3rd Sunday of Advent Year B 2017

 3^rd. Sunday of Advent (B)

                (Isaiah 61: 1-2, 10-11; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1: 6-8, 19-28)

 I rejoice heartily in the LORD, in my God is the joy of my soul; for He has clothed me with a robe of salvation, and wrapped me in a mantle of justice.

Who can speak like that?  Only the Christ, speaking of His humanity,

Like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem,

and the blessed Virgin Mother referring to her Immaculate Conception:

like a bride bedecked with her jewels.

The book of Revelation (19:7) gives us another viewpoint:

Let us rejoice and be glad and give Him (God) glory, for the wedding day of the Lamb has come, His bride (humankind) has made herself ready.

And the reason for all this our Advent rejoicing is because, as the prophet Isaiah tells us:

          The Lord God will make justice and praise spring up before all the nations.

However, the greatest of all the prophets who was uniquely close to our Blessed Lord Jesus on the very cusp of Israel’s fulfilment, found himself confirming Isaiah’s prophecy by making use of more sober language in order to reveal with all clarity a truly disconcerting reality:

I am not the Christ; I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord; for there is One among you Whom you do not recognize, the One Who is coming after me, Whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.

That, dear People of God, is the setting for our Advent preparations to welcome the Lord coming to His spouse, Mother Church, like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem:

            There is One among you Whom you do not recognize.

Dear People of God, look all around you this Advent time at the great majority of Christmas celebrations and you will have no doubt about the truth of the Baptist’s words:

            There is One among you Whom you do not recognize.

Why is Jesus not recognized today by those, so many of them, who were formerly professing Catholics or Christians?  It is, to a certain extent, because many have succumbed to the lure and enticements of popular sin, or have fainted or despaired under the burden of personal and worldly cares.

There is, however, another cause for Jesus being unrecognizable to too many modern self-styled believers, and that is because they are out of touch, unaware of and insensitive to the authentic Traditions of Mother Church … they are ‘undoctrinal’ believers, being entirely given over to and satisfied by the emotional feelings and convictions welling up from their just-me-and-Jesus-here-and-now drive, enthusiastically accompanied by others who much prefer to feel rather than to think about Jesus; who prefer to demonstrate publicly rather than to privately pray to God in the solitude of their hearts, or to consider calmly with other good Catholic friends, or (most unacceptable of all) to humbly seek enlightenment.   They make use of the Bible of course but interpret it popularly for themselves, as they will, as they want, here and now.

Dear Catholic People of God, we Catholics are the original Christians, members of the original body established by Jesus as His Church on the foundations of His Personally chosen and endowed Apostles, to whom He uniquely said:

I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I  have  told  YOU  everything        I have heard from My Father.    (John 15:15)

Moreover, He promised those original Twelve:

The Advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in My name — He will teach you everything and remind you of all that (I) told you.    (John 14:26)

Those original Apostles are thus the source of Mother Church’s essential doctrines and traditions, and it is absolutely necessary that those Apostolic memories of Jesus’ words, addressed Personally and directly to them as His personal friends for the good of further friends to come through their ministry, that those Apostolic traditions known from Jesus’ very actions and attitudes witnessed by their own eyes and heard by their own ears, remain intact in Mother Church today.  No one -- not even Pope, and certainly not Prince -- can sever us from Jesus’ love and guidance handed down through the ages in those Apostolic traditions and teaching.

There are difficulties today for a faithless generation wanting to justify itself and confirm its worldly popularity: it tries to confuse issues by subtly ‘updating’ texts, by teaching in accordance with modern preferences while, on the other hand, simply trying to consign to oblivion what cannot be thus ‘updated’.

This is due to the fact that (as Jesus Himself said, John 14:17):

This is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him, because He abides with you, and He will be in you.  

The world cannot receive the Spirit of Truth because it does not, will not, believe in Jesus: 

And when He (the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth) comes, He will convict the world in regard to sin, because they do not believe in Me.   (John 16:8–9)

The Apostles, on the other hand, know the Spirit of Truth, because He now abides with them as the future Catholic (universal) Church of Jesus, and will be in them, individually, as faithful disciples of and witnesses to Jesus their Lord, their Master and their Saviour.

The season of Advent is a time of great expectancy, because we are looking forward to the coming of the Lord; and, being certain that His coming anew this Christmas will be for our blessing, we beseech His most Holy Spirit to prepare us to welcome Him with hearts and minds authentically attuned to Him in the Apostolic purity of Mother Church’s teaching and traditions.

We are also aware that at the appointed time -- we do not know when -- He will come in glory to judge the world, to triumph over all His enemies and cast out Satan; and then, after having ultimately established the Kingdom of God, He will lead all His faithful ones to worship, and rejoice in, the supreme Lordship of His Father. This is what St. Paul explained when writing his first letter to his converts in the great Greek seaport of Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:22-26):

As in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.   But each one in his own order: Christ the first-fruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming.  Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power.  For, He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet; the last enemy that will be destroyed is death, for, "He has put all things under His feet." 

This season of Advent is, consequently, a time of joyful expectancy, because the true disciple of Jesus, although being fully aware of his human weakness and personal sinfulness, nevertheless, most assuredly hopes and trusts that, ultimately, he will be called to share in His Lord’s heavenly glory and experience eternal blessedness in His Kingdom, for Isaiah (40:10) rightly spoke of the Lord God coming to His People with an abundance of blessings:

Here comes with power the Lord GOD, Who rules by His strong arm; here is His reward with Him, His recompense before Him;

and therefore, even now, all true disciples of Jesus can take up in all simplicity, humility, and sincerity the blessing, the  reward and recompense, of rejoicing enshrined in Isaiah’s great prophecy: 

I rejoice heartily in the LORD, in my God is the joy of my soul.

                                                                                                                              (

2nd Sunday of Advent Year B 2017

 2^nd. Sunday of Advent (B)

(Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; 2^nd. Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8)

           

There is one thing, my friends, that you must never forget: that with God ‘a

day’ can mean a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.

God is infinite, He is not subject to time; and so, the admonition contained in this morning’s reading from St. Peter recalls to our minds that John the Baptist’s preparing the way for Jesus around 28 AD., yes, and even the first reading from the prophet Isaiah which was first heard about 540 BC., are still as relevant as they were then: they tell us how, in this Advent time, to prepare to welcome the God Who is coming, coming into our lives to transform them, if we will allow Him.

‘If we will allow Him’, yes, Jesus’ message to mankind, His Gospel proclamation, is an address, even an appeal, to our freedom.  The time will come when He will be revealed as Judge and then, we will have no say in the matter, we will be judged according to our works; for the present, however, we are offered a choice, we can opt for good or for evil.  If we choose evil, or, let us put it in St. Paul’s language, if our choice of preference is for the flesh – all the sensible joys and pleasures offered to us by this world – if we deny our need for, our dependence upon, God and prefer to trust in the strength of our own right hand so to speak and the cleverness of our mind, we shall, St. Paul warns us, choose corruption and death, with all that they bring of pain and bitterness.  Make such decisions for pleasure and power in youth, comfort and profit in middle age, with immediately-to-hand advantages always being in view, and it will become a habit you cannot break, not even as those pleasures become daily more insipid and short lived, and the desired advantages prove ever more illusory; ultimately, indeed, it can become a habit so ingrained that there is neither pleasure nor advantage, or anything of that sort left to be tasted, nothing but unsatisfied self, thwarted sensuality, and bitter pride.  And the terrible danger, dear People of God, is that, having been destined for eternity before God, our denial of such a destiny will be no mere peccadillo but a deliberate anti-life option, and could indeed, even become a positive choice of death and corruption in a self-destructive fury of frustration and pride.

That is why the option for good is characterized as salvation: it is God saving us from ourselves, saving us from the powers of destruction which allure us on every hand with their seeming sweetness and deceptive promises.

Our Catholic and Christian Advent season is a time for truth about ourselves and about God, a time for sizing life up in all its aspects, for listening to and recognizing the deepest needs and aspirations of our being, it is also a time for youthfulness of spirit, looking forward in hope and opting for life in all its fulness, eternal life, in the conviction that by God’s goodness to us in Jesus we can attain it.

Advent is a time for divine truth, for listening to the voice which, as the Gospel said ‘cries in the wilderness’, a ‘still small voice’ that whispers in the depths of our hearts as we wander in the wilderness of youthful experience, a voice which urges us to give the Lord Jesus a chance in our lives, to prepare a way for Him, to make His paths straight, that He might come to us, enter into our lives, as King and Saviour; every valley of despair is to be filled in with confidence, trust, and hope in the Lord Whose Spirit  guides and sustains His People in all circumstances; no matter how difficult, painful, or shameful they may be.

Advent is a time for truth about ourselves, for every mountain and hill of pride and self-conceit to be laid low, for there can be no peace, no true fellowship or love, in the heart of a proud and conceited person centred on self-first-and-foremost, and every cliff of precipitous anger and violence must become a plain where justice, patience and peace rule, allowing the ridges of anxiety to become a valley of trust and contentment.

However, such blessings, desirable and admirable as they are, are not ends in themselves, for Christianity does not offer us merely a happier, but still earthly, life; it offers the truly authentic fulness of humanity where death no longer overshadows all, indeed, it promises that:

The glory of God shall be revealed (for us and in us), and all mankind shall see it.

Christianity offers the prospect of eternal blessedness and glory in God, thus making Advent a time of supreme hope, giving us a sense of belonging and significance in creation, and among our fellows of being endowed with a supremely beautiful, transcendent purpose: the opportunity of being a channel, an instrument, an influence for good which is able to face up to and overcome the forces of evil that wreak so much havoc in our physical world and human society today; and above all, Advent offers us the supreme joy of personal communion with, and eternal fulfilment in, the all-holy God Who is our Father, our Saviour and our Brother, and our most intimate Spirit of holiness and truth,  God’s Gift to guide and sustain us in the darkest depths and details of our life and being.

People of God, Isaiah tells us that:

            The time of service (slavery) is ended.

We need no longer have to endure being pushed around, hither and thither, by our fears and passions, by every passing emotion that froths up in the unending disturbances of life.  We can learn this Advent to appreciate and mould ourselves to the responsorial psalm we heard today:

I will hear what the Lord God has to say, a voice that speaks of peace, peace for His people.  His help is near for those who fear Him, and His glory will dwell in our land.

His help is near, indeed very near for those who experience time under the guidance and inspiration of Mother Church’s Liturgy.  For us here today, Jesus is about to come among us as we offer His sacrifice at Holy Mass, He will come into our very hearts as we offer ourselves with Him and receive Holy Communion.   What welcome will we give Him?  Not only our own lives depend on the answer to that question but the well-being of our modern world is likewise in the balance.  Welcome Him, every one of you, with all the sincerity of your joyful heart and trusting mind.

First Sunday of Advent Year B 2017

1^st. Sunday of Advent (B)

(Isaiah 63:16-17, 19b; 64:1, 3-8; 1^st. Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:33-37) 

Our reading from the prophet Isaiah on this, the first Sunday of the Advent season, is a direct preparation for what is the supreme teaching of the Gospel and the ultimate realization and fulfilment of the purpose for which Jesus the Christ came among us as man: namely, the revelation of God as Father, and the re-birth by the Holy Spirit, of Jesus’ faithful disciples as living members of His Mystical Body and adopted children of the heavenly Father.

In our first reading Isaiah referred to God three times as Father, twice in the following verse:

You are our Father.  Were Abraham not to know us, nor Israel to acknowledge us, You, LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer you are named from of old.  

Isaiah was very conscious and equally proud of the fact that God was a Father to Israel; yet, what did he mean by that word ‘Father’? 

Let us now turn our attention to the Law, to the book of Deuteronomy, source of the fountain which supported and inspired Isaiah, and there we read:

Of the Rock Who begot you, you are unmindful, and have forgotten the God Who fathered you.    (Deuteronomy 32:18)

Then it continues in the name of the Lord (32: 21, 28):

They have provoked Me to jealousy by what is not God, but I will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation; they are a nation void of counsel.

So, though the word ‘father’ is used, and even backed-up by the words ‘begot’ and ‘fathered’, nevertheless they are all used metaphorically, since it is all about the birth, that is, the calling, formation, and establishment of a nation from those who had previously been wandering desert tribespeople and latterly a persecuted minority of slaves in Egypt.  That is why when for the third time the word ‘father’ is used in our reading from Isaiah we hear:

O LORD, You are our Father; we are the clay and You the potter: we are all the work of Your hands.
  

Obviously, Isaiah did not realize the full significance of the word ‘father’; and though he said: ‘You are our Father, our Redeemer you are named forever’, he showed more precisely what he meant with the word ‘father’ in the words that followed: ‘You are our Father, our potter’.   So we have it: the prophet himself was not, and could not be, fully aware of the meaning and sublime significance of the word he was being led to use when calling God the Father of Israel.

Nevertheless, as St. Paul said to his Christian converts at Corinth in our second reading:

God is faithful, by Whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yes, God in His faithfulness guided His Chosen People over hundreds, indeed thousands, of years – surely that is one of the deepest reasons for our loving and trusting Him – and, having thus gradually formed Israel as a nation, He latterly encouraged them through His prophets, Isaiah above all, to refer to Himself by a word they could not as yet, fully appreciate. He then further guided His People and gradually formed their history so that those words of prophecy and traditional faith were finally shown to be true in the sublime beauty of their fullest meaning and significance when He brought about through Mary of Nazareth, the Flower of Israel, the birth in time of His only begotten and eternally beloved Son, as Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, for mankind’s salvation.

Yes, God sent His co-equal Son in fulfilment of the words of the prophet to save His People and all mankind from Satan’s power of sin and death.  Through faith in, baptism into, and obedience to Jesus -- the Son of God become our Brother -- we are enabled by the Gift of His Holy Spirit to become living members of the Unique Body of which Jesus is both Lord and Head, and in Him to become children of the One, true God and Father of us all.  That, dear People of God, is why you heard St. Paul exclaim in the second reading:

I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus.

As we are now entering upon a new Church year, it is not only right and proper, but surely also most helpful and beneficial, for us to be aware of the ultimate goal of our life in Jesus under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is, that we should truly become children of the Father. Moreover, it is not only Jesus and the Holy Spirit who are at work in us, leading us to the Father; no, the Father Himself comes to us, as Jesus promised:

          If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and           We will come to him and make Our home with him. (John 14:23)

The Father Himself, therefore, comes with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, to abide with us and make us His children in Jesus, and this He does in a way that is unique to Him, that is, by showing Himself to be the most perfect Father to us.

The Father can contact us -- if we will hear and listen -- because He, our Creating Father, speaks to us in the very centre of our being;  good parents share this ability, although only to a limited extent, which is why certain words and attitudes of our parents can remain with us throughout life.  However, since our creating Father is able to address us through unspoken words uttered in the depths of our personality, and because, in our early years we had not yet learned to recognize His traces, early experiences of such communication seem to originate within ourselves and to be, unaccountably, ours: mysterious longings and desires, sudden lights and quiet convictions, protecting fears and simple assurance, all can seem to be very much a part of us because they come from the centre of our being; nevertheless, because they are, in fact, communications from the as yet unknown-to-us-Father, they remain inexplicable to us. The Father’s addressing us as His adopted children in Jesus only becomes intelligible to us by our walking in the ways of Jesus and thus beginning to share in His infinitely sensitive awareness of and responsiveness to His Father’s abiding Presence and loving Providence.  When many apparently unrelated events and diverse incidents come to be seen and recognized as connected and coherent parts of one embracing Providential care protecting us from our own sinfulness and weakness; when parents and teachers, friends and personal talents, come to be understood as aspects of the Father’s Providence guiding us out of our native ignorance towards truth and fulfilment; and when the past gradually takes on an overarching shape that gives meaning and purpose, hope and expectation, to our life, then the Father’s now loved-and-appreciated Presence is able to reveal Itself to us in glimpses reflecting the beauty of His truth in the Scriptures and the splendour of His grace in Mother Church, where greater certitude arises from presence rather than proof, and deeper knowledge from experience rather than investigation.  Then, indeed, amazement stuns our mind, while love inflames our heart and restores our soul.
 

In ways such as these the Father can speak to us in any situation and throughout the whole extent of our life.  No earthly father or mother, no lover, no friend, can speak so intimately or be present to us in such a way; because He is the God who originally made us in His Own likeness for Himself.

Yet, much more than that; for He would be our All not only in our origins, but also in the end and ultimate justification of our being, because He wants to be for us the perfect Father, such a Father Whom only Jesus can reveal to us, for Whom only the Spirit can form us, and Whose Presence we can encounter only as living members of the mystical Body of Christ, our Brother and our Head.  He is indeed, and wills to be known by each one of us personally, as our sublime Father Who is always there, with us, in us, closer to us even than we are to ourselves; the Father Who gives us to Jesus and Who, in Jesus, forms us for Himself by the Spirit.

If we bear in mind that, in the Catholic and patristic tradition, the Son and the Holy Spirit have been spoken of, figuratively, as the hands of the Father, we are now in a position to understand the true significance of Isaiah’s words:

O LORD, You are our Father; we are the clay and You the potter: we are all the work of Your hands.

Understanding the significance of Isaiah’s words and realizing that they were pronounced hundreds of years before Jesus, we are also in a position to appreciate not only the loving providence and sublime wisdom of our God, but also the fact that, as the most perfect of Fathers, He has indeed loved us before we were born, and continues to love us in such a way and to such an extent that, in return, we most surely can commit ourselves to His infinite wisdom and goodness wherever life may lead us or death o’ertake us, ever beseeching the Holy Spirit to inflame and inspire us in Jesus to echo, in perfect harmony, His sublimely Filial love, thanks, and praise to His Father and our Father.

                              

         

Christ the King Year A 2017

Christ the King (A)

(Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17; 1^st. Corinthians 15:20-26, 28; Saint Matthew 25:31-46)

Dear Brothers and Sisters Christ here at the end of the Christian year we have a Gospel passage which is often seized upon with great enthusiasm by unbelievers as ‘the do-gooders’ charter’ which is supposed to do away with all Christian, and most especially Catholic, religious doctrines, moral practices, and even any need for divine worship; for this Gospel reading, it is said, shows that all Christian waffle can be boiled down to one thing, easily acceptable to and understood by, men and women of all conditions and cultures, namely, doing good to others, whatever that word ‘good’ may mean.  And, of course, modern do-good-Governments with their vast resources do that best of all by legally making everybody equal, no distinctions based on sex, race, colour, or religion being allowed; for the world is mankind’s world, and though we did not make it originally -- indeed  it was not made at all, but just came about -- the main fact is that we are certainly making the world and our very selves just as we want them to be, independently of what religious believers like to call ‘nature’ or God’s will.  Indeed, mankind’s specially enlightened scientists are even now lining up other planets for our possible use when this one comes to the end of its suitability or adaptability.   However, the great difficulty for all of us do-gooders is that, at present, we can’t ‘line up’ anything at all for ourselves when we die and this causes deep distress and despair for many of us, especially when we just know our worth-living-life is dead even though our heart still keeps on beating.

Let us now, dear People of God, have a truer, closer, Catholic/Christian look at today’s Gospel where Matthew is presenting the Lord Jesus to and for his own Jewish-Christian congregation, comprising Jewish converts to Christianity, and Jewish Law adherents looking into, or on-the-way-to, Christian belief.

Matthew’s congregation knew all about the value and necessity of good works, for the Pharisees of the synagogue where so many of them were brought up cherished what they called ‘works of love’, and the six examples given by Our Lord were all included in the commonly accepted Jewish lists of meritorious actions: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, showing hospitality to strangers etc.   But the Pharisees, those teachers of Israel sitting on the chair of Moses, were very conscious of those works of love as their works of love, and they built their hopes for a heavenly reward not on God’s mercy and goodness but on a calculated expectation that their ‘credit account’ accruing from such personal ‘works of love’ would surely outweigh any debits due to their transgressions against, or failings in fulfilment of, the Law.

Jesus, however, would have no such outrageous pride, no such lowering of their appreciation of God’s supreme holiness, among His disciples, and in our Gospel reading He presents those on His right hand as being blessed by My Father and inheritors of the Kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world.  Guided by the Spirit of Jesus, those disciples were not calculatingly aware of having personally done anything meriting such blessings – their right hand had not known and they themselves, not having closely observed, consequently could not remember, what their left hand had been doing.  However, Jesus explains to them in His parable:

Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.

Those who, on the other hand, failed to win God’s blessing were told:

Depart from Me you accursed, Amen I say to you, what you did not do to one of these least ones – brothers of Mine – you did not do for Me.

The criterion in both cases was ‘what you did – or did not do – to one of the least of these brothers of Mine’.

Now those ‘brothers of Jesus’ are not any-and-every human being as modern irreligious do-gooders quite hypocritically like to claim, rather are they those concerning whom Matthew had earlier (12:48–50) taught his congregation by quoting Jesus at His most explicit and dramatic:

“Who is My mother? Who are My brothers?”   And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, Jesus said, “Here are My mother and My brothers.  For whoever does the will of My heavenly Father is My brother, and sister, and mother.”   

All three synoptic Gospels report that particular incident, but Matthew makes it most intimate and Personal to Jesus by quoting Jesus as speaking not simply about ‘God’, but about His heavenly Father; while the gentle St. John’s accepted parallel is the most incisive and exclusive of all:

            You are My friends if you do what I command you. (John 15:14)

The ever-faithful St. Paul, for his part, takes that teaching of Jesus for granted when, writing to his converts in Corinth about their doing good most effectively and most fruitfully, he says:

As a result of your ministry, (the saints in Jerusalem) will give glory to God. For your generosity to them and to all believers will prove that you are obedient to the Good News of Christ.     (2 Corinthians 9:13 NLT)

People of God have confidence in the Gospel and Mother Church’s Spirit-guided traditional understanding of it, and do not let modern unbelievers try to high-jack it and turn it into their own hogwash: the Gospel, Christianity, our Catholic faith, is not concerned with making mankind apparently equal but with making all believers one in Jesus, sharing in His glory before His heavenly Father as complimentary members of the one eternal Body of which He alone is the supreme Head.  We are not rationalists idolizing manageable abstractions such as ‘equality for all’; we are Catholics and Christians, disciples of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, aspiring to oneness with, and unity in, Him Whom alone we worship.

Dear People of God, St. Matthew gives us here Jesus as Universal King by offering us a ‘personally tailored’ share in His own Resurrection life of eternal beatitude in His Father’s heavenly Kingdom (we must use such earthly regal terms because they are the best ones we know able to open our hearts and minds to what is glorious and beautiful awaiting us), and we should now set aside all earthly distractions by concentrating our minds and stirring up our hearts by contemplating the wisdom and beauty, the goodness and holiness, the most sublime majesty and supreme power of Jesus, Our Lord and Judge, the King of the Universe.

Before that final and universal judgement, however, how do we experience, how can we proclaim, Jesus as King of the Universe?

We can do that first of all by recognizing the wonder of Mother Church spread throughout the world over nigh 2000 years; we can look upon the mighty empires that arose and fell in the course of those centuries, more especially those that tried to destroy her by, crush her under, their physical tortures and psychological terrors.   We can look at her unique endeavours to bring the various and distinct races, nations and cultures – in their very uniqueness and difference – into one worldwide body united in their love and worship of Christ their Lord and Teacher by the power of His most Holy Spirit enabling and empowering them all.   No doubt Mother Church has a long record of mistakes, failures, and even human wrong-doing; but precisely, she is made up of human beings not all of whom responded or are responding whole-heartedly to the teaching of Jesus and His Church or to the grace of His most Holy Spirit.   However, no body or organization is to be judged by its failures, by those who do not express truly their being as practicing members, such judgement can only be made on the basis of the quality of her healthy fruit, and by such criteria Mother Church on earth has no rival.

So therefore, dear People of God, read the history of Mother Church and her glorious martyrs from all peoples, read the lives of her innumerable saints in all their amazing beauty and glorious variety, look at the wondrous Cathedrals and Churches built out of devotion and in despite of poverty, temples whose glory all our modern money can hardly maintain let alone imitate!  Above all, however, dear People of God, to experience and proclaim Jesus as King, look into your own lives and try if you can to number all your blessings as a disciple of Jesus, one by one.

The Old Testament gave to Israel immediately a moral human law blessed with insights of divine truth which enabled Israel to produce that supremely beautiful example of humanity, the Blessed Virgin Mary, a woman of such wisdom, humility, unshakeable faith, decisiveness, amazing courage and totally self-less commitment (all those attributes fill my mind from her first meeting with the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation) that I am amazed.   She was and is indeed the glory of Israel and of the whole of humanity, a woman to be backed up – as was necessary -- by an Israelite, Joseph, a man of true humility, with a moral strength and deep piety that helped to provide safety and engender peace for those entrusted to his care.  

Israel of old produced and formed those two highlights of humanity but is was Mary’s unique privilege to receive, embrace, and indeed clothe Divinity Itself with her personal humanity.  And that dear People of God is our greatest treasure: Jesus, the Son of Mary, Who brings to us and opens up for us the most sacred beauty and totally unfathomable glory of Divine Life at its most intimate, a life of mutually sublime knowing and loving, giving and sharing, resting and ‘soaring’, resting and ‘soaring’.

I am sorry, People of God, that I must finish here; time is short and the subject is now overwhelming me, but, with St. Augustine, I hope that, where most opportune, God will inspire you by His Spirit to better appreciate and proclaim the treasures of our Faith in Jesus Christ the Universal King, our beloved Lord and Saviour.

33rd Sunday year A. 2017

 33^rd. Sunday of Year (A)

         (Proverbs 31:10-13, 19s, 30s; 1st. Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30)

Today’s parable was relatively long and detailed with special emphasis being given to the lot of the servant who received one talent and did nothing with it.  Some people tend to think that what he did with the one talent is irrelevant because he was unfairly, if not unjustly, treated from the beginning by being given only one talent while others had more given them; and so, feeling sorry for this servant who “received only one talent”, they harbour a kind of grudge against the master of those servants and don’t really seek to learn anything from the parable.  

However, we should take care not to project our own psychological make-up and/or complications onto the parable but rather just try, first of all, to appreciate how much a talent was worth in those times long-ago.  One talent was equivalent to 6000 denarii, and a man and his family could live adequately for one day at the cost of 2 denarii.  So you see that the man who received “only one talent” was actually entrusted with a sum sufficient to provide a suitable living for himself and his family for over 8 years!

People of God, let us have nothing to do with prevalent greed and self-love which leads many to cry foul where some seem to have more than others!  All of us have, indeed, been most generously endowed by God for the task of bringing forth fruit for eternal life in the course of our earthly pilgrimage.

Let us now, therefore, ask our heavenly Father for wisdom – personified as ‘the worthy wife’ in our first reading – and then calmly turn our attention to the two faithful servants so as to learn from their experiences. 

Their master said to each of them on bringing their profit to him:

Well done, my good and faithful servant. Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.

Such words make us feel glad, happy for and happy with those servants.  If we concentrate more directly on the nature of that happiness, we can recognize three aspects mentioned or implied in those words:

Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.’ 

“You were faithful” implies the joy, the peace, the happiness of a good conscience.  “I will give you great responsibilities” foresees one being able to use one’s talents and abilities to the full, which is what we call the fulfilment of our being.  However, even so great a natural happiness is not able to dominate our attention in this parable because of those last words:

Come, share your master’s joy!

Ultimately the joy of a good conscience will lead not only to our natural fulfilment but even, thanks to Jesus, to joys that are beyond our natural capacity, a personal share in the eternal joys of our divine Lord and Master in heaven:

Since you were faithful in small matters, I will give you great responsibilities. Come, share your master’s joy.

Next, let us, for just a few moments, compare those three sorts of happiness, and you will realise how wonderful is that invitation to enter into the master’s joy.   Surely, we have all experienced at times some of the many and varied innocent joys and deep happiness that can result from human endeavour and life in human society: sometimes we have the joys of success and achievement; we treasure the happiness of love and family; we can appreciate too the joys of beauty recognized or of truth known and appreciated.   Many of these earthly types of joy and happiness do indeed delight us and give us a sense of deep fulfilment; and yet, they are also indirectly connected with sorrow and sadness.  There is a famous song, “Plaisirs d’Amour” which tells of the joys of love which swiftly pass and of its pains and sorrows which endure.  That might be a somewhat mawkish and poetic appreciation, but, nevertheless, we all aware, that, in this world, human love is inevitably accompanied by its own particular sorrows.  That is why so many modern people opt only for pleasure and try to avoid love: they want just loose relationships for pleasure without any binding commitment, so that if and when too much sorrow looms ahead, they can break the relationship and take up another source of comfort and pleasure that promises less trouble or greater satisfaction.  Yes, earthly love and family life, though they are such deep and indeed necessary joys for most, nevertheless, they also bring with them -- due to our sinfulness -- their own particular and inescapable sorrows.  Moreover, our work, at best, only offers us limited successes, and, of course, those short periods of apparent fulfilment can be quickly obscured by the shadow of competition and/or soured by occasional threats such as short time or redundancy.

The joy of a good conscience, however, is not in any way connected with sorrow and is therefore joy of a superior kind; moreover, it leads to another unsuspected joy which can be ours; that is, a share in God’s eternal happiness which totally transcends all earth’s joys.  But how can it come about that we, who know ourselves to be so sinfully weak and fragile, are capable of receiving and appreciating, infinite, eternal, happiness?  Despite all the outstanding advances of modern scientific thinking and technological ingenuity and expertise, we cannot even imagine, let alone conceive, the immensity, variety, and beauty of the universe God has created and sustains: how then can our poor hearts be expanded so as to be able to accept a fullness corresponding to His infinite beatitude in which are promised a share?

The Psalmist (Psalm 81:10) gives the answer to our question:

I am the LORD your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide.

How are we to open wide our mouth?  Listen to the Psalmist (Psalm 119:32) once again:

I will run the course of Your commandments, for You shall enlarge my heart. 

So that is the way we can prepare ourselves to receive the divine happiness that can be ours: we open wide our mouth by walking, indeed by running, in the way of God’s commandments; and He then enlarges our hearts so that He might subsequently fill them with the riches of His blessings:

I am the LORD your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. (Psalm 81:10)

It is often objected against the very thought of eternal happiness, that it must be extremely boring.  ‘Not that happiness itself is boring’, such people would add, ‘but surely eternal -- that is everlasting, unchanging -- happiness must become boring’.  Let me counter such a remark with a question.  Could eternal pain be boring?  Of course not, the pain would not allow us sufficient respite ever to think we were bored!  The thought of being bored in heaven is a foolish thought; and yet, though not logical, it does, nonetheless, lead many to put aside any positive thoughts of heaven, it does explain why the promise of heaven means so little to so many unthinking souls.  Therefore, I would just like to help you think a little about heaven now: not so much intellectual thinking as considering an experience that probably most of you have known several times in life.

I want you to just try to recall the happiest moments of your life.  Do you remember how short the time seemed?  You were so happy it seemed only a moment, even though it might have been hours, days, even years.  Now that gives us the key to heavenly happiness, for even though time is earthly, part and parcel of creation where things are always changing, nevertheless, there are occasions -- yes, even here on earth -- when time seems to stop or disappear, melt, in the presence of happiness.   How much more then is the question of time utterly irrelevant in eternity where there can be no time!  Eternity is not endless time, eternity is timeless; time has no meaning, there is nothing to be measured by time, in heaven before God’s Presence.  St. Peter tells us something of this in a pictorial way in his second letter (2 Peter 3:8):

Beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

Therefore, for those who are called to share, with Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, in God’s blessedness in heaven, time will be totally obliterated by transcendent joy flooding their being.  Think again, People of God!  You have had plenty of experience even here on earth, which is, so to speak, a time-zone: if you are bored or weary, anxious or worried, time drags ever so slowly; and yet, when you are happy it flies!  Therefore, even here on earth time is relative.  Now, heaven is a time-free zone: that is, in heaven time is totally irrelevant, not only because we won’t notice it, but because it has no being, no function, in the bliss of God to which we are invited in Jesus by the Holy Spirit.

People of God: each one of you has been given much by God.  Each and every one of us is called, offered the chance, to share in God’s eternal blessedness, but for that we need the whole Gospel, not a Gospel shortened by the exclusion or omission of what some people may think is ‘not nice’ to hear.  Pieces are being ‘ear marked’ for omission these days because they might cause hurt, offence, even harm (would you believe it, the Gospel causing harm!! Harm for what sort of Catholics?). Today’s Gospel is one where verses 24-30 are ‘ear-marked’ as mentioned.   We have heard the Gospel in full today, let us give a little particular attention to what might have been legitimately (!) or perhaps even preferably (?) for some people, omitted:

Master, I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant, and gathering where you did not scatter, so (I was afraid).

What does it mean in Jesus’ parable that the one who originally received 5 talents made another 5 and the one who received 2 made another 2?  In accordance with recent Gospel readings we can interpret that of the two commands: love of God and love of neighbour.  Each of us receives according to the measure of God’s gift, faith, that is love of God; and we have to put that gift to profitable work, by progressing in and learning to live out, love of our neighbour as the fruit of our co-operation with God’s grace.  We do not have to seek out extraordinary forms of behaviour in order to do this, we simply need to follow St. Paul’s teaching (1 Thessalonians 4:9–12 NLT):

We don’t need to write to you about the importance of loving each other, for God Himself has taught you to love one another.  Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. Then people who are not believers will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others.  

Such a life of charity and simple edification is not beyond anyone’s capacity, so richly have all of us been endowed.  Those endowed with the one talent -- love of God in the faith of Jesus -- are called, as living members of Mother Church, to thereby progress to love of neighbour as St. Paul indicates.  Called that is, by Jesus Himself, Who -- though He Personally only sowed the seed of His Gospel in Palestine for the Jews -- does indeed, like the master returned from a long journey, expect His Church, through her members, including you and I, to proclaim His Gospel throughout the whole world and to all mankind by our growth in love of neighbour, and thereby bring forth copious fruit for God’s glory and the salvation of all those of good will who will respond to Mother Church’s proclamation of Jesus’ Gospel.  Those who will not thus progress in love of God to love of neighbour will have no excuse, and Jesus’ final words will ultimately be found to be infallibly true despite perhaps having being considered ‘not nice’ and ‘better-to-be-omitted’ by certain modern-day disciples of Jesus, and not-so-humble servants of Mother Church.

Don’t think little of your gifts, People of God, be they 5, 2, or 1 talents’ worth, they are more than ample for all your needs.  Don’t be foolish enough now -- and ultimately wicked enough -- to ignore a happiness which can transfigure your whole being and help transform our world, making you eternally fulfilled and happy beyond all imagining!  It can be yours in Jesus: let Him lead you, in His Church, by His Holy Spirit, to live and work for the glory of the Father, in Whose presence Jesus promises, you will be greeted by those most memorable words:

Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord! 

32nd Sunday Year A 2017

 32^nd. Sunday of Year (A)

(Wisdom 6:12-16; 1^st. Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13)

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You have heard today’s parable of the 5 wise and 5 foolish virgins many times, People of God, and you might therefore be inclined to prefer a homily which deals with other matters such as important contemporary issues in society, or good causes that cry out for our attention; it is, after all, much more interesting to hear something new, even if you do not fully agree with it, than to hear and go over once again something you think you already know quite well.

However, Dr. Samuel Johnson, one of the wisest men and greatest literary figures this country has ever produced, once famously remarked that Christians have much greater need to be reminded of things already heard than they have to hear of new things.  Following his advice, therefore, let us look at the parable once again.

Who is the bridegroom mentioned in the beginning?

The kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.

We know for sure that it is Jesus from the answer Jesus gave when He was once questioned about the behaviour of His disciples:

The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were fasting. Then they came and said to Jesus, "Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?"  And Jesus said to them, "Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.  But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. (Mark 2:18-20)

And John the Baptist gave a beautiful testimony to Jesus as the Bridegroom, when he declared:

A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness that I said, 'I am not the Christ,' but, 'I have been sent before Him.'  He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:27-30)

Jesus, therefore, is indeed the Bridegroom at the wedding feast in the Kingdom of Heaven, and that, I think most of you already knew.  However, there is, strangely enough, no suggestion of who the Bride might be.  Let us now, therefore, think a little more closely about her.

One of the most momentous and uncompromising statements ever made by Jesus concerned the relationship between a man and his wife:

Have you not read that He Who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?  So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate. (Matthew 19:4-6)

Man and wife, Bridegroom and Bride, become one flesh.  The Bride for Jesus, the heavenly Bridegroom, is Mother Church, that is, saved humanity, all those men and women who will be one with Jesus and with each other as members of that glorified, heavenly Body of which He is the Head.   As we read in the letter to the Ephesians:

May (we) grow up in all things into Him who is the head -- Christ -- from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love. (4:15-16)

And at the heavenly wedding-feast, all those true children of Mother Church, all those living members of the Body of Christ, will be recognised as children of God the Father, because they share in the flesh of Him who is both the heavenly Lord of Mother Church and the only-begotten Son of the eternal Father.

Therefore, the ten virgins waiting for the Bridegroom represent the whole of mankind called to become the Bride, called to enter with Christ as members of His Body into the wedding-feast of Heaven.  Five, half of them, however, carried out their duties on behalf of the community so negligently and foolishly that they were found to be definitively unfit to enter into the feast.

Due to the delayed appearance of the bridegroom, all ten of the virgins had grown tired, just as we ourselves, indeed, would grow tired under such circumstances, for very few of us like the exhausting tension of delayed expectation.   There was no fault in such weariness.

However, when the cry had gone up that the Bridegroom’s arrival was imminent, and all ten virgins had dutifully set about trimming their lamps since those lamps were quite small -- not being meant light up the way so much as to show that someone was attentively waiting, ready and willing to welcome the Bridegroom -- when, after such a long delay, they had tried to trim their flames to burn brighter, they found that there was too little oil in their lamps to support a bigger flame.  Once again, that of itself was natural enough and without blame.  

However, it had always been a strong possibility, nay even a probability, that the Bridegroom would be delayed in his arrival due to friends and neighbours congratulating him on his way to the wedding-feast, and those foolish virgins were consequently shown to be most seriously at fault in that they had not taken precautions against any such contingency by bringing an extra supply of oil with them.  And now, at the very moment of the Bridegroom’s arrival those five had been obliged to go off in search of more oil for their lamps and consequently were not able to welcome the Bridegroom, which was an insult to the Bridegroom, a betrayal of the splendid preparations planned by the whole community, and a disgrace for themselves.

Sadly, many Christians likewise grow tired of waiting for the Lord to manifest His presence and His power in their lives; and -- like the foolish virgins of our parable --not having grown sufficiently in virtue as a result of having paid little attention to their understanding and practice of the Faith, they are often found to be too proud in mind, too impatient in temperament, and too weak in faith, to be able to wait for the Lord with faithful devotion and humble expectancy.   As Jesus once said:

Many false prophets will rise up and deceive many.  And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.  But he who endures (that is, those individuals who endure) to the end shall be saved. (Matthew 24:11-13)

Many hearts, Jesus said, indeed -- near the end – most, will grow cold through waiting.  That can already be seen in these our days when lawlessness of the most primal and degrading, and also most outrageously proud and exuberant sort, proclaims itself so loudly and openly that some, though having been brought up as Catholics, on seeing that the flow of life around them is becoming a torrent both wild and dangerous, begin think that they too, perhaps, should be experiencing something exciting or doing something different or special in and with their lives, not apparently wasting them by continuing with what seems to be futile, namely, devoutly loving the Lord and patiently waiting for and trusting in Him.  If He does not quickly show His hand, so to speak, by bestowing tangible blessings, these stop looking for Him and, at the best, turn to proving their own worth by winning the world’s approval for publicly good works, or else – less good but much more likely -- to proving their own worth by winning the acknowledgement of others by working in the world’s way for what the world prizes.

Here we should try to get things clearly into focus.  Good works are always, as the words say, good of themselves.   However, the spiritual value of good works can easily be diverted from God’s account, so to speak, to bolster the public credit of the one doing those works; or they can be personally treasured and dwelt upon in such a way as to provide the doer with a warm feeling of self-approval and self-esteem, a more secret and perhaps more secure way of escape from the emptiness of the apparently unnoticed and wearisome devotion of waiting for and attending to Jesus.   This warm glow of self-satisfaction and/or the welcome praise of others can very easily become death-dealing substitutes for Jesus Who alone, as the only-begotten Son of the eternal Father, is totally life-giving both in His death on Calvary for us and in His most holy Eucharist with us and for us.

Jesus, however, does want, above all, our personal love; He wants us to make personal love for Him and obedience to and trust in Him the very centre of our lives. As you will well remember, He once said (John 15:13):

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one's friends.

Now, love for Jesus has grown cold when a Catholic is unwilling to die to self for His sake: when waiting patiently for Him, obeying Him, is too like dying and therefore unacceptable.  In that way too many, even some of the better Catholics and Christians, shy away from attending on, waiting for, Jesus with deep personal love and patient, humble, service and praise, in order to give expression to themselves in welcome activities which show to others their personal abilities while giving themselves a most welcome psychological boost.   In such cases, the works remain good works but they no longer bear witness to a true and total personal love for Jesus, just as the foolish virgins, though they were waiting together with the wise virgins, could not trim their lamps when the Bridegroom arrived and were not there to welcome Him.  Those foolish virgins could not light a true flame of personal love for Jesus because He, Personally, did not occupy, fill, their minds and hearts so much as the things they were doing, ostensibly for Him but really for themselves.

This type of thing, carried to the worst extreme, once led Jesus to say to the Pharisees:

You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. (Luke 16:15)

People of God, seek, above all, to personally love the Person of Jesus at all times and in all circumstances.   When you are in Church, keep your eyes on Him, so to speak, by listening to His Word, admiring His goodness and wisdom, and by trying to understand and appreciate His teaching; receive Him in the Eucharist out of a desire to sincerely open up your whole life to the purifying flame of His most Holy Spirit, indeed, pray that the Holy Spirit might inspire and enable you to love Jesus more and serve Him ever better.  Only work that is motivated by such personal love and longing for Jesus can bear fruit for eternal life.

The love of most will grow cold:  the five foolish virgins, having waited long, were not able to turn up the flame of their witness -- personal love for Jesus – when the Bridegroom ultimately arrived.  What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.  Think on these things, and may God’s blessing be with you.