ORAT0RIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - 2017

Michelangelo's famous image of Isaiah.

The second part of the Book of Isaiah the prophet is very special to Christians. It contains, amongst much else, four Songs of the Servant of the Lord, which increasingly reveal him as a Suffering Servant. The third of these Songs of the Servant of God presents him as being falsely accused before the authorities of his people, despised, insulted and humiliated, but nevertheless confident that whatever he must suffer, God will ultimately vindicate him.

For a Christian, this song 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.

We should look carefully towards ourselves when considering this scripture. 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.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

Some years ago it was fashionable to seek human explanations for the miracles of Jesus. For example, according to this trendy kind of thinking, there was not really a miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, when Jesus fed the five thousand. What really happened (the trendy said) 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. They responded quite differently. They 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.

This is something far more than mere human kindness. In Jesus, the miraculous cannot be limited to the little human gestures described in the first paragraph of this reflection. God really has broken into our reality in Jesus, and his miracles and signs show the real power of God to transform our human reality, to intervene in this world of want, of sin and of suffering.

When God intervenes, we are healed; we are fed; we are even raised from the dead. Where God reigns, there is no more sin, no more suffering, no more shame, no more deprivation. His miracles, of whatever nature they are, are glimpses of a new creation, pure and holy, in which we all are transformed, in which we all do his will at all times. Even now, we can share in the promise of that reality. Even now, if we learn to love and obey him with all our hearts, we can glimpse the wonderful future he has in store for each one of us.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: 22ND SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

Dr Louis Pasteur, famous French scientist and devout Catholic. A journalist once asked him, "Dr Pasteur, how is it that you, one of the greatest scientists of our age, have the religious faith of a Breton peasant?" Pasteur replied, "What you say is true. But I hope that one day it will be different. I hope that one day, I will have the faith of his wife."

There is, on YouTube, a series of about forty episodes called People who Changed the World. What is interesting, is the people that have been chosen. All seem to be amongst the darkest and most evil in the world: Mass murderers like Pol Pot of Cambodia, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia or Kim Jong Il of North Korea. They are people who have created darkness and misery and death for millions of people. They have certainly changed people’s lives through hardship and suffering. But the strangeness is that they have made no real contribution to the world. People have been wounded, physically, emotionally and spiritually by them, but as time passes, the world always seems to recover from them. They are here today, gone tomorrow, and eventually ordinary people just forget them as generations pass. Soon, like Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem, little remains of the might they have conferred about themselves but mouldering ruins.

Nowhere in this series does one find the great and good; scientists like Louis Pasteur, for example, whose work still benefits billions of people worldwide. Nowhere does one find the great reformers of labour laws, prisons, medicine and nursing. Nowhere do the great abolitionists of slavery feature. Great humanitarians like St Theresa of Calcutta are conspicuous by their absence. There is an unbridgeable gap between the monsters presented in the series, who changed times and places, albeit drastically, for a while, and those who brought the light of God to bear upon the world.

For this is the great difference. The murderous and violent figures in the series all started with a vision for a godless heaven on earth. When they began to fail, as such visions always do, their proponents attempted to shore them up and force their continuance with ever increasing control and violence, until the systems became more oppressive and brutal than the ones they were supposed to be replacing. They replaced love and justice with oppression and fear. They failed to deal with the one thing that could have made the difference; human sin, both within and around them. And they lacked the one thing that could have made the difference: God’s redeeming love, as He communicates it to us through the death of Jesus on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead.

Without God to heal, us, we carry around with us, sin and its consequences, and no matter what we attempt, sin stains and pollutes it. We need to be redeemed, to be made “whiter than snow.” (Psalm 51) It is those who were close to God, who loved him above all things, who have really changed the world. The horrors inflicted on Romania by the Ceauçescus lasted for 25 odd years, and the country is recovering from them. What they did has passed into history. But the efforts of William Wilberforce in the emancipation of slaves is with us still, and the world has been transformed forever by the work that God achieved through his faithfulness.

It would be wonderful were we to be able to make a counter-series about “People who REALLY Changed the World, and to tell the stories of people such as William Wilberforce, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, St Peter Claver, St Theresa of Calcutta, Archbishop Romero and a host of others. But perhaps it is not necessary. God has seen their work, and the world has benefited by it. What will the contribution of each one of us be? Great or small, each one of us has a very definite task to do for God, and even the smallest can change the world without even knowing it. May each one of us respond to his call, and carry out that task to the very best of our will.

Fr Phillip.ere is, on YouTube, a series of about forty episodes about people who changed the world.

ORATORIAN COMMUNITY IN FORMATION: 21ST SUNDAY OF THE YEAR - 2017

The Last Judgement, by Michelangelo, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Do you remember, as a schoolchild, being given an assignment for the following week; how far away it seemed? There was so much time before the task had to be handed in; there was no hurry. And then, suddenly, it was the evening before due date, and there just was not enough time to do it justice. As a result, you either had to make a lame excuse as to why it was not done or face the equally unpleasant consequence of a poor mark for a rushed job. Did you ever wish, in such a situation, that you had not wasted the time of the previous week when you could have been preparing thoroughly for the due date of that task?

In the letters of Paul to the communities of the early Church, there is always a sense of urgency. The day of the Lord could come at any moment; are you ready to meet him when he comes? In Paul’s era, the expectation was that the Lord could come again at any moment; He was, in fact, expected to return quite soon after his Ascension. As time passed, they realised that this was not the case, that Jesus’ return might be quite some time later than originally expected.

This did not alter the urgency with which they regarded his return. Like the early Christians, we do not know when or how Jesus will return, only the fact that he will, that it will be unexpected; as the Lord himself put it, “It is not for you to know the times or places”. Paul is quite clear, as is Jesus himself in the Gospels, that we must be ready to receive the returning Lord whenever he might appear. The only way to do this is to be ready to receive him at all times. A half-baked, rapid prayer at the last moment may not be enough if our hearts are not prepared to receive him.

Paul encourages us to be ready through our love and attention to prayer, our care for one another, our dedication to supporting and encouraging one another in readying ourselves for his coming. He urges us to prepare “with all our hearts.” There is no such thing as a “basic minimum” to get into heaven; we are either all for Jesus, or not at all. In our daily lives let us heed Paul’s wise words, and in everything that we do, let us keep ourselves ready to receive Jesus, whenever he might return.

Fr Phillip.