28th Sunday Year A 2017

 28^th. Sunday, Year A

Isaiah 25:6-10; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-14

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On this mountain the LORD of hosts will provide for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy rich food and pure choice wines.  On that day it will be said: “Behold our God, to Whom we looked to save us! This is the LORD for Whom we looked; let us rejoice and be glad that He has saved us!”

This passage, indeed the whole of the first reading, is wonderfully suited to picture the blessings of Christianity, and by that, I mean above all, the Catholic religion,  for those who, be they pagans or nominal Christians, have felt the anguish of ignorance accompanied by a vaguely oppressive sense of sinfulness and inadequacy, weakness and insignificance, those who have felt the insufficiency of all merely human ideals to enable them to withstand the trials and temptations of life – “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:19) -- and all who have suffered from divisions within themselves, within family, society, and between nations.  All who have experienced and want to learn from such occasions of suffering and sorrow, the Catholic faith is a most wonderful reconciliation with God, with the world, and with one’s own self.  It is a setting free, a restoration of peace, meaning, beauty, and above all, of hope, to life.

Nevertheless, all these wonderfully great blessings do not easily penetrate through to the warm sensitive core of men as individuals.  For men are formed by, and live most fully in, their personal relationships with others.  It is in the deliberate and free gift and acceptance of whole-hearted personal love (not the impulsive, driving passion of sexual encounters!) that a human being first opens him- or her-self up for maturity.  When a man or woman gives and receives such love for the first time they are changed thereby, and life is no longer the same as it was before that encounter and embrace… it is the initial warrant and seal of one’s worth as a personal being.

Now it is the Eucharist which brings that glow of personal, loving, encounter, fully into prominence in the spiritual life of a Catholic Christian, for the Eucharist is indeed the feast, the banquet, of rich food and pure, choice, wines.  For the most stupendous fact and meaning of the Eucharist is that Jesus, the very Son of God made Man for us, there presents and renews (not repeats!) His original and eternally enduring gift of Himself as man in sacrifice for us all, and in Personal love to each one of us who receive Him.  Now that gift of total love by Jesus is unique and absolutely inimitable: we human beings can only offer ourselves partially to another, and can also only receive another’s gift partially, even though most sincerely and committedly.  Uniquely with Jesus, in the Eucharist, is total gift and commitment to be found, and -- by the Spirit of Jesus -- to be gradually and most carefully nourished in us who receive Him.  As foreshadowed on the human level, so here most sublimely, this union of love (CHARITY) is indeed the ultimate fulfilment of one’s being, it is the total vindication of one’s worth as a human-being now become a child of God the Father in Jesus.  For Christ is Truth, Love, and Life, and He comes to us that He might give us a share – chosen for us by the Father – in His Own Life of Truth and Love before the Father.

All these blessings, which reach to and transfigure the core of our human being are ours in Christ indeed, but we are only aware of them through faith, and we have to pray that we might grow in faith precisely in order that we may appreciate, esteem, value, and respond to these blessings to which our Father invites us.

That is not always easy for us since we, like children who seek all that glitters, are very subject to the impressions of our external senses and our resultant inner emotions, and these can easily drive us to over-involvement in worldly activities; not that is wrong to be fully involved in all that we undertake -- indeed St. Paul warns us against half-heartedness – but that over-involvement so easily leads us to over-esteem success in those worldly activities and under-value those spiritual blessings which we can only perceive through faith, to which our instinctive emotions do not immediately respond.  And it is here that we must turn to our Gospel reading.

The invited guests in Our Lord’s parable were first of all, self-regarding-righteous Jews, and the OT covenant with God was the first invitation.  Jesus Himself was the servant ultimately sent to announce that the Messianic feast, long foretold, was now prepared.  Because that meant leaving aside the pursuit of power, profit, and success, the excuses came back thick and fast from all sides with varying degrees of politeness: but they all had the same fundamental meaning, ‘We have much more important things to do just now than come to your feast.’

That is the great danger for us today, People of God: we can come to value earthly, visible, emotionally stirring, activities exclusively if we allow ourselves to become too wrapped up in them … the traditional fault, indeed, of too many husbands in their family life, and sadly the modern, and yet more unnatural failing of some wives – I am writing as a Catholic priest for married Catholics, not for legal ‘partners’ or pseudo-wives -- who find they have not enough time,  when money can be earned and personal success be gained, for them to be true mothers.  Of course, the surety which such sinners feel in denying any significant value to religion is not so much a proof that religion has nothing to offer, no meaning for them, no reality in itself, but rather an indication of the extent to which they have been blinded by earthly attractions, and deafened by the cares and solicitudes of life, to the intimations of spiritual truths.

In this parable Jesus teaches on the one hand that no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven by his own efforts without an invitation from God which has to be not only heard but also recognized and accepted as being  for our compliance; and, on the other hand, that no one is condemned to remain outside the Kingdom except as a result of their own deliberate rejection or willful disdain of God’s offer.

People of God, there is no automatic predestination or salvation, no impersonal fate.  A choice has to be made by all of us; it is a choice for Jesus,  a choice involving  life or death, a choice to be made not once by God judging for us or against us, but one to be made and re-affirmed by ourselves many, many, times over the years of our life.

Lest light-headed, and perhaps big-headed(!) youngsters, care-oppressed adults, weary elders, are inclined to think of these things as of no modern importance, let me quote some tragically beautiful and yet so sadly mixed-up thoughts of a modern philosopher of renown, Bertrand Russell:

“The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain – a curious, wild pain – a searching for something transfigured and infinite.  The beatific vision—God, I do not find it.  I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life.”

The only-begotten, most beloved, Son of the heavenly Father came as our Lord Jesus to save those original likenesses of God still loved by His Father but cut off from the benefits of that love by life preferences and practices adopted through ignorance and weakness.  Our Lord died and rose from death to save those spoiled ‘likenesses’; and ascending back to His Father in heaven He offered them the Gift of His Most Holy Spirit to enlighten their ignorance and support their weakness, and, as living members of the Body of Christ on earth, Mother Church  (unknown or at least unappreciated by Bertrand Russell looking for understanding and truth exclusively to his own powers of human thought) to lead them to the fulness of earthly life and heavenly glory as ‘other Christs’ in the beatific vision divinely revealed to us in Mother Church, and so vaguely loved and doubted by Russell.

27th Sunday of the Year (A) 2017

27^th. Sunday of Year (A)

(Isaiah 5:1-7; Paul to the Philippians 4:6-9; Matthew 21: 33-43)

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Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah foretold the destruction of the Temple of Solomon and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; in the Gospel we heard of Jesus directly warning the Jews of their ultimate rejection as Chosen People called to bring in the Kingdom of God and -- as subsequent history would show -- indirectly that the Romans would raze Jerusalem to the ground and destroy Israel’s Temple, the glory of Jerusalem.  In both cases the destruction was a punishment for the nation's sin, continued and deliberate sin: the vineyard itself – the house of Israel and the people of Judah --failed to produce fruit in the parable of Isaiah, and in Jesus' parable the tenants – vide. the chief priests and religious elders --repeatedly and deliberately, withheld the produce, the fruit, to which the landowner, the God of Israel and Judah, had a right, and ultimately killed his most beloved son.

But of course, God is not concerned about grapes for Himself.  What 'fruit' does He expect of us who are now disciples and members of Jesus called to serve and usher in God’s Kingdom world-wide?

Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.  (Heb. 13:5)

We, disciples following Jesus their Lord, are called to offer up His uniquely supreme and eternal sacrifice, with our own accompanying 'sacrifice of praise', 'the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name'; thanks, indeed, to God for the many personal blessings we have received throughout our lives from Him in the name of Jesus and through His Spirit.

In order to give thanks, however, we have to be able to recognize and appreciate our blessings;  and since many people in our modern, western and affluent, society, though constantly relating themselves to the material and physical world around us for what pleasures or riches they can get from it,  do not regard it as God’s generous gift to us, His truly beautiful and wise creation for us, and  they do not, consequently, feel gratitude to God so much as praise for themselves when having been able to grasp something of what they wanted for themselves..  And if such people, wanting much, then envy others who seem better at getting than themselves, how can they appreciate as blessings the things they themselves have already taken from an unacknowledged God?  How can young adults appreciate the blessing of a good home with loving parents if they are all the time wanting to live it up, so to speak, with the wildest and most foolish of their peers around?  Can those who have developed a lust for pleasures a-plenty take in even the wisest words of their parents or teachers about the benefits and joys of a good education?

I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, (but) apart from Me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)

What, among the multitude of gifts that God gives, are the blessings for which we Catholics and Christians should most particularly bring forth the fruit of lips giving thanks to Him?  In that regard, the Christian tradition, in its Jewish-Christian origins or its Gentile-Christian development is unanimous in its teaching, as is witnessed in the letter of St. James from Jerusalem:

The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy.  Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace (3:17-18);

and by those of St. Paul, writing to the Gentile Church at Rome (15:13):

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit;

and again, to his own converts in Galatia (5:22):

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.

Joy and peace in believing, hope based on the power of God's Spirit, such, St. Paul tells us, are the better gifts that God gives those who truly believe in, and faithfully follow, His beloved Son. 

Let us listen, however, as St. Paul tells us what can threaten that tradition:

The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.   (Romans 14:17)

Apparently, there were, even in the earliest Christian communities some who were beginning to appreciate immediate worldly pleasures more than heavenly blessings.  Now this switch from the heavenly to what is earthly begins first of all with the earthly imitating the heavenly: pleasure being paraded as joy; sexual and passionate love-making being thought of as an ideal expression of Christian love/charity; indifference and indulgence being accepted as substitutes for patience, kindness, and goodness.  In other cases, however, the heavenly blessings are regarded as no longer suited to more modern situations and so are blatantly substituted by worldly counterfeits: righteousness before God cannot be seen by others, and so, for the spread of the faith, the disciples of Jesus should aim at popularity and public appeal.  Again the gift of peace,  which is rooted in God's Spirit ruling our mind and heart, is popularly supplanted by a carefree ignoring of the claims and commands of conscience; after all, a life-style uncluttered by self-discipline or examination of conscience is much more easy to sell on the doorstep or promote in the street, so to speak: just as an invitation to assemblies promising a communal good time will be accepted with far greater alacrity than one to a gathering for true worship and serious prayer.

That is why our Gospel message today, supported by the age-old experience of God's dealings with His People, is so important for us.  It shows us with all clarity that we cannot turn our hearts to, nor indulge ourselves in, the sin of the world and, at the same time, pretend to know God or hope for His blessings.  It also warns us that we should not allow ourselves to be led into the inviting downward spiral – a truly horrific ‘black hole’ -- which, going round and round, would comfort us, at one moment, by offering what is worldly, and then, occasionally try to reassure us with what might appear heavenly, for it is always and inevitably spiralling round and down from heavenly to earthly according to the strength of one’s worldly desires.  Round and round, indeed, that spiral goes, but ever-more steeply downwards, until, in the end, the worldly is found to be totally illusory while the heavenly is no longer understood or forthcoming.

Through (Jesus) then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name. (Hebrews 13:15)

To do this, our Catholic and Christian calling, we have to invite God much more seriously into our lives: we need to prepare a welcome for Him by suspending, warding off, holding in abeyance, the cares, anxieties, and fears that can fill our hearts and weigh us down; we need to create a breathing space in the multitude of our daily thoughts and imaginations, preoccupations and fears, so that He might be able to speak with us and we hear Him. Oh, how such interior silence and peace is feared and hated by people today! To encourage us to give time to Him in our daily living God originally established the sabbath rest day; today, interior silence and peace should, for truly Catholic people, be part of the rhythmic routine and strength of our lives; we can never tell Him, ‘I have only a few minutes, You must do all that both You and I want in the only time I have available.’

Moreover, we need to give a truly personal welcome in our hearts to God Who is sublimely Personal Himself: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  First of all, a welcome for Jesus, God the Son made man, our Brother and our Saviour; and in Him, for the Father, our Father and your and my Father; and for the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide, my comforter, my strength, and my joy.  For our Faith is more than our common bond and identity, it has to become also, for each and every one of us, our total and most personal, loving commitment.

God is infinitely, sublimely, Personal, and our capacity for a truly personal relationship is a unique gift of God to mankind.  However, it is not a cheap gift, for it demands a foregoing sacrifice: a willingness to open up self to Him and an on-going preparedness to hand over self, to yield personal autonomy for love of Him and His.

Now self is also, in some respects, the great ‘forgettable’ of modern times.  Boy and girl, man and woman, meet, and instead of meeting someone find themselves, already conditioned through social practices and pleasures, to being immediately confronted with a body: a girl or woman displaying, or drawing attention to, her body; or a man … or mannish boy … obsessed with her, or embarrassed by his own, body.  In such circumstances the essential Christian relationship, a truly personal relationship is very difficult if not impossible, and that is why our Faith demands that we must not let sex, bodily gratification (please, don’t even think of the modern word of self-justification, ‘love‘, in this respect!) rule in our lives, mar our relationships.

Our Faith is meant to be far more than our common bond and identity.  We Catholics should be, in this increasingly pagan world, ever more conscious of and gratefully thankful for our difference in the world!   We cannot tell people today how to live; fellow Christians once could help each other by occasional, mutual, correction, but today we can only give the worldlings around us -- some of them perhaps even of our own family -- a humble and sincere witness to Jesus and His Christian teaching by our open service to and love for Himself, and for all in their need for Him.  Our Catholic faith is today called to be, for each and every one of us, our total and most personal commitment:  to Jesus, to the Father, and to the Holy Spirit; and that personal commitment, response, and self-sacrifice should be reflected in the whole of our lives in Mother Church, becoming far more influential than our ‘body’ commitment to the life and culture of our modern society; indeed, it can and, hopefully and prayerfully, will lead us to the fulfilment spoken of in those beautiful words of St. Paul:

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise —meditate on and practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

           

              

26th Sunday of the Year A 2017

 26^th. Sunday of Year (A)

(Ezekiel 18:25-28; Philippians 2:1-11; Saint Matthew (21:28-32)

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Dear People of God, the Gospel passage you have just heard is closely connected with another saying of Jesus (Matthew 7:21):

Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’, shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven but he who does the will of My Father Who is in heaven.

Notice the repetition of the word ‘heaven’.  That indicates to us that it is no arbitrary decision of God which decides whether or not people enter Kingdom of Heaven; but rather, that where the Father is, there is heaven, and to be in heaven is to be with the Father, one with Him; and consequently, to attain to that ultimate union with Him in heaven, we must necessarily prepare ourselves here on earth by doing His will, conforming ourselves to His likeness, that is, to Jesus, perfect God-become-man, as much as we can in all things:

Jesus said, ‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip?  He who has seen Me has seen the Father.  (John 14:9)

Therefore, to be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven it is not a matter of observing prescribed rules of conduct set before us as a test of our blind obedience and subjection … no, it is a matter of growing in the life and likeness of the Father, as His adoptive children that is, through faith in and loving commitment to Jesus – come from and sent by the Father.  To merely obey rules there is little need for personal involvement; at times, one can do it almost automatically.  There is no need, that is, to be involved with anyone other than oneself; and at this juncture, those who claim to live a good life and say that they are following their conscience, are so mistaken; because to live, to try to live a heavenly life, a life for heaven, it is absolutely necessary to re-orientate our lives and centre them no longer on ourselves (our own conscience) because the new life – offered us by Jesus via His most Holy Spirit – is a share in God’s life, a sheer, and totally gratuitous gift.

The type of change that has to be brought about in us is well characterized by the prophet Ezekiel who writes:

            I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your impurities,   and   from all your idols I will cleanse you.  I will give you a new heart and place a new  spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you        hearts of flesh.   I will put My Spirit within you and make you live by My statutes,    careful to observe My decrees.      (Ezekiel 36:25–27)

The heart of stone which is excellent for the blind observance of impersonal rules and the meticulous execution of mere ritual, is to be replaced with a heart of human flesh and a new, divine, spirit, because all our initiatives are to be divinely ordained.

That fusion of human divine is to be the supreme, all absorbing task of our lives … as true disciples of Jesus.

In Our Lord’s parable today, a man asked both his sons to work in his vineyard; one answered automatically, ‘Yes’ but did not, in fact, go; the other opened himself up, becoming personally involved as he confronted his own personal preferences -- perhaps plans of some standing -- with the immediate wishes of his father, and, needing to give an immediate reply, he answered, ‘I will not’. Notice his honesty, he did not say ‘I cannot’, but ‘I will not’.  The resultant situation was wrong, he realized that almost immediately afterwards.  However, his process, so to speak, had been right initially: he had confronted his own wishes with those of his father … and although after momentary consideration he had chosen wrongly, nevertheless, the relationship he had with his father had demanded first of all that he spoke truthfully to him and that relationship subsequently showed up the bluntness, the harsh bluntness of his words, and the lack of respect in his attitude to his father; that he could not sustain and immediately, he changed his mind and went.  He had taken both himself and his father, and indeed their long-lived-mutual-relationship seriously, and if a man does that with the Gospel message there is real hope, the parable encourages us to think, that he will be likely to say ‘Yes’.

With the other son, however, his automatic words of obedience did not demand that he look into his own heart, nor that he listen seriously to his father, his words were simply a way of ‘keeping the old man quiet’ while he himself could do what he wanted now and perhaps, later on, say a hypocritical ‘Sorry’.

People of God, too many nominal Catholics do the same as that second son: following certain religious practices but living their professed faith on automatic pilot, so to speak, with no sincere mind or human heart behind whatever appears to make them Catholics, seeking only their immediate natural desires and worldly pleasures, while all the time allowing their Catholic and Christian life-blood to drain away until it exists no longer as a force in their lives.

In all our relations with God we need to open up our human hearts first of all to the questioning light of God’s truth and the encouraging warmth of His love: I doubt very much that the ‘automatically speaking' second son truly realized why, what were the heart-felt motives why, he didn’t want to accede to his father’s request, and he certainly didn’t consider the dismissive manner of his response in the light of the respect he owed his father and the future benefits he still expected to receive from his father.

Dear People of God, the Gospel puts questions to us at times, questions that can reveal truth about ourselves in so far as we try sincerely to answer them.  For many, however, such questions are too often side-stepped and disregarded.  The Gospel tells us that mankind is weighed down by sin of every sort, but today the majority happily pretend to have no awareness of sin in their lives.  Jesus died for us -- to save us, His brothers and sisters, from the consequences of our sins -- and most people today only see Him as a foolish man, One Who probably meant well but was pathetically misguided.  Again, modern men reject as humanly degrading any idea that God can command their obedience and yet the vast majority are totally subservient to whatever might be the prevailing mantra in their society.  On every hand the Gospel challenges are rejected by mockery and a refusal to see what is true:  minimal dress only shows the beauty of women, foul language only emphasises manliness, while salaciousness serves to promote nothing worse than human conviviality.   Innocence reigns, the Gospel is wrong:

            The Lord’s way/judgement is not fair!

Those Gospel questions need to be humbly considered before being answered; we need to commune with them in our hearts of flesh in order to know what they really mean for us, what response they stir up in us; and we must clothe our considered response with human warmth and sincere devotion, the commitment of our personal and individual act of faith.  It is a matter of recognizing Jesus as Our God and Saviour and embracing His Gospel in the plenitude of its fullness, as presented to us in Mother Church’s proclamation that is, and casting it like some divine fuel on the embers of our warm human hearts.  The resultant flames, divine and human in origin, will blaze for God’s glory and shine -- around and afar -- for the honour of the Name of Jesus.

Our Blessed Lord was, and is, perfect Man.  Being perfect God by nature of His being the only-begotten Son, the Word, of God, He became – sent by the Father, and born on earth of the Virgin by the power of the Holy Spirit – man, true man, perfect Man.  And we now, becoming divine by His grace and the Gift of His most Holy Spirit, are called also to become, in Him, fully, truly, perfectly human with sin totally uprooted from our lives.

Life is a glorious prospect and adventure, because the ultimate discovery, so to speak, is unique in each one of us, being the intimate fusion and balance of God and man in each one of us, as planned by God in creating us.  It is a discovery because it can only be found by being lived with Jesus, by the Holy Spirit living and working in us, for the Father, in the fullness of the Catholic and Christian faith.  As St. Paul said in our second reading:

                        Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.