22nd SUNDAY OF YEAR 2016

Did you read about one of the more recent “churches” to register itself in the USA? It made an appearance in 2002, and goes under the name “The Sons of Jedi.” Imagine; not a children’s game, or even a joke, but a real-life religion based on a Hollywood science-fiction series; adult human beings dressing up in exotic uniforms and saying “The Force be with you” to each other, together with whatever else it is they do.

On the one side, we can laugh at the idiocies to which a society without God will descend. On the other hand, crazy though it may seem, we could see this new “religion” as a desperate cry for help; people without God, looking for God, and in their desperation, trying out any trace of what promises to be some power greater than human beings, even the fantasies of a commercial movie.

In the late 1960s, Andrew Greeley, in his book the Persistence of Religion, described how occult religions were mushrooming on American university campuses where Christianity had been rejected. Why? He came to the conclusion that there is in man a deep-seated need to worship God, and that in the absence of Christianity, these strange cults were the nearest the students could come to communicating with spiritual powers greater than themselves.

A hundred years before, the great Cardinal Newman described man without God as “a great river cramped into a narrow channel”. Only God, he said, can “elicit the ten thousand senses of which a human being is capable”. Fifteen hundred years before either Greeley or Newman, St. Augustine said simply, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You, O God.”

Never in our history has there been an era like ours, when man has tried on such a grand scale to do without God. Never has there been such an era of darkness, death, destruction, squalor and hopelessness. And never before has man sought God in such a variety of twisted and monstrous forms, from the ugly cults of California to the ideologies of the east which have laid waste to whole nations and lands.

Man seeks and longs for God with all his heart. Man without God, a world without God, is a dry, empty husk. What the Psalmist recognises of himself is true of the whole modern world. "O God, you are my God, for you I long," he says. "For you my soul is thirsting."

This is not a general feeling that things are all right without God, but better with him. Without God there is a terrible emptiness, one which threatens life itself, for unquenched thirst leads to death. In even stronger terms, the psalmist restates the sense of desperate emptiness which is the lot of one who is far from God: "My body pines for you, like a dry, weary land without water." When we pine for something, or someone, we feel so empty at the lack that we cannot eat, sleep, think or talk about anything else. Our whole being is consumed when we pine. We endure an emotional emptiness which is so intense it becomes physical, and which leaves us in a state of weariness, of exhaustion.

Underneath all the brashness, sneering and apparent self-confidence of the godless, this is the real state of his heart, a state which can be brutally exposed when his support system is blown away. Man longs with all his heart for the fulfillment which only communion with God can give, whether he knows it or not. How blessed are we who to whom God has revealed himself. How blessed are we who can know him and love him in the person of Jesus Christ. God has asked us to be a light in the darkness, to spread his work through our own words, work and example. He has made us, his Church, his people, to be a light in the darkness. Let us take up this task today, as he has called us. Through us may he provide light in the darkness, fulfillment in place of emptiness and love in place of longing.

Fr Phillip

ASSUMPTION OF OUR LADY 2016

The Scriptures have much to tell of the Mother of Jesus, and indeed, much more to tell us when we study her very few words to us and the events surrounding her life.

The angel tells her, “Hail, full of grace”. This literally means “You who are already filled with grace,” for the Greek perfect tense in which it is expressed implies a present situation arising from something that has happened in the past. If Mary is “filled with grace,” there is no room for any sin within her. Mary’s flesh is already sinless when Jesus is conceived, so that he might truly be “One like us in all things but sin.”

From this follows the teaching that Mary never bore another child but Jesus. The Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time claimed membership of God’s holy chosen people by virtue of their genetic descent. John the Baptist tells them that this means nothing, that “God can raise up sons of Abraham from these very stones.” Our only claim to a relationship with Jesus is through baptism, by which we are reborn as adopted sons and daughters of God.

Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth her cousin, six months pregnant with John the Baptist, has a profound message to us as well. When Mary arrives and greets Elizabeth, Elizabeth says, “The moment I heard your voice, the child in my womb leapt for joy. How blessed am I to receive a visit from the mother of my Saviour!” The unborn John the Baptist recognises the presence of the barely conceived Saviour, Jesus. This should certainly make clear to us the preciousness of human life, and the evil of abortion.

Finally, there are Mary’s words to the angel and at the wedding at Cana. “I am the handmaid of the Lord; let what you have said be done to me.” An engaged fourteen-year-old girl accepting a pregnancy by no human agency; who would believe her? And facing a penalty of death by stoning? What faith to accept God’s call in the face of such a situation! Yet she did, and placed her faith, her life and her future completely in God’s hands.

The other, at the wedding at Cana, when Jesus turns water into wine, applies these words to our own lives. What an embarrassing situation at a Jewish wedding; to run out of wine! Mary knows that Jesus will act despite his reluctance, and tells the steward, “Do whatever he tells you!” — “…whatever he tells you!” A strong command, but one which saves the honour of the groom and allows the guests to continue to rejoice.

How often do we complain that God doesn’t help us, that he seems to leave us high and dry? But do we do whatever he tells us? Or only something of it, just in case God messes up and we have to take things into our own hands? Mary placed her all in God’s hands, and as a result her words “All generations shall call me blessed!” have become true in a way she could never have imagined. Like Mary, doing whatever God tells us might lead us to things we might never have imagined. And like Mary, we, too, will be blessed in ways beyond our imagination if only we would do “whatever he tells us.”

Fr. Phillip