It’s all one, really

Sunday 31B 31^st October 2021

[Deuteronomy 6: 2-6, Mark 12:28-34]

Tibetan Mandala: The Cosmos

A favourite game when we were children was to claim, rather selfishly, that we had the best toy, or marbles, or collection of weeties-cards or whatever else, among all the kids in our group. Comparing and ranking things in this way is an essential part of our learning; but it is hardly mature behaviour if we continue doing it when we are adults.

In today’s gospel, when that scribe asked Jesus which is the first of all the commandments, was he trying to pick the best among the hundreds of Judaic laws? Was he trying to find the best way to serve God? Or was there a trace of egoism in his showing that he knew the laws and obeyed them more perfectly than most other people?

The many laws in the Hebrew bible were written to guide people in their daily lives. They covered diet, hygiene, property, marriage and many other things. By asking Jesus to pick the first among them, the Scribe was expecting him to separate one from the rest. But Jesus was careful to gather the many laws into just two, and to link those two together. Jesus was showing that all good laws serve one purpose, they help us care for each other, which is the same as loving God.

In order to learn anything, we often need to cut it apart, to analyse it, so as to understand it. We used to cut up frogs biology class; and students in technical college used to take apart engines. But we will know things properly only when we can again see them as a whole.

My early Catholic education certainly stressed moral laws and rules, but it wasn’t always clearly pointed out that the reason for them all was to teach us to love. Later in my life it was a revolution to move from ‘law’ to ‘love’ as the basis of life. We do need to teach children basic rules of behaviour, how to live in the community, especially by respecting others. But even little ones can understand that we do things this way because other persons need our love.

We begin to understand other people only when we start to see them as our sisters and brothers; connected to us because we are all part of the same immensely long evolutionary creation; all children of the one Creator. With good reason, the ancient Jewish Law begins with: ‘Listen Israel, the Lord our God is one…’ This is still the basic prayer of Judaism.

In many ways our civilisation is making real progress towards unity. We can now see our whole planet from above. We can communicate world-wide in an instant. We have cracked the DNA codes that underlie all life, and we have taken steps towards world government through the UN, EU and globalised treaties. This progress itself brings enormous risks and challenges, and there is still much arms dealing, violence and war, but there is no denying our progress towards unity.

Jesus shows us by his life and death that our relationship with God is not that of a criminal to a police constable, or even a servant to a master, but rather that of a child to its mother. Even more deeply, the Scriptures and the mystics tell us that we can look at God as lovers gaze at each other. Being loved by God unites us, and we can draw on the love we receive abundantly from God, to care for other people when they need us. This vision can transform the way we see every person. It also shows us why it is such a terrible abuse to destroy the planet by our careless greed.

When we can see that God loves all people, we also see that the ‘law’ of loving our neighbour links us directly with every oppressed person crying for justice. Love impels us to be nonviolent, to abhor war and the death penalty as much as we abhor abortion. Love impels us to shun any action that would take away the life or dignity of our weakest sisters or brothers.

Jesus often criticised the Jewish leaders for not treating people justly: lepers; social outcasts like tax agents; the disabled of all kinds. He broke the laws about the holy Sabbath, in order to help people. For loving in this way, he was eventually murdered.

The lawyer in today’s gospel seems to get this, for he affirms that the two commandments together are ‘far more important’ than any other offering we can give to God. In fact the prayers and devotions that we ‘give to God’ are often, deep down, attempts to bribe God, hoping for a reward. This too is hardly mature adult behaviour.

The real meaning of sacrifice – ‘making holy’ – is loving God and other people. Today’s other reading from Hebrews describes Jesus as a priest because he lived and died for others. Whenever we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, we bring our efforts to love God and our neighbour, and join these with Christ, who of course is still working through us. Our self-giving, joined to Christ’s, is truly a sacrifice. The Sign of Peace with which we greet each other, eloquently expresses our combined efforts to bring about the Reign of God in our world.

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Is our church upside-down?

Monday Week 30 25^th October 2021

[Dominican friars’ community Mass]

[Romans 8:12-17, Luke 13:10-17]

The woman whom Jesus met in a synagogue on his way to Jerusalem had been bent double for eighteen years. She probably saw the world tilted sideways, if not completely upside-down. When we were children we enjoyed putting our head between our knees for this surprising view for a few moments, but if this is what we see all the time, our whole life is badly distorted.

Jesus touched that poor woman, and healed her. She gave thanks to God, as we do at every Eucharist. But Jesus also rebuked the religious officials who controlled that synagogue for turning upside-down the works they were meant to be doing in God’s name: they were putting religious ritual, the sabbath laws, before helping people who needed help. On the sabbath those officials would look after their own animals, their property, but had no concern for this ‘Daughter of Abraham’.

From the beginnings of humanity we have always been hungry for the Transcendent; to find realities beyond what our senses perceive. We have used prayers, rituals and holy objects trying to reach ‘God’, and have been helped by gifted people to lead us in our search – shamans, prophets, priests, rabbis, presbyters, clergy. Our ancestors in the Hebrew faith came to see that there is only one God, our Creator, to whom they offered sacrifices. But from that Hebrew people Jesus emerged, bringing amazing Good News. In today’s reading, Paul reminds us that through the Risen Christ we can each receive the gift of God’s own Spirit within us, making us God’s children. We can call God ‘Father’, give ourselves to God, and enter God’s eternal life.

We have God in us, but we still need to use material things to help us pray to God; and to be led by human helpers. Our Christian communities need good leaders, but Jesus often warned that these are not ‘superior’ to the rest of us. It is right to be grateful to these leaders, but it is the error known as clericalism to see clergy as holier than other Christians. Can it be right to give them a different level of honour and privileges, and call them by titles: ‘Reverend’, ‘Your Eminence’, ‘My Lord’?

The New Testament shows us the Eucharist as the whole community thanking God together. Christ became more deeply present when they broke bread and shared the one cup in his name. By the fourth century, however, specialist clergy had taken over as the only ones who could lead the Eucharist. Eventually it became a solo performance. (Note 1)

In today’s gospel Jesus called those synagogue officials ‘hypocrites’ for making sabbath rules more important then needy people. What would he say to those many clerics who sexually abused children to whom they had easy access because parents trusted them as clerics? What would he say to the many bishops who concealed the clerics’ crimes rather than caring for the children the clergy had abused? And what would he say to those who wrote the Canon Laws that made this all more possible?

If each of us has God’s Spirit in us, have our leaders turned the church upside-down by denying half the world’s Catholics regular access to the Eucharist, because ‘we are short of priests’? Why are local communities not allowed to gather and break bread, led by one of their own members, as in the early church? Why are our church leaders now joining four or five parishes into one, usually without consulting the people, when in those communities there are many men and women who could lead a small local group in the simple act of celebrating Eucharist together, as was done in the early church? Are church leaders making these choices for the good of people, or for the benefit of the clerics themselves?

Our church is suffering and struggling; nearly 90% of baptised Catholics no longer come to public worship. If clerics are listening, they will learn that many, especially women, walk away because of clerical control. St Paul gives us the sobering reminder that our journey towards our resurrection contains suffering. This is an integral part of life and can always help us to let go of our own selfishness. Can our church learn from its suffering to listen to the Holy Spirit speaking through all its members: to the voice of the faithful? Here in Australia we are half-way through our Plenary Council. Will our bishops really listen to the thousands of challenging submissions they have received? In many parts of the world lay people are organising their own synods, and speaking frankly. (Note 2) If our church’s leaders do not truly listen, not only will our church remain in many ways upside-down: we will be in danger of denying the Holy Spirit.

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Note 1: Thomas O’Loughlin: The Eucharist: Origins and contemporary understandings. Bloomsbury Academic [T & T Clarke] 2015.

Note 2: E.g. Root and Branch Synod, Bristol, September 2021. https://www.rootandbranchsynod.org/all-our-talks

How did Jesus ‘ransom’ us?

Sunday 29B 17^th October 2021

[Isaiah 53:10-11,Mark 10: 35-45]

Last night’s news showed us a refugee couple freezing and starving in a forest in Belarus. They could neither cross the border into Poland, nor go back. The pregnant wife had just lost her baby. We, in our secure comfort, can hardly imagine the depth of their suffering.

Today’s reading from Isaiah looks deeply into the meaning of suffering. We hear the awful statement that God ‘was pleased to crush …with suffering’ the mysterious figure known as the ‘servant of God’. We know that when Old Testament writers say that God ‘caused’ suffering, they meant that God created the overall situation in which people suffer, but does not directly will or cause their pain. Here it seems also to mean that God approved of his servant’s suffering, supporting him in it, for what it achieved. But that still leaves us with the mystery: why?

Mark’s gospel links this ‘servant’ with Jesus. The servant in Isaiah ‘shall justify many’ by his sufferings; and Jesus says that he too has come ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’.

None of us escapes suffering. It is inseparable from being human. No matter how we protect and insure ourselves, our bodies will ultimately die and decay. But here God is showing us that suffering leads somewhere. ‘His anguish over, he will see the light.’ This means more than dark clouds having a silver lining. Suffering actually forms us, teaches us and enables us to see the light. It does the necessary work of stripping away our innate self-centredness. One wise woman I heard recently described pain as a ‘catalyst’; it’s not good in itself, but a necessary agent in the process of living.

A lot of suffering comes from the wonderful fact that we can love other persons. When they suffer and we can’t relieve their pain, we suffer too; but our love can help to ‘redeem’ them.

Maybe this is what we mean when we say that Jesus ‘ransoms’ or ‘redeems’ us? The words originally meant paying money to free a prisoner or slave. At times, brave persons have offered themselves as a replacement, to free another. Isaiah’s vision saw a ‘Servant of God’ as somehow liberating the human race. Jesus does this as ‘Son of God’. Does he do it merely by his teaching? Surely more by his loving, defending the poor, even though he knew it would lead to his death? His universal love is forever a profound example for each of us. But having passed through death, he is in us, empowering us.

In today’s gospel story the hard lesson about suffering is prompted by the ignorant and outrageous request by James and John to have ‘important positions’ in the coming kingdom they had heard Jesus speak about. Whenever we ask like that for a favour, we are usually being selfish.

Jesus challenged them: ‘Can you drink the cup – of suffering – that I must drink? Be ‘baptised’ – suffer – as I must suffer? They rashly promised that they could. ‘Yes, you sure will’, said Jesus, but your after-death situation is for God alone to deal with. Mark’s early Christian hearers would connect this with their own daily struggles, and the strength they got by being baptised into the Risen Christ, and by celebrating the weekly Eucharistic meal.

James and John weren’t the only ones who didn’t understand Jesus’ teaching. The other ten, foolishly, got angry with the two who brashly tried to get favourable treatment. Jesus tells them all that his ‘kingdom’ is not a political one. In the Reign of God, the world as we can re-make it even now, there will be no hierarchy, no superiority of one over another. We create this kingdom when we find that happiness does not come from possessing or achieving more, but only by loving and forgiving each other. Jesus ‘ransomed’ us, but not by dying instead of us. We are all still going to die; Jesus showed us how to die to our selfishness in loving and serving others.

All this prompts us Catholics to ask: why does our church try to justify maintaining a hierarchy, with titles and self-importance, which began about the fourth century? Why, even as the Australian church is in the middle of a rare Plenary Council, are many of us unwilling to look honestly at the many urgent questions among the 17,500 petitions sent in? Our bishops and the Vatican officials who still have power over them – should they have this power? – must reform the way we have mistreated women, LGBTQI people, the victims of clerical sexual abuse, and many others. The people who are the majority in the church, must be listened to.

And that couple in the Belarus forest? Local people began to save them by bringing some food and warm coverings, but those loving acts ‘redeemed’ them only to a limited extent: government guards then callously took them away, their destination unknown.

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For good coverage of the Plenary Council:

https://garrattpublishing.com.au/blog/post/plenary-tracker/

When is it safe to believe?

Monday 28B 11^th October 2021

[Romans 1:1-7, Luke 11: 29-32]

When we are confronted with things that our five senses cannot explain, how can we know if they are real? A good example is the Near Death Experience, which happens to some people who for a short time are ‘clinically dead’. About 40% of these folk find themselves still completely conscious, looking down on their own body. Many also tell of meeting their ancestors or other spiritual beings. Sometimes they learn things that they could not have otherwise known.

Some Catholics, and especially priests, cannot accept that the Near Death Experience is genuine. Perhaps they are afraid that millions of people might be finding and meeting God outside the church-structure and beyond the control of the clergy?

How can we be certain about things beyond our senses? Just before today’s passage from Luke’s gospel, Jesus had healed a deaf man. In those times, such disabilities were believed to be caused by a demon possessing the person, so some of the people who saw the healing accused Jesus of curing by demonic power. A few verses later, Jesus says: ‘This is a wicked generation’ because it was still asking for a sign from heaven to prove who Jesus was. In Mark’s earlier gospel, Jesus simply refused to give any sign; but Matthew and Luke show Jesus saying that the only sign he will give is ‘The sign of Jonah’.

The book of the prophet Jonah is a humorous and absurd short story, a parody, poking fun at the people of Israel for their lack of faith, and at their prophets, who weren’t giving them God’s true word. In the story, God gives Jonah the impossible task of preaching to the pagan Assyrians in Nineveh, so Jonah takes ship to run away. God sends a storm, and to save the ship, Jonah is tossed overboard but is rescued when a fish swallows him. Back on dry land, he does convert the huge pagan city of Nineveh, with a ten-word sermon! As we would say today: ‘Yeah… right!’

Matthew’s gospel says that the ‘sign of Jonah’ was Jesus’ three days in the grave, like Jonah in the preposterous fish. Luke, however, sees the ‘sign of Jonah’ as Jesus himself, urging people to ‘repent’, to see the bigger picture, that God is all around us. In Jesus, ‘A greater than Jonah is here’.

Jonah ran from God because he could not stomach the idea that God loves all people, and wanted to bring even the pagan Assyrians to know God. Jesus adds that besides the Assyrians, another pagan, the ‘Queen of the South’, came a long way to hear the wisdom that God had given King Solomon. Jesus is expanding our horizon: showing that far beyond the boundaries of whoever we think are the ‘chosen people’ – Jews, Catholics, Islam – God loves and is saving everyone.

Why did Luke write his gospel? Perhaps his community, a generation after Jesus’ resurrection, were struggling to keep believing in someone they had never seen? Luke’s gospel stories remind them: ‘Look at the most important sign God ever gave us: the Risen Christ.’

In other parts of Luke’s gospel, people are given a sign to prove that the message they have been given is true. Remember how Zechariah was struck dumb until his son was born, because he didn’t believe the news? Mary, on the other hand, was given a sign – Elizabeth’s pregnancy – to confirm what Mary already accepted. Sometimes other people in the bible asked for a sign to help them believe a messenger, as Gideon did in the Book of Judges. [Chapter 6].

Where do we stand, in believing things that our senses can never show us? It is common sense, in fact it is wisdom, to listen keenly to all the signs that come our way, carefully discerning how credible they are. Then we must make a leap of faith. It’s not unreasonable, because it’s based on reason. St Paul speaks of this, in the opening words of his Letter to the Christians in Rome. He calls himself the slave of God. Years before, on the road to Damascus, Saul/Paul had been persecuting Christians but had a mystical vision, very like the Near Death Experience. He was overcome by The Light, and heard the Risen Christ telling him what to do.

Paul did not understand this experience with his senses, but came to trust the Unseen One completely. He tells us here that we too can come to ‘the obedience of faith’.

We need to respect all our own experiences: when we are blown away by the beauty of the world; when we pray, thanking the unseen One. And especially when we experience love for each other. In all these, we are touching the unseen, Transcendent Realm. It pays us also to listen to the vast range of other people’s experience, and how it changes their lives. ‘By their fruits you will know them.’

We will be sure when we are in touch with the Power greater than ourselves – Christians are confident that they know it in the person of Christ, but we will never know him completely. Are we ready to keep growing continuously, accepting love, even if we do not know the Source, and thanking and loving in return?

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PS An example of an atheist’s Near Death Experience can be found here: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=atheist+shocked+by+who+he+meet&view=detail&mid=5FBF1FC2EA43C640BAD05FBF1FC2EA43C640BAD0&FORM=VIRE

This post is not a homily

You may find this video interesting. It is relevant to everyone, for each of us will die one day! This hard-working family man, a power-line engineer, described himself as an atheist, until he had a Near Death Experience after a work accident. It radically changed his life.

Some people scoff at Near Death Experiences, but after studying them for more than 40 years I am convinced that they are genuine encounters with the Transcendent. I would add, however, that what happens when the person is ‘clinically dead’, with every organ not function for many minutes, the ‘spiritual’ experience that some have is literally indescribable. When they are revived, they want to tell others about it, but can only use images and words that come from life in the material world. Metaphors! In other words, their experience was real, but their story is an attempt to describe the Transcendent, which is indescribable. They are often disbelieved or laughed at. Some have real difficulty in re-adjusting to ‘normal’ life.

Many attempts have been made to explain away the NDE, but none are satisfactory. If you are new to all this, judge for yourself!

‘… and they become one body.’

Sunday 27B 3^rd October 2021

[Genesis 2:18-24, Mark 10:2-16]

What else can Jesus’ Good News mean, unless that God’s infinite Love, is guiding us to use our gifts to heal all human relationships and bring peace to the world? We need faith to believe this, looking around the world today; but Jesus describes our future, the coming Reign of God, as a great party, a wedding feast, in which all are welcome. It is happening slowly, Jesus tells us, as yeast leavens dough and a seed germinates in darkness.

This story from the book of Genesis is colourful and child-like. It is about the earliest stages of God’s Kingdom. This first human being is like God: Adam can think, and take care of the garden. In God’s amazing new world everything is said to be ‘good’. But suddenly something is wrong. God sees that ‘it is not goodfor the man to be alone.’

In this quaint myth, God brings to the man all the different animals, one by one, to see if there is a match. Adam has the privilege of naming them, but finds no relationship there. Nothing suitable. Dogs may be wonderfully friendly and sympathetic; horses faithful and extremely useful, but there has to be something better.

The wise Creator goes to work again. He puts the man to sleep, takes a part of the man’s own body and forms a new creature. It is to be equal to the man, but remarkably different. When Adam wakes and sees her he is overwhelmed. At last! A mate; someone I can relate to. A helper. The Hebrew word [’ezer] does not suggest an inferior servant or slave, for the Bible often speaks of God as the ’ezer of Israel. But a patriarchal society wrote this story, and it is hard to let go of male superiority, so Adam gets to name the woman, as he had named the other creatures.

We believe that the books of the Bible contain inspired wisdom from God, written by human minds and hands. No other Middle Eastern culture has stories which dignify woman by saying she was created separately like this. Perhaps some Indigenous cultures do? Genesis says she shares the man’s bone and flesh – his strengths and weaknesses? The author then adds an important footnote: ‘this is why a man leaves’ even his patriarchal home ‘and becomes one with his wife’: naked, hiding nothing from each other, without guilt or shame, in full relationship.

This beautiful human relationship is surely the foundation stone of the Reign of God. And it foretells something even more beautiful: St Paul sees that marriage is a sort of weak reflection of the relationship that each of us has with God. [Ephesians 5:31]

This particular Genesis story focuses on the mystery of a lifetime partnership without mentioning having children to extend the human family. Partnerships where there are no children, and between couples who are long past child-bearing have always been accepted as true marriages by Christian theologians and canon lawyers. Isn’t there room here also for life-long partnerships between those people on our human spectrum who are attracted to the same sex as themselves?

Genesis leaves no doubt that the partnership of man and woman is meant to be life-long. When the Pharisees challenge Jesus about Moses permitting divorce, Jesus quotes Genesis, reminding them that God’s authority is greater than Moses. Is Jesus harsh in saying that remarrying after divorce is as bad as adultery? As usual, Jesus is showing us the best that we are capable of: the beautiful possibilities of the ideal marriage. Perhaps we must read this as we read Jesus’ other metaphors advising us to escape temptations by cutting off our hand or plucking out our eye: or that God will torture some of us forever, in fire?

Jesus urges us to strive for the ideal, but doesn’t expect us to take his metaphors literally. Most human partnerships make huge mistakes: and the Genesis myth soon describes Adam and Eve’s huge mistake. But God always offers us ways out of our failures. We all know people who enter, too young, into a foolish, unprepared marriage. When they fall apart, painfully, the second try is often much more successful. God’s mercy is infinite, and Jesus brings that mercy among us.

Mark’s gospel is just one Christian community’s effort to recall what Jesus did and taught. Matthew’s gospel is another. It allows an exception, when certain marriages can be ended, and theologians are still arguing about what it means! The letters of St Paul and St Peter mention other exceptions when marriages can be dissolved. Catholic marriage tribunals take all these into account when judging whether a marriage is valid. In discerning when a marriage is not a marriage, our church is now much more merciful, less legalistic than it once was.

Every human person fails, often. We build God’s Kingdom by dealing with them by forgiving each other and growing in love. It is helpful to return to that inspiring scene where the first man sees the first woman for the first time. It is our first picture of human love.

Whether we are married or single, widowed or divorced, can we look today at the many people in our life with the same awe and thanks that the first couple expressed when they first saw each other?

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