This beautiful 15th century work of art depicts the Virgin Mary kneeling in veneration and contemplation of the Holy Child who is a source of illumination and a light to the nations. In the background an angel appears to shepherds tending their sheep on the hillside. Discover the significance of this painting at the link here: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/…/geertgen-tot-sint…
Geertgen tot Sint Jans, The Nativity at Night, c. 1490. National Gallery, London.
On Saturday, 14th May, our faithful friend and fellow parishioner, Peter Even, went home to meet The Lord, at the age of 91, after many months of quietly and stoically battling cancer. He had continued to attend Mass until the week before his death, and on the Friday evening prior to his passing, he received the Last Rites.
We extend our deepest sympathies to his family, who in December of last year, also lost their mother and grandmother, Johanna Christina, wife of Peter.
Peter’s Funeral Mass will be held at 09:30 a.m., Saturday 21 May 2022, at St Andrew’s Church, Clarkson, followed by burial at 11:00 a.m. at Pinnaroo Cemetery, Whitfords Avenue.
As we pray in the Eucharistic Prayer,
“Remember our brother who has fallen asleep in the hope of the resurrection, and all who have died in your mercy; welcome him into the light of your face.”
On the Third Sunday of Easter, we welcomed Fr Thomas Zureich to our Catholic community of Yanchep/Two Rocks. Fr Thomas comes to us after serving in the wheatbelt towns of Corrigin/Kulin/Hyden, where, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and the local community, he has worked very hard to repair and renovate the parish buildings, and revive the sacramental program. May Our Lord and our Blessed Mother accompany him with grace to help our local parish community to grow and thrive.
Here are the local Mass Times for the Easter Triduum.
| Holy Thursday | 1st April | LANCELIN | MASS OF THE LORD’S SUPPER | 5:30 p.m. |
| Good Friday | 2nd April | TWO ROCKS PRESBYTERY (3 Blaxland Ave) | STATIONS OF THE CROSS | 10 a.m. |
| Good Friday | 2nd April | TWO ROCKS PRESBYTERY (3 Blaxland Ave) | THE LORD’S PASSION | 3 p.m. |
| Holy Saturday | 3rd April | YANCHEP COMMUNITY CENTRE | EASTER VIGIL | 6 p.m. |
| Sunday | 4th April | GUILDERTON | EASTER MASS | 8 a.m. |
| Sunday | 4th April | LANCELIN | EASTER MASS | 10 a.m. |
Wishing you all a blessed Holy Week.
I do love the little coincidences that are a constant part of the life of a Christian. I had been thinking it was high time I published a tribute to Pat Murphy, one of our former parishioners, who died on 17 September this year. And so I started searching through my enormous collection of photographs to find one that I remembered taking of Pat and Bishop Sproxton, when he visited Yanchep. When I finally found it, I had one of those tingles of surprise and satisfaction to discover it is exactly 5 years to the day since I took that photo. I say “satisfaction” because that is the feeling one gets when it is confirmed to you that the cloud of witnesses is actually very close by, and giving you hints.
Pat was (and is still!) a very holy, gentle woman. She had a great love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus and was one of the ladies of the parish you could rely on to be at daily devotions, rain, hail or shine. She was also one of those self-effacing people who always had a kind word, and was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to you, if there was some doubt about your wholesomeness! I still remember the time when there was a bit of a kerfuffle going on, and she said to me, “I don’t think those things they said about you were true.” (I still haven’t found out what she meant, but never mind.) So I felt quite attached to Pat, and since her funeral, I had been thinking about a prayer card she once gave to me when I was desperately upset, and wondered where on earth I had put it. Well, within a week of her funeral, lo and behold, I was doing some tidying up and came upon C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity in a pile of paperwork, whereupon this prayer card of hers fell out, as I had been using it as a bookmark. That gave me another of those satisfying shivers (thanks, Pat!)
So I ask Pat, “Please pray for me and my family, as I pray for your period of purgation to be short, and your soul to be united as soon as possible with Our Blessed Lord in the company of the angels and saints.”
The verse that immediately comes to mind is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14.
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.
Her grave is not far from my husband’s – should you wish to pay your respects, it is in the section 1672-1730, Tuart Court, Pinnaroo.
This week we have a guest post from Simon Dennerly. Simon, on behalf of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, has got together with the Dawson Society to host a series of talks on Chesterton’s fictional works. Our local literary expert, Daniel Matthys, gave us a spellbinding introduction last week. If you haven’t yet attended, it’s not too late to start.
Chesterton and the Ordinariates
by Simon Dennerly
What do G.K. Chesterton and the Ordinariates have in common? In a sense, everything. This has lead to a project to promote the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, by promoting G.K. Chesterton: using a model that is easily replicable.
Many people are aware Chesterton was an Anglican writer who converted to the Catholic Church: but that is only half the story. To a vast majority ‘Anglican’ automatically means ‘Protestant’, but while Chesterton wrote many of his great works while a member of the Church of England, few are aware he was a member of the Anglo-Catholic section of that institution and critical of Reformed Theology. Faith shapes one’s world-view, and Anglo-Catholicism is more than just liturgy, it is also an intellectual school. So when we talk of Chesterton’s conversion: it was not to ‘Catholicism’, as he already held Catholic…
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The entry of Jesus into Jerusalem
Today’s readings
Word format: Year A Palm Passion Sunday 2017
Pdf format: Year A Palm Passion Sunday 2017
This week, long time Two Rocks resident, Josie (Giuseppina) del Bene, teaches us how to make crosses out of palm leaves for the Palm Sunday procession. Watch her step-by-step on this YouTube video:
The Raising of Lazarus
This week I will continue answering a question from one of the readers of these posts, this time focussing on the middle section, concerning whether the Christian Bible condones rape:
Why don’t Christians condemn the parts of their Bible that instruct non-believers must be killed. While they are at it they could do the same about the bits that condone rape and the bits that say gays must die.
I was somewhat bemused by the claim that the Bible condones rape, as most people understand the Bible to be strongly opposed to sexual sin, so I had to resort to consulting an atheist website with the congenial and obviously impartial name, The Bible is Evil, to discover our reader’s likely sources. It turns out that this website lists a number of examples from Judges, Deuteronomy, Numbers and Exodus which, according to the author, support rape. I will take just one of these by way of illustration and look at some general principles of interpreting Scripture, and leave some references which deal with the other examples.
The first example involves a rollicking yarn from Judges 21, concerning the rape of the daughters of Shiloh by the men of the tribe of Benjamin. Most Catholics who are not regular readers of Scripture are probably unfamiliar with this story, as the Catholic Lectionary for Sundays and Major Feasts includes not one snippet from the Book of Judges, and the weekday readings cover less than 10% of the entire content of the book (Lectionary Statistics by Felix Just, S.J.). This leaves Catholics somewhat unarmed for assaults from atheists on some of the more intemperate parts of the Old Testament.
To answer our reader’s question and provide some context, I will give a brief(ish) synopsis of the tale, which begins back in Judges 19.
The story begins with an unnamed Levite from Ephraim who has a slave wife – or concubine. Although concubinage was common in the Ancient Near East, in the Bible it is never described with approval. Jewish readers would understand immediately that the fact that the Levite has a concubine is a blemish on his character. This concubine has made an escape from her master to return to her father’s home – in Bethlehem of all places – and after a leisurely four months, the Levite finally decides to make the journey to recover her. We get a hint of why she might have run away from her master as his character is revealed in the story. To cut a long story short, the Levite gets along swimmingly with the concubine’s Dad, and the two of them spend the next several days eating, drinking and making merry far into the evening (while the concubine seems to be completely ignored). Finally, the Levite manages to tear himself away from the insistent father and makes his way back to Ephraim, together with the concubine, a servant and two donkeys.
When they start off, it is already late, and the light is failing as they approach Jerusalem. The servant sensibly suggests they stop there for the night, but the Levite turns up his nose at staying in what was at this time a city occupied by Jebusites – non-Jews, and moreover, descendants of the cursed line of Canaan (see Genesis 10) – and opts to head to the next Israelite town of Gibeah, in Benjamin. By the time they reach Gibeah, night is falling, and as they wait in the town square for someone to offer them hospitality, their chances of finding it are slim. Remember street lighting was not a given at this period in history. As luck would have it, an old man comes along and offers them a place in his house. Levitical law made it obligatory for Jews to offer hospitality, even to foreigners: “If you have resident aliens in your country, you will not molest them. You will treat resident aliens as though they were native-born and love them as yourself – for you yourselves were once aliens in Egypt.” (Lv 19:34)
But just when they have settled down to dinner indoors, we discover that Gibeah is not the safe place the Levite thought it was. In a scene reminiscent of Sodom, an unruly band of men surround the house, wanting to pack-rape the Levite (as one does). The old man and the Levite prove themselves cowardly in the extreme, for to get themselves out of this tricky situation, the old man suggests they substitute his daughter, while the Levite ends up giving them the concubine to do with as they please.
They had intercourse with her and ill-treated her all night till morning.
In the morning, the concubine, after a night of being violently gang-raped, drags herself to the door of the house, where in great distress, she dies “with her hands on the threshold”.
Meanwhile, the Levite, astounding us with his indifference to her plight, appears to have had a good night’s sleep! The tranquillity of the Levite is masterfully juxtaposed with the horror of the scene that has just occurred:
In the morning her husband got up and, opening the door of the house, was going out to continue his journey when he saw the woman, his concubine, lying at the door of the house … ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘we must leave!’ There was no answer. (Judges 19:27-28)
This is all the more appalling when we remember that Levites had a sacred calling and were the tribe set apart for service of the sanctuary. Jesus himself is not above criticising the hypocrisy of certain Levites (Luke 10:32), and perhaps this Levite is typical of those priests and Bishops who in our own age have been indifferent to reports of sexual abuse or even complicit in such activities. But I digress.
Without feeling a ounce of self-reproach, the Levite hauls her body home on his donkey, and proceeds to cut her up into twelve pieces, distributing the parts countrywide to each of the twelve tribes, with the message,
Has anything like this been done since the day when the Israelites came out of Egypt until today?
Instead of examining his own conscience, his purpose is to stir up the vengeance of all Israel against the men of Benjamin, and he succeeds, as representatives from all the tribes (except Benjamin) gather at Mizpah and declare that they will not let this injustice go unpunished.
When the Benjaminites refuse to hand over the rapists from Gibeah, full scale war breaks out, and to cut a long story short, after two days where Benjamin appears to be getting the upper hand, the Israelites get strategic and draw the Benjaminites away from Gibeah to a place where they can be hemmed in and massacred, while in the meantime other Israelite troops ambush Gibeah, killing the inhabitants and setting the town alight. Only 600 men from Benjamin remain, having escaped into the desert.
With all the mishegoss of a Woody Allen movie, the Israelites are suddenly struck with Oy vey iz mir about the fact that they have practically wiped out one of their own tribes,
Yahweh, God of Israel, why has this happened in Israel that a tribe should be missing from Israel today?
One imagines God going *ultimate headdesk*. (Er … because you killed them, stupid.)
So the Israelites decide that they need to ensure they provide wives for the remaining Benjaminites in order that the tribal remnant might not die out. Well, they can’t provide wives from among their own daughters, as they have previously made an oath not to contaminate their families with the murderous Benjaminites, so they come up with a plan to steal all the virgins from the one town in Gilead that had not gathered in Mizpah – having slaughtered everyone from that town outside the category of virgin – but this provides only 400 women for 600 men. They make up the balance by telling the men of Benjamin to seize the girls from Shiloh as they come out to dance at the annual festival (these are the rapes mentioned by our reader). Having done this, the Israelites all return home, and the Benjaminites are free to rebuild.
What are we to make of this unedifying story?
Atheists and anti-theists tend to think this way:
But to the Biblical exegete, that’s not what the book of Judges is about. One has to understand the intention of the author, and in this case, he is quite clear. We have the repeated verse regarding good leadership:
The generations after Joshua have forgotten God, are lacking good leaders, and have resorted to doing whatever they like. The entire book of Judges describes a repeated cycle of the Israelites turning away from God to worship the gods of the Canaanites, being humiliated by their enemies, being rescued by the Judges, having a brief period of peace, and then falling back into sin.
The Israelites then did what was evil in the Lord’s eyes and served the Baals. They deserted Yahweh, God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt, and they followed other gods, from those of the surrounding peoples … He delivered them to the enemies surrounding them, and they were no longer able to resist their enemies … so that they were in dire distress. Yahweh then appointed them judges, who rescued them from the hands of their plunderers … But once the judge was dead, they relapsed into even worse corruption than their ancestors. They followed other gods; they served them and bowed before them … (Jg 2:11-19).
Our reader asks why Christians don’t condemn the rape that is described in this book. A better question would be, “How did you, dear reader, manage to miss these repeated sentences condemning evil?”
Perhaps the atheists who ask these questions are just indulging in the straw man fallacy, relying on the ignorance of their audience. Or perhaps I am being cynical and the reader genuinely wants to know the true interpretation. In fact, we could say with today’s reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans,
People who are interested only in unspiritual things can never be pleasing to God. Your interests, however, are not in the unspiritual, but in the spiritual, since the Spirit of God has made his home in you.
When it comes to active atheism versus total indifference, active atheism wins hands down, because at least it cares about asking the important questions.
At any rate, the point of Judges is to warn us about the consequences of evil and to show what happens when a society abandons God and does whatever it likes. In fact, it is a book that is most applicable to our own time when relativism is the prevailing standard and everyone ‘does as they see fit’, without reference to God.
As far as the other claims go regarding rape verses in the Bible, I will refer you to Jimmy Akin’s treatments here:
Stay tuned for next week, when I will tackle part three of the question.
Today’s readings:
Word format: Year A Lent 5th Sunday 2017
Pdf format: Year A Lent 5th Sunday 2017
Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, Angelika Kauffmann, 1796, oil on canvas, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
Today I’m going to depart from the usual format of commenting on the Sunday readings and take up a question from a reader of my Facebook page. The question is this:
Why don’t Christians condemn the parts of their Bible that instruct non-believers must be killed. While they are at it they could do the same about the bits that condone rape and the bits that say gays must die.
Firstly, I’d like to thank Bill for asking the question, and say that I had similar questions when I first took up the Bible to read it cover-to-cover. But I found that the deeper I delved into Sacred Scripture, with the help of commentary from the best scholars, the more miraculous and life-changing the Bible became.
Today I will focus on the first part of Bill’s question, and I’ll take the second half next week.
With reference to ‘the parts of the Bible that instruct non-believers must be killed’, I’m not sure which particular passage Bill had in mind (sorry, Bill, I should have asked), but let’s take, for example, Deuteronomy 20:16-18:
But as regards the towns of those peoples whom the LORD your God is giving you as your heritage, you must not spare the life of any living thing. Instead you must lay them under the curse of destruction: Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the detestable things which they do to honour their gods: in doing these, you would sin against the LORD your God.
Sounds pretty violent? Here are some thoughts on how to interpret this:
We need to understand the context of the story in order to understand why it says what it says. This is not an instruction to us NOW to go out and lay anyone under a curse of destruction, and I have never encountered anyone suggesting such a thing (except non-believers telling Christians how violent the Bible is). The Bible spans at least 2,000 years of history, and the parts of the Bible which have the most violence occur early in the history of the Israelites. But still, it’s legitimate to ask, “Why is this violence there at all?”
The Bible is really a collection of books in different genres which trace the story of God’s revelation of Himself to mankind. Now it’s not an easy task to teach humans anything, so God, in his wisdom, decided to select one particular nation – the Jews – and lead them gradually by methods that they could understand, to a fuller knowledge of Himself. When we read Scripture, it helps to think of the question, “What is God trying to achieve?” He wants the Israelites to be in a Covenant relationship with him – as children to a loving Father – and he wants them to learn how to listen to him and live good and holy lives. It’s essential that we understand the covenantal love of the Father if we want to understand the Old Testament – God is creating a bond with creatures he wants to elevate to the level of family.
During the period described in the Deuteronomy passage above, the Jewish nation is still in its infancy. Like toddlers, they are having great difficulty learning to listen to the voice of God, their Father, who, like a good parent, knows what is best for them. By the time we get to this passage in Deuteronomy, we have seen numerous examples of the peaks and troughs of the Israelite journey. One minute they are trusting in God with wholehearted self-abandonment, and are rewarded with blessings, next minute they are a nation of grumblers and mutterers who forget God’s help during the good times and are now backing away and suspicious of God’s intentions. The Israelites have an unfortunate habit of thinking their own ideas are better than God’s.
The Israelites of this period are like spiritual toddlers, who are embedded in a culture that is not very nuanced or morally sophisticated, and so God has to achieve his purpose of returning them to the Promised Land by talking to them in the only language they can understand – the rather unsubtle Deuteronomic Law.
For more on this and how to understand the Bible generally, I would recommend reading Walking with God by Tim Gray and Jeff Cavins.
God had previously given peaceful instructions to Moses for re-entering the Promised Land (remember this is the land they had left about 500 years earlier, when they had relocated to Egypt during a famine), but they had failed to obey orders. What, specifically, were these directives?
Look, I am sending an angel to precede you, to guard you as you go and bring you to the place I have prepared … I shall send terror of myself ahead of you; I shall throw all the peoples you encounter into confusion, and make all your enemies take to their heels. I shall send hornets ahead of you to drive Hivite, Canaanite and Hittite out before you. I shall not drive them out ahead of you in a single year, or the land might become a desert where wild animals would multiply to your cost. I shall drive them out little by little before you, until your numbers grow sufficient for you to take possession of the land. (Exodus 23: 20, 27-31).
So this re-entry was meant to be accomplished without warfare, but merely through the Israelites trusting in God to drive the enemies of Israel out little by little as they were (a) thrown into confusion and (b) discomfited by something as relatively mild as an outbreak of hornets.
But, just when the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, they got cold feet! The reconnaissance party that had been sent out to assess the land, returned in fear, and their negative report caused the whole nation to waver and lose trust in God’s promise to be with them.
They began disparaging the country they had reconnoitred to the Israelites, saying, ‘The country we have been to reconnoitre is a country that devours its inhabitants. All the people we saw there were of enormous size. We saw giants there too … We felt like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them’
The whole community then cried out in dismay, and the people wept all that night. All the Israelites muttered at Moses and Aaron, and the whole community said to them, ‘Would to God we had died in Egypt, or even that we had died in this desert!’ (Numbers 13:32-33, 14:1-2)
The consequence of the lack of fidelity shown by Israel, is that they have to wander in the wilderness for forty more years, before they can have another crack at the Promised Land.
Now this is where the book of Deuteronomy comes in (the violent passage quoted at the beginning). What we have to understand about Deuteronomy is that it’s not God’s first choice – the name itself means, “second law” (Deutero = second, nomos = law). The only law that is universal and continued into the New Covenant under Christ is the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) – and the principles derived from it. Jesus himself gives a critique of Deuteronomic law when he talks about divorce in Matthew 19:8:
They said to him, ‘Then why did Moses command that a writ of dismissal should be given in cases of divorce?’ He said to them, ‘It was because you were so hard hearted, that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning. Now I say this to you: anyone who divorces his wife … and marries another, is guilty of adultery.’
Referring back to Deuteronomy 24:1, we can find out what ‘Moses’ command’ was.
Suppose a man has taken a wife and consummated the marriage; but she has not pleased him and he has found some impropriety of which to accuse her; he has therefore made out a writ of divorce for her and handed it to her and then dismissed her from his house; she leaves his home and goes away to become the wife of another man. Then suppose this second man who has married her takes a dislike to her and makes out a writ of divorce for her and hands it to her and dismisses her from his house or if this other man who took her as his wife dies, her first husband, who has repudiated her, may not take her back as his wife now that she has been made unclean in this way.
See how different Jesus’ version is from that of Moses’ Law? The Deuteronomic law was given for people whose hearts were already hardened to God. Therefore the teaching about killing the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, and any other recalcitrant tribes, is also a ‘limited edition’ instruction which falls away under the New Covenant.
But why does Moses say, “You must not spare the life of any living thing”? The reason that the Israelites must not contaminate themselves with Canaanite culture is made clear:
so that they may not teach you to do all the detestable things which they do to honour their gods: in doing these, you would sin against the LORD your God.
The thing that many people don’t appreciate is just how horrific and obscene the practices of the Canaanites were. Think of it from God’s point of view – for the Jews simply to blend in with these Canaanites would be like your conscientious, God-fearing and well-behaved son getting involved with a bunch of drug dealers and sex traffickers. Once his mind has been twisted by the wrong sort of friends, it will be very difficult for him to extricate himself. Similarly, if the Israelites start intermingling with the deplorable Canaanites, soon their close, distinctive and holy relationship with the one true God will be so diluted as to be unrecognisable.
So what sort of things did the Canaanites, Hittites, and the rest of them get up to?
The Storm-god [Baal] came to El-Kunirsha, the husband of Ashertu [Asherah], and entered El-Kunirsha’s tent … Thus said the Storm-god. “When I entered thy house, Ashertu sent out her maidens to me, saying, ‘Come, sleep with me.’ Ashertu is impugning thy virility. Although she is thy wife, she keeps on sending to me: ‘Come, sleep with me.’ El Kunirsha began to reply to the Storm-god: ‘Go sleep with her! Lie with my wife and humble her!’
There is one custom amongst these people which is wholly shameful: every woman who is a native of the country must once in her life go and sit in the temple of Ishtar [Venus] and there give herself to a strange man. The History of Herodotus, Book 1, 199.
Mightiest Ba’al obeyed.
He loved a heifer in the pasture,
A cow in the fields by the shore of the realm of death;
he did lie with her seven and seventy times,
she allowed him to mount eight and eighty times;
and she conceived and gave birth to a boy. (Baal and Mot 5, v, vi)
and worst of all,
You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God.
Cleitarchus describes the Phoenician method of child sacrifice:
There stands in their midst a bronze statue of Kronos [the Phoenician equivalent of Moloch], its hands extended over a bronze brazier, the flames of which engulf the child. When the flames fall upon the body, the limbs contract and the open mouth seems almost to be laughing until the contracted body slips quietly into the brazier. Thus it is that the ‘grin’ is known as ‘sardonic laughter,’ since they die laughing.
The commentary in the Jerusalem Bible says, “In Canaanite ritual, children were sacrificed by being made to pass through fire, i.e. by burning … The rite found its way into Israel, notably at the burning-place in the valley of Ben-Hinnom (‘Gehenna’), just outside Jerusalem. The origin of the word Molech is Phoenician and designated a certain type of sacrifice.”
All Christians know that, whatever is said in the Old Testament, the fullest expression of the heart of God the Father is contained in Jesus Christ, the ‘icon of the invisible God’ (Col. 1:15). Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, the Word of God, who has assumed human nature and come to us to reveal the Father more fully. Therefore the definitive guide for Christian behaviour is seen in the New Testament and explained by the Church which Christ established on earth. The Church has clear teachings on the killing of others, grounded in Christ. If atheists don’t hear Christians proclaiming these teachings week after week, it’s probably because they’re not in Church or looking in the right place. In fact, today’s Gospel reading is perfect for illustrating Jesus’ method of approaching those who do not share Jewish beliefs.
… because all Scripture has been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and describes how God has revealed Himself to mankind over the course of at least 4,000 years. Without God’s preparation of the Jews described in the Old Testament period, without their strengthening as a distinctive race with a distinctive Covenant relationship with God, the teaching of Jesus would have been incomprehensible, and his many fulfilments of prophecy would have been invisible.
(See here: Prophecies fulfilled by Jesus Christ)
Bill, I hope this has answered at least the first part of your question. Stay tuned for next week, when I will tackle the second part.
Today’s readings:
Word format: Year A Lent 3rd Sunday 2017
Pdf format: Year A Lent 3rd Sunday 2017
Catholic in Yanchep 