6th Sunday Year C 2022

 

6^th. Sunday of Year (C)

(Jeremiah 17:5-8; 1^st. Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; St. Luke 6:17, 20-26)

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Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, whose heart turns away from the Lord.

Jeremiah had a great deal of experience with duplicitous men: kings and religious authorities, ordinary people of faith or no faith; and his judgement of ‘human beings’ generally was based on that experience.  But his judgement was based even more on his awareness of the blessings that God had already given Israel and was preparing to bestow a yet greater one on them (Jeremiah 31:33):

This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be My people.  

However, though the Law was, indeed, in their minds, written on their parchments, and meant to be written on their hearts, many of the children of Israel had, in Jesus’ days ‘turned away from the Lord’, so that when He came among them to be their Saviour and make them children of God, He was crucified.  And we heard in our second reading Saint Paul -- Jesus’ specially chosen one to proclaim His Gospel to the nations -- berating some members of the Church he had founded in Jesus’ name in the Greek city of Corinth, using words not unlike those of Jeremiah:

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ we are the most pitiable people of all.

Paul said that because certain individuals were saying that there was no resurrection of the dead!  Obviously, they did not rightly understand Jesus as the Christ, perhaps because they were Christian converts of Sadducee origin' indeed, even former members of the synagogue in Corinth, where Paul had first proclaimed Jesus as the Christ, before going on to found a Christian Church there; for St. Luke tells us in his Gospel that Sadducees had opposed Jesus towards the end of His public ministry:

Sadducees approached Jesus saying that there is no resurrection.

They had then tried to confound Jesus with a trick question about seven brothers, one wife, and the Law of Moses, but to their imagined conundrum Jesus answered:

You are misled because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God.  Have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?  He is not the God of the dead but of the living.  (Matthew 22: 29-32)

Dear People of God, the Old Testament dispensation and its Scriptures had been given to show God’s Chosen People, to teach them of the fact and about the nature, of sin in men’s lives: that sin separates sinners from the one true God Who is the All Holy One, as it had alienated Israel from the Father Who had deliberately chosen them for His own People by calling them out of the slavery of Egypt and giving them their own land flowing with milk and honey.  Correspondingly, the whole purpose and aim of the new dispensation  which Jeremiah prophesied -- the new and eternal covenant to be offered by God to Israel and through Israel to the whole world -- would bring not only forgiveness of sins, but also the sanctification of all who would believe in the Good News of Jesus Christ, which was able to purify and free mankind from their primordial slavery to sin by the Gift of most His Holy Spirit Who would enable them to rejoice as children of God, new-born in Jesus Christ as members of His mystical Body, for the praise and eternal glory of the Father of all.   

You are aware that St. Matthew tells us of Jesus’ celebrated Sermon on the Mount; possibly, scholars say, reported, presented in that way, by Matthew for his Jewish-Christian Church congregation, because of their life-long familiarity with the Law of God given on Mount Sinai to Moses.  Today, however, St. Luke’s Gospel gives us a like sermon of Jesus but presents it as His Sermon on the Plain or Plateau, that is, a sermon given at the people’s level to the people actually with Jesus and hearing Him, an account shorter and less Jewish in character than St. Matthew’s presentation of it as a sermon given to Moses alone on the very top of Mount Sinai

Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount begins with the words, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’, rather impersonal and legal, whereas Luke’s Sermon on the Plain begins:

Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of Heaven is yours; blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.                              

That crowd gathered around Jesus on the Plain had come far and wide to hear Jesus and to learn from Him: they were poor, in need of Jesus’ help, ‘hungry’ for His teaching and truth, they were actually weeping for their sins, because they had come to a prophet Who called on them to repent and actually enabled and inspired them to do just that.   Above all however those people were to be made aware of what awaited Jesus Himself and how they themselves might be called upon to share in it with Him as true disciples:

Blessed are you when people hate, exclude, insult, and denounce you, on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!  Your reward will be great in heaven!

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ St. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain is directed to us Catholics and Christians living today, in times of pandemic and resurgent paganism, where millions, far from seeking out Jesus for the true wisdom of life, are deliberately turning their hearts away from the One True God and the Christ Whom He has sent, and rejoicing in what they foolishly consider as their new-found freedom: to do what they want, as and when they will; to enjoy their own chosen pleasures as and how they will; to flourish before men, secure in their power, popularity, and possessions; and eventually, to contentedly anticipate -- if not exactly a well-earned rest -- but certainly a gentle entry into the restful peace of untouchable oblivion.

BUT! our Gospel recalls to our minds once again the spirit of those words of Jeremiah, ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, whose heart turns away from the Lord’, by continuing further with Jesus’ own words of warning (not cursing):

Woe to you who are rich, who are filled, who laugh now; woe to you when all speak well of you, for their ancestors treated the false prophets in this way.

Yes indeed, woe to all who turn their hearts away from the Lord in their search for the good things and comforts the god of this world offers to all who will – as Jesus would not -- bow down and serve, worship, him; woe because:

You justify yourselves in the sight of others, but God knows your hearts.  For what is of human esteem is an abomination in the sight of God. (Luke 16:15)

 

 

5th Sunday of Year C 2022

 

5^th. Sunday of Year (C)

     (Isaiah 6:1-8; 1^st. Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11)

 

Today, my dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, we can learn from the Scriptural readings something about the spiritual life of a faithful disciple of Christ, as distinct from the ‘expectations’ of pseudo-Christians and the secular world around us.

We heard in the Gospel reading:

(Simon) and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish which they had taken; and so also were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men."

Just as Simon and his companions used a net to catch fish, so Jesus would -- He said -- use Simon, and with Simon his companions, to catch men.

Notice that People of God, because very many today dislike the thought of salvation depending not only on God’s goodness to us in Christ, but also, through the Church; they prefer to think that if there is a loving Saviour-God they should be able to strike up a direct personal relationship with Him or with Jesus the Saviour: why should they need to feel indebted to and grateful for a universal Church?  Moreover, they are positively antagonistic to the idea that they should have to obey a human authority such as the Pope, the Vicar of Christ.

And yet, for all that, it cannot be denied that Jesus did indeed say to Simon:

            Do not be afraid; from now on you will catch men.

That unwillingness of many to accept the idea of the One True Church of Christ, their denial of Peter established by Jesus as the one Rock and Shepherd serving and maintaining the oneness of His sheep in His one Catholic (universal) Church, is an expression of the sinful pride of modern man, and of the pseudo-religious spirit abroad in our times.

In the first reading we heard how Isaiah had a remarkable vision of God in the glory of His holiness and majesty:

I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.  Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.  And one cried to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!"

Such a vision would be enough to fill any human being with awesome fear and humble reverence.  But we are told that Isaiah also:

Heard the voice of the Lord, saying: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?"  Then Isaiah said, "Here am I! Send me." 

Does that not seem to be presumptuous on the part of Isaiah?  Does not the worldly picture of a good Christian in such a situation involve the humble recital of words such as “I am not worthy”?

Let us now turn to St. Paul and observe his behaviour, for he tells us that:

Jesus appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.  After that He was seen by over five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. After that He appeared to James, then to all the Apostles.  Last of all, as to one born abnormally, He appeared to me.

Think now how Jesus understood the word ‘Apostle’ which He bestowed on the Twelve. For Jesus loved to repeatedly say of Himself that He had been “sent by – was the ‘Apostle of’ – His Father”!

Jesus Himself only Personally chose and appointed the Twelve as His Apostles to proclaim His Gospel of Salvation to the whole world.  He did send out 70 others to places He Himself was shortly to visit in His public Ministry, they were also called Apostles later on, but not by Jesus Himself.  As former Pope Benedict so beautifully says, the ‘Twelve’, personally chosen by Jesus, were to be sent on their world-wide missions as ‘specialists in Jesus’, basing himself on this episode in St. John’s Gospel (1:35-39):

The next day John (the Baptist) was there again with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God’.  The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus.  Jesus saw them following Him and said, ‘What are you looking for?’  They said, ‘Rabbi, where are You staying?’  He said to them, ‘Come and see.’  So, they went and stayed with Him that day.  Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter was one of the two who followed Jesus.

Only the Twelve were called to such personal, daily, fellowship with Jesus of Nazareth. Paul, for his part, was personally chosen by the heavenly Lord Jesus Who sent the disciple Ananias to heal Paul blinded after the Lord’s apparition to him:

The Lord said to (Ananias), ‘Go, for this man is a chosen instrument of Mine to carry My name before Gentiles, kings, and Israelites, and I will show him what he will have to suffer for My name.’ (Acts: 9:15-16)

Paul was the first to admit that he did not have the supreme authority of Peter, and that he was not one of the original Twelve.  But whatever his detractors thought or said, Paul would not shrink before them: he always confidently asserted, “Jesus, appeared to me also “.   Paul was, indeed, an ultimate Apostle, commissioned and sent by the risen Lord: in Paul’s case, however, called and sent by the heavenly Risen Lord -- to proclaim the Gospel he received through revelation of Jesus (Galatians 1:12). He was in no way simply a representative of the Twelve (Galatians 2:7-9):

When those who were reputed to be important saw that I (Paul) had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter to the circumcised, when they recognized the grace bestowed upon me, James and Cephas and John who were reputed to be pillars gave me their right hand in partnership.

Paul being sent to the Gentiles, arrived at Corinth with that Good News, able to declare with full confidence in God, not men: “No matter what some of you may think, I am an Apostle; indeed, I am your Apostle” (1 Corinthians 4:15):

For though you might have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.

And so it is, that in our readings today we have not only heard of the great prophet Isaiah pushing himself forward “Send me!”, but also of Paul fighting vigorously  and repeatedly to have himself recognised as an Apostle: the Gospel he preached and the authority he exercised came from the Risen Lord Himself.  He even went on, in his second letter to these Corinthians, to sing his own praises as he compared himself to other apostles, not with the Twelve, but with all those others spoken of as apostles in the early Church:

Are they ministers of Christ?  I speak as a fool, I am more: in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequently, in deaths often.  (2 Cor 11:23)

Dear People of God, notice how wonderfully close Paul was to Jesus!  He probably knew nothing of the words the Lord used when sending Ananias to restore his sight, but he lived and appreciated his calling in exact accordance with Jesus’ very words!  He went exclusively to the Gentiles – and to those Kings and Israelites among the Gentiles – and boasted when he considered it necessary to vindicate his Apostolic authority; but he boasted only of the sufferings he had embraced for the name of Jesus!  Jesus knew His man and Paul loved the Lord Who, he so firmly believed, had died for him!!

This man is a chosen instrument of Mine to carry My name before Gentiles, kings, and Israelites, I will show him what he will have to suffer for My name.’

Today the popular picture of Jesus and of a good Christian is of someone who is nice, always good, never nasty, never pushy, never fighting for self in any way; always smiling at children and patting dogs, always speaking soothing words and totally incapable of condemning sin or punishing evil-doers.  In other words, the world’s picture of a Christian is colourless, insipid and negative, and so the Gospel is robbed of all challenge, of all its power to inspire and strengthen.  Even the good works done by such Christians for others are tasteless, because they are human good deeds done for human purposes and human satisfaction; since they are not directed towards God’s glory, they remain within the orbit of this world, and cannot renew the world.  Ultimately, indeed, they are condemned to become ordinary and meaningless, just as the words “I forgive” can become trite when they are not spoken in response to Jesus’ prayer to God (“Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive ...”), but rather offered meaninglessly and spoken tritely to those who are not in any way either interested in, or asking for, forgiveness.

Since I am saying that the comfortable picture of the good life painted by lovers of this world is insipid, do I thereby say that Catholics and Christians should become extremists?  By no means!  Let us look again at the “pushy” prophet Isaiah, and the “self-assertive” Apostle Paul. 

In the first reading, Isaiah who said, "Here am I. Send me!", had had his sin taken away.  He tells us that:

One of the seraphim (from before God’s throne) flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with the tongs from the altar.  And he touched my mouth with it, and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged."

So, you can realise that Isaiah had in no proud sense been pushy: God was preparing and encouraging him for a work He had in mind for him, and Isaiah had to learn to speak with confident zeal in answer to God’s inspiring call.

Look again at St. Paul.  He was fighting to establish his own authority indeed, but only so that the Gospel truth he had proclaimed to the Corinthians might not be brought into disrespect or doubt by others with more apparently attractive Jewish-Christian credentials, and who were preaching a Jewish version of the Gospel which was failing to appreciate, and fully respond to, the new wine that Jesus had brought.  Therefore, Paul was not fighting for himself, he was fighting for the authentic Good News of Jesus, for his new converts whom he would not allow to be saddled with the old, worn out, Jewish prescriptions; he was, indeed, fighting for Christ and the glory of God the Father.

Our readings today, People of God, therefore encourage and guide us to authentic spirituality as disciples of Jesus.  We are not to conform to, settle for, the flabby, colourless, “goodness” of those who want to win the approval of modern society and accommodate Christian doctrine to modern morals; people who want, above all, to avoid the Cross of Christ (witness the Church in Germany!).  Yet neither are we to seek to make a name for ourselves, striving to be dynamic and contradictory, flaunting authority, and ignoring normal sensibilities.  No, we have to despise both those attitudes: we must not be so weak as to seek the world’s good pleasure; we must not be so proud as to set our own standards.  In all things we have to seek to know, love, and obey Jesus: we cannot hide behind ignorance (ignorance is bliss!!), nor must we pretend love (mere words and fine gestures), for only as sincere disciples of Jesus, obedient to His guiding Spirit in our lives, will we be enabled to become true children of our heavenly Father.     

 

 

4th Sunday Year C 2022

 

 4^th. Sunday (Year C)     

 (Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; 1^st. Corinthians 12:31 – 13:13; Luke 4:21-30)

 

 

In our first reading the young Jeremiah, a somewhat frightened and unwilling prophet it would seem, was called by the Lord:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.

And, despite his protestations of youth:

            Ah, Lord GOD!   Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a youth

he was told:

Prepare yourself and arise, and speak to them all that I command you.  Behold, I have made you this day a fortified city and an iron pillar, and bronze walls against the whole land -- against the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land.

From that you see that when God chooses someone for a special work of whatever sort, He prepares and enables them to do that for which He is choosing them.  Let us now look at Jesus, beginning in Galilee the work for which He had been sent by His Father:

He came to Nazareth and went according to His custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read (from) a scroll of Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

He handed the scroll back to the attendant, sat down with the eyes of all looking intently upon Him, and said:

            Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing!

In modern parlance one might say that that reading from prophet Isaiah was the Messianic brief Jesus had been given, and we are about to learn what Jesus’ understanding of His calling was.  We are told that, on ending that prophetic reading, Jesus then went on to speak in such a way that:

When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury.  They rose up, drove Him out of the town, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl Him down headlong. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away.

They tried to ‘hurl Him down headlong’ -- headlong and backwards -- down one of the steep parts of the hills surrounding their village, where nests of swallows can still be found.  George Adam Smith tells us you cannot see Nazareth from the surrounding country ‘for Nazareth rests in a basin among hills; but the moment you climb to the edge of this basin, what a view you have!  Esdraelon, Carmel, the Valley of the Jordan with the long range of Gilead, the radiance of the great Sea, thirty miles in three directions, a map of Old Testament history!’

Make no bones about it, People of God, Jesus did not inspire such anger and resentment by a slip of the tongue, so to speak.  Not at all!   He heard many in the synagogue praising Him before being silenced by the poisonous question, ‘Isn’t this the son of Joseph’.  This was a paradigm for the best that Jesus – as Messiah and Son of God – could expect!!  These were His own people, not proud and exclusive Judeans who scorned them for both their accent and their proximity to pagan towns and influence; not the influential Scribes and Pharisees who despised their Galilean ignorance of the Law and their traditional practices; these were the presumably humble and simple faithful in Israel who had been praying for God’s messianic blessing for centuries!

Jesus answered them immediately with supremely purposeful words that might disabuse them:

Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.

Surely you will quote Me this proverb, 'Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here in Your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.'"  

To lay bare in such a way the personal attitude of those present might have seemed enough, but no, Jesus went straight on to infuriate them even more by exposing the ridiculous national and religious pride which tethered them to those Judeans, Scribes and Pharisees who held them is such low esteem as members of the People of God:

Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was closed for three and a half years, and a severe famine spread over the entire land.  It was to none of these that Elijah was sent but only to a widow in Zarephath, in the land of Sidon.  Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian.

How is the mission of comforting and salvation foretold by the prophet Isaiah in those words read and accepted by Jesus, to be reconciled with what He subsequently said? For reconciled they must be, if we are to have some true understanding and appreciation of Our Saviour, and His work for us today.

The eventual rejection and even the crucifixion of Israel’s Messiah and God’s own Son are revealed as being deeply embedded and even cherished in the People of God’s own hearts and minds as witnessed by these supposedly devout synagogue-goers of Nazareth who had known and lived with Jesus from His infancy, who had worked with Him, or had Him and Joseph work for them; people whom Jesus from childhood had been taught to look up to with respect!

Today there are many people like those at Nazareth, with secret attitudes restrained by only skin-deep levels of social awareness and conscience, ready to burst out into violence under minor provocation: people ready to join any mob or demonstration ‘for the love of it’: yelling ‘racist’ with, at times, convincingly hateful intent; blocking roads and toppling statues; anti-whatever is considered too authoritative or institutional, too traditional or ‘stupidly’ normal!  In all, people deeply uncultured not because of intellectual ignorance, but by personal arrogance and spiritual pride.

Dear People of God, do not be led astray by such ‘evangelists’ of modern thought and morality!  To live in today’s world -- which the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking warned was in danger of destroying itself in the next 100 years -- as true Catholics and Christians, as children of God, and members of the Body of Christ, we ourselves need to be dis-abused by Jesus’ word and actions.

St. Luke’s Gospel today tells us that no one’s sincerity and fidelity can be presumed.   Humble and persistent personal prayer and sacramental worship, along with sincere selflessness, are ever-more necessary for us in our endeavours to witness to and promote Jesus’ ‘Good News’ in our wilfully godless society of today.  And we can only do that if we have truly firm confidence and trust in God’s saving and loving grace, grace unfailingly present in the worship and sacraments of the Catholic Church which is His Spouse and our Mother, grace whereby He is preparing blessings beyond any earthly measure, for all who will ultimately and eternally find themselves sitting at the wedding feast of heaven.

What is grace, however?  Christian grace is a gift, a blessing of the Holy Spirit, and as such is HOLY, leading us to do God’s will, for our fellows’ good on earth, and our own spiritual and personal fulfilment and eternal salvation, that is, life in Jesus for the Father in His heavenly kingdom.

Saint Paul waxed lyrical in our second reading about the Christian virtue of charity, translated as ‘love’ in modern parlance; but what is the love Paul speaks?

Such 'love' is not an emotional feeling; it is not a sexual need; it is not a complaisance; it is not even a merely human commitment; it is a transcendent Christian virtue properly called ‘charity’, because it is a participation in God’s own personal Being and eternal life; in our human context, it is a response to God’s call leading us to seek His good pleasure for one’s self, His great goodness for our fellows, and above all, it is a thanksgiving and commitment to the service of, and supreme delight in, His greater glory.

On this Sunday Jesus -- raising high His standard as He entered upon the public mission for which He had been sent by His heavenly Father for our salvation -- spoke plain words that scandalized those members of His own synagogue whose religion was tainted by their desire for popularity; so too today, we must, as Christians, understand the truth about what is so popularly misconstrued by so many around us.

Jesus’ words and actions could be hard as well as gentle: He would help but never cajole, He wanted obedient love not popularity, He had come to redeem not excuse, to raise up human beings, not to indulge their weaknesses (Luke:12:49):

I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

For Jesus holiness was simply and solely, totally and wholly, love for His Father and fellowship with all our brothers and sisters in Christ; He lived and died for His Father’s glory and for the fulfilment of the Father’s will for our salvation, though it cost Him the agony of death upon a Roman cross.

Much good is done in the public sphere today, such ‘goodness’, however, is not Christian charity: great efforts are made and much money spent to improve public health, but that does not prevent living children having been and still being aborted in their millions now; loving relationships are always publicly acceptable, most even laudable, but that does not prevent much sexuality being publicly practiced for selfish and even degrading reasons; education is considered of great, perhaps, the utmost, importance, but knives are now much more common and are murderously used by young people; infants and children are taught nothing about God, and they are thereby taught that men and women such as they see every day around them are the best they can hope for, that nothing is right or wrong, good or bad, unless others think so, unless the police or the law say so.  RIGHT OR WRONG IS ONLY WHAT PEOPLE THINK.    Mental health is also said to be so important, and seriously so, but while psychology admits that people can suffer from what may be paranormal, what is supernatural and beneficent – God and His love for us -- is inadmissible and ignored.

Dear People of God, today we have been invited to – and you have come to – participate in what is supremely spiritual and God’s most sublime testament of love for us: His enduring Word, His abiding Gift of the Spirit, and His only begotten and most beloved Son’s perennial and eternal offering of His own Self-sacrifice of love for His Father and for us.  May  His blessing come down upon you, ever abide with and sustain you, to heaven's portals.