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.
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??
