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Holy Thursday | Where does Jesus ordain a new Priesthood?

Jesus_washing_Peter's_feet-Ford Madox Brown

Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet, Ford Madox Brown (1852-56), oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London.

Have you ever wondered why Catholics have priests, but many other Christians have ‘pastors’ or ‘ministers’ and shun the idea of priests because they equate them with the dreaded Pharisees and the teachers of the Law?

At the amazing ecumenical Bible Study I attend in our little seaside community north of Perth, we have been studying chapters 13 to 21 of the Gospel of John, or the ‘Book of Glory’ as this section is called.  This has given me the opportunity to delve deeper into the reading we will have on Holy Thursday:  Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.  On the surface Jesus is talking about humility, selfless love and service to others, but when we start looking at the typology, a whole new world of meaning opens up.

In fact, Jesus himself tells us there is more under the surface when he says: “At the moment you do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.”  This reminds us of other times the disciples didn’t know what Jesus was talking about – Luke 18:34, for example, “But they could make nothing of this; what he said was quite obscure to them, they did not understand what he was telling them.”

   They were at supper, and the devil had already put it into the mind of Judas Iscariot son of Simon, to betray him.  Jesus knew that the Father had put everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was returning to God, and he got up from table, removed his outer garments and, taking a towel, wrapped it round his waist; he then poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel he was wearing.

   He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’  Jesus answered, ‘At the moment you do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.’ ‘Never!’ said Peter, You shall never wash my feet.’  Jesus replied, ‘If I do not wash you, you can have no share with me.‘ ’Simon Peter said, ‘Well then, Lord, not only my feet, but my hands and my head as well!’  Jesus said, ‘No one who has had a bath needs washing, such a person is clean all over.  You too are clean, though not all of you are.’  He knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said, ‘though not all of you are.’

   When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments again he went back to the table.  ‘Do you understand’, he said, ‘what I have done to you?  You call me Master and Lord, and rightly; so I am.  If I, then, the Lord and Master have washed your feet, you must wash each other’s feet.  I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you.

‘In all truth I tell you,
no servant is greater than his master,
no messenger is greater than the one who sent him.’ 

So what points can we make to demonstrate that during this scene, and in the chapters following, Jesus is transforming the status of the disciples to that of priests and carrying out a mystical and sacramental act?  In fact, this would have been much clearer to the disciples and early Christians than to us, because they were familiar with the language and significance of the Old Testament.

  1. Jesus is acting as a High Priest about to carry out an act of expiation. The Old Testament prefigures and is fulfilled by the action of Christ in the New Testament, so we can look for parallel passages in the Old Testament which throw light on what Jesus is doing.  One such passage is Leviticus 16 which describes the action of Aaron, the high priest, for the Day of Expiation.  The table below shows the common elements between Leviticus 16 and John 13.
NEW TESTAMENT

The Washing of the Disciples’ Feet  (John 13)

 Common elements OLD TESTAMENT

The Great Day of Expiation (Leviticus 16:23-25
… he got up from table, removed his outer garments The High Priest takes off his outer vestments. When he has sent the goat into the desert, Aaron will go back into the Tent of Meeting and take off the linen vestments which he wore to enter the sanctuary and leave them there.
… and, taking a towel, wrapped it round his waist; he then poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel he was wearing. The High Priest carries out a washing ritual – but Jesus transfers the washing to the disciples. He will then wash his body inside the holy place …
When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments again he went back to the table.  Re-robing after the washing. …put on his vestments and come outside …
Jesus is about to offer his own life as the ultimate expiation for sin. Expiation … to offer his own and the people’s burnt offering.  He will perform the rite of expiation for himself and for the people.
  1. Jesus is wearing the garment of the High Priest. We know this because he has just taken off his outer garment – probably his prayer shawl.  So he must be wearing the seamless undergarment that John tells us about in John 19:23 – a characteristic of the High Priest’s linen vestment as well.  Josephus describes the seamlessness of the high priest’s garment in his History of the Exodus.

Now this vesture was not composed of two pieces, nor was it sewed together upon the shoulders and the sides, but it was one long vestment so woven as to have an aperture for the neck; not an oblique one, but parted all along the breast and the back. A border also was sewed to it, lest the aperture should look too indecently: it was also parted where the hands were to come out.(Antiquities, Book III, Chapter 7, 4.)

  1. Jesus is carrying out a ritual water purification prior to approaching the altar of sacrifice – where he will be the sacrifice. This is described in Exodus 30:17-21, except that instead of Aaron the High Priest and his sons, the Priests being purified, we have Jesus the High Priest purifying his spiritual sons, the Twelve Apostles, priests of the New Covenant.

You will also make a bronze basin on its bronze stand for washing.  You will put it between the Tent of Meeting and the altar and put water in it, in which Aaron and his sons will wash their hands and feet.  Whenever they are to enter the Tent of Meeting, they will wash, to avoid incurring death; and whenever they approach the altar for their service, to burn an offering for Yahweh, they will wash their hands and feet, to avoid incurring death.

 Note that John takes for granted that his readers would understand that the disciples would have washed their hands during the course of the Passover meal anyway.  There were three ritual hand washings during this meal: before drinking from the second cup during the reading of the Haggadah (Exodus story), before the unleavened bread was distributed, and after eating the roast lamb.   Only the feet remained to be done, and in fact Jesus may have replaced one of these hand-washings with the foot-washing instead.

  1. Jesus talks about the disciples “having a part in him” – so if he is the High Priest (Heb. 4:14-16), they are the regular priests. John uses the Greek term, meros (μέρος) for the disciples’ share (part, portion) in Jesus.  This is an unusual word to use, but when we look at its parallel usages in the Old Testament, it makes perfect sense.  Where God gives land to the tribes of Israel, he says to the Levites, the priestly tribe, “You will have no heritage in their country, you will not have a portion (μέρος) like them; I shall be your portion (μέρος) and your heritage among the Israelites” (Numbers 18:20).  Again in Deuteronomy 10:9,

The LORD then set apart the tribe of Levi to carry the ark of the LORD’s covenant, to stand in the presence of the LORD, to serve him and to bless his name, as they still do today.  This is why Levi has no share (μέρος) or heritage with his brothers: the LORD is his heritage (μέρος).

So when Jesus says, “If I do not wash you, you can have no share (μέρος) with me,” (Ἐὰν μὴ νίψω σε οὐκ ἔχεις μέρος μετ’ ἐμοῦ), Simon Peter gets the reference to the ordination of Aaron and his sons, the priests, and wants to be anointed feet, hands and head!

  1. Servanthood = ministry. Another interesting point is that when Jesus says,

Amen, amen,
no servant is greater than his master,
No messenger is greater than the one who sent him.

the word doulos (δοῦλος) in Greek means both servant and minister, and the word for messenger is, of course, apostle or apostolos (ἀπόστολος), so Jesus is talking about appointing these apostles in a particular role as a ministerial priesthood.

  1. Jesus’ consecration of the Apostles during the High Priestly prayer. If we read further in John, we will come to Jesus’ act of consecrating Himself to the Father, and then consecrating his Disciples.  This is outside the scope of the Holy Thursday reading, but relevant to the consecration of Priests.  For ‘consecrate’ he uses the word, hagiazei (ἁγιάζει), which is also used in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers for the ordination of priests.

Consecrate them in the truth;
As you sent me into the world,
I have sent them into the world,
and for their sake I consecrate myself
so that they too may be consecrated in truth. (John 17:17-19) 

A lot more could be said on this topic than will reasonably fit into a blog post, but let me recommend Scott Hahn’s study, John, the Sacramental Gospel, particularly part 6, which covers the section from chapter 13 onwards, as well as Dr Lawrence Feingold’s treatise on the Typology of the Old Testament Priesthood, which goes into the comparison between the threefold model of High Priest, Priest and Levite in the Old Covenant, with the offices of Bishop, Priest and Deacon in the New Covenant.

Today’s readings (2nd Sunday of Lent):
Word format: Year A Lent 2nd Sunday 2017
Pdf format: Year A Lent 2nd Sunday 2017


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1st Sunday of Lent, Year A | Why do we need a Saviour, anyway?

fall-of-man-hugo-van-der-goes-999-px

The Fall of Man, Hugo van der Goes, 15th century, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

The first reading today goes to the heart of why we need a Saviour.  How many of us really understand Original Sin and can explain it to others?  I know I have trouble.  I have rewritten this blog post about four times and have almost given up.

  • The thing is, if we don’t understand how much God loves us, we won’t understand why sin is so terrible.
  • And if we don’t understand that sin has a seriously damaging effect on us and those around us, we won’t understand why we need a Saviour.
  • And if we don’t understand that we need a Saviour, we are at risk of losing out on eternal life.

One of my sons once asked me, “Why would I want to believe in a God who sends people to Hell for all eternity just because they don’t believe in him?”  That kind of misses the point.  And is heavy with irony, because this particular son loves gaming and you can virtually guarantee that most games on the market are replete with rules that reward with eternal consequences (within the confines of the game) the characters living in them.

But somehow, despite my efforts at catechesis, he has appropriated this distorted interpretation of Scripture, so amusingly described by the incomparable Edward Feser:

Many people seem to think that the doctrine of original sin says something like this: Adam and Eve were originally made for the eternal bliss of Heaven, but because they ate a piece of fruit they were told not to, they came to merit instead eternal torture at the hands of demons sticking pitchforks into them as they roast over hellfire.  Though Adam and Eve’s descendants had no part in their fruit-stealing, they are going to be held accountable for it anyway, and merit the same eternal torture (demons, pitchforks, hellfire and all).  For they have inherited a kind of guilt-carrying gene, which will automatically transfer them into the custody of the pitchfork-carrying demons straightaway upon death unless God somehow supernaturally removes it.  For some reason, though, this gene doesn’t show up in biological research, and its existence must be taken on faith.

The way my son has framed the question suggests that he has created in his mind an image of God that is petulant, angry and shallow.  It’s easy enough to get this sort of God-caricature from our increasingly secularist culture (which itself is growing increasingly petulant, angry and shallow), but it’s not what the Bible actually teaches.

A careful reading of the Genesis narrative (and the Catholic church does not ask you to take it literally) shows a God who has been exceedingly generous and loving to the first humans who have been ensouled.  First he has woven all of space, time and evolutionary history together to set up the conditions favourable to the existence of this Paradise in which he has placed them, and then he generously says:

God blessed them, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful …
                Be masters of the fish of the sea …
                To you I give all the seed-bearing plants …

The Catechism tells us that God created man in his image and established him in his friendship (CCC 396).

God created man in the image of himself,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27) 

There’s a building and a gathering in these lines that suggests a circle of love and communion between God and the man and the woman.  Ed Feser again:

… According to Christian theology, God offered to our first parents more than what was “owed” to us given our nature.  He offered us a supernatural gift.  Here it is crucial to understand what “supernatural” means in this context.  It has nothing to do with ghosts, goblins, and the like.  What is meant is rather that God offered us a good that went above or beyond what our nature required us to have.  In particular, he offered Adam and Eve the beatific vision– a direct, “face to face” knowledge of the divine essence which far transcends the very limited knowledge of God we can have through natural reason, and which would entail unsurpassable bliss of a kind we could never attain given our natural powers.  He also offered special helps that would deliver us from the limitations of our natures – that would free us from the ignorance and error our intellectual limitations open the door to, the moral errors our weak wills lead us into, the sicknesses and injuries our bodily limitations make possible, and so forth.

By definition, none of this was “owed” to us, precisely because it is supernatural.  Hence while God cannot fail to will for us what is good for us given our nature, He would have done us no wrong in refraining from offering these supernatural gifts to us, precisely because they go beyond what our nature requires for our fulfillment.  Still, He offered them to us anyway.  But this offer was conditional. 

Indeed, God places limits on these first humans:

You are free to eat of all the trees in the garden.  But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat; for, the day you eat of that, you are doomed to die. (Gen. 2:17)

The death referred to is spiritual death, a separation from that friendship with God that is engendered by trust, obedience and submission to God’s wisdom and authority.

So how did Eve succumb to the serpent’s temptations so easily?  What on earth was she thinking?

  • I need to exaggerate and embroider what God actually said: “You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death.”
  • I don’t think God was telling me the whole truth. Was he even lying?
  • This serpent is one smart cookie. He sounds like he knows more than God.
  • It’s OK to change my mind like the wind. I’m a woman.  Let your no be yes and your yes be no.
  • I can’t resist this delicious looking, mouth-watering fruit! Who needs self-control?
  • I want to be thought of as wise, knowledgeable and god-like.

Wow, she sounds just like me.  And then there’s Adam.  Don’t get me started on him.  I’ll just refer you to Monsignor Charles Pope who does a superb job on both Eve and Adam.

Anyway, getting back to how Original Sin is passed on:

The penalty was the loss of the supernatural gifts they had been given and that their descendants would have been given, and a fall back into their merely natural state, with all its limitations.  In particular, it was a loss of all the helps that would effectively have removed those limitations — and worst of all, loss of the beatific vision.

Similarly, we inherit the penalty of original sin, not in the sense that we’ve got some “original sin gene” alongside genes for eye color and tooth enamel, but rather in the sense that the offer of the supernatural gifts was made to the human race as a whole through their first parent acting as their representative.  Inheriting this penalty from Adam is more like inheriting your father’s name or bank account than it is like inheriting his looks or his temperament.  (Modern Biology and Original Sin) 

I would like to emphasise the effects of sin even more strongly than Professor Feser, because I myself have often wondered about  why God can’t just take us all to heaven without all the palaver of atonement – and I have prayed for Him to give me more understanding in this area.  [This is the wonderful thing about being a Christian.  We’re not just believing something from 2,000 years ago, but are having real live conversations with Jesus in the present.]  And every time I have done so, God has in the few days following, made me acutely aware of some sin or other of mine which has caused great damage.  Suddenly all the trauma of some situation from the past has been dredged up and re-presented to my mind, to the point where I have called out to God, “OK, ok, stop.  I get it now.”

So if we don’t understand Original Sin, or even bog standard everyday sin, neither will we understand why it was necessary that Christ should offer his life in atonement for us.  When I say ‘necessary’ I don’t mean it in the logical sense, because God is not constrained by this or that method of saving us, but God is perfect Justice, and therefore something has to offset the debt that has been racked up by our sins.  St Thomas Aquinas explains it perfectly:

That man should be delivered by Christ’s Passion was in keeping with both His mercy and His justice. With His justice, because by His Passion Christ made satisfaction for the sin of the human race; and so man was set free by Christ’s justice: and with His mercy, for since man of himself could not satisfy for the sin of all human nature, as was said above (III:1:2), God gave him His Son to satisfy for him, according to Romans 3:24-25: “Being justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath proposed to be a propitiation, through faith in His blood.” And this came of more copious mercy than if He had forgiven sins without satisfaction. (Summa III:46:1)

… or as St Paul puts it in our second reading for this Sunday,

If it is certain that death reigned over everyone as the consequence of one man’s fall, it is even more certain that one man, Jesus Christ, will cause everyone to reign in life who receives the free gift that he does not deserve, of being made righteous … As by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.

Trust me, we can’t make ourselves fit for heaven, we can only get there by holding on to Christ’s hand.

Today’s readings:

Word format: year-a-lent-1st-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-lent-1st-sunday-2017


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8th Sunday, Year A | The depressed person’s guide to escaping from dark times

our-lady-of-walsingham-and-english-saints

Our Lady of Walsingham and English Saints, mural, hall outside Slipper Chapel Shrine, Walsingham. Photo by Norman Servais.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Whenever today’s Gospel reading comes up it takes me back to 1991.  This was the year my beloved father died and my daughter was born.  We had taken the decision that I would be a full time Mum some years earlier with the birth of my first child, so making ends meet was difficult, since my husband was in the process of building up his own business, with every spare cent being reinvested back into the business and Australia still suffering a loss of confidence following the 1987 share market crash.  But after Elinor’s birth, life was further complicated by my developing post-natal depression.

The winter of 1991 was probably a perfectly ordinary winter, as winter’s go, but inside my head, the landscape was bleak and, at times, terrifying.  It seemed to rain constantly so that I spent much of the time cooped up indoors with a two year old and an infant, and no support family within two thousand kilometres.  Odd things happened, like the Water Corporation invading the park behind our house to fix a sewerage problem, and the whole neighbourhood being filled with noxious odours for days on end, adding to my general feeling of malaise.  Then I had a great fear that I was going to develop a mental condition that was present in my extended family.  And of course I was grieving for my Father who had wasted away over five years until every breath was a struggle.

But God uses these moments of interior misery to bring us back to him. The children and I had joined the local playgroup which was run by some of the young mums from the Neo-Catechumenate group.  On one particular day, when our bank account was down to about $3 and I was wondering how we were going to manage until payday, the ‘Neocats’ invited me round for some Italian macchinetta-brewed coffee as well as prayer round their kitchen table.  By chance, their Bible reading for the day was this:

‘That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? And why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of these.

  Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field which is there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will he not much more look after you, you men of little faith?

  So do not worry, do not say, “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? How are we to be clothed?” It is the pagans who set their hearts on all these things. Your heavenly Father knows you need them all. Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these other things will be given you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow, will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble if its own.’  (Matthew 6: 25-34)

Sometimes you just know God is trying to tell you something.  I went home and thought about it.  Depression is different from other medical conditions, in that there is a certain amount of control one can have over it merely through the choices one makes.  No, really.  (I can hear people disagreeing with me.)   I have met people who seem almost to identify with their depression to the point where they describe it as being part of their genetic makeup, and love-love-love telling you about how they and all the members of their family are living on anti-depressants due to congenital deficiencies in their parietal lobe.  Fiddlesticks to that, I say.

The reason I have my doubts is that we are humans who are free agents, and free agents can choose at each moment how they are going to behave.  We might not always be able to control how we think, but we can control how we behave.  I can remember thinking while I was depressed, that I was ever so bored with my brain which seemed to want to go round and round in an endless monologue over the same subject matter.  The trick seemed to be actually to do something which would change the subject.  What helped me escape from my depression was meditating on the above reading, telling God that I needed a hand and then going outside myself to think about other people who were in situations far worse than my relatively mundane and self-centred situation.  At one point, I remember seeing a picture in a newspaper about a young boy from Vietnam whose face had been terribly disfigured through burns, but who was coming to Australia for plastic surgery.  These things made me realise I needed to get out of my own head and start doing something positive, even if emotionally I didn’t feel in the mood.  I decided the cure for feeling miserable and broke was to start helping other people who were even more down-and-out than I was.  I looked up the nearest St Vincent de Paul Conference and went to their next meeting.  Soon I was in training with a senior member, learning how to discern whether someone required a food voucher or other assistance.  I had always been a Mass-goer, but now prayer and scripture reading became more of a daily feature of my life.  And the more I concentrated on helping others, the smaller my own problems seemed.  In addition to this, over time, God helped us to prosper our business and manage on our budget.  I look back on this period as my first great re-conversion to the Faith.

This didn’t just happen once in my life – over the course of decades, there have been several occasions where things have gone pear-shaped and I have been tempted to slip into depression and self-centredness.  And every time, God has reached in and shown me the way forward – because Jesus Christ our Saviour is the Light of the World, He cares about our individual situations, He wants us to come into a right relationship with Him, and He wants us to be filled with an unshakeable joy in the midst of life’s trials.

Lent is about to begin on Ash Wednesday.  This is a perfect time to pre-empt Satan’s plans for our misery by deepening our prayer life, coming close to God and asking Him to place in our path those people whom he wants us to help and encourage.

Today’s readings:
Word format: year-a-8th-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-8th-sunday-2017


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Seventh Sunday, Year A | The Bible and the Love-Justice Dialectic

jesus-teaching-manuscript-francais-916

Jesus Teaching, Michel Gonnot (priest and scribe), 1474, Manuscript Français 916, fol. 69r, National Library of France, Département des manuscrits, accessed at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8539714c/f143.item.

How do we love perfectly?  Jesus gives us some clear examples in our readings for today – and he doesn’t just talk in abstract and generalised terms, he talks in concrete examples that we can apply to our own situations.

‘You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well; if a man takes you to law and would have your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him. Give to anyone who asks, and if anyone wants to borrow, do not turn away. 

 ‘You have learnt how it was said: You must love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

Of course, we need to discern each case individually.  Because we are also told in the first reading: “You must openly tell him, your neighbour, of his offence; this way you will not take a sin upon yourself.”  So by ‘offering the wicked man no resistance’, Jesus does not mean that we should avoid educating him about his wickedness – otherwise we would become willing participants in evil.  Jesus is talking here about going above and beyond the call of duty.

These statements by Jesus are the last of his Six Antitheses from the Sermon on the Mount, where he uses the form, ‘You have learnt how it was said … But I say this to you …”  Marcion, a second century shipping magnate who used his power and influence to cause a schism in the Church, took this to mean that the God of the Old Testament was mistaken, and that Jesus was correcting him.  Henry Chadwick in The Early Church, describes Marcion’s view in these terms:

The Gnostics liked to contrast the God of the Old Testament as the God of justice, whose principle was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, with the loving Father proclaimed by Jesus.  This antithesis was especially worked out by Marcion … He wrote a book entitled Antitheses …  in which he listed contradictions between the Old and New Testaments to prove that the God of the Jews, the creator of this miserable world, was quite different from the God and Father of Jesus of whose existence the world had no inkling until the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar when Jesus suddenly appeared preaching the Gospel. 

Tertullian tells us:

We know full well that Marcion makes his gods unequal: one judicial, harsh, mighty in war; the other mild, placid, and simply good and excellent. (Against Marcion, Book I, Chapter 6) 

So desperate was Marcion to demonstrate his case, that he (like many other heretics) then had to change Scripture to suit his interpretation: he rewrote Luke’s Gospel to remove any influence of “Judaising influences” and actually drew up the first canon of Scripture – which excluded all of the Old Testament and much of the New.

What are we to make of Jesus’s statements, then?  Pope Benedict XVI, in the Apostolic Exhortation, Verbum Domini says,

The roots of Christianity are found in the Old Testament, and Christianity continually draws nourishment from these roots. Consequently, sound Christian doctrine has always resisted all new forms of Marcionism, which tend, in different ways, to set the Old Testament in opposition to the New.

… It must be observed, however, that the concept of the fulfilment of the Scriptures is a complex one, since it has three dimensions: a basic aspect of continuity with the Old Testament revelation, an aspect of discontinuity and an aspect of fulfilment and transcendence …

Here it must be remembered first and foremost that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance. God chose a people and patiently worked to guide and educate them. Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times. 

Back to the Gospel, then.  Jesus is in continuity with the Old Testament in so far as he quotes from it (“you have heard it said”), but then he shows how he is fulfilling and transcending this teaching with something even more demanding.  He is raising the bar and drawing us into greater union with God.

Where the legal codes of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ found in Exodus are suitable for providing legal limits within a societal and juridical setting, if we apply these principles within our own families, we will be engaged in an endless cycle of retribution for wrongs small and large and never be able to escape the cycle of violence and egotistical score-settling.  Jesus is showing us how to love truly – how to have good will even towards those who have no love for us.

In Fr Robert Spitzer’s, New Proofs for the Existence of God, he describes the Five Transcendentals of the Divine Mystery: Perfect Truth, Perfect Love, Perfect Justice/Goodness, Perfect Beauty and Perfect Home, all of which aspects are found in the ultimate unconditioned reality we call God.

So if we relate these attributes of God to our Gospel reading, whereas last week’s antitheses were concerned  with Perfect Justice and Goodness in the areas of murder, adultery, divorce and the swearing of oaths, this week’s antitheses, with their focus on vengeance and hatred, seem to concentrate more on how we can practise Perfect Love.

Fr Spitzer describes love as a movement from autonomy to empathy to self-giving.

Though this unity with the feelings and being of another does not cause a loss of one’s self or self-consciousness, it does cause a break in the radical autonomy one can effect when one focuses on oneself as the centre of one’s personal universe (autonomy).  … This acceptance and identification of the feelings and being of the other give rise to concern for the other, which evolves into care for the other as the relationship grows.  This care, in its turn, can completely reverse the human tendency toward autonomy (over against the other) and give rise to a self-giving that can become self-sacrificial (agapē).

As far as justice/goodness are concerned, Fr Spitzer says,

The “love of justice and the good”  is a natural unifier, for it overcomes the natural barriers and enmity arising out of competition for scarce resources, fear of strangers, natural animosity, survival of the fittest, and suspicion of others’ potential injustice.  It overcomes the natural barriers and enmity of irresponsibility (responsibility to myself alone, or the complete abdication of responsibility), by calling individuals to a higher duty to the just society.  It can also lead to self-sacrifice (the sacrifice not only of one’s advantage and aggrandisement, but of one’s very self) for the sake of the good of society or for goodness and justice within society.

Drawing these two aspects together – Perfect Love and Perfect Justice/Goodness –

… we may do well to pause for a moment and consider the complementarity between love and the good in human self-consciousness.  Three of these complementarities are described in the history of philosophy by the “love-justice dialectic”: (1) Love tends to look first toward care for the individual and through this lens, to move towards care and co-responsibility for the group or even civil society.  Conversely, the good has the connotation of looking first towards the common good, that is, the good of civil society, the culture, and the group, and then moving from this to the good of the individual. (2) Love begins with care and empathy, and from this moves toward co-responsibility and duty.  Conversely, the good tends to move from co-responsibility and duty to empathy and care.  (3) Love proceeds from compassion and mercy, and then moves to justice and the need for law, whereas the good proceeds from justice and respect for the law and then moves to a specific application of the natural law, and then to respect for the individual protected by the law, and then to compassion and mercy under the law.  In sum, love and goodness must eventually overlap, but they overlap each other from opposite directions.

It seems to me that much of the imbalance in society right now, is that empathy towards certain individuals and sectors of the community is drowning out discussion of the common good as far as civil society and culture are concerned.  As Christians, we need to regain our ability to speak without fear about the common good of society, without sacrificing love.   There are arguments to be made about love vs the common good in the areas of immigration policy, the education of children, marriage and family, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, amongst others.  It’s not an easy task, especially when our own sinfulness leaves us open to accusations of hypocrisy, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  And in our personal lives, we need to have a good hard look at whether we are practising what Jesus is asking of us, especially in those relationships where we feel the most tension and would rather engage in a culture of avoidance than a culture of encounter.

Today’s readings:
Word format: year-a-7th-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-7th-sunday-2017

 

 

 


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5th Sunday, Year A | Salt, light and the sex abuse crisis

bruegel-pieter-massacre-of-the-innocents

Massacre of the Innocents, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1565-67, Royal Collection, United Kingdom.

God has such impeccable timing.  Here we are with a Gospel reading today that proclaims,

You are the salt of the earth. But if salt becomes tasteless, what can make it salty again? It is good for nothing, and can only be thrown out to be trampled underfoot by men.

  You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill-top cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house. In the same way your light must shine in the sight of men, so that, seeing your good works, they may give the praise to your Father in heaven (Mt 5:13-16).

while from tomorrow and for the next three weeks  the Church will be reporting to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about its failures, and the policies and procedures that have been put in place to prevent any recurrence of this lamentable period when we failed to be the salt of the earth and a light to the world.

Our Archbishop, the most reverend Timothy Costelloe SDB, has issued a pastoral letter.

I ask you too, to continue to pray for the victims and survivors of sexual abuse in our Church. The heavy burdens they carry, inflicted on them by people who were supposed to be signs and bearers of God’s love and care but who were the very opposite, and the dismissive, disbelieving and insensitive way in which they were treated by so many of our Church leaders, impels us as a community to do all we can to assist them now and into the future. This last public hearing of the Royal Commission will inevitably be a stressful and painful time for many. Paradoxically it might also be a time of healing. 

As a community we are deeply shamed by the failures of so many in our Church in relation to the care of our children and young people. More than this we are horrified by the suffering which has been inflicted on so many innocent people. 

As I have in the past, I want now to again express our profound sorrow and apology for this shocking failure on our part and for the pain it has caused to so many. As a Church we are committed now to doing everything we can to ensure that this evil is eradicated from our midst.

 You can read the rest here.

Francis Sullivan, the head of the Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council has also made the point that the data that will be revealed this week will be ‘the first time in the world the Catholic Church’s records on child sexual abuse have been compiled and analysed for public consideration’.  (The Australian, Horrific extent of Catholic child abuse, 2 February 2017).  I’m not sure exactly how Australia’s contribution is unique: there has been a veritable boatload of reports issued in other countries: the John Jay Report, the Murphy Report and the Ferns Report, to name a few.

We, as a Church, can expect to be thoroughly humiliated in the public forum – and deservedly so.

Nevertheless, let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is not just a Church problem, but a societal one.  Kelly Richards, writing in Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, No. 429, writes,

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (2005) Personal Safety Survey, of all those who reported having been victimised sexually before the age of 15 years, 11.1 percent were victimised by a stranger. More commonly, child sexual abuse was perpetrated by a male relative (other than the victim’s father or stepfather; 30.2%), a family friend (16.3%), an acquaintance or neighbour (15.6%), another known person (15.3%), or the father or stepfather (13.5%; see Figure 1). It should be noted that these totals add to more than 100 percent (103.7%); this indicates that a small proportion of child sexual abuse victims (3.7%) were abused by perpetrators belonging to more than one category.

In other words, the vast majority of child-sexual abuse perpetrators have not been targeted by the Royal Commission, since it is dealing with institutional not familial responses.  Writing in The Australian, Gerard Henderson makes the point that even among institutions, the Catholic Church may be being unfairly scapegoated (Child Abuse Royal Commission: Don’t Just Target Catholic Church).  And the irony is that even while the government with one hand is busy rooting out this sort of child sexual abuse, with the other hand it is actively promoting the abuse and sexualisation of children through insidious programs such as Safe Schools.

What does all this mean for the ordinary parishioner like you or me?  In practice, the issue has already largely been dealt with, through various Safeguarding offices and through the Diocesan Professional Standards Office.  For my part, I can’t say I have ever actually met either a sexually abused parishioner or an abusive priest, although I do know someone who, as a child, had a teacher who attempted (unsuccessfully) to groom him.  So the problem is not front-of-mind in the experience of currently practising Catholics, as it is to some degree historical, not current.

What parishioners are finding, though, is a certain guardedness in interactions between parishioners, the general public and clergy.  Priests are now more cautious about placing themselves in situations where they might be vulnerable to accusations, and unfortunately in the mind of the general public, the two words ‘priest’ and ‘paedophile’ have become associated with each other.  If ever Satan wanted to undermine the effectiveness of the Church in carrying out its mission of telling the world about Jesus Christ, this would be the way he would have chosen: to insert sufficient paedophiles and unconcerned bishops into our ranks to cause chaos. Fortunately most of the priests I know are  concentrating on serving their communities and living good and holy lives.  And most parishioners are trying to get on with doing the same.

As we see in today’s Psalm, “A light rises in the darkness for the upright.”  We need to go through the darkness of chastisement and purification and pray for our Archbishop, the leadership of our Archdiocese and our priests.  What I think we will find, when the Royal Commission has done its work and people have found closure, is that the task of evangelisation will start to get its legs in Australia, as it has already done in the US.  At the moment, we can’t evangelise effectively, because we’re still undergoing purgation and being rightly shamed for our past mistakes.  But, as Bishop Robert Barron explains in his YouTube video, God will ‘rebuild his Holy City’ through those who have remained faithful through it all.

You might also enjoy watching these recent videos on current topics from Bishop Barron, interviewed here by Dave Rubin from The Rubin Report:

Part 1: Belief, Faith and the Church Sex Scandal

Part 2: Abortion, Gay Marriage and Porn 

Today’s readings:
Word format: year-a-5th-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-5th-sunday-2017

 

 


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4th Sunday, Year A | Being peacemakers in a divided society

church_urtijei_with-sermon-on-the-mount

Sermon on the Mount, Franz Xaver Kirchebner, fresco, Church of St Ulrich in Gröden, Urtijëi, Italy.

Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, is fascinated by the liberal-conservative divisions in society.  Although he leans slightly left himself, he describes himself now as having ‘stepped out of the game’, especially since his research among widely divergent cultures led him to revise his preconceptions about conservatives.  Sick and tired of the rancour and demonization so characteristic of social media culture, he has been trying to find ways to help people at opposite ends of the political spectrum understand one another.

What Haidt discovered through his research in a number of different countries, was that there are at least six foundational aspects to the way we reason about morality, common to all humans.  He compares them to our having an audio equaliser with six slider switches, each of which can have the sensitivity turned up to varying degrees.  These switches are:

  1. Care (empathy, compassion, protecting others) versus harm;
  2. Fairness (justice, rights and proportionality) versus cheating;
  3. Liberty versus oppression;
  4. Loyalty to your group, family or nation versus betrayal;
  5. Authority (submitting to legitimate authority) versus subversion;
  6. Sanctity versus degradation.

What he didn’t expect to find, was that left-leaning people prioritised the first two: care and fairness, but right-leaning people endorsed all six approximately evenly.  As a follow-up, he asked his subjects to answer questions while role-playing as people holding ideological beliefs opposite to their own in real life, a technique known as an Ideological Turing Test.  He found that it was the right-leaning people who could correctly explain and defend the beliefs of the left-leaners, while the progressives had great difficulty expressing and understanding the positions of the conservatives.

Haidt argues that for most people, moral choices are decisions based on intuitions or emotional responses, rather than on carefully reasoned arguments.  We are all guilty of confirmation bias: our brains are like lawyers or press secretaries for our emotions, and we send them out scurrying to find the evidence which supports our emotional responses.  The ubiquity of Google now gives us unlimited scope for rapid confirmation of whatever wacky idea our emotions want to defend.  Haidt sees this as ramping up the heat, nastiness and rancour in our political and ideological debates, especially as many of us choose to inhabit ideological enclaves of like-minded people.  He describes the cure as follows:

Individual reasoning is post hoc and justificatory;  individual reasoning is not reliable because of confirmation bias.  The only cure for confirmation bias is other people.  So if you bring people together who disagree, and they have a sense of friendship, family, having something in common, having an institution to preserve, they can challenge each other’s reasoning, and this is the way that the scientific world is supposed to work.  We end up being forced to work together, challenging each other’s’ confirmation biases – and truth emerges.    And this is a place where I think the Christians have it right, because they’re always talking about how flawed we are. (Interview with Bill Moyers)

So why am I bringing this up?  In today’s Gospel, we read what is probably the single most influential speech of all time, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount .  Quoted for 2,000 years and spreading out to every country of the world, the Sermon on the Mount has had an incalculable influence on our morality, particularly the morality of Western Civilisation.  Unfortunately, most children today will never encounter the Gospel in their school curriculum, and will through no fault of their own, be unaware of the transcendent teachings it contains.

Today’s Gospel concentrates on the eight Beatitudes: those things that will help us to be happy in this life and the next.  Of course, they transcend Haidt’s six aspects of morality, but we can also link the Beatitudes to Haidt’s universal moral categories and find some correspondence.  The point about the Sermon on the Mount is that Jesus is inviting us to transcend our tribal and egocentric emotional responses and make conscious choices that place God and our neighbour at the centre of our choices.

Beatitude Which aspect in Moral Foundations Theory does it correspond to?
1.       How happy are the poor in spirit;
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.		 Sanctity … the poor in spirit are sufficiently detached from avarice for their choices not to be corrupted by a desire for wealth and comfort.  The poor in spirit are also aware of their spiritual poverty and need for grace.
2.       Happy the gentle:
they shall have the earth for their heritage.		 Care … the gentle prioritise kindness and empathy towards others.  They are very aware of how their words impact others.
3.       Happy those who mourn:
they shall be comforted.		 Sanctity … these people are not addicted to pleasure; they are able to pass serenely through the trials of life while trusting in God.
4.       Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right: they shall be satisfied. Fairness … These people care about justice and proportionality in decision-making, for the common good.
5.       Happy the merciful:
they shall have mercy shown them.		 Care … these people care about justice, yet are able to temper it with forgiveness and mercy when appropriate.
6.       Happy the pure in heart:
they shall see God.		 Sanctity … these people are ennobled by their focus on what is edifying.  Pure in their minds, their speech and their actions, they will always attempt to inspire the best in others.
7.       Happy the peacemakers:
they shall be called sons of God.		 Loyalty and authority … these people see humanity as sharing in the image and likeness of God.  They want to help all people to live in charity and reconciliation with one another.
8.       (a) Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right: theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Loyalty and liberty… these people remain faithful to God’s law and to right conduct in spite of opposition.  They express their liberty by refusing to recant under pressure.
8.       (b) Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Loyalty and liberty … these people remain faithful to Jesus Christ in all circumstances.  They are able to weather mockery and contempt.  They are liberated from attachments to worldly honour, because of their fidelity to and friendship with Christ.

But I need to return to my main point, which is about how we can be practical peacemakers, knowing what we know about Haidt’s research into confirmation bias.  It’s supremely important for us as Christians not to retreat into the bubble of our Christian ideological and religious enclave (sometimes called The Benedict Option).  Sure, every Christian should surround him- or herself with Christian friends who provide the mutual support of being collectively loyal to Christ and faithful to the Magisterium.

But we also need to make sure that we encounter all sorts of ‘others’ so that we can learn to understand how they think, respectfully talk about things we disagree on, gently challenge their confirmation bias and create that space where we can be friends in spite of our differences.

Today’s readings:
Word format: year-a-4th-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-4th-sunday-2017

By the way, if you’re interested in the fresco above, it’s a detail of the ceiling of St Ulrich in Gröden in the Italian Alps.  The whole thing is quite stunning.

 

church-urtijei-with-sermon-on-the-mount-reduced


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3rd Sunday, Year A | Prudence and Passion

calling-of-peter-and-andrew-ravenna-mosaic

The Calling of Peter and Andrew, Mosaic, 6th century, Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy.

Calculation and rationality can only take us so far when it comes to following Christ.  Every now and then, Christ calls us to do something which may, to others, seem a bit imprudent.

Consider the disciples in today’s Gospel.  There they were, Simon and Peter, James and John enjoying another humdrum day at the nets, when Jesus summons them to follow him.  And they drop everything and go.  Can this possibly be sensible – leaving the security of their trade, abandoning their family responsibilities?

Surely the prudent person would have been more like the young man in Luke 9:61, to whom Jesus says, ‘Follow me’.

[He] replied, ‘Let me go and bury my father first.’  But Jesus answered, ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead; your duty is to go and spread the news of the kingdom of God.’

What about the rich young man in Matthew 19:21-22?

The young man said to him, ‘I have kept all these [commandments].  What more do I need to do?’  Jesus said, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.’  But when the young man heard these words he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth.

Jesus is asking him to do what the world might consider foolish and reckless.

Then there’s the widow in Luke 21:1-4:

 … he noticed a poverty-stricken widow putting in two small coins, and he said, ‘I tell you truly, this poor widow has put in more than any of them; for these have all put in money they could spare, but she in her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’

Surely that was imprudent!  Shouldn’t she have kept something aside for herself?

Part of the difficulty in our understanding is that our use of the word prudent in contemporary English has shifted.  It now has overtones of cautiousness, whereas the traditional usage is much richer than that.

Prudence is the ability to decide where an act is on the sliding scale from those acts which are cowardly, over-cautious and self-protective to deeds which are reckless and needlessly risky.  Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes are acts which are courageous.  Too much caution will make you immobile with fear; too little caution and you may end up in hot water.  But Jesus doesn’t seem to mind people making radically incautious choices when it comes to his Kingdom.

prudence

The question is, “What does the Holy Spirit want?”  This is the whole point of the Holy Spirit’s gift of Counsel or Right Judgement – to perfect the virtue of prudence, the ability to choose wisely with this single criterion in mind: “Does it help advance the proclamation of the Gospel?”

So we have to rethink Prudence in the light of an act’s service to the Gospel.  That is why the disciples’ leaving their livelihood, or a person giving his money away to the right cause, or being willing to die rather than renounce his faith, can, in God’s eyes, be supremely prudent.

But prudential decisions are not made merely in a dry, analytical framework.  Today’s readings give us a glimpse of the audaciousness, surprise and joy that accompany a radical decision for Christ.

The people that lived in darkness
has seen a great light;
On those who dwell in the land and shadow of death
a light has dawned.

It’s not easy to describe the inner landscape of a person who has been illuminated by the Holy Spirit.  But it’s as if one now inhabits a mental universe where all things are possible, where the most tricky situations can be entrusted to a loving Father, where self-forgetfulness replaces self-consciousness.  There’s something about Jesus that has enlightened the disciples on this day by the Sea of Galilee and stirred up the courage and the passion to abandon themselves to his plan.

If we look at the lives of holy people, we can get a sense of their joyful, incautious abandonment to Christ.

St Francis of Assisi .. gave up the opportunity to live a life of luxury as the son of a silk merchant, and devoted himself to spreading the Gospel through preaching, living the same life of poverty as the poorest of the poor and restoring several ruined churches.
St John Bosco … had a bold idea to help street children and unemployed boys to find work, safe lodging and a grounding in Christ.  Despite his almost constant lack of resources, he worked tirelessly to establish his Oratory and trusted in God to supply their needs.
St Katharine Drexel … gave up her seven million dollar fortune to join the Sisters of Mercy and found the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, providing schools and missions to native Americans.
St Damien of Molokai … gave up his personal comfort to share his life with the quarantined leper colony in Hawaii, building schools, roads, hospitals and churches to provide for their material and physical needs.
Mother Angelica … despite knowing nothing about broadcasting, had a bold vision to evangelise through television and, starting from small beginnings, went on to develop EWTN, the largest religious media network in the world.

Let’s try having a conversation with God today about his purposes for us – he might be about to inspire us to do something joyfully bold for his Kingdom!

Today’s readings

Word format: year-a-3rd-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-3rd-sunday-2017


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2nd Sunday, Year A | Being and remaining in Christ

Jesus-Christ

Christ Blessing Children (detail), Pacecco de Rosa, 1600-1654, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

You would almost miss it if you weren’t looking for it.  There’s a phrase in today’s second reading that is quintessentially Christian: the phrase ‘in Christ’.  It’s the phrase that’s traditionally used when Christians sign letters – or a variation thereof.

This is the opening paragraph of Paul’s letter to the Christians in Corinth, and he is giving a quick summary describing the people he is addressing.  It’s very easy to see this introduction as a mere formality to be got out of the way before he gets to the meaty bits, but I’d like to concentrate on pulling apart this single phrase.

In Australia you could be forgiven for missing it altogether, because the Jerusalem Bible translation gives “greetings to the church of God in Corinth, to the holy people of Jesus Christ”.  The New American Bible, however, (used in the USA) translates the Greek more accurately as “to the church of God that is in Corinth, to you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy” (τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, τῇ οὔσῃ ἐν Κορίνθῳ,  ἡγιασμένοις ἐν Χριστῷ  Ἰησοῦ, κλητοῖς ἁγίοις).

What’s so special about this phrase, ‘in Christ’?

Jesus talks frequently about our remaining in him.  You wouldn’t find Mohamed expecting people to remain in him – he saw himself as only a prophet; God was completely transcendent and by nature not susceptible to unity with humans.  Neither would one expect this in Buddhism – for the Buddhist believes that there is no such thing as the self or the soul which exists in the first place (the doctrine of Annata).  But Jesus is God incarnate, and he stresses the importance of our remaining in Him through obedience to his Word and participation in the Sacraments:

“Remain in me, as I in you.  As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, unless it remains part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me”  (John 15:4).

“Remain in my love.  If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love” (John 15:10).

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.  As the living Father sent me and I draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will also draw life from me” (John 6:56-57).

The theologian, N.T. Wright, points out that Paul never uses the term “in Jesus” or “in the Lord” but the preposition ἐν is always combined with the word, Christ, as in ἐν Χριστῷ (in Christ) – Christ meaning the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Son of David whose coming had been predicted.

A shoot will spring from the stock of Jesse,
a new shoot will grow from his roots.
On him will rest the spirit of Yahweh,
the spirit of wisdom and insight,
the spirit of counsel and power,
the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:1-3).

This Messiah will be not only for the Jews, but for the world.

… according to Psalms 2 and 72 (the former of which in particular is enormously important in early Christianity), and passages like Isaiah 11 (also quoted by Paul), when Israel’s Messiah arrives he will be the rightful lord not only of Israel but of the whole world. So Paul did not have to abandon his Jewish heritage in order to have a message for the world; he only had to stand at that point in the Jewish heritage which says, ‘From this vantage point all nations are called to obedience to Israel’s God, and to his Messiah.’ That was precisely Paul’s stance.  (N.T. Wright)

That is why in today’s First Reading from Isaiah 49, we have God saying,

‘It is not enough for you to be my servant,
to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back the survivors of Israel;
I will make you the light of the nations
so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.’

The Messiah brings a new way of relationship between God and man.

One of the chief significances which this word [Christ] then carries is incorporative, that is, it refers to the Messiah as the one in whom the people of God are summed up, so that they can be referred to as being ‘in’ him, as coming or growing ‘into’ him, and so forth.  (N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology)

The mystical body of Christ into which we are incorporated gives endless food for reflection – our incorporation into Christ through Baptism, our incorporation into His mission, and our incorporation into each other through Him.  If only we could ‘remain in Christ’ more faithfully, how much more fruitful our parish life would be, and what a sign we would be for the world!  This is why it’s so important to be drawn into a personal relationship with Christ, allowing Him to lead us deeper into Himself.

Some more verses for reflection on this topic:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come  (2 Corinthians 5:17).

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22)

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1)

You are the children of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus, since every one of you that has been baptised has been clothed in Christ.  There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female – for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:26-28).

Just as each of us has various parts in one body, and the parts do not all have the same function: in the same way, all of us, though there are so many of us, make up one body in Christ, and as different parts we are all joined to one another (Romans 12:4-5)

Today’s readings:

Word format:year-a-2nd-sunday-2017
Pdf format: year-a-2nd-sunday-2017


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The Epiphany of the Lord | A Star shall come out of Jacob

gentile-da-fabriano-adoration-of-the-magi-detail

Adoration of the Magi (detail), Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, Tempera on panel, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

There was a ‘feeling in the air’ in the first century Roman Empire – a sense that something greater was about to invade the world.  The Jews apprehended it and calculated the approximate timing of the coming of the Anointed Prince from Daniel’s prophecy:

From the time there went out this message:
“Return and rebuild Jerusalem”
to the coming of an Anointed Prince, seven weeks and sixty-two weeks … (Daniel 9:25)

Even the Romans were aware of the coming King.  Suetonius (c. AD 69-140) records that the belief in a Judaean King who would rule the world was widespread in the Eastern Empire – the Emperor Vespasian (naturally) applied the prophecy to himself, little realising that the King had already Risen and was rapidly expanding his Kingdom under Vespasian’s very nose.

There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief, that it was fated for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. This prediction, referring to the emperor of Rome -as afterwards appeared from the event- the people of Judaea took to themselves. (Suetonius, Life of Vespasian 4.5)

That other great historian of the Roman Empire, Tacitus (c. AD 56-120), wrote of this as well:

The majority [of the Jews] were convinced that the ancient scriptures of their priests alluded to the present as the very time when the Orient would triumph and from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world.  (Tacitus, Histories 5.13)

How typical of God’s action in history, to ensure that all the key elements were in place for the coming of the Messiah: the Pax Romana with its efficient network of roads , a common language – Greek – for the spreading of the Gospel, and a fevered expectation throughout the eastern end of the Empire that a Messiah-King was due.

So when the Magi arrived in Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the infant King of the Jews”, they were taken seriously.  So seriously, in fact, that Herod did his utmost to prevent the prophecy being fulfilled and ordered the Massacre of the Innocents.  He should have read his Sophocles and realised that the more one attempts to circumvent a prophecy, the more one ends up being caught in its net.

Herod is known as “The Great” because he poured money and resources into ambitious construction projects: the vast expansion of the second Temple and the impressive ten hectare harbour at Caesarea Maritima which was the largest open-sea harbour in all the world.

Great in material achievements Herod might have been, but what is that in the scheme of things?  What do we see about his character from today’s Gospel: deviousness, duplicity, envy and murderous intent;  the use of his power to squash opposition, no matter how small and defenceless;  the recruitment of others to execute his commands, so that, removed from the physical brutality of killing, he could maintain a semblance of dignity.

Josephus tells us that Herod the Great murdered even his own sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, who had gained great popularity with the people, but whom he suspected of plotting against him.

… he ventured, without any certain evidence of their treacherous designs against him, and without any proofs that they had made preparations for such attempt, to kill his own sons, who were of very comely bodies, and the great darlings of other men, and no way deficient in their conduct, whether it were in hunting, or in warlike exercises, or in speaking upon occasional topics of discourse; for in all these they were skillful, and especially Alexander, who was the eldest; for certainly it had been sufficient, even though he had condemned them, to have kept them alive in bonds, or to let them live at a distance from his dominions in banishment, while he was surrounded by the Roman forces, which were a strong security to him, whose help would prevent his suffering any thing by a sudden onset, or by open force; but for him to kill them on the sudden, in order to gratify a passion that governed him, was a demonstration of insufferable impiety.  (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVI)

So much for Herod.  Meanwhile, the Magi – the priestly astronomers of their day and masters of the night sky – are open to the guidance of the Spirit and attentive to the way God communicates through natural events.  The sight of the star ‘fills them with delight’ – their childlike enchantment is as much like Heaven as Herod’s malice and egocentrism is like Hell.  Nobody was forcing them to make this trip to Judaea – they came in voluntary humility, with the idea of giving homage, paying tribute, showing their allegiance, acknowledging a greatness outside themselves.  This journey was not about them, it was about the newborn King.  We don’t even hear their names in the Biblical account.  There was nothing they gained by the journey – no quid pro quo they were expecting to receive from the newborn in return for their gifts.  This was an act of self-giving.

Were these Magi real or fictional?  Fr Dwight Longenecker has been on a quest to discover the historical truth of the matter.  He says,

What I found was astounding. First I discovered that because of their assumption that the Magi story was a fairy tale very few scholars had taken the time to investigate thoroughly the possible identity of the wise men. My research brought me into contact with new technologies which shed light on the subject. Some fresh archeological findings and new understandings from the Dead Sea Scrolls also contributed to the quest.

As it turns out, it is perfectly probable that there were wise men who had the motive, the means and the method to pay homage to Jesus Christ just as Matthew recorded.  The simple truth is that Matthew’s account is factual not fictional. 

My findings not only stand the established academic orthodoxy on its head, but they should cause everyone interested in New Testament scholarship, ancient history and the historical veracity of the gospels to think again. 

Like the story of King Arthur, the tale of the wise men who visited Bethlehem was embroidered and embellished over many years. The history became legend and the legend became myth. But beneath it all there is a foundation of historical truth which is fascinating and compelling.

Stay tuned for his book, The Mystery of the Magi, which will be released in Advent 2017.

Today’s readings:
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