A SHOCKING CONFRONTATION

 A SHOCKING CONFRONTATION

Just after ‘an election win’, when Peter is confirmed as leader of the little group

of disciples, there is a strong exchange of words between him and Jesus. Having

identified himself to them as indeed the Messiah, Jesus explains what he will

have to endure in order to achieve his goal: ‘… to suffer grievously … and be

put to death’. Peter is horrified and vehemently advises against it.

But this is the heart of the matter and Jesus tells him bluntly; ‘you are a scandal,

an obstacle in my path.’ How often that confrontation takes place! Not only

between people but within the heart of a person? The war in Ukraine gets far

more coverage than the war in Sudan but the same dynamic is at work. We hear

of young men, on the cusp of life, opting to stay and fight, knowing that they

may not live to see their wives and children again.

Matthew, Chapter 16, right in the heart of the gospel is the heart of the gospel. It

is decision time. Am I going to choose the ‘better part’, the ‘road less

travelled’? Or am I going to take ‘the easy way out’? The question comes all the

time. There was a banker in Zambia who was doing well, ‘climbing the ladder’,

‘upwardly mobile’! But she knew in her heart she was not satisfied. The work

brought her a comfortable life but no peace. She gave up her career and studied

psychology and became a psychotherapist helping countless people. She ‘lost’

her life and found it.

There are many people who make this good and generous choice each day and

let us celebrate them. Much of the time we can include ourselves! But the

yawning question remains. It goes on beckoning us. It is there in the elections

we have just endured. Do we settle back into our normal ways which disturb no

one, least of all ourselves? Or do we keep up the reaching, the searching, the

straining for something better. There is no authenticity without the cross. It

leaves a mark on every decision we make. We either choose the cross and find

‘life’ or avoid it and settle for a half-life.

A hundred years ago, James Joyce gave a terrifying description of a priest’s

sermon on judgement and hell to boys in a secondary school in his Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man. I hope no priest would do the same today! But I

suppose many of us have sometimes wondered about what our final exam will

be like! Will we get a warm welcome, a ‘well-done’, a Summa cum Laude, or

just a pass?! It will be a warm welcome but we still have to keep the question

always before our eyes: ‘can I lose my life each day and so find it?’

3 Sept 2023 Sunday 22A Jer 20:7-9 Rom 12:1-2 Mt 16:21-27

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.

NEXT YEAR IN MOSCOW

 

NEXT YEAR IN MOSCOW

Pages have been written on two brief statements in the gospel about surprise finds and the reaction of the finders. So excited are they, they sell everything to buy what they have seen. They are seized by a desire to possess them. Everything else is put aside. Nelson Mandela could perhaps have left prison earlier if he had compromised. But he didn’t. He had discovered a vision for South Africa and he was prepared to die for it.

Alexei Navalny is Russian and, like Mandela was, he has been sentenced, in practice, to life in prison in his own country. His health is failing from undernourishment and the conditions in his cell are much worse than those endured by Mandela. He is in solitary confinement, caged in a six square meter cell and his mattress is taken away at 5.00 a.m. The only furniture is an iron stool fixed to the floor. The light is never switch off and there is no ventilation.

His crime is that he speaks the truth about Russia and his message is that those who have the truth have the power. It may take a long time but one day Russia will be free and there will be no more war. From his prison cell, he says Russia should withdraw from every inch of Ukraine and use its oil revenues to rebuild the country. He believes Russia, like Ukraine, is gaining a new sense of national identity, from this war. ‘Change is possible’, he says, and a new generation of younger, poorer and angrier Russians is listening.  

‘Prison exists only in your mind’, Navalny says, ‘I am in a space capsule traveling to a new world.’ He knows he may not live to see it - Mandela would have thought in the same way – but the important thing is that it will happen. Navalny is a Christian but he also draws on the Jewish Torah, the epic journey of the Jews to the promised land. He borrows their saying – ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ -and makes it, ‘Next year in Moscow’.

Navalny has found the treasure, as Mandela did before him and as the two in the gospel did. They ‘sold everything’, risked everything, to gain what they discovered. They had found the truth and it was so attractive they were prepared to die for it. Truth is beautiful. The ancient Greeks knew this and the poets added, ‘beauty is truth’. When the world is seized by this, there will be no more war. There will be perfect peace.   

(The above draws on a series of nine astonishing podcasts from The Economist: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/next-year-in-moscow/id16707).

30 July 2023    Sunday 17 A     1 Kgs 3:5-12    Rom 8:28-30    Mt 13:44-46

THE WHEAT AND THE WEEDS

 

THE WHEAT AND THE WEEDS

There used to be a cartoon in The Herald featuring a delightful rogue called Andy Capp. One day he eyes a smartly dressed young lady and the local vicar happens to be passing and notices. He feels bound to remonstrate but before he can open his mouth, Andy says, “I know, Vicar, there’s so much good in the worst of us, an’ so much bad in the best of us, it is difficult to tell which of us ought to reform the rest of us, Eh?”

Jesus’ story of the wheat and the weeds makes the same point: ‘do not remove the weed now in case you pull up the wheat at the same time. Let them grow till the harvest; then the reapers will separate the good from the bad.’ We live a mixed reality. We would love everyone to obey traffic rules but they don’t: they cut in ahead of you, they over take on the left, etc. Louis Armstrong wrote a song ‘Oh! What a wonderful world.’ Well, it is not that wonderful. It is very messy.  

We find it in ourselves. We have many gifts and do well. But we are aware of our darker side: our selfishness, our avoidance of challenge, our judgement of others, etc. In this we are no different from famous people – even saints. In a recent short study of St John Henry Newman, Eamon Duffy, the Cambridge historian wrote; ‘Newman strove all his life for holiness but he had more than his share of human frailties. He could be tyrannical in friendship, he was thin-skinned and easily offended, slow to forgive, even at time implacable.’

It has been said that we have the ‘weaknesses of our strengths’. I used to work under the leadership of a Jesuit who had been a British officer in India during the war. He was a strong leader in the sense that he was focused on getting the job done. But he could trample on many toes in the process; leaving people angry, frustrated and with a feeling of being used.

In conclusion, we can say the wheat needs the weeds! In some mysterious way, opposition – even from within ourselves – brings out the best in us. Our journey to holiness calls us to make friends – not enemies – of our spontaneous negative reactions.

Christian asceticism today is no longer about flagellating ourselves but in integrating our passions into our personality in a way that reflects the values of the Beatitudes. Yesterday, we celebrated St Mary Magdalene. She was a shining example of this. It can be even harder to do than carrying out the exterior penances we were encouraged to practice in an earlier age.

23 July 2023   Sunday 16 A      Wis 12:13-19          Rom 8:26-27                Mt 13:24-30