10th Sunday of the Year (C) 2016

10^th. Sunday of the Year  (C)

(1 Kings 17:17-24; Galatians 1:11-19; Luke 7:11-17)

In today’s Gospel reading we are told of a very significant miracle performed by Jesus when He raised a young man from the dead.  What most impresses us today however, is not so much, perhaps, the objective fact of the miracle itself, for we believe Jesus to have been the Son of God made man, One very capable of performing such an act, but the human sympathy of Jesus which led Him to spontaneously involve Himself and perform so striking a miracle with such tender Personal compassion.   There are deep and most powerful human emotions involved here which secretly stir-up and evoke our own sympathetic involvement even today.  For here was a tragically distraught woman appearing before Jesus: already a widow, her only son -- a young man Jesus called him -- had just died as the promise of the fullness of life   had begun to dawn for him and bring some measure of warm hope back into her heart.  For a second time now she was walking alone, though followed by a crowd of sympathizers; walking upright in body yet with head bowed and her heart overwhelmed with grief as tears blinded her eyes.  She was no longer young in years and, most probably, had little or no idea of her future livelihood and security, let alone of any hope of love and companionship.  At the best, the crowd of sympathizers could suggest that she might find herself with some happy memories of friends and family; but would that enable her to face up to a doubly lonely and possibly threatening future?

In such circumstances, was Jesus foreseeing His own mother’s grief and loneliness on Calvary?  Possibly.

For, in the course of His public ministry Jesus was compared to, even mixed-up with, Elijah:

Jesus went on with His disciples to Caesarea Philippi.  And on the way He asked His disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’  And they told Him, ‘John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.’    (Mark 8:27)

And Elijah was not merely one of the prophets Jesus had remotely heard of, but one whose life and work for the glory of the God of Israel against the wicked queen Jezebel’s worship of Baal He admired, one who  – as would be shown at His Transfiguration when Elijah appeared with Moses speaking with Jesus – came readily to Jesus’ mind:

Jesus began to speak to the crowds: Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. All the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and if your are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. (Matthew 11:7, 11-14)

Jesus would, therefore, have been acutely aware of the similarity between His present situation and that of Elijah who performed a miracle for the widow of Zarephath grieving for her dead son, as we ourselves have just heard in our first reading

Elijah said to her, ‘Give me your son.’  Taking him from her lap, he carried the son to the upper room where he was staying and put him on his bed ... Then he stretched himself out upon the child three times, and called out to the Lord: ‘O Lord, my God, let the life breath return to the body of this child.’

Now, had Elijah stretched himself out upon the child not only three times, but also in the form of a cross: with the prophet’s outstretch arms and full length body covering those of the child to symbolize the warmth of life being transferred from the prophet to the child by God’s healing goodness and mercy?  A great miracle of vindication in Elijah’s time indeed, but in God’s Providence a truly wondrous foreshadowing not only of the crucifixion of Israel’s  promised Messiah,  but of the life-giving, death-and-sin-destroying, power of His resurrection as the Saviour of all mankind.

After Elijah restored the living child to his mother:

The woman replied to Elijah, ‘Now indeed I know that you are a man of God.  The word of the Lord comes truly from your mouth.

The word of the Lord spoken by Elijah was a prophetic word.  The word of God in Jesus was salvific, a word bringing salvation for mankind; and such a word, Jesus knew, could only come from His Cross-transfigured heart and soul, blood-drained body and being; it was indeed a word of life from the One Who alone could and would engage and conquer death. 

Again, was Jesus at that very moment foreseeing and anticipating His own mother’s grief and loneliness on Calvary?  Quite possibly, for we are told that, after His miracle He simply, and quite mysteriously, gave the widow her restored son without any further Personal words of sympathy or encouragement, not even words of blessing.  It would seem that this widow’s tragic suffering might well have occasioned in Him what He had not anticipated and to which He could not, at that moment, give any suitable expression for merely human sharing.

Saint Paul wanted to make most clear to the Galatians this aspect of the Gospel message in his letters when he declared that:

The Gospel preached by me is not of human origin.  For I did not receive it from a human being, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ Who died for all, that all those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him Who for their sake died and was raised.    (cfr.  Gal. 1:11s. + 2 Cor. 5:15)

In other words the Good-News of Jesus was not something as it were cogitated, argued, and proof-read beforehand, for St. Paul; nor was it anything of that nature for Jesus Himself especially on the occasion of this sudden and unexpectedly-most-touching encounter with a grieving mother suffering – so much like His own mother would soon suffer – for her beloved, only, Son.

This meeting with the widow of Nain, this raising of her son from his coffin, bier, of death, was uniquely intimate.  Immediately before and, in St. Luke’s narrative, straight after, this incident at Nain,  Jesus restored to health the servant of a Roman Centurion and also:

                               

Healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind He bestowed sight. (Luke 7:27)

On these occasions He spoke directly to the attendant crowds.  But not here at Nain.

When the Lord saw her He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’

Private words of most sincere sympathy, surely to be heard by her alone who so needed them. 

On approaching the dead man’s bier He simply touched the bier to stop the bearers and then addressed the young man himself saying:

                Young man, I say to you, ‘arise.’

Whereupon ‘Jesus gave him to his mother.’   Nothing more.  All so tender and utterly  intimate.  The restored son was enough for the woman, she would quite possibly not even have heard words of sympathy about her situation from Jesus; and as we have hinted, any words expressive of His own emotions at that moment were above ordinary human appreciation.

Elijah took up the restored child and, we are told, gave him to his mother.  Is that perhaps why St. Luke seems to have been in such a rush to tell us that Jesus likewise gave him to his mother although – according to the actual words describing Jesus’ act of healing – he was still seated in the coffin held by its bearers?  Or was that parsimony of words possibly because Jesus, immediately on healing the young man, turned to his mother and with a glance or perhaps a slight gesture of His hand said, with truly sublime humility and sensitivity, ‘There you are good mother, take him’, and left the two together?

Of course, the accompanying crowd could not fail to see and enthuse over what had happened, and they whole-heartedly cried out: A great prophet has arisen in our midst!

Just as the widow of Zarephath herself had done when she exclaimed: You are a man of God, the word of God comes truly from your mouth.

Here at Nain,  however, revelation is proceeding and there is something more; not that the people proclaiming realized just what they were saying, but was the Father perhaps once again witnessing to His Son, for all glorified God exclaiming, GOD has visited His people?

God indeed, God-made-man, was visiting His People in Jesus our Saviour Who would be stretched out on the Cross of Calvary for love of men, and Whose death and Resurrection would give life to all those touched by the Gospel of Jesus’ Good News.

That revelatory report of Jesus -- the crucified and risen Lord -- has spread throughout the intervening ages indeed, and has reached us once more this day to refresh, inspire, and comfort us with the truth it brings and the beauty it contains for us.  Truth because it is a revelation of the Risen Lord Who was crucified for us, because Jesus is ever the Way, the Truth, and the Life.   And Beauty, because (Psalm 27: 4, 13):

One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in  the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord ... I believe I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! 

Truth guides and sustains, beauty inspires and comforts; so, dear People of God, let us ever seek to embrace God’s Truth in all its Beauty as we hear and strive to understand, embrace and put into practice, the authentic Gospel proclaimed to us in Mother Church, the Immaculate Spouse of her Risen Lord and Suffering Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Trinity Sunday Year C 2016

Trinity Sunday (C)

(Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 5:1-5; St. John 16:12-15)

What is happiness for a human being?  How is it to be found?   Can it be ultimately, definitively, acquired?

In answer to that last question ‘can happiness be ultimately acquired, gained for oneself?’ the Christian answer is ‘No!’; but according to the Christian promise, it is offered and will be given by God, to all who recognize, love, and obey His Son, Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

Let us now turn our attention to the other questions: what is happiness for a human being and how is it to be sought?   My answer is short, and, undoubtedly, all the more sure because it is short: happiness is to live in harmony with and accordance to our original, fundamental, make-up as we aspire to our ultimate human potential and personal fulfilment in Jesus Christ Our Lord.

In our first reading from the book of Proverbs we heard of the remarkably close relationship that exists between mankind and the rest of creation:

Thus says the wisdom of God: The Lord possessed me, the beginning of His ways, the forerunner of His prodigies of long ago;   From of old I was poured forth, at the first, before the earth. … When the Lord established the heavens there was I; when He marked out the vault over the face of the deep, when He made firm the skies above; when He fixed fast the foundations of the earth, when He set for the sea its limit; then was I beside Him as His craftsman, I was His delight day by day, playing before Him all the while.

Creation was indeed a joyful work of wisdom and love!!  And the wisdom of God rejoiced supremely when:

Playing on the surface of His earth I found delight in the sons of men.

There we can sense how close are the bonds uniting us with the whole of creation: bonds of deep compatibility and joyous sympathy bestowed by God Who created the whole universe -- with mankind as its crown -- through His beloved Son, the wisdom of God, by His nurturing and hovering Spirit of love.  Son and Spirit, the Father’s two creating hands!

Such ties with creation are not just the indirect result of God’s creative activity, they are directly willed by Him for our well-being and creation’s integrity; for man, as lord of earth and of the universe, was made indeed the channel of God’s presence to creation:

The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it.  The Lord God formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the air, and He brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each living creature was then its name.  (Genesis 2:15, 19)

God blessed them, saying: “Be fertile and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.”  (Genesis 1:28)

Behold the richness of our human make-up, conditioned by so many and such varied, original and joyous, bonds: bonds of root compatibility with the whole of inanimate creation; bonds of appreciation and gratitude for all living sources providing food and serving the furtherance of society; bonds of most intimate knowledge and deepest sympathy with all animals claiming our stewardship before God!!

We are wide-open, so to speak, by our very position in creation; we are not beings closed-in on self!  Selfishness is not in harmony with and accordance to our original, fundamental, make-up; and, going in that way against our very grain, it can never bring us happiness, not even on the natural level.  And how that picture is confirmed by the relationships we go on to build up among ourselves in human society, relationships relentlessly multiplied by scientific and technological advances!

Nevertheless, our faith proclaims that we are not, like the rest of creation, to be satisfied with a merely natural destiny; for, being specially created in the image and likeness of God, we are endowed with a supernatural calling and potential for an eternal destiny: 

God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.  (Genesis 1:27)

Given, therefore, along with our serious and pressing concerns for the environment and future generations of men here on earth, the wide-spread alarm at the developing break-up of human society and mutuality all over the world, let us look more closely at the relevance of the teaching we have just reviewed with regard to that aboriginal concern of human-beings, "How is true happiness to be found today?”

Why are we human beings wide-open on so many fronts, yet, as individual persons, so deeply sensitive to intimate concerns?  Why are we personally enmeshed in such a complexity of relationships and ties?

Because, as our faith teaches us, we are called to share, eternally, in the happiness of the eternal and infinite God Who made us, the God Who is One and Three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three divine Persons in the One Godhead.

There is constant development, from our very origins in creation, through our natural experience of personal life and social commitments, to our God-given calling to share in the social life and beatitude of God Who is Personally three and essentially One.

We cannot accept, surely, that our life here on earth – be it apparently good or bad, happy or sorrowful -- is of no consequence for our eternal destiny: our life on earth must be some sort of a preparation for the calling with which we have been endowed.  And, indeed, Jesus has taught us that, in accordance with the faith and commitment we show in answer to our divine calling, we can begin, even here on earth, to experience a foretaste of the blessedness of heaven:

 I have told you this, that My joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.

My Father, Who has given (you) to Me, is greater than all; and no one is can take (you) out of the Father's hand.  (John 15:11, 10:29.)

Therefore, since our eternal blessedness is bound up with the Three Persons in One God, selfishness is once again found to be, fundamentally and totally, opposed to any aspirations for true happiness; for, the intimate life of the Holy Trinity in which we -- in Jesus by the Spirit -- are called to participate, is a most sublime mystery of love, life, and total commitment. 

Life, the glory of the Most Holy Trinity, is the expression of what is a divinely mutual and totally comprehensive knowledge:

No one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him (Matthew 11:27),

together with what is the only possible response to such comprehensive knowledge of divine Being and Beauty, namely, a transcendent love and commitment, as manifested in human flesh by Jesus in His Passion:

The hour is coming, and has arrived, when each of you will be scattered to his own home, and you will leave Me alone.  But I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. (John 16:32)

Father, the hour has come. Give glory to Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You.

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, "Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit"; and when He had said this, He breathed His last. (John 17:1, Luke 23:46,)

Love, based on knowledge of the truth, and issuing in commitment, is ultimately the best guidance that can be given to humanity in its supreme quest for happiness.  Because mankind is made in the image and likeness of God, and because our eternal destiny and divine calling is to share in God’s intimate life and beatitude, therefore our happiness as human beings here on earth is only to be found in love, commitment, and life; sharing in that love, commitment, and life revealed in the Father Who, knowingly and lovingly begets His only Son, and in the Holy Spirit of love proceeding from the Father and the Son in their mutual comprehension and total commitment.

Selfishness is totally destructive of human nature and human aspirations.

The Father's love is total: He loves His Son to such an extent that the Son is the equal of His Father in all things:

            Everything that the Father has is Mine.

Similarly, the Son loves His Father with His whole Being, with the result that, when, as the Son of Man on earth, He was faced with the greatest torments known to the ancient world, the torments of a Roman flogging followed by death on a Cross, He wholeheartedly embraced them for His Father's glory (John 12:27-28):

I am troubled now.  Yet what should I say? 'Father, save Me from this hour'? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name!"

The Spirit likewise in His earthly mission manifests His Divine Character by His total commitment to Jesus, as Jesus himself said:

He will glorify Me, because He will take from what is Mine and declare it to you.

People of God, even in everyday, ordinary, experience, those who are committed are also to some extent admired or even envied, because, having a purpose in which they can lose themselves they are seen to have become more or less free from the stifling bonds of self-solicitude and concern; and, most wonderfully, the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in what we call the Holy Trinity, though recognized as the supreme Christian mystery of the nature of Divine Being is, nevertheless, so close to our experience and appreciation of life, in so far as it is the total and eternal expression of the selflessness of Divine Love!  Made in the image and likeness of God, Who is never far from, never alien to, us!!

We are called to share in that Divine Blessedness as members of the Son: members of that Body of which He is the Head.  In Him, by His Spirit, we are destined to see the beauty and experience the majesty of the Father in all truth; and, in a beatific response of love, to be entirely committed -- in total self-forgetfulness -- to praising the glory of the Father, and come thereby to the fullness of our life and being in Christ Jesus Our Lord.

Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin.  A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son makes you free, then you will be free indeed. (John 8:34-36)      

Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage. (Galatians 5:1)

People of God, our human nature, created by God for Himself has, indeed, been vitiated by sin but it has not been destroyed; and so we are always liable to have what Wordsworth has described as ‘intimations of immortality’: insights, in this case, into ourselves and the realities of our life and calling which far surpass in their penetration our normal observations and awareness.  Our human longings for that freedom and fulfilment which alone can give us true happiness can be penetratingly clear, but too frequently that clarity of vision becomes clouded over when we turn to our own devices, and experience the deceits of men, or discover the vanity of the world’s easy promises.  We should learn today, and never again forget, to appreciate the treasures of our faith, and above all to look with ever deeper admiration, reverence, and awe, to the Holy Trinity -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- for that inspiration, enlightenment, and power, that will enable us to seek aright in this life and ultimately to receive in the next God’s Gift transcending all earthly imaginations and desires: the Gift that will transfigure and glorify in the likeness of the Risen Lord Jesus the whole family of God’s adopted children and establish the heavenly and eternal Kingdom where God is All in All.