REFLECTION FOR THE THIRTEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

In one of the well-loved stories from Mark’s gospel, we see Jesus on his way to raise up a little girl who “is not dead but sleeping.” The narrative of his journey is interrupted by another miracle, the healing of the “flow of blood” from a woman in the crowd surrounding him. The story sounds very graphic; whoever is recounting it saw what happened before his eyes, and remembers it vividly.

Yet all said, there is more to this story than meets the eye. The synagogue official is desperate about the fate of his sick little girl. But Jesus seems calm, collected and not at all in a hurry. When a messenger rushes on to the scene to tell the synagogue official that his daughter has died, Jesus’ only comment is the apparently inappropriate, “Do not fear, only believe.” When Jesus remarks, without even seeing the child, “she is not dead but sleeping”, he is laughed at. But by the words “Talitha, kumi” he raises her up and restores her to her without doubt thankful and joyful parents.

The word “kumi” is a Hebrew command which means “Arise!” It is the link with Jesus’ command to the synagogue official, “Do not fear, only believe.” It is the prelude to a conversion of heart, followed by the command “Shuv!” which means “Turn around!”, a 180º turn which takes us back in the direction from which we came. When the Prodigal son returns to his father from pig-keeping in a gentile country (the lowest to which a Jewish man of Jesus’ time could sink), he says to himself, “I will arise and go to my father and say, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you’!” Arise and go; kum and shuv. He has turned back from sin towards his father, as we are called to turn away from sin towards Our Father in heaven. When Jesus calls on the synagogue official saying, “Do not fear, only believe,” he is calling upon the man to believe in him. In the midst of the storms of life, Jesus brings calm. It is no doubt because the others scoffed that Jesus would not let them into the house. He required of them that they have faith in him because of whom he is, not merely because of the miracles he performs.

And yet, they already have an example in front of them before he even reaches the synagogue official’s house. The woman with the flow of blood does have faith in him, that he can heal her, that “If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.” Jesus, being whom he is, is aware of the healing that has just taken place; the whole crowd must have been pressing in against him, yet her touch is different because of her faith. In fact, his response to her is, “Your faith has made you well.” Yet despite seeing this sign and hearing his response about faith in their very presence, they scoff at his power to “wake up” the little girl. But even here, we must remember that to “fall asleep” is often a euphemism for death, which in turn tells us something about Jesus’ attitude towards death, to be destroyed by his Resurrection.

Jesus calls us, too, to believe in him, not because of miracles or even the “gospel values” (that dreadful term!) he teaches, but because of whom he is. We are called to have faith in him as a person, to turn away from our sins and to be converted back to him. Today’s stories abound with this message of faith and conversion. May they also become our own story, that his words may resound in our hearts: “Do not fear, only believe!”

Fr. Phillip

REFLECTION FOR THE TWELFTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

In our everyday experience, there is on some occasions a very great difference between truth and falsehood; so great that we are easily able to tell the difference. But there are other situations where truth and falsehood sound so similar that one has to look very carefully to see exactly where falsehood deviates from the truth. With religious truth, as with any other, this can be the case; for falsehood is a twisting of the truths of God, and as with a clever liar in a murder trial, untruths about God stick as closely as they can to the truth, deviating only where it is necessary so as to present an appearance of truth or innocence. One of the areas in which this occurs is discrimination.

In today’s world, there is a great concern with discrimination, be it against race, gender, religion, age or any number of other issues. We are powerfully opposed to and kind of discrimination. So, it is clear, is Paul in today’s reading from the letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.” All three pairs of examples were opposing groups in the world of Paul’s day. Paul is denying that they oppose one another. This sentence sounds, in some ways, like much of what is spoken by opponents of discrimination. And yet…

…and yet, how different this statement becomes if we include the phrase which follows it: “…for you are all one in Christ.” The whole meaning is turned on its head. For according to Paul, equality does not depend upon any human philosophy or theory, but upon Divine Revelation. It is because we are made one in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross to destroy sin and thus to end our enmities with one other, that we can be made one in him, that the true and permanent end to all discrimination lies. Through salvation in Jesus Christ, we are all made one as nothing else can make us one.

Does this mean that before Jesus came, this divine equality did not exist, that peace and unity between us was not a reality or a possibility? By no means! In the same Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we are told that God “...chose us in Christ, before the foundation of the world…his plan is to unite all things in Christ.” God’s plan, before he even created us, is that we should live together in unity, love and peace. He never intended us to discriminate against each other on any grounds at all. But his plan to unite us all is “in Christ.” There is no other basis on which it can happen, for there is no other way that we can be freed from the sin that sets us apart.

What does this say about the resentments we harbour in our hearts against other peoples; the discriminatory statements made by politicians and others based upon past history and events? How can we, who were destined to be one before ever we were created, hold on to such ideas? To “be one” is what God calls us to; in our Cathedral, in our Church, in our country, in the world. And if we are to be one as Jesus commands, then we must really let go of the past. But we can only do this if we have a more powerful future: and our future, as Pope Benedict XVI told the young people of Germany, “is Christ.” Every single one of us needs to relinquish the past and all its resentments, and boldly to enter the future with the Lord Jesus. He is our only hope, and strong in his power, and in that power alone, will we be able to “love one another as he has loved us.”

Fr Phillip.

REFLECTION ON THE ELEVENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is one of the most powerful testimonies in the New Testament to the centrality of Jesus Christ in our salvation. In a word, he is to us: everything.

Paul was a Jewish rabbi. To him, the Jewish law was everything. He would have obeyed every one of its commands. To use the familiar Jewish idiom, “Even to a rabbi he was a rabbi.” He pursued Christians to distant cities because he believed that they were blasphemers who deserved to be stoned to death. He could not conceive a life of holiness without obeying every tiny regulation of the Law. Yet here he is now saying that “By the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.” By justified he means being freed from all sin, made righteous in the sight of God. What could have made him take such a U-turn in his life?

Paul, after his tremendous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, realised how all-embracing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was, how totally sufficient it was for our salvation. If we still need the Law, he reckons, then the death and resurrection of Jesus is not sufficient. But, he says, this patently absurd. Jesus, to quote John, is “the Lamb of God who takes away (all) the sins of the world.” Paul may not have used those words, he may in fact not ever have read them, since they were probably written down after his martyrdom, but he would heartily have endorsed them, for Paul is saying the very same thing in his own way. Paul expresses himself in an extreme way in his letter to the Church at Philippi: “For Jesus Christ I have accepted the loss of everything, and I count all else as rubbish if I only can have Christ.” Where we read “rubbish” Paul actually uses the word “dung”. That is how uniquely Paul sees the role of the Lord Jesus in our salvation.

What does this mean for the Church in our time and place? A great deal. Modern people are so often caught up in “issues” such as “a green earth” or “justice and peace” or “a nurturing environment” that we no longer give preference to the Word of God. We try to hi-jack Jesus to our point-of-view, often by asking the question “What would Jesus have done/said?” after which we put our own opinions into his mouth. We no longer search earnestly after his truth in scripture and prayer. We seek out scriptures which confirm our prejudices; we use prayer to tell him what he should be doing. We do not ask him what he expects of us; we tell him what we expect of him. We say, with increasing frequency, “I can’t believe in a God who…” as though it is we who determine what God is, rather than discovering through faith who he is.

We need to find our way back to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who reveals himself to us in and through the person of the Lord Jesus, who died and rose from the dead that we might be freed from sin and death. If what he has done for us is really sufficient, then we should have no hesitations in following his mother’s advice to “do whatever he tells us.”  It is he who will give purpose, meaning and effectiveness to all the issues that confront us, not vice-versa. All these issues are thorns in the flesh that we suffer constantly in daily life. But in this especially we should follow Paul: “…there was given me a thorn in the flesh to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

His grace is sufficient for us. We will never resolve the world’s problems by own unaided efforts. But by his grace, and by it alone, will lasting, not to say eternal, solutions be found.

Fr. Phillip

REFLECTION FOR THE TENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Some of the most colourful stories in the Old Testament revolve around the prophet Elijah and his relationship with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. We tend to read the stories in isolation, and do not always see how they hang together.

Jezebel was what Israel considered a foreign bride. She was from Tyre, in modern Lebanon, and worshipped the pagan God Ba’al. Ahab was a weak king, and allowed her to make Ba’al worship the official religion of Israel. This met with very stiff resistance, for the God of Israel is, for the Jews, the only and only God. Ba’al was God of fertility, of rain and new birth. God therefore challenges Ba’al at his strength, and through Elijah prophesies a three-and-a-half-year drought.

The story ends with Elijah and the prophets of Ba’al contesting on the top of Mount Carmel to end the drought through their sacrifices. The prophets of Ba’al dance and chant and gash themselves all day around their altar, but nothing happens. Then Elijah rebuilds the broken-down altar of God, places wood and the sacrificed bull upon it and has water poured over it as a sign of his prayer for rain. He then offers a quiet, simple prayer, upon which lightning from heaven strikes and consumes everything on the altar. The people of Israel are convinced by this that God is the true god, and chant “Elijah! Elijah!” over and over – which means “The Lord is my God!” The drought is broken; rain pours from the heavens. Elijah, the true and faithful prophet, has been God’s instrument in breaking it.

Today’s First Reading, in which Elijah raises back to life the dead son of the widow who has been looking after him, is part of this cycle of stories. Ironically, the widow is of the same nation as Queen Jezebel, whose promotion of Ba’al worship has led to the drought in the first place.

There are two vital lessons in these stories for us. The first is that God is the only true God, and that we who have been privileged by his call to serve and worship him must, like Elijah, be faithful to him with all that is within us. God gave Elijah all that he needed to carry out his task against a cruel and brutal king and queen. In the same way, whatever he calls us to do, he will always provide what we need for the task, even if it seems daunting and impossible. In the words of the Angel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin, “All things are possible to God.”

The second is that, if we are not prepared to carry out the mission to which God calls us, then he will allow others to do what we should be doing, as he did with the foreign widow who cared for Elijah. It was not the Catholic Church that brought the thugs of uptown New York to Christ, but a solitary evangelical preacher called David Wilkerson, whose story is related in The Cross and the Switchblade. There are many other examples. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, it is true, did similar work, hauling out the unwanted poor from gutters and behind dustbins and giving them life, hope and dignity.

But what are we doing to witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ? All around us are people hungry for God, longing to hear his word. In the everyday world in which we live, what are we doing to bring them closer to God? God calls us to this, and we must respond if we are not to become less and less relevant to God’s mission for us to win the world for Jesus Christ. These are deep and important matters. We need to ponder them, and then to engage fully in the mission which God has given each one of us. 

Fr Phillip