“We shall see God as God really is”

Easter, Sunday 4 21^st April 2024

(John 10: 11-18, 1 John 3:2)

Many young Catholics, even before they leave school, lose interest in attending Sunday Mass. Parents and grandparents have long been expressing their concern about this trend. Older folk also struggle to find reasons why they should continue to attend, and many decide not to.

Could this dissatisfaction in young and old be happening at least partly because our churches do not bring people into real contact with the infinite mystery of God? Let’s look at the metaphor for God that we use in the gospel on “Good Shepherd Sunday”. When Jesus called himself the “good shepherd”, he was speaking to people who every day would see shepherds leading their small flocks along the road to and from pasture. Those shepherds knew each animal by name, and their sheep knew and trusted them.

So in the earliest days church leaders reasonably used the title “pastor”, but unfortunately, over the centuries, because many clerics had superior knowledge the title came to be associated with superior power and control rather than with love and concern for persons. Clerical privilege led to the scandal of tens of thousands of children being abused, and the crimes concealed.

Some people might find questionable Pope Francis’ metaphor that clergy should immerse themselves in the “smell of the sheep”. Who wants – even metaphorically – to be seen as a dumb sheep, anonymous among a huge flock, waiting to be shorn or sent to the abattoir?

Some clerics speak and write as if God has revealed God’s self once and for all, and that clerics hold the key to this cache of esoteric information. It would seem more helpful, especially to young people, if we were to teach in our churches that God reveals God’s self in every flower, sunrise, thunderstorm and human face. If clerics mistakenly call such teaching pantheism, they might learn – for example from Thomas Aquinas – that God is within every particle of creation.

We need to move beyond this contemplative vision – true as it is – to learn from Jesus that God loves each of us with all our faults, far more tenderly than any two lovers ever held each other, or parents looked at a newborn child.

Perhaps more people would come to church if they heard us clerics remind them, as saint John did in this letter, that each of us is already like God (Genesis 1:26-27), and that after our death we will see God “as God really is”?

Almost half of the people who have been clinically dead for a short while see a real mystical vision. They find themselves out of their body but still conscious and deeply at peace. They meet and communicate with a “Being of Light”, who is seen by people of every faith or of none, and whom Christians recognise as Christ.

But I have known clerics to scoff at this Near Death Experience. Perhaps if we “leaders” listened more carefully to people’s experiences, rather than imagine we hold a monopoly on truth, then more people would feel welcome in our churches?

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Thinking about temples

Lent Sunday 3 3.3.2024

(John 2:13-25)

In every city and town of Europe, and wherever Europeans made colonies around the world, churches and cathedrals are a common sight. In Australia, Christian places of worship are scattered in every town, sometimes on adjacent corners of our main streets. Likewise, in parts of the world where populations practice Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, temples, pagodas and mosques are a common sight.

Archaeologists have found the remains of temples that date back to at least 9500 years BC, and we know that even earlier, people who left no buildings of brick or stone had their sacred places. For uncounted millennia, Australia’s First Nations peoples performed their religious rituals at corroboree grounds and bora rings.

Why have people always set aside spaces as “holy” or “sacred”? Surely it is because they have always had genuine experience of reality far beyond what we can see or touch. Although we have extended our knowledge of the physical world so that we can explain earthquakes, thunderstorms and even the orbits of planets and the decay of stars, our minds cannot comprehend “why there is something rather than nothing”. Wise people in every culture on earth have concluded that we and our world – which we now know is part of more than a trillion galaxies – must derive from a conscious Mind. Can this be merely ignorant superstition?

And so people have built temples, spaces marked out and adorned, where they try to honour and communicate with the gods or God responsible for our existence and for our endless future. In this matter too, human thought and experience have grown and evolved.

The ancient Hebrew peoples’ experience of God taught them to make a temple at whose centre was an empty space, representing the One who is nameless and unknowable. This temple played an important part in the formation of Jesus, who was raised in the Jewish culture and faith. But he was a turning point. At his baptism he realised that he was filled with the Spirit. He later challenged those who ruled his people from the temple precinct, particularly because they exploited the poor.

It went deeper: Jesus taught that a new Reign of God was beginning with himself. Humanity had reached a new stage, when people would worship “in spirit and in truth” as Jesus told the Samaritan woman (John 4:23). Jesus even promised that “this temple” was soon to be destroyed – ambiguously referring to Jerusalem’s prestigious icon and to his own body. With great daring he symbolically cleansed the temple of corruption and temporarily shut it down. The gospel writers point out that when Jesus died the curtain concealing the Holy of Holies was symbolically torn apart, (Mark 15:38) because the risen Christ can now directly give us God’s Spirit. Christians well know that “…you are God’s temple, and the Spirit Of God is living in you” (1 Cor 3:16, 2 Cor 6:16, Eph 2:21)

Nevertheless we are social beings, and we need to meet together to praise God, as well as to build our community. We need a worthy meeting place in which to gather, and naturally we like to make this place beautiful. But there is an ever-present danger that we will focus too much on the “temple” – its beauty, its cost, or the prestige and power assumed by those who administer it – while we neglect or even lose contact with the Infinite Mystery within each of us that the physical building represents.

Tragically, Christians have even sometimes shut out from their temple people whom they consider “unworthy”, forgetting that the persons they reject are of infinitely more worth than the building from which they are excluded.

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The importance of not keeping secrets

Sunday 12A 25^th June 2023

[Matthew 10:26-33]

We call them “whistle-blowers”; those who act on their conscience to report wrongdoing by governments or other institutions. They are often threatened with severe penalties, because the organisations they challenge are enormously powerful. Nonetheless they feel compelled to reveal the truth about the evil, and speak out for the common good.

The Australian parliament recently improved Australia’s whistle-blower laws, but these amendments are not good enough. It is good that those who exposed Australia for shamefully deceiving the Timor Leste government have now been pardoned, but others still face terrible punishments. For instance David McBride blew the whistle on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, and faces a trial which could put him in prison for up to fifty years. Richard Boyle, who reported misconduct at the Australian Tax Office, could be given a sentence of up to 161 years in prison. And then there is the Australian Julian Assange, who rightly exposed US war crimes and other evils, but has suffered conditions that amount to torture in a British jail, and may still be jail in USA for more than a century.

The twelve apostles whom Jesus sent out were also to told to reveal a secret – “What you have heard in secret, shout from the housetops” – not about guilt, but the glorious news that God is with us. Every human culture since the beginning had sought to grasp the mystery of where we have come from. and our final destination, but these messengers were to announce that the unseen Creator loves us; that we can address God as the most loving parent; that God’s reign was now beginning. Christians call this revelation: the Infinite Consciousness telling us about itself.

Jesus warned his messengers that they would be opposed and even be killed, as he himself was later murdered like the lowest slave. But he also encouraged them not to be afraid of those who can kill the body, but to fear only whatever can kill body and soul in “Gehenna”. The original Aramaic meant the destruction of the whole “self”, not of the soul separated from the body, as Greek philosophy has taught us to imagine.

Whatever the saying means, it does not mean that God might torment some souls or people in hell-fire forever, as Christian artists and preachers liked to portray. Catholics of earlier generations were taught this belief, but when imposed on children this terrible threat was a form of child abuse. Perhaps it was taught because it maintained the power of clerics, who claimed to hold the means to save us from “damnation”. It was one of the ways in which the church went astray.

The bible’s many sayings about the end of human life, or the end of the world, are highly symbolic and metaphorical. The symbol Gehenna comes from the burning, stinking rubbish dump in the valley of Ben Hinnom, outside Jerusalem. It powerfully symbolised the chaos of a life wasted and destroyed.

But immediately after this threat is mentioned, God’s infinite love is declared. We are told that God knows every detail of the natural world, including the movement of sparrows and the loss of human hairs. Jesus’ reported words conclude by saying that we are worth more than many sparrows. So we need to discard any idea we have of God as a human judge, made in our image, and pronouncing a final condemnation. The New Testament tells us that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8 & 16), and that if we can awaken and respond to that love, we will have nothing to fear. (1 John 4:18). This is the “secret” message that Jesus told his apostles to spread. Is it any wonder that he also told them – and all who speak the truth – not to be afraid, even of death, because the Spirit of Infinite Love is within them.

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Why are truth-speakers persecuted?

Sunday 11A             18^th June 2023

[Matthew 10:1-20]

The gospel assigned for this Sunday shows us Jesus deeply moved by people’s suffering, and selecting twelve followers to send to help them. At first they go to local towns, but at the end of Matthew’s gospel their mission will be extended to the whole world. These messengers are given powers to heal the sick, cast out demons and even to raise the dead. Peter is recorded as giving this unusual assistance to the recently deceased Tabitha, (Acts 9:36-42), just as Jesus himself had revived Jairus’ daughter (Luke 8:42ff); a youth at Nain (Luke 7:11-17) and his friend Lazarus (John 11). Unless we have been deceived by materialism and are blind to all evidence, we will know that such healing powers do exist. The apostles would have been welcomed into villages with joy and gratitude, for in first-century Palestine poverty was extreme and diseases like leprosy were a life-sentence.

But this text raises a question: why did Jesus need to warn his messengers that they will sometimes be violently opposed, flogged and even killed? “Be prepared for people to hand you over to assemblies and scourge you in their synagogues… you will be dragged before governors and kings…” (Matthew 10:9-18)

We can find the answer in many places throughout history. For example nineteen centuries later, the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and others had passed laws prohibiting slaves from learning to read and write. Anyone who dared teach them could be heavily fined or jailed for up to a year. The unfortunate Black learner would have an index finger cut off or be whipped. Slave-owners wrote such cruel laws because slaves who could read might learn about the world beyond their prison-plantation, and gain a little more power against those who otherwise had total control over them. They might even join with others to revolt.

We are all tempted, by selfish greed and lust, to dominate and control others even in small ways. But Jesus announced the kingdom of God, and brought it about. God’s love for all people now empowers us to overcome  domination. Every exploited person who seeks justice and equality is blessed by God. “Blessed are the poor… who hunger for righteousness” (Matthew 5:3-11)

We might wonder why some of Jesus’ words are omitted from the Sunday readings: his instructions that the apostles should be poor like those they are helping; and the grim warning that in announcing the kingdom they will be strongly opposed (Matthew 10:9-10, 17-18)? Could this be another example of the church having lost its way in the centuries after Jesus? Did its leaders forgot that they were meant to be poor and suffer hardship in teaching God’s kingdom of equality? Is it because church leaders, around the fourth century, became wealthy and set up a very unequal hierarchy, imagining that the institution they lead is the perfect kingdom of God?

Today many followers of Jesus are persecuted and killed for defending the rights of the poor against those who would steal their land or ravage it by industrial pollution. But church leaders, sadly, are often in the other camp. Bishops who lead the institution often sympathise with dictators and join with governments and corporations who crush the poor.

When slavery was socially acceptable, some bishops and religious orders themselves owned slaves. Today church leaders often put property and investments above the needs and rights of the poor, particularly by failing to compensate children sexually abused by church leaders. Should not the church challenge governments about their cruel treatment of refugees and prophetic whistle-blowers, or obscene military spending? Where is their study or crusade to find and change the reasons why most people are kept in poverty, even in wealthy countries?

Some Christians hide behind the absurd slogan that we must not mix religion and politics, but Jesus’ basic teaching is that God is centrally concerned with the poor. Jesus identifies the most wretched with himself (Matthew 25: 34 ff). Is it surprising that he warned his disciples that they would be opposed and flogged in religious establishments which ought to be calling for equality and justice?

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The Eucharist: do we “get it”?

Feast of The Body of Christ                       11th June 2023

[1 Corinthians 10:16-17, John 6:51-58]

[Sieger Köder]

If we don’t see the whole picture, we can make terrible mistakes. Twenty years ago, a judge sentenced Kathleen Folbigg to forty years in jail, because a jury had concluded that she had murdered her four babies. There was no physical evidence that she was guilty: just her intensely emotional diaries, which her husband had handed over to police. But good friends had kept fighting to question her conviction, and last week Kathleen Folbigg was pardoned and released.

New DNA evidence showed that her children had each carried a gene predisposing them to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and experts who re-examined Kathleen’s diaries pointed out that they were not admissions of guilt, but the fantasies of a deeply grieving woman who carried wounds from her own childhood. When the fuller truth was heard, this woman whom raucous media had condemned as an evil murderer was seen instead to be a victim of tragic errors.

What has this to do with the Eucharist, the centre of the Christian church? For more than a thousand years, Catholics have been taught to honour, as a precious object, the wafer of unleavened bread that a priest has consecrated during Mass. It is a “real presence” of Jesus, to be received only when we are cleansed from our sins, and – until recently – had fasted from all food and water from the previous midnight. Kept in gold vessels, veiled in silk in a locked tabernacle, the “sacred host” is sometimes displayed in a glass monstrance and given special honour on the feast of Corpus Christi or at massive Eucharistic Congresses.

Could new information radically change our understanding of this focal point of our Christian faith? The gospels can help us re-discover its deeper meaning. St Paul and the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke tell how on the night before Jesus died he shared one loaf and one cup of wine with his friends, stating: “this is my body… my blood”. Christians believe he is truly present when we do this in his memory.

But sharing a meal is an activity, not an object. At that final meal, Jesus said “do this”, not: “keep this safe to look at and worship”. As he was about to suffer a terrible death in solidarity with the world’s most deprived, he challenged us to give our lives for each other. When we do this, we are keeping his basic commandment, which is to love (John 15:12), and we become like him: become his Body.

At our family meals we do not greedily satisfy our individual selves: we see that all get enough food, and we grow in friendship as we share it. At a wedding banquet, individuals do not eat alone, but the bride’s and groom’s families try to become more strongly joined. The Eucharist too is not meant only to “make me holy” as an individual. Although generations of Catholics were taught this, they were not shown the whole truth. We cannot “meet Christ” unless we love each other! To love as Jesus loved, and commands us, we need to forgive every “enemy”. So the Eucharist, far from being a private “devotion”, is the way to change the world, to bring about God’s reign by abolishing all hatred and war. Rather than worshipping the Eucharist as a holy object, are we prepared to practice it?

Have church leaders, in trying to preserve Jesus sacred gift, actually distorted it by encouraging pious, but selfish, individualism? Even worse – have they allowed it to promote inequality, by inventing a tradition that only special men are able to lead the simple Eucharistic ritual because they have been made “ontologically different” by ordination? Worldwide, the church is now reeling from the countless crimes committed by privileged, ordained men who because of the prestige their position gave them, could more easily abuse children and adults. Abuse is the destructive fruit of inequality and privilege. Eucharist brings us together in holy communion.

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The mystery of God as three “Persons”

Trinity Sunday, 4^th June 2023 [Exodus 34:4-9 John 3:16-18]

Triskelion – Ancient symbol of the Trinity

The other day I came across, online, a wonderful gadget that I was tempted to buy, despite the high price. It was a realistic globe of the Earth, mounted on a stand. It turns slowly, ceaselessly, without batteries or wires, but driven by hidden magnets and a solar cell.

Perhaps the reason we find models so fascinating is that they let us see the bigger picture more clearly. This model of our turning planet shows how the earth, suspended in endless space, glides around the sun while itself turning at 1600 km per hour. It is awesome to see in miniature the colossal ball of oceans and continents, on whose surface we all go about our daily lives. Pondering this leads us to look at the even bigger picture: the mysterious force that not only moves the earth and the countless galaxies beyond us, but which causes them to exist and is holding them in being.

We can do more than just ponder! Today’s readings tell us that this Creative Force has the qualities of infinite tenderness, compassion, kindness and faithfulness. Our maker loves us. We heard in the mythical story of Moses how went up the mountain and met God. It doesn’t matter if Moses existed or not. The writers who created the story had just such a vision; they experienced the love of the Transcendent, and put it into the mouth of Moses. St Paul – who was certainly a real historical character – had a similar experience of the Transcendent. We are told about it at least three times in the New Testament: how Paul met the Risen Christ in some indescribable way. He was temporarily blinded by it, and spent the rest of his life teaching about the Risen One. More explicitly than Moses, Paul tells us that God seems somehow to be threefold: Father, Son and Spirit, and has the qualities of grace, love and fellowship. Many Christians are not aware that even before Paul’s time, in far off India, the Hindu sages were teaching that in God there is Being, Consciousness and Bliss: Sat, Chit and Ananda.

The writer of today’s gospel tells us that Jesus of Nazareth came from “the Father” and gives us his Spirit. God lives in us! Here we glimpse more clearly that God is a Trinity. Jesus tells Nicodemus that he has come not to condemn but to save the world, including us; to bring it all to completion. Our future destiny, our wholeness, is to be with God, the Trinity, in the timeless dimension after our death. For each of us, the vital question is: how do we respond to this good news?

Catherine la Cugna, in her book on the Trinity, points out that early Western theologians focused too much on trying to define the inner, immanent being of the Trinity and not so much on the fact that the Trinity is constantly looking outward, working to create the whole cosmos, to hold it in being, and to move our planet as it constantly evolves in all its beauty and complexity. Catherine La Cugna died quite young. On her tombstone, there is carved the quote: “ ..we glorify God by living in right relationship as Jesus did.. . by existing as persons in communion with God and every other creature.”

The Trinity is pure, self-giving relationships; and our wholeness is to learn to live in the same way. Relationship is at the heart of what it means to be a person. To become whole, we need to move beyond our immature individualism, our egotism.

It is sad that in our church, the institution, the disease of clericalism is rampant, based on selfish narcissism. This is diametrically opposed to sound relationships! For example, rather than relate with compassion to victims of sexual abuse, the institution’s leaders are still punishing and re-traumatising these victims by using lawyers – at huge cost – to avoid paying compensation; to permanently shut down the victim’s appeals. Instead of treating these victims as the Good Shepherd would, many church leaders treat them as enemies! This destroys relationships between people! It demolishes community.

The Trinity is pure Relationship between three “Persons”, who only analogically resemble us human persons. These divine “Persons” are in perfect relationship. We cannot understand God’s nature, but we can experience God’s love… that these “Persons” embrace the whole human family and the entire cosmos. The important question for each of us is: How do I respond to this? How do I relate to the Trinity? How often do I turn to give thanks? And with how much love?

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Can law conflict with love?

Easter, Sunday 6 14.5.23

[John 14:15-21]

After Easter, Christian churches often read from the gospel of John. A recent passage quotes Jesus, the night before his death, challenging us: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Commandments, both divine and human, are precious. We strive to see that our nation and international society run on the rule of law. Wise parents try to form their children by giving guidelines, rules, that show them acceptable ways of behaving, and teach those rules in the context of love. But love is intangible, not as easy to measure as rule-keeping.

Sadly, some children grow up without either guidelines or love, and struggle against becoming psychopaths. But most of us, until late childhood, were judged – and judged ourselves – as “good” or “bad” by the degree to which we kept the rules. Many adults, unfortunately, never develop beyond the stage of seeing rules and laws as the main framework of their life.

In contemporary society most of us work in institutions: companies, government departments, the church, schools, universities, police, medicine etc. In these institutions, when wrong is done – as often happens – leaders and members feel inclined to put self-interest before law, and try to protect the institution’s “image” and profits. This leads to even more rules being broken, and people being gravely damaged.

In Christian churches – not to mention the synagogue and mosque – this is still happening. Even “holy” institutions continue to struggle with the sexual abuse of children committed by a small percentage of their clergy. In the Catholic church, although bishops knew that some priests were committing these despicable crimes, not one Australian bishop ever reported the crimes to police. This situation is improving, very slowly, but for too long the Vatican and Canon Law, presuming on clerical privilege, forbade the reporting of these criminals. Instead, rather than show love to the victims, bishops misused law to conceal and defend the guilty. In Philadelphia, a cardinal lied before a Grand Jury to deny the extent of clerical abuse there; and Cardinal Law fled from Boston to the Vatican before he could be charged with similar concealment. The judges at the Australian Royal Commission did not accept evidence that Cardinal Pell gave them under oath. Many victims suffered because Cardinal Pell’s Melbourne Response minimised payouts and demanded that victims sign a promise to keep silent about their case. Dioceses around the world have claimed bankruptcy, because of huge legal fees as well as by payouts to victims.

Vatican rules made it quite difficult to remove a priest who committed these crimes, but priests who have spoken out about the church’s failures have been “suspended from ministry”. This has happened to myself, for publishing the book Clerical Errors. *

The question for people of faith is: Do we see God mainly as a law-giver, or as a lover? If John’s gospel reports Jesus as saying : “Keep my commandments”… it adds that his commandment is “love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15: 12) and promises that this leads to God living in us. It is by our gift of knowledge that we write laws. But among all our gifts, above knowledge and law, “the greatest… is love”. (1 Corinthians 13:13)

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* Clerical Errors: how clericalism betrays the gospel, and how to heal the church. Wipf & Stock, 2022.

Vision and divisions

Sunday Lent 4A 19^th March 2023

[John 9:1-41]

[Getty Images]

Light is completely different from darkness. The mythical creation story in Genesis explains this division by imagining God’s first words as “Let there be light”. This hinted at the Big Bang, which physicists say produced all the fuel that later formed a trillion galaxies, including our sun.

Some people never see the sun, being born blind. Many come to accept that condition as their normal, and would not wish to change it, but sighted people can use their eyes to see many more divisions among things: different colours, shapes, faces: countless aspects of beauty. And whether or not we have healthy eyes, there are higher levels of difference that we need to “see” if we are to become mature and find happiness: we need to see the truth about what we are. We need wisdom.

When early Christians learned about Christ and accepted baptism they described this as “enlightenment”. John’s gospel was written for a Christian community about sixty years after Jesus’ death. It included this story of Jesus healing a man born blind, to teach about baptism. Jesus healed the man without being asked, for the Holy One always makes the first loving move. God gives us our existence without consulting us!

The disciples had been asking Jesus why this unfortunate man had been born blind, quoting traditional explanations: that the man’s parents must have sinned, or even – bizarre thought – that the man himself had sinned before his birth. Jesus cut through these errors. He had come to free us from any idea that God punishes us or is vengeful, as the Old Testament often taught and which many Christians, sadly, still accept. Jesus told them: “He was born blind so that that the works of God may be revealed in him”. This does not mean that God uses us as laboratory rats, to demonstrate God’s mercy; that would be worse than the older view. No: because our wonderful material world is limited in every dimension, everything eventually breaks down, and death is our doorway to our next stage of growing. When we are crushed by age or failing health, or see our loved ones suffering and dying, these events can open us to find the bigger dimension, the reality of God’s Infinite Love.

Much of our suffering is caused by divisions arising from people’s greed, anger or fear… including our own. This leads to bullying, violence and war… and grave damage to our whole planet. But we can become free of all these when we discover that Infinite Love lives within us, and desires “to gather up everything under Christ as head”. (Ephesians 1:10) Like many people, I can attest that: “the works of God” have been revealed for me in severe illness, which enabled me to grow stronger in faith and love and lead me to thank God more deeply for the gift of existence.

But this story of the blind man also shows how divisions can spring up between us because some people cannot see, or stubbornly deny, what others have been privileged to discover before them. The pharisees attacked the healed man, saying that he was “steeped in sin from birth”. They made his parents fear being expelled from the synagogue. They denied that Jesus had healed the man, doubting that the man had been blind; or if he had been healed, it should not have been done on the sabbath! Eventually they made Jesus the ultimate outcast and murdered him outside the city. All this encouraged John’s first-century community of Jewish Christians, who were being excommunicated from synagogues for accepting Jesus as Messiah.

Such divisions still happen in our church today. Some persons in authority insist that laws are more important than people’s need to be healed. They even condemn Pope Francis for teaching compassion and living the gospel. These painful “clerical errors” can be seen as necessary stages in our growth as a church community, for true vision and wisdom is to experience Christ as present within ourselves and everyone else, not just to talk about him in “orthodox” ways. Much less is it wisdom to insist on liturgical practices developed by clerics, as if they are more important than obeying Jesus by forgiving and serving people.

If we, like those fictional pharisees, persist in refusing to see the beautiful vision Jesus offers, we will remain in darkness. The New Testament writers warn – with typical exaggeration – that this sin can never be forgiven. (Mark 3:29, John 15:22, 1 John 5:16) Overcoming it, struggling together to see the truth, is surely a slow and difficult process.

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Meeting the Holy

Lent; Sunday 3 – 12^th March 2023

[John 4:5-42]

That Samaritan woman had good reason to be astonished. At midday she had gone out as usual to the well, to fill her water jar. The other village women came out in early morning or at sunset, but she avoided them, because they would not speak to her. It was the divorces – which had not been her choice – and the other men. But that’s another story.

It seemed like an ordinary day, but then this Jewish traveller came up to the well. He was hot and tired, and asked her for a drink. She had never spoken to a Jewish man before, but this one was friendly and started a conversation. He soon showed that he knew about her husbands. She saw that he was some kind of prophet, and when he told her that he was the long-awaited Messiah, she could believe him. She dropped her jar and hurried back back into the village, calling out her news to everyone.

That Samaritan woman had not just learned a theological truth. She had met someone who accepted her, as she was, with all her shame, and showed her that God accepted her, as she was. To know that she was loved, truly, set her gloriously free.

Does our Catholic church today always do what Jesus did for that woman? Sadly, it doesn’t. A priest who died recently in Sydney had asked that Deirdre Browne’s hymn Come as you are be played at his funeral. However the presiding archbishop refused to allow it to be sung. Why not? Some Catholics have expressed doubts about its “orthodoxy”. Could they and the archbishop have been troubled by the lines:

Come as you are, that’s how I love you…

Or perhaps:

Nothing can change the love that I bear you…

Each time you fail to live by my promise
Why do you think I’d love you the less?

Do those who would censor this hymn think that if we have sinned, as we often do, God does not love us until we have confessed to a priest? This would be serious confusion about the God that Jesus has shown us. How could Infinite Love ever cease to love what it has made?

We need to think deeply before we presume to censor what others are saying, whether in ordinary speech or in poetry. Thomas Bowdler’s sister, in the 19^th century, removed from her edition of Shakespeare all the words that could not be spoken aloud in a family setting. Perhaps this could be justified by the desire to “protect children”, but the same argument can hardly be used today to justify publishing bowdlerised editions of Roald Dahl and even Enid Blyton. Don’t children need to hear and learn about real life, so as to prepare to live in it?

In 2020 the USA Catholic bishops published a list of hymns that should not be used in liturgy. Astonishingly, their list included the much-loved God Beyond All Names, The Lord of the Dance, St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, All Are Welcome, City of God and Table of Plenty. How can bishops presume to dictate to other mature followers of Christ, many of whom have more artistic talent than the bishops, what words we may use to thank and praise The Holy One? Their invasion of others’ natural rights showed similar arrogance to that small group of men who in 2011 imposed on every member of our church a Mass translation in second-rate English.

How many Plenary Councils must pass, before we can question the right claimed by a few to force us into this kind of crippling uniformity, by using the totalitarian structures that have been allowed to develop in our church-institution?

How far this has taken us from Jesus’ promise to that Samaritan woman that we need to worship God “in spirit and in truth”?

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‘The Kingdom of God is very near’

Sunday 14C 3^rd July 2022

[Isaiah 66:10-14, Galatians 6:14-18, Luke 10: 1-20]

Jesus sent out seventy-two disciples to announce that the Kingdom of God is very near. Scholars who analyse the gospels say that this may not have actually happened in Jesus’ time, but was probably the practice of the Christians in the community where Luke was writing. The persons sent out two by two were to announce that the Reign – or Kingdom – of God is already near, but has not yet arrived. When they came to a town or a house, the disciples were to announce Peace, shalom. The Hebrew word comes from a word meaning wholeness. The Kingdom means that, when we begin to learn from Jesus what God is truly like – that God is an infinitely loving parent – we become whole as human beings.

Fired up with Jesus’ new teaching, the disciples cast out all kinds of evil. When you believe in infinite love, you are immune from evil. Jesus used the metaphor of snakes and scorpions because they were common physical dangers then. The preachers also “cast out demons”. When sick people get a glimpse of Infinite Love, it releases all kinds of healing powers in them.

To preach the coming of the Reign of Love and Peace, the disciples had to focus completely on their mission. They took only minimal gear: they were poor, showing that the Kingdom is not about wealth or focusing on oneself, but about growing in self-giving; in our spiritual dimension.

In today’s reading from Galatians St Paul boasts “only in Christ’s cross”. This does not mean he wanted to suffer pain or loss, but gave himself in loving generosity – as parents do for their children; as hard working nurses and doctors do; or teachers, so that young people can learn. The cross is about giving life to others; about loving. The meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice was not the destroying of anything, least of all a human life. His sacrifice was the total love that kept him at his task, even when it led to being tortured and murdered by his own religious leaders and government.

When Jesus asks us to pray for “labourers in the harvest” he does not necessarily mean more missionaries to get more people to sign on as members of the Catholic church; or more priests to run parishes, regardless of whether the present shape of our church is meeting everyone’s need. Obviously it isn’t. If we really listen to the thousands of requests people have made to the Plenary Council – which will conclude soon – there are many things in our church that need to change.

To “harvest” people for the Reign of God means to show them that every person is abundantly loved by God. The great English Dominican Herbert McCabe once wrote that faith is nothing more than knowing that we are loved, by a God who is mysterious and infinite, but totally reliable. If we base our lives on genuine love, then we will re-shape our Christian church to live the truth. Then we will automatically attract others. The whole church will be proclaiming the Good News.

When Jesus’ disciples came back after announcing the Reign of Peace in a few villages, Jesus rejoiced with them. He said that he “saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”. He saw the beginning of the Reign of God in a few human beings, and the possibility that it can be in every human being. That will mean world peace; we all learn to forgive our “enemies”, and replace violence with kindness; war with peaceful co-existence. It will mean the end of famine because we have stopped wasting trillions of dollars on military spending, and share the earth’s resources more justly. We will cope much better with the drastic changes that will happen to our planet as it rapidly warms and many more species become extinct.

I mentioned parents’ generous love. So did the prophet Isaiah in our first reading, speaking about God’s city, Jerusalem. Although it had been destroyed and its people driven into exile for seventy years, the city was going to be rebuilt. Isaiah saw the Holy City as like a mother giving suck to her baby. Her milk is abundant. But he goes further: and speaks of God as like a mother comforting her child.

Jesus told his disciples that their names are written in heaven. Won’t our names also be written in heaven – won’t we glimpse our eternal future – when we begin to base our life on love; forgiving those who hurt us; completely avoiding violence? Paul described this as becoming a “new creation” by knowing Christ as our friend.

Can we believe that our eternal future is to be loved, and to love in return? Weren’t Isaiah and Jesus right to find this a cause for great joy? What do you think?

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