Seeking the face of God
An audio version of today's gospel can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 14: 12-14) offers us once more a lesson in many layers. On the surface, it is a simply matter of whom one extends charity to: Jesus tells one of the leading Pharisees not to invite desirable guests to his dinners but the humanly undesirable ones, so that his reward will be given him in terms of eternal merit, not some earthly currency. This teaching follows the lesson in Matthew chapter 6 when Jesus warns His listeners not to practise their virtues ostentatiously in front of others:
When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then, your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Yet this is not so much about whom one invites to dinner or whom one extends one’s charity to, as about the motives behind such actions.
Jesus does not, for example, mean that people should not invite friends, brothers, relations or rich neighbours at all, as if the standard of the gospel were not so much to love the poor as to deliberately offend the wealthy. There are the physically poor and lame, and then there are the spiritually poor and lame; the former benefit from our corporal works of mercy, while the latter from our spiritual works of mercy. They may sometimes be the same person!
Of course, Jesus Himself deliberately offends against the niceties of the Pharisees but His aim is not to give offence, so much as to offer two further lessons.
The first of these is for the Pharisees whom we should understand as those devout in their religion, and the lesson is not to do the done thing, so much as the thing that is pleasing to God. The Pharisees seem to have operated like a select club; appearances were important; conformism was expected; a judging eye for failures in observance was simply de rigueur; unity mattered more than justice; and as for cover-ups, they were probably considered a duty. All of these tendencies reflect what happens to religion when it seems to become skin deep, enmeshed in shallow priorities, attached to a kind of performative, self-congratulatory perfectionism. This kind of religion is up with the latest trends or else it is all ears for the voices of the right-minded people. Pharisaism invented virtue signalling long before the twenty-first century adherents of what some call moralistic, therapeutic deism, the touchy-feely and intolerant version of Christianity that loves the Way but neglects the Truth and the Life of the gospel. Jesus’ reproaches to the Pharisees offer a standing rebuke to every devout soul who becomes absorbed not in God but in their own service of God.
But if we should not do the done thing, what then is pleasing to God? This is the second lesson to take on board here. Ultimately, as we noted in last Friday’s gospel, and in Sunday’s gospel, what is pleasing to God is that we should love Him above all things, seeking His face and yearning for it. St Augustine of Hippo summed it up nearly four hundred years after Christ walked the earth:
Two loves have made two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.
This then was the challenge for the Pharisees, as it is for ourselves. Our souls are a battleground for two competing loves. No matter our levels of piety or regular devotion, the battle is not done. It wages on, even as we seek the face of the Lord. The terrible thing about total self-surrender to God is that it may not be half so pretty as all the regular practices, the pious statuary, and the romantic imaginings our minds prefer to conjure. It may involve something as cruel and painful as wrongful condemnation, a tortured final mile, and an agonising death on a rain-soaked hill of humiliation. But perhaps it is much harder to find the face of God in the darkness if we have not become accustomed to finding the face of God in the ordinary world that surrounds us, or even in those aspects of the human world that repel us. There is the peace of God that keeps us – united in love with a common purpose and a common mind: the mind of Christ.
For the Pharisee, it was never wrong to invite the rich and famous to supper. It was only wrong not to seek the face of God and to yearn for it in the dinner guests, yearning instead for the earthly gain that such company seemed to offer. For the Pharisees, Jesus’ counsel to invite the humanly undesirable guests was only ever a way of removing that temptation from the table so that their souls could journey towards God, rather than sinking more deeply into the mire of their own self love.
It is mostly easy to spot the temptations of the world and the devil around us. What is more difficult to spot is the more insidious temptations that our own self-love draws into the very fabric of our religion, making a parody of the kingdom of God within us.
The alternative is to seek the face of God and yearn for it, in every moment of our lives like Mary. For there is the peace of God.
Prayer up hill and down dale
An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 6: 12-19) sees the appointment of the ‘apostles’ who become a select group among Jesus’ many disciples. We also see how the people from Judea, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Sidon flocked to hear Him preach and to beg His aid. It must have been quite a sight, not least because, as this gospel extract attests, power came out of Him that cured them all. It was not that Jesus was a mere miracle worker; His very presence generated miracles. Jesus was not just a person but an event!
Yet perhaps the most spectacular part of today’s gospel is its opening line:
Jesus went out into the hills to pray; and He spent the whole night in prayer to God.
In the light of these words, for example, we can place the events of the following day in their true perspective. Jesus appointed apostles, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. Jesus went among the crowd that had gathered to see, hear, and be cured by Him, but first He was wrapped in prayer all night long. The prospect of the heroic prayer of Jesus should put to flight the many excuses we find not to pray; our shortage of time, our many pressing duties; the priorities of immediacy over the enduring value of the eternal which, in our human calculations, can be covered by prayer tomorrow just as well as by prayer today. If we somehow, in some weird place in our heads, think our need for prayer is not that great today (because, you know, we are pretty devout anyway), by the same cheap measure we should wonder why Jesus needed to pray all night long. I mean: who needed to pray less than Jesus?
But this is, as I say, a cheap measure. If we only pray like customers at the jumble sale of divine favours, we are like those religious believers whose prayers seek to forge currency rather than communion; something to trade with rather than to live in. Our conscious minds need prayer like our bodies need food, in regular rhythms of activity and rest. But our unconscious minds need prayer like we need oxygen. Changing Charlotte Mason’s dictum about education, we might say prayer is an atmosphere, a disciple, and a life. Prayer’s atmosphere surrounds us and holds us in being; prayer’s discipline encourages the harmonising of our inner life with the pulse of the Eternal Father – if that metaphor can be allowed; and prayer’s life fills us up, for to pray as we ought is to pray like Christ. Jesus prays all night; would that we could too; would that we could find the path that leads to those heights where He plays before the Father of us all. At the very least we can try to be open to His gifts of prayer, whether they lead us to the desert or to the hills.
For that too is important. He surely prayed often enough for His daily bread, as He taught us to do. But His delight was to pray in the hills, closer to the eternal mysteries, as it were; from Tabor to Calvary, from the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon from the Cross, Jesus often reveals the sublime to us on elevated ground. In these events, Jesus is always an example, even though He is always an exception. His possession of the Beatific Vision meant He had no need to go to the hills; and yet He goes to the hills to pray, perhaps suggesting to us how we should fly the lowlands of our distractions, the busyness of our overworked brains with their dizzying engagements, in search of the rest and recollection we desperately need before God; an unmet need we are insensible to, like the unfelt hunger of a starving man. From these heights, we have a chance to see things for what they really are; from these heights we can beg the grace to see them as God sees them in their eternal light; not in the garishly blinding dimness of workaday desperation.
And then He spent the whole night in prayer. It would be wrong to see this only as a quantitative statement: the whole night as opposed to a half or quarter of it. Unless we are the parents of babies or small children, the point is that, so often, while our day belongs to others, our nights belong to ourselves, nature’s reward for the labours behind us. And here is Jesus, giving His whole night – the one thing that does not belong to His followers - to the Father instead. For to spend the whole night in prayer for Jesus is to do no more than to rest secure in His belonging entirely to the Father. The Father and I are one. Of course, many of us experience unwelcome wakefulness in the night; it is as if our day is robbing our night in the interests of worry and fretfulness. Yet, as we know, wherever the Master is, there His disciples are bound to follow. A broken night feels tangibly like an invitation to follow Him in suffering; but perhaps it would be more fruitful – perhaps more encouraging – to see the fragments of a broken night as an invitation to hear the call to give ourselves wholly and entirely to Him who gave Himself wholly and entirely to us and to the Father in His nights of prayer.
Then, lastly, comes the unspoken part of the gospel: when day came, before He summoned His disciples, He must have descended those hills. Once we are up there, we do not want to come down, like the three apostles who wanted to build tabernacles for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It is good for us to be there. It seems good to us to stay there.
And yet, as we followed Jesus into the hills, we should follow Him down from the hills, for this too is His command: If a man serves me, he must follow me, wherever I am, my servant will be there too.
In that, at least, we have Mary’s example to follow, for she went into the hill country of Judea to sing her Magnificat but descended to Nazareth to undertake her work – her work and our work - of bringing forth God’s son.
If I were a rich man (yabba, dabba, etc.)...
An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today's gospel (Luke 12: 13-21) is one of those extracts in which the circumstances of daily life give rise to one of Jesus’ parables. Two brothers are in dispute over their family inheritance; two siblings set in rivalry against one another – and thus it has been since the time of Cain and Abel. But Jesus’ first response is not to underline their inherent hostility to one another but rather to warn against avarice of any kind:
for a man's life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs.
And, in this line, we learn why we should all pay attention to the parable that follows: not because this is a meditation on what we normally think of as avaricious behaviour, but rather because it reaches beyond it, to the kind of avarice that effects even those with modest incomes. On the surface, this is a parable about a rich man, but underneath this is a parable about us all.
Because we are all in search of what will make our lives secure. For the rich man in the parable, the pursuit of security consists in building bigger barns and storing up his goods. In his case, not only does he sin by seeking his security in the wrong place, but also by what he proposes to do next: take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time. Freely, he has received, for the harvest was good; but these goods do not flow freely through his hands to the benefit of others. Goodness wishes to share itself; evil is a cul de sac, and this man's priorities seem like a judgement on his soul, even though eating, drinking and having a good time are all necessary things in their place.
Yet, as I said, this is not just a parable about a rich man who is fixed on enjoying his bounty. It is a parable about the pursuit of security in all the wrong places. It is possible for us all to mistake our vocations and to forget that being rich in the sight of God is our true security. What is it that we are most afraid of? What is it that we perceive as a threat to ourselves? It may be physical suffering, poverty or illness. It could equally be mental suffering of some kind. In our own time and in our western cultures where we enjoy generally speaking an abundance of the things of this world, our mental suffering seems particularly acute. We live in a plague of anxiety, the world of work is wracked by stress, our family relations are poisoned by division; instead of hearing and pursuing our vocations, we hear and pursue unattainable prospects held up to us by the countless adverts we unwittingly drink in every day, or for some the professional demands of performance management. Even our children, exhausted by digitally induced dopamine insensitivity, grow bored and dissatisfied with the narrowness of it all. We have wanted to be rich in our own sight and the sight of others and have made ourselves paupers in the sight of God.
And even the most devout among us can be guilty of this avarice. We seek security when God calls us to intimacy. We seek safety even though salvation is a risky business. We want to treat grace like a currency that can be quantified and counted out, providing us with the warm reassurance of a rising bank balance. Perhaps we think that because Jesus paid the ransom for sin, our own part in the accounts must be traceable to some line in the ledger; it is but we will never know it until the day of judgement. For now, it is enough to know that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. God has not called us to calculate his mercies but to narrate them; to tell their story where we can. His love for us is a gift to be passed on; not a grab bag of merchandise to serve as our comfort blanket.
For security cannot be reached directly. Like a landing place on the far side of a fast-flowing river, security will only come if we face the adventure of the currents, and cast ourselves upon the mercy of God. And then, to return to Jesus’ metaphor, we can be rich in the sight of God and by His own gifts: rich in love, rich in gratitude, rich in our joy and rich in readiness to say ‘yes’ to Him in every moment of our life.
Come back to me
A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 11: 15-26) is a complex not to say confusing extract. Saint Luke does not identify those who were raising objections or criticisms about the exorcisms of Jesus. However, we can surmise that they were probably egged on by Jesus’ enemies. Yet, what comes next is hard to decipher. It seems to be, on the one hand, a kind of treatise in demonology that explains not only the inner logic of the kingdom of the devil, but also the power battles for souls that are waged by the fallen angels.
As always, we know that Jesus is teaching us here, leaving His lessons to be the food of slow reflection, rather than turning them into flash media campaigns that press everyone’s buttons without winning their hearts. One sign that there is more to it, is that Jesus verges in these exchanges almost on banter, reducing his critic’s arguments wittily to an absurdity. His argument about Satan's kingdom standing is a good debating point but, underneath it all, it is a poor argument, for we know that Satan's kingdom will not stand. Indeed, the fallen angels are in a very real sense fallen and divided; fallen from their friendship with God, fallen from their exalted status, fallen from the vocations. What can He mean, then, by arguing that kingdoms who are divided against themselves cannot stand?
One clue may lie in that apparently random remark that sits in the middle of this demonology: he who is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters. Who is it who is not with Him or who does not gather with Him if not ourselves? Not that we are wholly in revolt, far from it, no more than the Sons of Thunder were in revolt; no more then brash Simon Peter was in revolt.
But, we are divided against ourselves. The further from God we are, the more scattered we are. We have our good intentions, but then we are all complicated. The pure light shines into us but refracts out of us in gaudy rainbow colours that fail to illuminate. We are the adopted children of God, and yet in our worse moments, as Shakespeare says,
Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.
This is not false abasement but a cause for humble joy for truth brings us insight. The demonology that Jesus sets out in this part of the gospel is of course about the fallen angels, but perhaps in another way, it is about ourselves. The devil in Latin is diabolus but this word comes from Greek and, according to some, it means to be thrown apart; in a sense, to be scattered. In truth, all our kingdoms are divided: the kingdom of Satan and the kingdoms of this world which are in fact ruled by the prince of this world, as we learn in the moment of the temptation of Christ. There is only one kingdom that is based on unity and it is the kingdom of God.
For God is one and sufficient unto Himself, yet He chose to share His goodness by creating the world and calling us into it. But, then the unity of God calls all things back to Himself, and by a special and extraordinary privilege, the call for the human race was to share in God's very happiness, in the inner life of love that belongs to the Holy Trinity. This is why we need forgiveness: for sin is brokenness, and a retreat from that original unity to which we were called. And this is also why, insofar as we do not gather with Christ, in all those parts of our inner life that do not strive towards unity with Him, we are scattering ourselves and our heritage to the four winds.
Mercy of mercies, however; over the din that is made by the forces that shatter our hearts, we hear those words related by the prophet Joel:
Even now, declares the Lord,
return to me with all your heart,
with fasting and weeping and mourning.
