For the past two weeks Daniel Lloyd, a third year Ordinand at St Stephen's House, has been in our parishes on placement. Yesterday he preached at the Parish Mass and led a meditation at Benediction yesterday evening. The text of these are below....
The Homily:
A.M.D.G.
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
“And he asked them, ‘but who do you say that I am?’”
Green is not my favourite colour. I’m more of a red or blue sort of person, and Green Sundays like to-day can be dangerously close to being lumped in with the rest of that category. The sense of anticipation which Advent purple brings, the stirring Red of the feast of a martyr, or even the solemnity of gold or white in Eastertide – aren’t these all more exciting than boring old, ordinary old Ordinary Time?
But if we look more closely, we begin to see another side to this grassy sameness. We aren’t plodding along waiting for the Next Big Thing to happen; we aren’t counting the remaining shopping days until Christmass: we’re in what we might call the ‘period of reverberation’, that moment after the great bell has rung when the sound waves are still swimming around the room. And that’s why, even on “ordinary” Sundays, the Church bids us hear such extraordinary readings as to-day’s.
At Caesarea Philippi, on the frontier between Judaism and the strange, glittering religions of the heathens, Jesus asks a question to which anyone who would be a true disciple can give only one answer; and he reveals what that means for that true follower. All that is now to come in Mark’s Gospel, both geographically and theologically, turns to Jerusalem, and is to be seen and understood in the light of the Paschal Drama there.
There’s a series of slim theological volumes, rather useful to the harassed student, the titles of which all begin “What are they saying about...” “What are they saying about S. Paul?” “...about the Bible?”, and so on. They summarize the latest critical and scholarly opinions on the matter at hand. Similarly, when Jesus asks “who do men say that I am?”, Peter and the others recite the current theories about Our Lord: he’s John the Baptist, or Elijah, or another prophet. Such opinions are surely based on a thorough understanding of the scriptures and traditions of the sorts of Judaism in existence at the time – perhaps with a dash of Greek philosophizing or Eastern mysticism thrown in for good measure. On balance, probably, more likely than not, this wandering preacher is... well, pick one of the above.
And if we ask that question today, what answers do we get? “A wise teacher”; “a dangerous influence on the weak-minded”; “a transparent distillation of various near-eastern Virgin Birth myths pinned on to an historical rabble-rouser the proof of whose existence is, to say the least, lacking in proper evidence”; “basically a good chap, but handicapped by the conventions of his time”? Delete as appropriate, according to your personal taste and the latest documentary you’ve watched.
“But”, Our Lord goes on, “who do you say that I am?” Peter confesses what we all want to confess: “you are the Christ”. But when Jesus speaks of all that must happen to him, Peter doesn’t care for what he says at all. It can’t be: the Messiah will triumph, rescue the tribes of Israel, and usher in glorious peace and prosperity. Perhaps he responded: “no, Lord. You need not suffer – we will defend you; you need not be maltreated and rejected – we will testify for you; and you need not rise again, because you need not die – we will protect you.” Though Peter has outwardly confessed Jesus to be the Christ, he hasn’t yet truly, inwardly understood that Jesus is different from John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the Prophets. He isn’t just bearing a divine message, he is the message. He isn’t just close to God, he is God. For Peter, for us, Jesus can only make sense in light of the whole of his life: the teaching, the Passion, and the Resurrection, in his absolute obedience to his Father’s will.
If we want to say “you are the Christ”, we have to realize what that really means. There is an inner life to the faith we profess, grounded in what S. Paul calls, in his letter to the Romans, “the obedience of faith”. Christ does not suggest one way, he is the way. And our obedience to this is aided by the grace which we are freely offered. It isn’t just outward obedience, it’s inward too, but to truly follow Jesus, to come after him, cannot be done on our own merits; we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross. Here is one of the central paradoxes of the Christian faith: in choosing perfect freedom, we place upon ourselves a yoke of service so heavy that we cannot bear it unaided.
Following Christ doesn’t just mean facing the outward trials – we can’t all be martyrs, and losing our lives for Christ’s and the Gospel’s sake is not, and never has been, confined to facing the lions in the Colosseum. But the idea that we can do what the Christian Faith demands of us simply by trying really hard and really wanting to be nice to each other, is a grand old heresy which the Church sorted out rather a long time ago. Nor can we simply listen to some of the things Jesus says, and decide what we find helpful, discarding what we don’t – that limits the infinity and boundless majesty of God to the single, individual, human experience.
Following Christ inwardly means that every time we make a choice, or have a thought in our heads, or walk from one end of the High Street to the other, we have an opportunity to say, again and again, “you are the Christ”. An opportunity to make every one of those minute vibrations of thought and conscience something which, in our Christ-like obedience to God’s will, delights our Father in Heaven.
But recognizing that we can’t do this on our own is yet another part of denying ourselves. We are offered, in the sacraments, the grace we need to behave properly towards God. But grace isn’t a painkiller, working so that we don’t notice the damaging effects sin has on us, nor is it an umbrella, shielding us from everything the world throws at us. It is a gift which, like all gifts, needs to be used properly, and the technical term for this proper use is the ‘exercise of the virtues’. Through praying for, cultivating and exercising what we call the theological virtues – faith, hope and charity – we can come to believe in God, to trust in him, and to love him. Then, through the moral virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – we can come to grow in goodness. The theological virtues bring us to realize what it means to make a commitment to “come after” Jesus. The moral virtues equip us to persevere in that commitment.
All this talk of “virtues” can sound rather old-fashioned, rather formal and remote, and any small boy with a new chemistry set can testify that it’s easier to talk about how wonderful the gift is than to sit down, read the manual, and work out how to use it properly. More simply put, prudence is what we use when we choose what is good, and set about achieving it in the right way, as God wills it. Justice is what we exercise when we try to live out our proper relationship to God and to one another. It drives us to pursue the course of “equal but different” which is the hallmark of the Christian society. Equal in the respect we deserve and are called upon to offer, different in who we are, in our gifts, our callings and our frailties.
Temperance isn’t simply an avoidance of strong drink! It’s how we control the appetites which our fallen instincts love to indulge. It’s what opens our minds to the difference between want and need. Fortitude is more than merely “mustn’t grumble”. Through fortitude we remain resolute in our pursuit of what is good, and our avoidance of what is harmful.
S. James tells us more about how all this rather abstract-sounding cultivation and exercise of the virtues works in life: we can’t say to the naked and hungry ‘“Go in peace, be warmed and filled” without giving them the things needed for the body ... Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’. This, he goes on to say, also applies to our relationship with God, and it is too easily and too conveniently forgotten by too many of us too much of the time. Abraham had such faith in God that he was prepared to sacrifice his own son: But if we say we believe in him, we worship him and adore him, and yet are content to leave his house looking like the mean stable in which he had to be born as man because no other place could be found, if we leave his praises unsung, the liturgies in which we offer him our souls and bodies unattended; if we give not of our newest and best, but of what we can probably do without – then our faith is ‘like the body apart from the spirit’: dead.
If we truly want to be Christians, we need the virtues. If we want to accept the grace offered to us, we must learn to exercise it properly, and that’s where the difficulty, the taking up of the cross, comes in. S. Augustine tells us: “Hold on, persevere, endure, bear delay and thou hast borne the cross.” And so, as we come to receive again the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood, in which we are renewed and in which we may find the grace we need to keep on shouldering the burden of freedom, to keep on saying “you are the Christ”, let us pray for the grace, virtue and strength to take up that cross, through which we are saved and made free: free to choose; free to risk our all for him who gave us and made us all we are. That is the message which this ordinary Sunday in Ordinary Time brings home to us.
“And he asked them, ‘but who do you say that I am?’”
The Eucharistic Meditation:
It is easy to kneel before the Sacrament and yet to feel remote from the object of our adoration. The white disc in the golden sunburst on which we are concentrating our minds and our hearts is the same, in body, blood, soul and divinity, as the Judge of all Mankind, the transfigured and ascended Lord of Time and Eternity. And so it is small wonder that we feel the chasm between us suppliants and the Throne of Glory. We who are sick, hurt, distressed, lost: what have we to say to him to whom the angels ministered? What can we have to expect from him? And yet, this is the same Lord who knows the most intimate aspects of our humanity.
The life of Christ speaks to all of us, at all stages of our own lives. Christ, begotten before all worlds, knows our needs before we ask and our words before we speak them. Living in the womb of Mary, he knows what it is to be at once most vulnerable and most protected. Beloved of the Holy Family, in his childhood he knows the fears and joys of all children. Preaching the Gospel and teaching the Faith, he confronts the powerful, exposes the hypocrites and helps the oppressed.
When he heals the sick, brings sight to the blind, makes the lame walk and the deaf hear, he knows what it is to be broken, and what it is to be made whole. Hanging on the cross, he knows the pain of betrayal, and the hurt of injustice. Lying in the tomb, he knows the chill of death, the sorrows of those who mourn, and the depth of the abyss that separates this shore from the next.
Risen and ascended, welcomed and glorified, he sits at the Father’s right hand. Fully God and fully man, all that he assumed is healed. Present now in his glorious body, he bathes us with the radiance of his presence; giver of himself for heavenly food, he fills us with his love.
To seek healing is to seek to be made whole. Healing, wholeness, completeness are found only in him. Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him, but to accept who we are, in our frustration, our hurt and our frailties, and to use all that he has given us in his service: that is healing, that is wholeness, that is rest.
The healing of body and soul for which we long has only one aim: that, by his grace we may one day come to look upon him, not only under the form of bread but face to face, adoring and praising him in the company of all the angels and archangels, the apostles, the prophets, the martyrs and confessors, matrons and virgins, and of his glorious and blessed Mother, ever crying alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.
