A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

 

A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

On the 18^th of April, 1506, Pope Julius II laid the foundation stone for the present St Peter’s Basilica in Rome: it would take 150 years to complete. Round the inside of the dome above the high altar are the words, in six-foot high letters: You are Peter and, on this rock, I will build my Church and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.  These words, which we read in today’s gospel, echo those of Isaiah in the first reading where they amount to a job description for the new administrator, Eliakim, of king Hezekiah’s palace.

There had been much squabbling about who Jesus was; a new prophet like Elijah? John the Baptist risen from the dead? The leaders of the people were no help. Jesus wanted his closest followers to know and drew from Peter the emphatic revelation: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ Jesus immediately gives Peter his task: ‘You are Peter and, on this rock, …’ But then, Jesus tells them on no account are they to tell anyone he is the Christ, the Messiah.

So there are two questions:

          Who are you, Jesus?

          What do you want?

We have our answer to the first: he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. But did they understand what this meant? From our own experience, we often find ourselves saying of someone we have met but never spent time with, ‘I am delighted to have this chance to get to know you better.’ The disciples ‘knew’ Jesus as some kind of special prophet and charismatic leader. That is all. They did not know him ‘better’. He knows this and tells them not to talk about him for now. He is not the kind of Christ the people – or the disciples – think he should be. And we know this scene in the gospel is followed by a sharp rebuke: ‘Get behind me, Satan, your thoughts are not the thoughts of God, but of man.’ So, even Peter hadn’t a clue what kind of Christ Jesus was.

Are we much better? This leads us into the second question.  

We are so inclined to ‘tame’ Jesus and fit him into our own frame of reference. He is kind, forgiving, patient and the rest. He is all these but he is also demanding. Like a parent or a school teacher, he wants us to grow up. He wants us to stretch ourselves beyond the ‘comfortable’ and the ‘manageable’. He talks about the cross. This is the only identity and description of Jesus that counts. But they don’t get it. Though they will later. Where are we in this?   

While Peter may be ‘the rock’, early commentators did not see him as the only founder of the Church in Rome. Irenaeus, writing around 100 years after Peter’s death, tells us the Church in Rome – ‘the most illustrious church to which every church must resort’ – was founded by ‘Peter and Paul’. So it was not a one-man show and these two giants of the early church did not always agree. They had quite a sharp exchange on the conditions for gentile admission to the Church.

We can carry away two thoughts from this Sunday’s readings. Jesus left his Church in the hands of one person who was to be the anchor of unity. But that did not mean the one person had all the answers. The Church was to be in the hands of shepherds who might often differ. That is OK as long as they travel together (synodically) and hold to their unity with the rock.

And second, they will find a deeper unity in ‘losing their life’, that is, in listening to one another and being prepared to shift their position as they open themselves, step by step, to what is greater than any one of them. This can be hard.

27 August 2023           Sunday 21 A        Is 22:19-23       Rom 11:33-36            Mt 16:13-20

MARY

 

MARY

Jesuit Brother Bvukumbgwe, who died in 2002, was a composer whose songs are widely used in Church liturgies in Zimbabwe. One who knew him wrote:

Many of his songs come to him in his dreams at night. He would rise from his bed, sing or hum them into a cassette and go back to sleep. In the morning he played the cassette to his singers who then produce the song. While driving me to his village, he would be lost in his musical thoughts and his fingers and hands on the steering wheel would sometimes keep time with his thoughts. … The rhythm … improvises on the theme carrying it to new depths of meaning and experience.

Bvukumbgwe experienced the music first in his mind and then shared it with others and it finally became a song captured on a cassette. Mary, also, first experienced something beyond words and immediately went ‘in haste’ to share it with Elizabeth and finally the news became something written down and shared with the world. 

But it was not quite so simple. They fought over how to put it into words for centuries until finally, in 431, they agreed, in a place that is now a ruined city in western Turkey (Ephesus), that she could be called Theotokos, God bearer, that is, Mother of God.

First comes the experience. Then the putting it into words. People were drawn to Mary, over the centuries, as a way to God, a mother who longed to bring her children to know their need for her Son. The Franciscans, in the fourteenth century, grounded her in human experience by setting up Christmas cribs where children and grown-up children came and contemplated in wonder.

Some five hundred years later (in 1854), the Church tried again to put into words the experience of how Mary must have begun her existence by describing her as ‘Immaculately Conceived’. Many good Christians baulked at this and accused the Catholic Church of inventing something that wasn’t in scripture. But the Church was only trying to express her experience of Mary. Given who she was and what she became, it is not beyond our imagination that, by a special gift of God, she could have experienced the perfection we all long for from the moment she began to live.

And a hundred years later (in 1950) there was yet another attempt to put into words something that the Church, especially the Eastern Church, had experienced from the earliest centuries: that, at the moment of her death, Mary achieved the completion we all instinctively long for. It was expressed in terms of her being ‘assumed’ – bodily - into heaven. Anyone who believes the earliest creeds of the Church, holds ‘the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.’ But the Church, drawing again on experience, declared that in the unique case of Mary, her ‘Assumption’ was immediate. She shared in the first fruits (1 Cor 15:23). Even if we knew where she died, which we don’t, we would never find any of her remains.

An Italian artist, Francesco Botticini, painted The Assumption of the Virgin in 1475. Prominent in the foreground is an empty tomb, reminiscent of the empty tomb of Jesus in the gospels. There is no body and the earthly onlookers are puzzled. Botticini then has our eyes rise to a scene above, representing heaven, where Mary is in glory kneeling before her Son with the whole court of heaven in attendance.  

The importance of Mary, especially in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, is that she became the first person to receive the completion of life which was promised by God to all of us from the beginning. This, again, sounds like a lot of words but it is really the experience of love received and given in its fullness.   

We celebrate the feast of the Assumption this Sunday, 20 August. I am grateful to Fr James Hanvey SJ, for his thoughts on this great event in ‘Thinking Faith’.

Rev 11:19, 12:1-10                    1 Cor 15:20-27                      Luke 1:39-56

TRUST THE PEOPLE

 

TRUST THE PEOPLE

So it is election time. Someone threw a flyer over our gate. His priorities are water, roads and refuse collection. Nothing very revolutionary there. Basic needs. But basic needs not yet met. After all these years. Is the candidate ‘blowing in the wind’? Is there any prospect of these basic things being done? Are we just ritually marking up one more election? We go through the motions but nothing changes. The focus of the world will be briefly on us. Then they will move away to something else.

What we yearn for, year after year, is subsidiarity. Long ago (in 1931) it was defined by Pius XI as a principle by which every unit in the nation – family, local council, district, province and central government – performs the tasks which it can do at its own level. ‘The true aim of all social activity should be to help individual members of the social body, but never to destroy or absorb them.’ In other words, no higher body in the state should take to itself powers which lower bodies can do.

Paul VI commented: ‘To take politics seriously at its different levels – local, regional, national and worldwide - is to affirm the duty of every person to recognise the concrete reality and the value of freedom of choice that is offered to them to seek to bring about both the good of the city and of the nation and of all people. Politics are a demanding manner – but not the only one – of living the Christian commitment to the service of others.’ 

So there we have it. There are jobs to be done - providing water, mending roads, collecting rubbish – and no shortage of people willing to work. But no one, at the local level, to say nothing of the national level, is able to exercise their freedom to organise and carry out these works. So they are not done. Our social fabric is gridlocked, paralysed. And we are faced with five more years of inaction while the people languish in poverty and frustration.

It would surely be a simple matter to allow people to develop their social and economic activity at the level where they are able to do it. But there seems to be a terrible fear that if the people organise themselves on the local level – and succeed – it will somehow reflect badly on those at a higher level. And yet is it not obvious that if people succeed at the local level, it will redound positively on those at a high level? Parents take delight in the achievements of their children.

Do the people in the higher levels trust the ordinary people? 

15 August 2023

TWO VOICES

 

TWO VOICES

First voice: ‘It was so unfortunate for me when I got arrested by plain clothes police after taking some photos of the government party giving maize to poor people. I resisted arrest at first, but they handcuffed me and produced their IDs. It was around 11am when they threw me into the cells without taking any statement. My mobile and shoes had been surrendered in the charge office. They deleted the photos I took and confiscated my SIM card.

I spent the whole day and night in the cells which were stinking due to a toilet in the corner of the cell room which was only flushed once a day – it has to be done by someone outside the cell. We were 14 in the cell and were joined by another 7 at around 9pm – all 21 cooped up in an area around 16ft x 16ft. There was no view with a barred window near roof level.

I braved the cold night with no blankets. At 6am I heard the noise of the cell door being unlocked. We were told to come out for counting. After some 30 minutes, we were locked up again with no food or water. During the afternoon when I peeped through a keyhole, I saw a cop putting some food onto the big lid of a rubbish bin. The food stayed uncovered for almost half an hour when some pigeons took turns to feed.

Come 3 pm, they unlocked the gate of the fence surrounding the cells and told the inmates to come and eat. The food was sadza, not properly cooked with half cooked beans and no salt. I only had a pinch and couldn't continue feeding as I felt like vomiting. At 3.15pm we were locked up again until the next day. There were now 13 of us left as some relatives had paid fines for some inmates.

It was extremely cold during the night, and we shared one blanket among five people and tried to sleep on the cold hard rough concrete floor. The blankets were infested with lice which were biting. They were unbearably harsh conditions.

On the third day my uncle borrowed US$160 and paid the fine as he was worried that I was not taking my medication; I suffer badly from various ailments. I was released at around 5pm on Day 3, without being charged, feeling ill and afraid.’

Second voice: ‘He was still speaking when suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow, and from the cloud there came a voice which said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour.”’

We need to relate the two voices to each another. They both speak to us from ‘a cloud’. Failure to listen to them only sinks us deeper in the mud.