GALILEE OF THE NATIONS

Why do Matthew and Mark speak so much about Galilee? And why does Jesus say, in reference to his rising from the dead, ‘I shall go before you into Galilee?’ It seems a distraction when we are talking of Easter and the Resurrection. Haven’t we left Galilee behind?

There is a clue, perhaps, in John’s gospel where Jesus tells Mary, ‘Do not hold on to me’, as she was clearly hugging him, ‘but go and tell my brothers and sisters I am going to my Father and your Father’. In other words, he seems to be saying, I am now able to build this relationship with the Father but you have to go and tell people about it and I will be with you. In fact, I go before you.

But go where? Galilee is the place where Jesus laboured. And we know it was a crossing place for trade. ‘All’ the nations passed by. Geographically it was a good place to start. But even more so, theologically it was the place to begin. ‘Recall all the things I did and said in Galilee,’ he seems to be saying, ‘but this time do so with rinsed eyes!’ In other words, let the reality of who I am, which you have now at last learnt in the resurrection, sink in as you remember all those things.

Understand the meaning. Realise that what I was doing was reaching out to all the nations, starting with the Jews, and opening for them the way to the fulness of life. When we read the history of the world, we realise that this work has been going on ever since. Every nation, every culture, is straining forward towards something. Often, they are on the wrong track and they end up in disaster. But overall, if we take a hard look at what is happening in the world today, we see people ‘groaning in one great act of giving birth’ to use the imagery of St Paul.

We are trying, for example, to make sense of this invasion of Ukraine by the Russians. We can find no reason, no justification, for deliberately killing thousands of people and destroying their homes and places of work.

Galilee, if you like, is the workshop of the nations where the carpenter is working away day after to day to carve a people presentable to the Father. Time and again the work turns out wrong and the carving has to be discarded. But each time something is learnt and progress is made. The destruction, waste and loss of life is terrible. Sometimes it is unbearable and seemingly senseless – like Calvary. But the great work goes on. No one can stop it. They can only delay it for a moment. The momentum, from the beginning of time is inexorable. Deep down, this gives joy to the human spirit. ‘Doubt no longer, but believe’, Jesus says to Thomas.    

24 April 2022, Easter Sunday 2, ‘Thomas’ Sunday.

THE DOORS WERE CLOSED

 

THE DOORS WERE CLOSED

‘The sun rises; the sun sets. The wind turns and turns again. The rivers flow into the sea but it is never filled.’ Qoheleth finds the repetition of days and years futile and ‘chasing the wind’. ‘All things are wearisome. There is nothing new under the sun.’

So, it is Holy Week again. So it is Easter again. So what is new? We have heard it all before. Perhaps some weariness comes to us as we see the same things repeated. Nothing seems to be new.

It takes attention on our part to stop and ask; ‘Is this really so? Is it really all weariness and repetition?’ Each Easter, each day, each moment is something new that we can explore, attend to, rise to. Everything is alive with freshness if we look hard. Easter is a door that opens on a new world if we can be explorers. ‘Unless you become like children …,’ says Jesus. Children are explorers. Everything is new to them. Can we be explorers this Easter?

Can we explore, for instance, what Jesus has just done in his Passion? We are told by Isaiah that ‘He made no resistance.’ This does not mean he was passive, like a ball, kicked this way and that, by opposing players. He submitted, yes, to his captors but we quickly sense that he is always in charge. His words to Caiphas, to Pilate, to the women, to Peter, are always the words of the Master. Everyone is silenced by him. There is a great strength about hum. He shows this by submitting. But all the time he is pushing back against lies, hypocrisy, fear, darkness, sin and death. He fights them to his last breath. And, although his body dies, his spirit triumphs. The person we call Jesus triumphs.

This is something new, staring us in the face: we can pass through the closed doors of sin, darkness, lies, hypocrisy. We can burst them open, discover our true selves, our new selves. If we are to follow him, we do not resist in one sense but we fight vigorously in another. Easter means we become new people. We don’t achieve it in one Easter alone. We have to return, Easter after Easter, each time coming closer to our goal. Each time opening the door wider and wider

It is a task far from chasing the wind. We have a goal, an end to which we are striving. We have a longing within us straining to be fulfilled, ‘striving towards the goal’ (Phil 3:11). ‘You are fighting the same battle which you saw me fighting’ (Phil 1:30). Each Easter brings us closer to our destiny.   

17 April 2022, Easter Sunday.

DESPISÉD, REJECTED

 

DESPISÉD, REJECTED

Once more we ‘go up’ to Jerusalem with the Jews of old to celebrate ‘the Pasch’. We do not go by foot or bus or plane and it is not for that ancient Passover. But we are invited to make the journey nonetheless. Once again, we will see him, in George Handel’s words in the Messiah, ‘despiséd, rejected’, (there are three syllables in both sung words of the aria) as he goes to his Passion, but this time in his people; mothers and children sheltering underground in Ukraine – or some girls in Zimbabwe schools.

Fr Lawrence Daka has cited a witness in a collection of essays on child protection whose report makes for disturbing reading.

         'On 15 March 2019, 145 secondary school girls from a renowned nun- owned Catholic girls’ mission boarding school in Zimbabwe, mobilised    themselves as early as 4am and walked seven kilometres to a nearby   police station to report rampant girlchild abuse in the school. … the story         sent shockwaves … some were shocked at the girls’ courageous action.         Others condemned the girls who they accused of tarnishing the image of       the school and the Church. … The local Church responded with silence     … symptomatic of the ills and challenges that have bedevilled what is       desirable of responsible, transparent and accountable leadership in the     Church and in society.

In another case of a school principal being convicted of raping a nine-year-old girl, the local faith and civil community was angry and said the girl, the police and the health professional were all lying and the women in the community were more aggressive than the men in condemning the girl.'

Abuse and cover-up. The words ring around the world but there is still resistance to responding to the pain and ruin caused to so many young or vulnerable lives. Victims still have to live their lives as best they can while carrying their untended wounds. Too many of us are not prepared to change our way of thinking.

The Passion of Jesus is not ‘something out there’ – a painful event that we remember for a while each year and then pass on. It is a searing reality of our human condition today which we can find hard to accept. It touches, if we allow it, the limits of our daily consciousness and invites us to reach further, beyond our comfort and security, to that unchartered territory where our own fragility is exposed.  Then we are really in the Passion, sharing with Jesus and our wounded sisters and brothers, the experience of being despised and rejected.     3 April 2020

  

COMING TO OUR SENSES

 COMING TO OUR SENSES

Few things are more moving than to see a family not giving up on an errant son

or daughter. The parents have brought up their child but when he or she

becomes a teenager, the parents have to stand back and leave them to make their

own decisions. Often, in the absence of strong family tradition, the young

person loses their sense of direction and lands up in desperate trouble. The

parents are shocked and distressed but there is little they can do if the young

person refuses help.

The point of Jesus’ story about the errant son, the prodigal son, is that the

parents do not give up. They wait. Anxiously, hopefully and prayerfully, they

wait for the moment when their child ‘comes to his (her) senses’, sees that the

mess they are in is self-inflicted and that the way out can also be self-activated.

The young man in the story has abandoned his family, his country and his

religion (he ends up working with ‘unclean’ pigs), but the father has not

abandoned him. He waits for him, his eyes glued to the horizon, watching for

his return.

The common assumption might be that the father scolds him, demands an

explanation and maybe disinherits him. But this father embraces him, says not a

word of condemnation and invests him with a robe, a ring and sandals –

symbols that he is now in an even high state in the family than he was before.

Luke is telling us Israel has torn up the contract made in the desert, wasted its

inheritance and abandoned its destiny. In the accounts of Jesus’ trial before the

Sanhedrin this is precisely what the high priest does. But God has not

abandoned Israel. He waits. When Ukraine jumps out at us every time we

consult the media, we feel the anguish of the people – particularly the children

and the mothers who try to care for them in the absence of their menfolk,

fighting on the front line. (The media chooses to bring Ukraine to our attention

but we constantly need to remember that there is a bitter war also continuing in

Ethiopia.)

We pray. But, in a sense, even God has to wait. He cannot intervene if his

‘teenagers’ fight. He has given them freedom and wants them to use that

freedom to find a way out of the mess. In some mysterious way we cannot

understand, he does help them to open their eyes and see a way forward. But

this help is dependent on a real desire on the part of those involved to be helped.

Finally, we hear that the story ends with a celebration, a win-win event of great

joy. It is not a reward, not a victory parade. It is a moment when everyone

rejoices as they recognise the father does not judge but welcomes his son who in

his turn has learnt so much that you feel he is now twice the man he was before.

27 March 2022 Lent Sunday 4C Josh 5:9-12 2 Cor 5:17-21 Lk 15:11-32

THE PROPHECY OF PRESENCE

 

THE PROPHECY OF PRESENCE

Each day I read the news and view the pictures coming out of Ukraine in the hope of some glimmer of movement towards a resolution of the conflict. And each day the situation just gets worse. There was a time when Europe was a theatre of constant war but we thought that ended with the 20^th century. Yet here we are again, in a war that has no reasonable purpose and which brings untold suffering to millions. Cardinal Michael Czerny has been sent with a colleague to visit Ukraine and express Pope Francis’ sorrow and closeness to the people.

Czerny says, ‘I go above all to meet people, to be with them: this is the prophecy of a presence and a closeness that may appear weak, even insignificant according to the logic of the world and the force of arms. But this is not the case: being close to his people, to his children who suffer, is the way that God has chosen to enter into the history of the world. Even at the cost of ending up on the cross. A symbol of this way of God is the great wooden crucifix that, in recent days, was moved from the Armenian Cathedral of Lviv and taken to a bunker in the hope of saving it from the fury and madness of war. In bunkers, cellars and improvised shelters there are many people who address their prayers to that crucified Lord.’ 

This is an agony for the Ukrainian people. And since it is up there, the first item on the news, every day we are constantly reminded of it. And we are utterly puzzled and saddened by the madness of it. Militarily the Russians are advancing but there is no way they will win the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people. So why do they even try? They cannot win this thing in the long run. No one ever accepts the loss of their freedom – even if they are forced to for a while.

The cardinal reminds us, ‘being close to his people … is the way God has chosen.’ A mother by the bed of her dying child can do nothing but be close to them. She shares in the suffering and our belief is that sharing and suffering is not in vain. Mary stood by the cross, weeping. But the time came when everything would become clear and her tears would be turned into joy. That time is still far off, it seems, for the people of Ukraine, of Tigray or anywhere else where people are suffering so much.

But we can ‘be present’ to them in the only way we can.

March 13, 2022      

MECHANICS AND GARDENERS

 

MECHANICS AND GARDENERS

Life goes on. We know the Russians have invaded Ukraine but what can I do about it? I can pray and that is good. But it is usually all I can do in such moments. Yet it helps to think about it. Our screens show burning buildings – not from some accidental fire but by the deliberate intention of people who do not seem to care about human life, about the suffering of children, about mothers becoming widows, about people starving and unable to keep warm in that harsh climate.

How is it possible, after all we have gone through in wars over the earth, that we still don’t put an end to war and solve our problems by listening and talking round a table? If we do listen, we learn that the Russians do have some reasons for their actions. They do feel threatened by the western alliance that has now extended to their borders.

After the Second Word War which ended in 1945, the Russians seemed intent on expanding westwards and the Americans and Europeans dreaded another war where they would have to fight, not Germany, but Russia. An American diplomat in Moscow, called George Kennan, understood the Russians and that they had always felt threatened and wanted to expand their influence in order to feel secure. Kennan wrote a famous ‘long telegram’ to his superiors in Washington proposing the Americans display their power but hold back from any threat of action.

Later he explained,  

‘We must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs. We must realize that we did not create the forces by which this process operates. We must learn to take these forces for what they are and to induce them to work with us with understanding and sympathy, not trying to force growth by mechanical means, not tearing the plants up by the roots when they fail to behave as we wish them to. We do not need to insist that change in the camp of our adversaries can come only by violence.’

These have always struck me as wise words. To be a mechanic is to impose your will on a machine and make it do what you want. To be a gardener is to recognise the built-in nature of the plants and work with them in the hope of producing the results you hope for.

The Russians do have a problem. But we can lament that they did not ‘work with’ the people they considered threatened them. It is not my wish to start an argument over the rights and wrongs of this crisis. It is too sad for words. As we enter this precious period of Lent, we can lament this tragedy and try in our own way to be gardeners in all the relationships in which we are engaged.     (6 March 2022)

 

 

 

 

 

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

 

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

The doctor’s waiting area had four entrances. The wooden floor was old but polished. Nurses and patients came and went, all intent, in a steady unpredictable flow. They shared a common purpose of healing or being healed and a common humanity. They formed a temporary community of transitory connections. Without saying so, they wished each other well. They got on with the silent thoughts or their texting. The atmosphere was charged with unspoken anxiety. Like waiting for exam results or the verdict of interviews.

It was a provisional community. In another place, at another time, they would have chatted and learnt each other’s business.  They would have broken the silence and allow connections to develop. They would have revealed who they are and what were their hopes.

          The orchard where the tree grows is judged on the quality of its fruit,

          Similarly a person’s words betray what he feels.

 

So speaks Ben Sirach and he goes on: we cannot praise a person until we hear them speak. Words are like those daubs of paint that build up the whole picture. And they reveal whether the picture is full of promise or threat. When Jesus came, he spoke extraordinary words, words that penetrated the meaning of this planet. Yet they were simple words, easy to understand, like the instructions on a medicine bottle. ‘Lose your life and you will find it.’ They were words full of hope.

 

Easy to understand but so hard to learn. The Russians have invaded Ukraine. All the words they used in the build up pronounced they are acting in self-defence. A powerful country attacking a weaker one in self-defence? It is overwhelmingly sad. There is now so much anger at this situation, so much pain and sadness. It forces us back to the words of Jesus and calls us to pray. In quiet personal prayer or in public or on the internet or whatever way. People are losing their lives and those who remain live in fear. All because we ‘cannot lose our life – in the sense Jesus means - and so find it.’

 

Can we imagine what the world would like if we could live these words? All our doctors’ waiting rooms, sports grounds, musical venues and theatres of war – are the raw material of our relating to one another. There are so many opportunities to choose to reach out to others or, on the contrary, think only of ourselves. This attack is a huge step back for humanity. After all we have been through, we cannot see it, even ‘through a glass darkly’.

 

27 February 2022