REFLECTION FOR ALL SAINTS

“Judge not, that you will not be judged.” How often do we hear people saying that we must never judge others.” And how we misunderstand the meaning of this particular saying of Jesus! Jesus is talking to the leaders of his time, who were strict observers of the very complex Law of God, who regarded themselves as morally superior for keeping it in its entirety, and who looked down upon people who did not follow their very strict interpretation, Jesus included. In fact, they were not judging, but condemning their fellows.

Judgement is something quite different. The Greek word for a judge is dikaios, which comes from the word for righteousness. In English, the word judge means someone who justifies. When someone has committed a crime, he is brought before a judge, who decides on a penalty which will make peace between the offender and the society he has offended. In the language of an earlier era, when a man, say, had served six months in prison for burglary, he was said to have “paid his debt to society”. The purpose of legal judgement, then, is not to condemn, but to make peace, to reform, to save a man from himself.

This is the sense in which judgement is to be found in Christianity. We have all fallen short of the glory of God; we have all offended Him by sinning against Him. But God does not desire our punishment or destruction. He loves us, and wants us to come back to him with all our heart, in sorrow for sin. With God, judgement is for the purpose of salvation. As the old translation of the Second Preface for weekdays has it, “In love you created man, in justice you condemned him, but in mercy you redeemed him.” Notice the two terms surrounding justice: love and mercy. And there is not even any debt to be paid; the Lord Jesus paid the debt for all sins of all people in all times when he died on the cross as a sacrifice for sin. God’s purpose is summed up beautifully in the story of the women caught in adultery as told in John’s gospel: “Woman, has no-one condemned you?” “No-one, sir.” “Then neither to I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

The same applies to us. Paul warns us about condemning in Romans 8. But judging? If God did not judge us, then his mercy and forgiveness would be meaningless, since there would be nothing to forgive. Judgement is for the purpose of love and forgiveness. Do parents not judge their children when they do wrong? But they do not condemn their children; rather, it is a step on the path to goodness, to healing a broken relationship. We have to recognise when someone has gone wrong, if we are to be a means of their finding the right path. We often condemn without forgiveness, because we want to be rid of a person or institution in our lives. To repeat; judgement is not condemnation, but a step on the road to peace and forgiveness. And it is not the first step, either. It is merely the middle step. We begin with love; we end with mercy. In between, whether about ourselves or another, judgement is merely a recognition that something is wrong, joined to a desire to put things right. And the first person we should judge is – ourselves! God loves us, and wants to show mercy towards us. This is how we should be, too. Let us put aside condemnation, and seek the good of each other in love. Then everything else will fall into place.

Fr Phillip

REFLECTION FOR THE 30TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Some years ago now, a famous actor, who seemed to have everything, fame, looks, popularity, p

ublicity, wealth, friends and charm, quite unexpectedly committed suicide. His reason? As he put it in his suicide note: “I was so bored.” What does it mean, to be so bored that life is not worth living? To have the world at one’s feet, and to find it bland and tasteless?

“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus’ tells us in Matthew’s gospel. Consider first what salt means in our lives. Anyone who has been put on a low-salt diet will understand! Despite all the inventive substitutes science has offered, there is nothing to compare with good old-fashioned salt for bringing life and taste to food. Food without salt is about the most boring and bland thing one can imagine! Advertising agencies and business know well that it is one of the ingredients most responsible for the massive turnover and profit of the big fast food chains. Salt, literally, brings flavour and thus variety to life.

“You are the salt of the earth.” The disciple of Jesus has the same function in the world as salt has in food. Just salt brings out the fullness of flavour in food, so the disciple of Jesus is to bring out the fullness of meaning in the God’s creation. The world was created by God, and human beings can only really learn to understand, to love, to care for it if we become aware of the meaning and purpose with which God has invested it. When we grasp God’s plan for his creation, the world ceases to be a bland or indifferent place, and comes alive with colour, meaning and excitement. In the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” This is at the heart of Jesus’ message.

“You are the salt of the earth.” It is God’s plan to reveal the purpose his creation through the person of Jesus Christ. And in founding his Church, Jesus is calls us to be members of his very own Body. We are to be his presence in the world, through which he reveals God’s presence to everyone. God wants us to be the means by which all men to see the glory, his glory, which shines out through creation, leading us beyond that which we see to the Creator himself. 

Do you see yourself as one through whom the “grandeur of God” is revealed to the world? One has the uncomfortable feeling that we can be our own worst enemy in this task. Another British poet, Swinburne, wrote of Jesus: “Thou hast conquered, o Pale Galilean, and the world has grown grey with thy breath.”

If this is the image the Church really projects, then we have much to answer for. For we have been given everything that God could possibly give us. We know the great Creator of all, who saw that all he had made was good; we have been shown how any ugliness, any dullness in the world is not part of the nature of the creation itself, but of the grey and dull ugliness of sin, which we have brought upon it; and we have been entrusted with the glorious news of its redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ “for us men and for our salvation.” We know that God’s plan is for a renewal of creation, a restoration beyond even its initial beauty and goodness, to something unimaginably beautiful and holy.

If we are to be the “salt of the earth,” we must fulfil our God-given task of communicating the “grandeur of God” to those around us. For we know that it is Hopkins’ glorious vision, rather than Swinburne’s grey and colourless one, that is the truth. If we fail in our vocation as bearers of this vision, if we do not become the means through which God reveals his purpose and plan, then we, too, have become less than useless, like salt which has lost its taste. May God bless each one of us, and may he truly make us, in word and deed, the “salt of the earth,” so that all men, in the words of the psalmist, might “taste and see that the Lord is good.” 

Amen.

Fr Phillip

REFLECTION FOR THE 29TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Paul is for a large number of Catholics a closed book. We are used to the Jesus of the Gospels, which are usually the Scripture of choice for Sunday homilies. But the dense, almost indigestible chunks of Paul that form the main content of the Sunday Second Reading? What does he really have to say to us?

It is hard for us to conceive that Paul’s letters predate even the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, by at least five years. Paul was the great missionary, the one who spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, throughout the known world of his time. The Church, which wrote the Gospels between about 60-95 AD, had already been brought to faith in Jesus Christ by Paul’s missions and, his missionary letters which date from about 51 AD, which is when his earliest one, 1 Thessalonians, was probably written. When the Gospels, which we rightly reverence specially amongst the books of the New Testament, were written, they were received into a Church which had already been formed and won over to Jesus Christ by the great missionary work of Paul.

Paul’s language is dense, often difficult. Like the rabbi he once was, he thinks and argues in circles, coming back to the same ideas over and over in the course of a single passage. Yet it is Paul who holds so many of the keys to our faith. The Protestant churches are far more at home with Paul than we are, and very often, when Paul is preached in the Catholic Church, it is a Protestant convert who does so.

For Paul, Faith and the Holy Spirit are closely linked, since it is the Holy Spirit who convinces us in faith, and gives us an understanding of the Scriptures. But this power and wisdom also brings us into salvation. By being convinced of the truth in Scripture through the Holy Spirit, we are saved. And for Paul, faith is not some vague kind of belief, like the modern idea of “believing in yourself”. It is faith in “Christ Jesus”. This faith, as we have described it, is what brings us to bear fruit, the fruit of “every kind of good work”. This is important: it is this profound conviction of faith in Jesus Christ that brings us to bear the fruit of good works, not the other way round.

Paul calls us, in the same way, to stand firm in our faith, to believe in the truths of faith we have been taught from our youth. He calls us to allow the Holy Spirit to empower us with utter conviction that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, is Lord, and to be his unflinching witnesses in and out of season. He calls us to attend to the Scriptures that can teach us, refute error, correct us and discipline us.

If we are ever to the convince the world that Jesus is Lord, we have to believe it ourselves, and witness to it at all times. The world, though it might hate us, must be able to say of us, “they really believe in something” – or rather, “someone”. In the world in which we live today, it is time for us all to put aside the easy compromises we so often make, to lay down the exceptions to the Church’s teaching about faith in Jesus Christ which we reserve to ourselves. We all, lay people and priests, have to turn from our often half-baked faith and the indifferent, lukewarm witness it gives, and become, like Paul, utterly convinced. God will give us that gift of faith through the Holy Spirit, if we really ask him because we truly want this superlative gift he gives.

Let us all stand firm in that which have been taught, of which we are convinced. In the world in which we live, in the era in which we are called to witness, one which is not so different to Paul’s, that is our only hope.

Fr. Phillip

REFLECTION FOR THE 28TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Today’s second reading, from the letter to the Hebrews, gives us a clear picture of the nature of the word of God. For God’s word is not just sounds with meaning, as is the language we use. When God speaks, things happen; the power of his words carry out what they promise.

This is one of the first lessons of Genesis: “God said, ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light.” God creates through his all-powerful word. This is explained in some detail in Isaiah 55: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that for which I sent it.” In Hebrews, it becomes “sharper than a two-edged sword.” In other words, it becomes a word of judgement, by which truth and falsehood are separated and falsehood condemned.

Finally, “the Word became flesh, lived among us.” God’s word becomes a person, so that, in the words of Jesus to Philip, “he who has seen me has seen the Father.” Words communicate knowledge, and the Word of God which he reveals to us in Jesus is the fullness of his revelation to us. Beyond Jesus, God has nothing more to say to us, because in Jesus, he has said it all. The deeper our relationship with Jesus, the closer we will be to the Father and the more intimately we will know him.

Jesus, too is a the Word of Judgement. John tells us, in chapter 3 of his Gospel, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

This, in turn, tells us something about our response in faith to Jesus Christ. Faith leads to a judgement of salvation; unbelief to a judgement of damnation. Peter confirms this in his sermon on the first Pentecost Sunday, which is also the very first Christian sermon (Acts 2): “There is no other name in heaven or on earth by which we can be saved.” Pope Benedict XVI expressed this very powerfully in his instruction Dominus Iesus (The Lord Jesus). So important is salvation in Jesus Christ, he teaches, that even if someone who has never heard of Jesus Christ dies and gets to heaven, it is not because he is good or virtuous, but because the Lord Jesus died to take away his sins.

We are saved through faith in Jesus Christ. By this, the Word of God, Jesus, purifies us of all our sins and makes us fit to live with God forever. May we learn to know him more closely every day that in seeing him, we might see the Father, and live for all eternity with him.

Fr Phillip.

REFLECTION FOR THE 26TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

In the Book of Numbers, from which we read today, the elders of Israel are given the gift of prophecy when summoned before the Tent of Meeting in the desert. When God gives the same gift to two men left behind in the camp, the elders’ immediate reaction is indignation: “Who do these fellows think they are to usurp what is our exclusive right?” It is left to Moses to give the divine answer. Firstly, if God has given these two men the gift, who are mere human beings to deny it? Secondly, far from limiting the gift of prophecy and making it something small and exclusive, Moses expresses the wish that it were given to everyone. Moses’ longing, which reflects God’s action, is for universality rather than exclusivity.

There is a similar, even stronger message in today’s gospel reading. Jesus has called the Twelve and given them certain powers, including that of exorcism, the casting out of demons. When they find a man who is not a disciple doing the same, they are outraged, and want to put a stop to his activities; they, after all, are Jesus’ appointed disciples. He immediately redirects their thinking; the important issue is not who is “in,” but who is doing Jesus’ work. The fact that this man is not one of Jesus’ disciples does not prevent him serving Jesus. Jesus goes further to explain that the smallest service done for him, or in his name, is still truly an act of service to him.

Once again, the divine call is not to exclusivity and division, but to universality and solidarity. It is no accident that the incident around which this story is based is an exorcism; the clear message is that Satan will not be defeated if those who claim to serve God spend more time fighting and vying with each other than in fighting against the evil one. By stopping the outsider from performing his exorcism, the disciples are preventing the war against Satan from being fought!

This is a vital lesson for us today. In an increasingly secular world, which more and more is coming out into an open contempt for God and his kingdom, it is vital for Christians to stand together against the foe, and to stand united. We cannot allow the Church to be fragmented into little exclusive groups, each claiming to represent the real truth. We cannot refuse to work together with other Christians who stand as squarely against the foe as we. No-one who truly does the will of God can be against him. In Jesus’ own words: “He who is not against me is with me.” As long as we allow ourselves to be divided by our little human exclusivities, Satan’s kingdom will triumph over us.

But we must stand fast, and stand together. Within and without the Church, we must seek to co-operate with all who love the Lord Jesus and serve in his name. We need to work together; we need especially to pray together. May God, who loves us, who died for our sins and rose from the dead to give us life, free us from all evil and unite us in Christ for his own kind purposes. Amen.

Fr Phillip