to distinguish between the proper, true expression, of His love, and those intensely emotional feelings evoked by Jesus’ words, feelings of an intensity he had never experienced before.  Peter needed to somehow express HIS TOTAL LOVE, as a disciple, and that was something he had never done before.  Consequently, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to do what he aught to do,  Peter acted decisively as usual:

             Peter took (Jesus) aside and began to rebuke Him.  

I would much rather have said that he went aside to join Jesus, but in fact the gospel says that he took Jesus aside and began to rebuke Him!  Peter was, as I have just remarked, decisive by nature; but, on this occasion, his loving fears concerning Jesus’ safety and honour led him to completely overstep the boundary between disciple and master, servant and Lord, with the result that:

(Jesus) turning  and seeing His disciples, rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind Me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”

What a put-down!!  However, notice what St. Mark tells us: Jesus turned around and looked at His disciples.  Jesus words were not words of anger, they were measured words deliberately chosen to guide and protect His other disciples – who both admired Peter and were accustomed to follow him with full confidence -- by correcting Peter’s presumptuous impetuosity.  For Jesus, God His  Father was in loving command over, and total control of, every aspect of His life; and every detail of His Father’s plan would evoke a response of absolute commitment from Jesus: there was nothing that God could ask of His Son that His Son would not embrace, even to the extent of His Passion and Death on the Cross.   Peter’s present anxious fear for Jesus’ well-being was altogether alien to Jesus.

 

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?  The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?  When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh, my adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet will I be confident.  (Psalm 27:1-3)

 

And so we see how, in order to guide His disciples -- Peter above all – into total trust in His Father’s overseeing wisdom and love, Jesus rejected Peter’s blind emotionalism with those heart-felt and shockingly pertinent words: ‘Get behind Me, Satan!’  For Peter – being overly subject to his predisposition to decisive action -- was actually carrying on where Satan in the desert had temporarily stopped: trying to persuade Jesus to seek His own ends, His own self, rather than follow His Father’s way, do His Father’s will.

Notice also: not only those already fully committed to Jesus, not only those seeking to learn more and more about Him and His Good News, but even those ordinary people who were just seeing Him and hearing of His Gospel message for the first time, ALL of them had to appreciate this absolutely fundamental truth concerning Jesus’ crucial oneness with God His Father in His Father’s plan for mankind’s salvation, and in the Gift of their most Holy Spirit, bond of Love, and source, for men, of all truth and might:

if anyone would come after Me let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow Me.   For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.”

One of the iconic pictures of modern advances in social awareness and personal  fulfilment is that of a young person looking forwards and upwards -- that is, to an ideally bright and better future -- with words like ‘I want to do something worthwhile with my life’ on his or her lips.  In reality, however, the life offered to such young people is almost always a life in accordance with the aspirations of the pagan society in which they live, aspirations such as success, popularity, charism, talent, all leading to plenty and pleasure; aspirations such as singular achievement, endurance, fighting-spirit and indeed ruthlessness, all  manifestations of the individual ego striving to prove itself in the multiple and varied aspects of life in the jungle of modern society.

For us Christians and Catholics, however, that is not the life to which we are called.  The life offered to us cannot be achieved by us, for us; it is a life centred on God, on His will for mankind’s greater good on earth,  and for the heavenly home awaiting each and every ultimately true son and daughter of His.   It is a life to be lived with Jesus Who is the ‘Way, the Truth, and the Life’;  a life to be realised in the power of His most Holy Spirit with which we have been gifted.   It is a life to be gratefully embraced and lived to its fulfilment in the company of all the angels and saints for the ecstatic praise and glory of Him Who is the most loving Father of us all: INFINITELY WISE, TOTALLY BEAUTIFUL, ALL HOLY AND TRUE, THE ALMIGHTY, YET … INCONCEIVABLY … HUMBLE AND GOOD.

23rd Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Isaiah 35: 4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37)

Jesus was in a region – the Decapolis, on the other side of the Sea of Galilee – where a sizeable Jewish population lived; they were, however, influenced by the alien culture prevalent in those 10 cities (‘Decapolis’ is a Greek word meaning ten towns or cities) whose citizens lived in a Greek-style society with Greco-Roman government, and whose laws and religious beliefs – especially when taken together with their moral standards and practices -- were regarded by devout Israelites as ‘heathen‘.

There was sufficiently close contact between Jews and Greeks to support business activities and also to enable the ‘Greeks’ to acquire some awareness of and acquaintance with Jewish customs and religious practices.  Jesus had recently healed the daughter of a pagan Syro-Phoenician woman who, you will remember, had said that even the dogs were allowed to eat scraps from the children’s table. On that occasion Jesus had healed her daughter at a distance, her mother having come alone to beseech Jesus’ help.

Here, however, there was a crowd of expectant people, including numerous  Jews, who:

brought to Jesus one who was deaf and had a speech impediment, and they begged Him to lay His hand on him.  (Mark 7:32)

Jesus, you will notice, did not seek out this man any more than He had sought out the woman  whose daughter He had healed despite His initial unwillingness to do any such healing for a Gentile.  On this occasion, however, it was a crowd, probably most of them members, by birth, of the Chosen People, who “begged” Him to lay His hand on this deaf and dumb man.

People of God, recognize that this episode might well have brought a certain joy to the heart of Jesus.  The pagan woman had come to Him for the sake of her natural daughter; here, however, there is a crowd of people united in the faith of Israel asking for the healing of a fellow Jew.  They did not, most probably, observe their faith with sufficient care -- living and working, as they did, side by side with pagans -- but for all that, they still kept firm hold of a most important characteristic of their Jewish background, their faithful care for each other.

On this occasion Jesus willed not only to speak words of healing, but also to use His own human flesh to touch the man, and so we are told that Jesus:

            took him aside from the crowd privately,

because – having deemed it necessary to use His own body in order to save this man’s ‘Jewish’ soul -- Jesus did not want any noise from the excited pagan onlookers to disturb the mute man’s close attention to Jesus’ every word, whisper, gesture or touch.  Jesus then … first of all:

put His finger into his ears, and after spitting, touched his tongue, and looking up to heaven He sighed ….

Jesus wanted the deaf-mute man’s faith to grow step by step as He – Jesus, famous in all Galilee across the water --  did what the half-pagan Jew  could ‘faithfully’ relate to: he could see Jesus spitting, and then feel Him touching his own tongue with that saliva; ‘magical saliva?’    No, not really, for Jesus was now coaxing this man  --- in His own most wonderful way as Perfect God and Perfect Man – trying to draw him closer to His Father by looking up to heaven as He sighed deeply, encouraging, urging -- by the very depth of that sigh from His own most Sacred Heart --  the mute man first of all to relax and then open himself up for healing by looking up with Jesus hopefully in a heavenward  glance -- being a Jew by birth, he remembered that heaven was said to be God’s home -- and  then to rest, if only for an instant, expectantly in Jesus' arms as:

Jesus said to him, ‘EPHPHATHA’

in Aramaic, the common language understood well enough by both pagans and Jews present.

Then, all of a sudden, everyone around him was speaking to him as Jesus had just done, in Aramaic, and he was hearing them, he was cured!  

His ears were opened, his tongue released, and he spoke plainly.

People of God, we should try our best to appreciate that Jesus still uses human nature: we Catholics do not pray to a God who is just “up there”: we pray to, we turn to, we love, a God Who   is with us also here on earth, a God Who is with us in His own flesh and blood in the Eucharist; indeed, in so far as we are true disciples of Jesus, in so far as we live in His Body by His Spirit, we are all “flesh of His flesh, blood of His Blood”.  Because Our Blessed Lord deliberately continues to use His Body for mankind’s salvation through the instrumentality of His Church -- His Mystical Body -- He thus ALSO deigns to use our flesh, to use us, His disciples, in His work of redemption even today.  Our Christian vocation in Mother Church is therefore clear: as loving and obedient disciples of Jesus, the Son of God made flesh for men, we are called to become, each in our degree, willing instruments for His continuing work of salvation: by our Catholic prayer and worship, by our Christian living and loving, by the very way “we live and move and have our spiritual being” in Him.

That “sighing deeply”, also expressed the deep compassion felt by Jesus all mankind suffering so much under the burden of sin, as St. Paul tells us:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.   And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly waiting for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.  Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what we to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.      (Romans 8:22-26)

His sighing deeply is indeed also the result of His immense indignation that His Father’s creation, originally so good and so beautiful, should have become so deformed and ugly, thanks to the Devil’s lies and our complicity.  This is why, People of God, we should, indeed why we must, hate sin for dishonouring the Father of glory, for bringing such sorrow to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and for the degradation and grief, the pain and loss, it continues to bring about in the lives of all men and women, children, and even those still in their mother’s womb.  

Make no mistake about it, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we are called to HATE SIN; but also, as Christians, we must still love the sinner; that is, we must convict sin (‘do good-ers’ cannot do that) yet without condemning the sinner.

Jesus does indeed will that we, His People, share in His saving work for the whole world, but we can only do this by learning to ‘love the sinner’ as Christ loved us, it does not, as St. Paul tells us explicitly tells us, mean our cosying-up to sinners:

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?   What accord has Christ with Belial?   (2 Corinthians 6:14-15)

That true wisdom which alone can wholeheartedly convict the sin whilst lovingly restrain from condemning our sinning neighbour requires us to have both sincerity of heart and an enlightened and humble mind.  That is, hatred of the sin and love for the sinner demands our being wilfully subject to the Holy Spirit of Truth and Love, the only means whereby that most beautiful vision and prophecy of Isaiah, heard in the first reading, can come to true fulfilment:

Be strong, fear not!  Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God (hating and destroying sin); He will come and save you."  Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf  unstopped.   Then the lame man  shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.  For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.   The burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.   A  highway shall be there,  and it shall be called the Way of Holiness.  The unclean shall not pass over it. (Isaiah 35:4-8)