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TRINITY SUNDAY 2008
Last Monday I had the opportunity to see a remarkable film – ‘Into the Great Silence’. It is a documentary about the life of the Carthusian monks in La Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps. These monks live in total silence. Apart from the liturgy in the Church, and very occasional opportunities for conversation on great feast days, they live in solitude and in total silence. They live in silence so that they can be more deeply attuned to the mystery of God.
It is an extraordinary and indeed an extreme life. But it underlined once again for me how little silence there is in our lives. And it reminded me how important silence is as a component of prayer. It is in stillness and silence that we can become most aware of the mystery of God. It is in stillness and silence that we can begin to get beneath the layers of anxiety about things we are doing; are about to do; should be doing. It is in stillness and silence that we can begin to penetrate beneath the level of superficial activity. It is in stillness and silence that we can get behind our sometimes frantic preoccupation with the seemingly important, and touch the bedrock which gives meaning to our lives. Because of this somewhat frantic quality of everyday life, it is actually quite difficult to become still, to become silent. It can even be rather frightening. But if we begin to do so, we begin to be aware that at every moment of our lives, we live within the presence of God. At every moment we are held in being by our Creator God. At every moment we are continually held within the love of God. How badly we need to discover and rediscover this silence!
The Opening Prayer of the Mass today speaks of the sending of the Jesus the Word of God, and of the sending of the Holy Spirit. But it speaks of these as revealing the mystery of God. And in the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer we will say that we joyfully proclaim our faith in the mystery of God. On the way to this Trinity Sunday, we have worked our way over several months through the story of God’s saving action in sending Jesus his Son. We have reflected on God’s revelation of himself through Jesus, his Word made flesh. On this Trinity Sunday we come to rest, as it were, in the mystery of God himself. The mystery of God, before which our first response, at least, can only be silence.
Our response can only be silence, because the mystery of God is quite different from the sort of ‘mysteries’ which we come across in our daily life or our reading – the mysteries, for example, solved by Sherlock Holmes. The mystery of God is not a mystery that can be ‘solved’; it isn’t a mystery that will ever cease to be a mystery. We believe that in Jesus, God himself has taken our humanity. We believe that in Jesus God has revealed himself to us as fully as it is possible for God to reveal himself to human beings. But even if we were to have as full a grasp of God as Jesus can convey to us; even if we entered into the mystery of Jesus as fully as we could, with all our heart and with all our mind, we still would not have fully plumbed the mystery of God. This does not mean that what Jesus reveals to us is not true. As the opening prayer says, ‘you sent your Word to bring us truth’. Jesus is indeed the Way, the Truth and the Life. But by the very nature of God, there will always be more to God that the creatures he has made will be able to grasp; there will always be depths to God which even in heaven we will not be able to plumb.
So part of the invitation of today’s celebration of God the Holy Trinity is an invitation to silence – silence before the mystery of God; silence before the depth of the wonder of God’s very being, a depth which we can only just begin to grasp. That silence isn’t explicitly mentioned in the readings, but it strikes me that it is there by implication in the First Reading. Moses went up the mountain… Moses went apart from the hassle and the bustle of the desert encampment of the People of Israel. He went apart, and he went up. I’m sure that many of you have had that experience of wonder, a sense of being somehow closer to the mystery of God, in the silence and the expanse of view that a mountain top brings. (When we come to Mass it might help to remember that it is a sort of journey to a mountain top.) And the Lord descended in the form of a cloud. We are familiar particularly perhaps from the Gospel account of the Transfiguration of Jesus with the cloud of God’s presence. It is another symbol of mystery. ‘There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness.’ So wrote the poet Henry Vaughan, picking up a continuous strand of the Christian mystical tradition. And before that mystery of God’s presence, Moses simply stands there. He stands silently before the mystery. He stands silently, perhaps, within the mystery. And we need to practice doing that too.
One of the striking things about the film was that whenever, for example, one of the monks made the sign of the cross, he did it really slowly. Such slow gestures can be a way not just of doing the conventional thing, but actually coming into the silence before the mystery of God. A genuflection, for example, or indeed a bow – a gesture which acknowledges the mystery of the reality of the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament – the presence of Jesus in his humanity and the divinity - this habitual gesture, if we slow it down a bit, can be something which really does take us a little way into the silence of the mystery.
To Moses, standing in the cloud on the mountain top, God reveals himself as a God of tenderness and compassion. A God rich in kindness and faithfulness. This is not the revelation of the Holy Trinity. But it is the tenderness and compassion of God, it is the kindness and faithfulness of God, which Jesus the Son reveals more fully. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.’ It is the faithful God who never abandons us who sends the Holy Spirit to draw us into the mystery of his love, his tenderness, his compassion. The God we encounter here today is the same God, the one true God, whom Moses encountered on the mountain top. The darkness, the mystery of God remains. We can never penetrate it fully. And the dazzling quality of God is made even clearer to us than it could have been to Moses – even clearer because we have seen his glory revealed in the Son, we have been taken into that glory through the action of the Holy Spirit. Moses on the mountain top bowed down to the ground at once and worshipped. It is to this that our celebration calls us today. It calls us to silence. It calls us to allow ourselves to become aware of the mystery. And that silence before the mystery draws us quite naturally into worship.
The Feast we celebrate today helps us to focus on what is at the heart of every Mass. What so easily becomes just a routine aspect of our weekly lives is not only a journey to a mountain top, but a journey to the fringes of heaven itself, as we join the angels and the saints in proclaiming God’s glory: Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, God of tenderness and compassion, God of kindness and faithfulness. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.
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12th SUNDAY of Year 'A'
Today’s Gospel is concerned with fearless proclamation. And there is no need to be afraid, because we are in the hands of God. We have no need to be timid about our faith. But what is it that we are to proclaim so fearlessly? One answer to that might be that we are to proclaim today’s Second Reading (Romans 5:12-15). ‘Oh?’, many of you may well think, ‘what on earth was all that about?’ But next Sunday sees the beginning of a special ‘Year of St Paul’, so it seems appropriate to take his contribution to this Sunday’s scriptures seriously. (You might even like to have it in front of you.)
In our Pastoral Area the preparation of parents for baptism takes place centrally. Recently I visited a couple to make arrangements for the service. I asked how the preparation had gone. In response, the mother said that she feared she had rather thrown the catechists. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘how was that?’ ‘I asked a question about Original Sin’ she said. And what was the response? ‘We’ve never been asked about that before’. Well, you may have spotted that St Paul today is talking about exactly that – about Original Sin.
That indeed is where the reading begins. ‘Sin entered the world through one man.’ But let’s start with the end. Let’s start with this: ‘it is even more certain that divine grace, coming through one man, Jesus Christ, came to so many as an abundant free gift.’ This approach is echoed by the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It says (388): ‘We must know Christ as the source of grace if we are to know Adam as the source of sin’. Indeed what has been going round in my head is a little section of Handel’s Messiah. It may well be familiar to you. It too is based on a text of St Paul, where he is making almost the same point. In Handel’s Messiah, the soloists sing dolefully the words ‘As by man came death’; then the whole chorus bursts in triumphantly: ‘By man came also the resurrection of the dead.’ Handel makes in music the point that it is in the light of the victory of Christ that we can face the reality of sin and death.
Sin is certainly very important. We cannot be realistic about our world unless we recognise the universal effects of sin. But it is essential to recognise that it is not the last word. It isn’t even the first world. The first word is ‘God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good’. And the last word is Christ’s victory – his victory over both sin and death. In the light of that, we can both be realistic about the seriousness of human sin, and get it in proportion.
So what do we mean by ‘Original Sin’? First, it isn’t a sin as such. It is more like a contagion or tendency. A baby obviously hasn’t sinned, but even a baby is part of the human race. And it is a simple fact that the human race is in a mess. We have a vision of humanity living in unity and peace, but we are incapable of making that vision a reality. In our own hearts too we all recognise our selfish tendencies. Or, equally seriously, we don’t recognise them, and are convinced of our own goodness.
If God created the world good, how did this come about? We don’t know. But the truth of it is there in the story of Adam and the Fall – that primary act of rebellion against God. This, of course, is the story St Paul is reflecting on in the Second Reading. St Paul presents us with a three-stage process: Adam, Moses, Jesus Christ. First, Adam broke the only law which God had then given: ‘Don’t eat the apple.’ Adam ate it. With Moses we got the Ten Commandments. That, says St Paul, was when human sinfulness became obvious. Then God’s Laws for a flourishing human community were set down in black and white, and people couldn’t keep them.
That had been St Paul’s particular personal problem. As a Pharisee he tried so hard – and he knew that he failed. It was the abundant free gift of God’s love and grace revealed in Jesus Christ which rescued him from his sense of total, hopeless failure. But, says St Paul, don’t suppose that humanity was any different before Moses. Original Sin was there all right. Even then, they were all in the same mess that we are in. It was just that it wasn’t so obvious, because the rules hadn’t been articulated. The whole of humanity is in the same boat. In fact, we are all in the same predicament as Adam. In fact, ‘Adam’ isn’t a proper name. It means ‘man’, or ‘humanity’. Our faith absolutely obliges us to see all of humanity as fundamentally one – to see it, you might say, as Adam. Apartheid in any form is absolutely excluded. (And, in this context, I hope I hardly need to add that Adam, of course, includes Eve.)
And, says St Paul, Adam somehow prefigured Jesus Christ. Adam, made in the image of God, prefigured the One who would in his perfect humanity reveal God himself. Jesus is not a collective figure. He is an individual, living at a particular time and place. And yet, as we share Adam’s humanity, so we can mysteriously share the humanity of Jesus. We are baptised into Jesus Christ. We receive his Body and Blood. Adam was the beginning of the human race. Jesus is the new beginning. ‘If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation.’ When God in Jesus united our human nature to himself, he made a new beginning for humanity. In the mess of our world Jesus lived out a life which reflected the abundant divine grace which is the nature of God. God is not against us but for us. God wants to share his life and his love with us. God has made us to live in that love eternally. Behind the mess of this world, amazingly enough, is abundant divine grace.
In the light of that we need, perhaps, to go back to the beginning. ‘Sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death. And thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned.’
St Paul makes the link between Adam and Christ. But he also makes the link between sin and death. St Paul is quite clear: no sin, no death. What can we make of that?
First, it is a link which helps us to understand what sin really means. Sin is about breaking our relationship with God. All sin is a turning away from God and going off on our own. And God is the source of our life. Sin, by its nature, takes us away from life. It takes us, in fact, in the direction of death. So there is a natural link between sin and death.
One apparent implication is that if humanity had not sinned, there would be no death. Nonsense, you might well say. However it does make sense, I think, to say that there would be no death as we experience death. We experience death as horribly final, as separation. Jesus echoed our experience in that terrible cry from the Cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ That cry points to the ultimate destination of sin. It points to the darkness of death as we experience it, and as God in Jesus Christ experienced it for us and with us. But one can imagine a world which might have been otherwise; a sinless world in which the passage through death might have been as easy and natural as going to sleep and waking up. All the agony and darkness of death is related to our separation from God. It is related to our sin. In this sense, as St Paul says, ‘death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned’.
But, says Jesus in today’s Gospel, ‘everything that is now covered will be uncovered’. Jesus spent those three years trying to teach his close friends. Only after his resurrection did they realise that the scandal of the Cross, the unthinkable mystery of a suffering Messiah, could be God’s way of breaking the stranglehold of sin and death on the human race. The love of God was and is made visible not from outside, but from within. The abundant free gift of God’s unconditional love and free forgiveness is made known on the Cross and finally vindicated in the resurrection of Jesus.
So here, week by week, this central mystery of love and forgiveness, this one real sign of hope for the world, is set before us in the Eucharist. ‘When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, until you come in glory.’ Here God invites us once again to respond to his love and to be united with the new Adam, to be united once again to humanity renewed in Jesus. God invites us into union with himself, and sends us out to proclaim from the housetops, in word and deed, the wonder and the abundance of his grace.
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14th SUNDAY of Year 'A'
You may remember from last week’s celebration of the Feast of SS Peter and Paul, and indeed from last week’s newsletter, that we are now in a special Year of St Paul; a year celebrating the 2000th anniversary of his birth. So I am going to have another go at his contribution to the Sunday Readings. Today we have another piece from the Letter to the Romans. We had one two weeks ago, and there is a close connection between the two passages.
Two weeks ago, St Paul was talking about Original Sin. He was talking about the fact that somehow humanity had become separated or distanced from God. The Genesis story of Adam and Eve, the story of what we call ‘the Fall’, gives a vivid picture of where we actually find ourselves today. Adam and Eve began with a quite open relationship with God. When they had disobeyed, they felt they had to hide. God had to come looking for them. We too experience a sense of separation from God. Most of our contemporaries, at least in our culture, ignore God altogether. ‘We don’t do God’, as the famous phrase from 10 Downing Street went. All of us, I suspect, know something of what it means to hide from God; we know what it means simply to ignore the prompting of conscience and to go our own way.
Two weeks ago, we were looking at the contrast which St Paul makes between Adam and Christ. Adam represents humanity separated from God and going its own way. Christ represents humanity renewed and restored. Indeed Jesus Christ does not just represent restored humanity. Humanity is restored in his person. ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation’. In Jesus Christ, in the humanity of Jesus Christ, the relationship between God and us has been restored. In Jesus Christ humanity is once more on the way to life.
In today’s Second Reading St Paul makes another contrast. In our translation it is the contrast between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘unspiritual’. ‘Your interests are not in the unspiritual but in the spiritual.’ Older and more literal translations say ‘You are not in the flesh but in the spirit.’ That isn’t particularly helpful either. ‘Spiritual’ tends for us to have overtones of the vaguely mystical and unearthly. ‘Flesh’ contrasted like that with ‘spirit’ takes us immediately into a sharp contrast between the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’. And if we are not careful we hear ‘Spirit equals good; matter – or body – equals bad’. But Catholic Christianity absolutely rejects that particular contrast between ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’, the idea that matter is bad, and spirit good. Our faith has at its heart incarnation. ‘The Word of God was made flesh and lived among us’. So that contrast of ‘matter –bad, spirit-good’ is not what St Paul is talking about when he makes a distinction between ‘spiritual’ and ‘unspiritual’. Rather, St Paul is making a contrast which is very close to the earlier contrast between Adam and Christ. What he means by ‘living in the flesh’ or being ‘unspiritual’ is living a life cut off from God. What he means by being ‘in the spirit’ or ‘spiritual’ is living a life in communion with God. He means living a life linked to Jesus Christ, in whom that broken relationship with God was and is restored.
So St Paul says to the Christians in Rome, and he says to us as well, ‘You are living in the spirit. Your life is fundamentally a life of communion with God, because the Spirit of God has made his home in you’. And he goes on to repeat the same thing in slightly different words. ‘Unless you possessed the Spirit of Christ’, he says, ‘you would not belong to him.’ Notice that St Paul speaks about the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ quite interchangeably. He speaks then about ‘the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead’ - yet another way of speaking of the Holy Spirit of God. I’ve mentioned before ‘the Go-between God’ – the title of a book about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One who is the ‘go-between’; the one who makes the connections. The Holy Spirit is the Love connecting Father and Son; the Holy Spirit is the power of Love who raises Jesus from the dead; the Holy Spirit of Father and Son is the One who connects with us and draws us into communion with the humanity of Jesus; the One who through our communion with the humanity of Jesus draws us into communion with God.
St Paul says to the Romans, and he says to us, ‘The Spirit of God has made his home in you.’ That is a fact. It is a fact, to begin with, of our baptism. Every time we offer Mass for someone who has died, we use these words: ‘In baptism he (or she) died with Christ, may he (or she) come to share in his resurrection.’ By baptism we were linked in an unrepeatable way to the new creation in Jesus Christ. It was in baptism that each of us made the fundamental transition from Adam to Christ, from ‘unspiritual’ to ‘spiritual’.
But today’s Second Reading has two paragraphs. We have dealt with paragraph one. The glory is in the first paragraph, but the sting is in the tail. St Paul goes on: ‘So then, my brothers (and sisters), there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves or to live unspiritual lives.’ In this, ‘necessity’ is an important word. Without Christ we could not help living lives disconnected from God. That is a necessary consequence of being fallen creatures. But by our baptism into Christ, by our membership of his Body the Church, we have moved into a new world, a different sphere. I think it would be really helpful if we could get a clear vision of the radical nature of this movement from Adam to Christ, from ‘flesh’ to ‘spirit’, from separation to communion. Our culture encourages us to think of our faith as just one aspect of life; I’m a grandfather, a kitchen designer, a golfer and a Catholic. In the consumer surveys ‘religion’ comes under leisure activities. But in fact to move from Adam to Christ is to breathe a new atmosphere. It is to give a new context to every aspect of life. It is indeed, rightly understood, to move from death to life.
It is tremendously hard for those of us who were baptised in infancy, those of us who have been brought up in the Church, those who have not had some Damascus Road conversion experience like St Paul, to get a sense of the greatness of this transition achieved by our baptism. But we need at least to get a glimpse of it; to pray, perhaps, for the grace to be given a vision of it. Because without that it is very hard to hear the final sentence of the Reading. ‘If by the Spirit you put an end to the misdeeds of the body, you will live.’
In the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the atmosphere of the whole of our lives as people living in Christ, we are invited to ‘put to death’, to kill off, what St Paul calls the ‘deeds of the body’. It sounds as if perhaps he is fixated on greed and lust. But in this context the ‘deeds of the body’ are pretty well equivalent to ‘the old fallen, disordered way of life’, everything, in fact, at odds with the Holy Spirit of God and of Christ. The Holy Spirit is the atmosphere we breathe; each Sunday by the power of the Holy Spirit our communion with the risen Christ is renewed through the gift of his Body and Blood; the foundation of everything in our lives is God’s love, God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, God’s gift of his life revealed in and through Jesus Christ.
But in that context we still have to kill off those aspects of our life which are not in harmony with God’s new creation. We have to kill off old habits, and form new ones. We have to live a disciplined life. We have to practice putting God and not me at the centre. It is a life’s work. There are disciplines of worship and prayer that we share as Church; there are disciplines which each of us needs in our personal inner battle with self-centredness. It is unfashionable and unpopular, but there is no escape from discipline in the Christian life. But the context of it all is given in the Gospel: in the end it is about fullness of life in communion with the Father and the Son; in the end it is about a light burden and an easy yoke; in the end it is about rest for our souls, as we discover our true vocation, and our true freedom, as sons and daughters at home in our Father’s house.
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