ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT - 2017

Why is there suffering and evil in the world? Why is it necessary for us to die? Is death the end of all things? These are questions that must have been in the minds of Mary and Martha when their brother died. All human beings ask them at one time or another.

Jesus speaks of his own death in terms of a grain of wheat. Unless it falls to the ground and dies, he says, it remains a single grain. But if it falls and dies, it produces a rich harvest. It is a singular fact that a grain of wheat produces many times its own weight in growth; the wheat plant itself, and finally the harvest, where from one grain, many ears of wheat are the harvest.

In this simple example, Jesus shows how much power there is in his death. There is not one little grain left to rot in the ground. That grain which dies, bursts forth with life, a harvest out of all proportion to what it was before it was planted. Jesus’ death and resurrection brings forth that kind of life.

Jesus’ saying answers the very deep questions to which human beings seek answers. The “Why?” of suffering and death is beyond our understanding. Even Jesus, the Sinless One, had to suffer and die. We, who are sinners, must also die. But the answer of God in Jesus goes much further than a simple “Why?” For it shows that there is a meaning to suffering and death. Jesus’ suffering and death brings forth power and life. Like the grain of wheat, life is an inevitable consequence of Jesus’ death. That life is the destruction of evil. It is given to all who believe in His name.

Whether we are given eternal life or not, according to John, depends upon whether we believe or refuse to believe in Jesus, and thus in God who sent him. If we refuse to believe, he will respect our desire to be without Him for all eternity, and the power of His saving death and resurrection will do us no good at all. In believing, we choose the glory of Jesus, the life He promised to all who believe in his name. God does not merely explain the world to us; He changes it for us. All our suffering, all the evil we encounter, the death which is our lot, are given meaning. Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, all these things are rendered powerless over us. Our own suffering and death become a path to light and eternal life, if only we believe in his name.

Fr Phillip.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT - 2017

The healing of the man born blind. Front, Jesus heals the man. Left, the Scribes and
Pharisees look on in disapproval. Right, the man washes his eyes and regains his sight.

Speaking of cruelty and evil, the great GK Chesterton once wrote: “If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.” (Orthodoxy) When one reads some of the ludicrous attacks on Christianity in social media such as Facebook, one cannot but be reminded of Chesterton’s amusing comment.

But this problem is much older than we think. We find it amongst the leaders of Jesus’ people in today’s gospel, in the healing of the man born blind. They do not want to face the implications of Jesus’ work, which would lead them into having to accept Jesus as what he claims to be; the Son of God. For them this is a blasphemy. As a result, they try to deny the existence of the miracle by undermining the evidence of its having happened.

The man who was healed and his parents are interrogated. The parents are too afraid to say too much, in case they are expelled from the synagogue. The man born blind sticks to the one indisputable fact: “I only know that I was blind, but now I see,” he says. When the Pharisees try to discredit Jesus, the man born blind laughs at them. “He opened my eyes, but you don’t know where he comes from!” In other words, Jesus’ actions prove him to be the Messiah. The leaders accuse Jesus of being a sinner for healing on the Sabbath. Since God does not listen to sinners, the healing could not have happened. They accuse the man born blind of being a sinner; being born blind means being born cursed by the Law, so that his evidence is inadmissible. In fact, far from investigating the miracle, they do everything in their power to AVOID doing so.

But the man born blind sees and believes. HE is drawn to recognise Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus, the Light of the World, has given him not only the light of vision, but also the light of faith. And Jesus applies this lesson to the leaders. They have vision, he says, but their refusal to accept an undeniable miracle and therefore accept Jesus for whom and what he is, makes them spiritually blind. And in that spiritual blindness, it is THEY, and not the man born blind, who are the real sinners.

How often are WE blind to the wonders that Jesus works among us, within us, because what he does and what he calls us to be, does not suit us? We must not cling to our own dark little vision of reality. We must invite Jesus to take away our spiritual blindness, so that we can recognise him as the Lord and see the world as He sees it; so that we may follow him wherever he leads us.

Fr Phillip.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION - THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT - 2017

Model of the Jewish Temple at the time of Jesus.

“Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.” But he spoke of the temple of his body.

During the long period of time between the Exodus and the time the Jews entered their Promised Land Israel was, as in the days of Abraham their father in faith, a nomadic people. Its homes were tents. As it moved from place to place, the action of “pitching one’s tent” was a common one. In the midst of the camp of Israel was the biggest and most important tent of all, the “Tent of Meeting”, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, and where the altar was raised for the purpose of offering sacrifice. The Tent of Meeting was the place where God made his presence specially known, the place where Israel went to seek counsel. If one sought to be especially close to God, it was to the Tent of Meeting that one made one’s way.

The tent became a symbol of human life itself. To unpitch one’s tent meant to die. To pitch one’s tent meant to be born, to take up residence, so to speak, in the community. Even after David the king had built himself a magnificent palace in Jerusalem, the Ark of God continued to be kept in a tent. The Temple, when first built in Jerusalem, was based upon the design of the Tent of Meeting. The nomadic image of a tent being put up and struck, also represented the transience of human life. It reminded Israel that human life was but a temporary thing, that our real life lay hidden with God.

This idea persisted into the New Testament. Paul, a former Jewish rabbi converted to Christianity, was by profession a tent-maker, and refers to the human body as a tent in 2 Corinthians, the passing flesh which will be replaced by a glorious body at the Resurrection. And the profoundest and most powerful reference to the human body in this way comes in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, words we know as, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”, literally “he pitched his tent among us.” For we are a nomadic people on a journey to our Promised Land, to eternal life with God, and in this image Jesus, like us, took on flesh and became one of us. He not only lived amongst us; he became, in the fullest sense possible, one of us.

And now, Jesus’ words, “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up,” reveal their true meaning. Jesus the Son of God has, like the Tent of Meeting, pitched his tent amongst us. He has become present amongst us in the fullest sense, as one of us. He has become, amongst us, “veiled in flesh”, transient flesh that, like ours, must die, to be raised from the dead in glorious form. He has assumed to himself the very Temple of the Lord for, as he tells the woman at the well in Samaria in today’s gospel reading, the time is coming when we will worship him “in Spirit and truth”, that is, wherever his presence is to be found. His glorious body is to replace the Temple in Jerusalem.

The Greek word luo, which he uses when he speaks of destroying the Temple, is also the word used to describe the decaying of a body in the grave, ontbinding, as it translates so neatly into Afrikaans. But even here it says more than the English reveals. For the sense of the statement, “Destroy the Temple, and in three days I will rebuild it”, is not a statement, but a command. “Destroy this Temple!” he commands them, as though that is what they have been doing all along by turning it into a “den of thieves” with their crooked market. Destroy this Temple – it doesn’t matter. It is in my resurrection that it will be raised up, and the new Temple will be my Body.

This is a great warning and a promise to us. It is not the stone Temple of Israel that will be raised up, but the temple of glorious flesh that will be our resurrected bodies. Do we want to be raised to live with God for ever in glory? Because if so, we must live as though our very beings are a “house of prayer.” If we turn ourselves into a “den of thieves” through unrighteous living, through immorality, through abuse of substances, be they alcohol or drugs, through crooked dealings and dishonest living, then we can expect his righteous anger over us as well. We cannot turn ourselves as human beings into such a thing and still expect God to accept us as one of his own. 

“My house shall be called a house of prayer,” he says. In other words, we must allow him, through the power of his Spirit welling up within us, to make of each one of us a place where he is worshipped in Spirit and truth. We must become living stones in the building of his living Temple. Where two or three are gathered in his name, he must truly be present in us, in Spirit and in truth. Can we truly and honestly say that each one of us is serving him like this? If not, it is time for us to make some major changes in the way in which we live.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT - 2017

In this icon of the Transfiguration Jesus, transfigured and shining like the sun, is seen speaking with Elijah on his right and Moses on his left. In the foreground are Peter, James and John. To the left of the icon, Jesus leads his disciples up the mountain before the event and right, He warns them as they descend, to tell no-one that He is the Messiah.

In last Sunday’s gospel reading the devil, having tempted Jesus and failed, “left Him, to return at the appointed time”. In today’s gospel, the disciples are warned to say nothing of the Lord’s Transfiguration “until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.” These are two of the many places in the story of Jesus in which time plays an important role. Not time in the sense of the days, hours, months and years by which we measure the passing of our lives. Time here means the right or wrong moment, what we might today refer to as the “timing” of an event. This kind of time only makes sense if there is a plan behind it, for how, otherwise can timing be right or wrong? In Jesus’ case, the plan is God’s one for his whole creation.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son, born of a woman.” This means not only that Jesus’ birth occurs at the right time, but also that it is so important that all other events are meaningless next to it, or that they acquire their meaning from this event. And in John’s Gospel, the Hour of Jesus is equally important; for it refers to the even more important event of His saving death. At the Last Supper Jesus says, as Judas leaves to betray him “Now the Hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Jesus’ “Hour” happens in the swift and violent action of His last few days on earth.

One of the most striking of these is revealed by comparing Jesus’ Temptation with the Way of the Cross. At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus is tempted three times by the devil, and three times the devil is rebuffed by Him. The devil goes away, to return at the appointed time. The appointed time, his “Hour” is, of course, that of Jesus’ suffering and death, the time of the reign of darkness, and also of its destruction. Jesus did not fall before the tempter in the desert, but He falls three times on the road to Calvary. But Jesus is not giving in to sin; He is staggering under its unbearable load as He fulfils his destiny to be “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Jesus himself is the ultimate fulfillment of God’s Plan for us, when the fullness of time had come. In Jesus, God’s meets us at the crossroads and calls us to follow Him down the path He has taken. But we need to remember that His path crosses ours, for the paths we map out for ourselves are rarely the paths he follows. When we meet Him at the crossroads, His invitation is always the same: “Follow me.” These are the “times” in our life; these are the “hours” when we, too, are called on to make crucial decisions, decisions which cannot be delayed: to follow Him, or go our own way.

Crossings converge and then diverge; the longer we wait, the further away from us he moves. “Yes, Lord, I’ll follow you, but not just yet” is not an adequate answer, for by the time we are ready for Him, we may no longer be able to find Him. When His path crosses ours, it is a “now” moment. At such moments, Jesus requires an immediate answer, and we need to find the faith and courage to follow Him wherever he leads us. 

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT - 2017

Every year, on the First Sunday of Lent, the gospel of the temptations is read. Mark’s gospel is the shortest, telling us briefly that Jesus was in the desert for forty days being tempted by the devil. Luke and Matthew, from whose gospel we read today, tell a more detailed account. In both, the devil appears to Jesus in what appears to be material form, and presents him with three temptations. In each, the devil tries to convince Jesus by quoting scripture to Him. In each case, Jesus rebuts the devil with his own quotations from scripture.

What is the meaning of these temptations for us? One very important point is that Satan does not always tempt us with a stark choice between good and evil. In fact, this rarely occurs. He is more likely to tempt us to what may seem little compromises of our faith, then to lead us progressively further away from the truth in little steps that seem almost harmless in themselves, but which mount up and gradually increase our distance from God, until we have lost sight of Him. Satan does not particularly want us to become mass murderers or armed robbers or spectacularly evil people; in fact, this might blow his cover. Anything will do for him, no matter how small, so long as it separates us from God, and little step by little step will suit his purposes just as well as dramatic breaks with God, as long as he can draw us progressively away from Him. In fact, this suits him better; the less his work in separating us from God is noticed, the more chance he has of succeeding.

He tempts Jesus like this. To compromise His powers to feed himself, that is, to use them for his own comfort rather than the purpose for which God has given him. To perform a spectacular feat of power by jumping off the Temple wall and letting the angels save him; in other words, to take a superficial short cut to winning people to God. To be given the whole world for one small act of worship, for Satan is the Prince of the world; as King Lear puts it, what if one could gain the whole world for one small sin? But Jesus knows that even the smallest act of worship of Satan is a betrayal of God, and a deadly one, and refuses point blank.

The gospel shows us that scripture can be misused; the devil can quote the Bible with the best of them. But he abuses it for the purposes of damnation, whereas Scripture is for our salvation. But most of all, it shows us how dangerous are even the smallest compromises of God’s truth: “Man does not live by bread alone…you shall not tempt the Lord your God…worship the Lord your God alone.” This Lent, let us search our hearts for all the small (and large) compromises we make with God’s truth, and let us come back to Him and serve Him, and Him alone.

Fr Phillip.