REFLECTION FOR THE 25TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Have you ever noticed how we commit the same sins over and over again, rather than different ones all the time? There is a reason for this. Sin leaves its mark upon us, rather as red wine does when spilled on a white tablecloth. The cloth can be washed clean, but the stain remains. It takes a lot of rubbing and stain remover to get the cloth white again. In the same way, the stain that sin leaves on us has to be scrubbed away, or it will cause us to commit the same old sins over… and over… and over…

The Church has traditionally identified seven of these “stains” of sin. Three have to do with love of others’ harm: pride, where we push ourselves up at others’ expense; envy, where we hate another for having something we want but do not possess; and wrath, uncontrolled anger directed towards another, which can be active or passive (sulking). There are three in which we turn our love away from God himself and towards the objects he has created; lust, gluttony and covetousness, which is longing for the possessions or gifts that others possess. Between these comes sloth in which, though we don’t actually do something bad, we somehow never get around to doing what we should. As Philip Neri put it, “When shall we begin to do good?”

How can we deal with these sins? From earliest times, Israel had three practices which the Church has accepted into its life; fasting, prayer and almsgiving. Fasting means taking control of our bodies’ incessant demands for comfort and indulgence. By saying “No!” to our physical side, we take control of our lives. In prayer, we turn away from self and allow our relationship with God to be restored. In almsgiving, we turn away from self to restoring our relationship with those around us. All of these are aimed at turning us away from turning our lives inwards on ourselves, and outwards towards self-forgetfulness, love of God and love of neighbour. And in doing this, we are making it possible for God to enter our lives and to scrub away at the stain of sin within us.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus draws his disciples away from envy and pride towards humility and self-forgetfulness. He sets the relative unimportance of a small child against the desire for self-importance among his disciples. He calls us to do the same. We should be able to rejoice in the gifts God has given us, and at the same time to rejoice in those of others, even when their gifts are greater than ours. But we need, too, to live out those familiar but forgotten old practices of fasting, prayer and almsgiving as a path to holiness. In the words of David, “O purify me, then I shall be clean. O wash me until I am whiter than snow.” May David’s longing become a reality in the lives of each one of us.

Fr Phillip.

REFLECTION FOR THE 24TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

This Sunday’s First Reading is from the Prophet Isaiah. But it is a rather special reading for Christians. To understand this, we need to take a brief look at what is the longest book of prophecy in the Old Testament. Isaiah falls quite neatly into three sections: Chapters 1-39, chapters 40-55 and 56-66. These are often, for convenience, referred to as First, Second and Third Isaiah.

First Isaiah contains the famous prophecies of the Messiah’s birth, of “Emmanuel; a name that means ‘God-with us’”. We all recognise passages such as “A maiden is with child…for unto us a child is born, a son is given…and they shall call him ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’” We hear these words every year at Christmas time. Third Isaiah contains some of the glorious readings we hear after Christmas on feasts such as the Epiphany, with the visit of the Magi, in passages that remind us of the Star of Bethlehem: “Arise! Shine out! For your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you!”

But Second Isaiah is quite different. It contains, amongst much else, four Songs of the Servant of the Lord, which increasingly reveal him as a Suffering Servant. The fourth of these we always read on Good Friday, and its Christian application is unmistakable: “A man of sorrows and familiar with suffering…so disfigured did he look that he seemed no longer human…on him lies a punishment that brings him peace, and through his wounds we are healed…”

Today’s first reading is the third of these Songs of the Servant of God. It presents him as being falsely accused before the authorities of his people, despised, insulted and humiliated, but nevertheless confident that whatever he has to suffer, God will ultimately vindicate him.

Take up your Missal when you have a quiet moment, and read through this passage slowly. For a Christian it resembles so much the trial of Jesus before the Council of his own people; for he was not tried by foreigners, but by those who should most have understood whom he is, who should have recognised him when he came, but did not do so; his own people, and their leaders at that, who really should have known better.

But we should also look to ourselves. When taxed that he had portrayed the Jews as Christ-killers in his film The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson replied, “If I were to say who crucified Jesus, I’d begin with these,” and held up his own hands. In the film it is, in fact, his own hands that hammer the nails into Jesus’. The leaders of Israel may have been instrumental in securing Jesus’ crucifixion, but we must never forget that he is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” And that means our sins; all of them.

Yes; it is our sins that nailed him to the cross. But God does not hold this against us. He wants us to come to repentance for sin, to turn back to him and seek the forgiveness that Jesus alone has won for us by his death and resurrection. Failure to do this empties the cross of Christ of meaning in our lives. “Seek the Lord while he is still to be found!” counsels the same prophet Isaiah. There is nothing more important in our lives. In the prayer of Jesus to be found in the lines of poetry affixed by the composer Gustav Mahler to the beginning of the last movement of his Third Symphony, “Father, look upon these wounds of mine. Let not one of your creatures be lost to you!” May it be so.

Fr Phillip.

REFLECTION FOR THE 23RD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Some years ago it was fashionable to seek human explanations for the miracles of Jesus. For example, according to this kind of thinking, there was not really a miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes when Jesus fed the five thousand. What happened was that Jesus persuaded the crowd to be unselfish and to share what they had already brought with them.

But this hardly squares with the reactions of Jesus’ disciples, or of the crowd. The people recognised the Messianic power of Jesus to provide in plenty and wanted to make him king by force, so that Jesus had to escape from them. Clearly, the crowd’s strong reaction is not the consequence of a mere exhortation to share on Jesus’ part; it is the response to something tremendous which actually happened, something so tremendous as to provoke their extreme reaction.

These expectations of the Messianic age are to be found in the Old Testament long before Jesus’ time. The people of Israel expected that, when the Messiah came, there would not be only miracles, but a complete transformation of the earth as they knew it: “…waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.”

This is something far more than the human miracles with which today’s Old Testament reading begins. It is nothing less than the restoration of Paradise, the Garden of Eden, replacing the hot, sandy deserts which were are still the  familiar surroundings of the Middle East. It is the vision of a new earth, a new creation. God does not just restore to Israel its kingdom; he returns earth to the condition in which it was before the Fall.

In Jesus, this becomes a new heaven as well as a new earth. John, in the book of Revelation, sees this in a glorious new Jerusalem; he sees it, in fact, as a wedding, with the new Jerusalem as the Bride and the Lamb, Jesus himself, as the bridegroom. Heaven is joined to earth in Jesus, and God lives permanently amongst men, their light in place of sun and moon, their Temple in place of stone buildings.

In Jesus, the miraculous cannot be limited to the kind of little human gestures described in the first paragraph of this reflection. God has as his vision the transformation of the whole creation into something new. He will transform our hearts, too, making us fit to live in this new creation. Let us take heart, then. God is not about to make a few little adjustments in order to make our present world a better or nicer place; he plans a new world, a transformed world, a world so beautiful and good that it is beyond our powers to imagine it.

Fr Phillip