Sacred Heart Catholic Parish, Teddington

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Homily

Homily:  Easter 3

In today’s gospel we are invited to consider and experience the new risen life of Jesus through the eyes and mind of Peter.   If we cast our minds back to just three weeks ago, to the events of Palm Sunday, Peter had seen Jesus entering Jerusalem acclaimed by the crowds.   As he watched that spectacle, he would have been very proud of Jesus, and might even have been looking forward to a life of glamour and security, basking in the glory of Jesus, and being associated with such a powerful celebrity, even if to others Jesus appeared as a big fish in a small pool.

And then everything changed, and Peter’s dream fell apart.  Overnight Jesus fell from grace.   Glory had turned to shame, security to fear.   Jesus was crucified and buried.   The game was up and there was no way back.

As Peter licked his emotional wounds he was told by a group of women that Jesus had risen from the dead.   So he went to the tomb to inspect it, and it was true, there was no body.   But so what?  All that demonstrated to Peter was that there were people around who would stoop so low as to rob the bodies of the dead.

But real life beckons.   Peter had no option but to get a job, and the only job he knew was fishing.    So he went back to it, but his heart was not in it.    He had enjoyed the buzz of seeing the Master heal people and trounce the Pharisees in debate.    He could see himself doing the same.    Now his companion and hero was gone and only he was left – and the fishing was tedious.    And now even the fish were against him.  He fished all night, and not one fish swam into the nets.

And then a stranger appears on the shore, preparing a sort of primitive bar-b-q.   Peter has no idea who the stranger is, but the stranger offers him some words of encouragement.   So Peter tries again, gets his fish, and the stranger turns them into breakfast.    As all this is going on something is happening within Peter too.  He is slowly making connections – the miraculous catch of fish – where did that happen before?    The meal of loaves and fishes……?     As Peter begins to make connections the other disciple, whose name we are never told, puts it all together for him.    The stranger is the Lord, but you have not yet recognised him.

This simple, quite charming gospel story tells us how our faith in the risen Jesus can grow from what is to all intents the darkness of unbelief to the point where we begin to recognise the presence of Jesus in strangers and symbols, and in the community that is the Church.      The problem the story addresses is not the presence of Jesus, but our capacity to recognise him.   The story of Peter recognising Jesus is like the passing of the night into the light of dawn.    Even  as the day breaks Jesus is present but Peter fails to recognise him, until the other disciple tells him once again what the women had already told him, ‘It is the Lord’.    Only then does Peter begin to recognise Jesus himself.

For every Christian there is a challenge to move from being told by others that Jesus is present with us in a new way, to actually beginning to see it for ourselves.    And that is just as true for us today.    We are challenged to believe and discover for ourselves the good news that the risen Jesus is present in the action of the Mass, in the breaking of Bread that is the Eucharist, in the stories of Scripture and in the gathering of strangers whom Jesus feeds and invites to become friends.

For many of us that may mean that like Peter we have to go through a period of darkness, disbelief and disillusion, in order that Jesus can break down those attitudes within us that we may think of as faith but are actually preventing us from seeing the risen Jesus.

Peter had to go through his own ‘dark night of the soul’ and be stripped of certain props and dependencies within his life – the attraction of glamour, security, the need to fulfil his own agenda in his own way – only then was he ready to recognise the risen Lord.    Only then could he say to Jesus, ‘I love you’, and be prepared to let Jesus lead him, rather than wanting to make Jesus fit into his own agenda.    And only then was Peter in a position to be able to say to others in his turn, ‘It is the Lord’.

Newsletter

Homily: Easter Sunday 2007

In a few moments we will be taking Liam and Archie to the Baptismal Font.    For most families a Baptism is the first occasion for family and friends to gather together and rejoice at the birth of a child, and to wish the Parents well as they begin a family or extend their family circle.

The rite of Baptism itself is about new birth and families.   In earlier times the ritual made this especially clear.    The person to be baptised was brought to a pool within the Church and immersed deep within the waters, before rising up and being clothed in a new white garment.

This ritual of immersion evoked the person coming out of the waters of the womb of mother earth to begin their life – the miracle of birth.   It also evoked the memory of the Israelites passing through the Red Sea to escape from their condition as slaves in Egypt so that they could travel to a land of freedom – the miracle of escape.    And most important of all it evoked the memory of Easter, of Jesus being drowned in the waters of suffering and death, only to be raised by the Father to new life – the miracle of resurrection.

Just before the baptism the Parents and Godparents make a profession of faith on behalf of the Child.    Today, on Easter Day, they will make that profession with the whole community here.  When they have said it the priest says, ‘This is our faith, this is the faith of the Church, and we are proud to profess it, in Christ Jesus our Lord.’     This shows us that baptism is about family too.   These children will form part of a larger family than their birth family.     After Baptism they will belong to the family of the Church, with Christ at its head.

When we recite the Baptism Promise we do so in two parts.   In the first part we are asked if we will renounce sin, the glamour of sin and the source of sin.    This is easier said than done.   Experience will have taught many of us that we may say yes, but we cannot do so by our own efforts.   We need help.  We need a power that comes from beyond our human resources.

The second half of the Profession of Faith points us in the direction from where help will come.   We profess belief in God and in all that God has done for us, through Jesus Christ.   

During his life Jesus asked one of his disciples, ‘Are you ready to be baptised with the baptism I am to be baptised with?’  Jesus was speaking not about a ritual, he was referring to his shameful death on the cross.    Jesus, who was without sin, freely allowed us to vent all our anger, frustration and violence on himself, in order to help us break free once and for all from the cycle of sin and violence.    By loving us to the end, and showing us how to love, he offered us a way out of that vicious circle of egotism and selfishness which we call sin.     The good news we celebrate today is that Sin could not overcome him.   He overcame Sin.     And death itself could not blot him out.   

When I try to explain this I am always at a loss for words, because I am trying to express a mystery too deep for words.     When you bring Archie and Liam to the Font, you will be plunging them into this great mystery, which is the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, and our liberation from sin.    That is not to say that sin is not around us, but we have a saviour to protect us from it.   The lighted candle you will receive later will be taken from the Paschal Candle, our Symbol of the Risen Christ.     It is a sign that something quite extraordinary has taken place in the soul of our children.   Your children have been given the capacity to hear the word of God himself, and respond to him.   Your children have been given the possibility of knowing Jesus Christ and his love for the whole human race.  My prayer for you is that you will do everything you can, by your prayer, example and teaching, to help your children grow into an ever deeper awareness of the mystery that has been planted in their hearts today.

Homily: Easter Vigil 2007

Tonight the Lord has led us to gaze at another empty space, the void which is the empty tomb.   In the temple of Solomon, unlike the later temple in which Jesus worshipped, the Holy of Holies was not completely empty.   It contained a kind of throne, surrounded by the Cherubim, a  throne on which sat the invisible mystery of God.    Tonight, when we gaze in our minds on the empty tomb, we are beholding the throne of the glory of God.

Over these past three days we have reflected on the presence of God in the empty places.    We began on Thursday with the empty tabernacle, and allowed that to lead us to the voids in our own heart and the emptiness that was Christ’s death.   On Friday we venerated the empty cross, symbol of our futile attempts to fill our emptiness with more and more of the wrong things that never satisfy, and we contrasted our lives with the humble obedience of Christ, who allowed the Father to fill the space of his human emptiness.    Christ shows us how to embark on the painful journey of humility that we cannot go by human effort alone.

Tonight we join the women at the empty tomb.    Their hearts are empty with grief.  They have lost the one they love.   They set out to do all they know how to do, to perform the last rites over the body of Jesus.   They try to fill their own void by holding on to the past, to Jesus as they remember him.    Then they hear the announcement of the two men.   ‘He is not here.   He is risen’.

This announcement leaves us with a sense of wonder and many questions.    What is announced to us is a mystery of faith, in the strictest sense of the word – and something that is not shared by any other religion in the world.   This should not give us a sense of having one over on the others – that would be to fill our void with a spirit of competitiveness – but it should engender in us a spirit of awe and wonder, gratitude and thanksgiving.

But it leaves us still with the question, ‘Where is Jesus, since he is not in the tomb?   This question leads us back once more to the temple, to a visit Jesus made when he drove out the money changers.

When asked by what authority he did so Jesus said, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again’.   The people who heard this were mystified.   It was only much later, after much thought and pondering that his disciples remembered these words and began to understand what Jesus meant.   He was speaking, they realised, of a new and different kind of temple, a new and different place where people could encounter God, and that was his Body.

The emptiness of the Holy of Holies, we said, symbolised that void in the hearts of individuals and groups of every kind that can only be filled by God himself.    Because Jesus, the eternal Word of God made flesh, was humbly obedient unto death, his body has now become that place of intimate encounter between God and us.

And where once the eternal Word took flesh in a human body, now the Eternal Word of God takes human form in the Body that is the Church.   But just as the glory of God was present, but in a concealed way, in the body of Jesus during his life on earth, so now the Body of Jesus is present, but in a concealed way, in the Church whose members still struggle with sin.      But with the eyes of faith we can find his presence in the Scriptures, hence tonight the Paschal Candle, symbolising the risen Christ, has remained beside the Book of the Scriptures.   Jesus Christ, risen, continues to reveal himself through the Sacraments of the Church – so after this Mass the Paschal candle will be placed beside the font, which is the gate of entry to the Sacramental life of the Church, ready for the baptism of two children in the morning.

Tonight, we give thanks in deep gratitude for the wonderful works of God, who has transferred us from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, and transformed our emptiness with his love.    Yes, we continue to struggle in order to gain the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.  Yes, our faith is weak.   Yes, we sometimes refuse to follow Jesus on the path he calls us to.   But Jesus will never leave us to our emptiness.    He returns in Word and Sacrament, he returns in the heart of our community.    As our invisible centre he bids us join in the new song of the redeemed.   We are the Easter People, and Alleluia, Praise God, is our song.

Homily: Good Friday 2007

‘Christ was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross’.

But what is this humility of Christ?     Humility is not a word that tunes in well with our modern culture.     To get on we must be self-confident and self-assertive.   Young people of an early age do activities with a view to their CV.  Footballers write their autobiography before their mid-twenties.    We are encouraged to push ourselves forward aggressively, lay blame at the door of others and demand apologies when we are slighted.   We are quick to apologise for the failings of our ancestors, but slow to apologise for ourselves.    We are encouraged to live as solitary figures on our plinth of moral self-righteousness.

In this culture humility sounds like something sad, something for losers.  Yet when we look closer at ourselves we may find some sinister dark shadows that are disguised by our public affluence.  Deep down there is much fear and anxiety.   Many people live with a sense of hopelessness.   New forms of slavery in the form of people-trafficking or the sex industry are but the tip of an iceberg which is allowing our lives to be shaped entirely by market forces, where everything has its price and anything can be done provided someone is willing to pay.

So what is this humility?   It is something that is hard to see, particularly in our culture, but it is the basis of everything.   Cardinal Hume once wrote about humility, ‘It is a very beautiful thing to see, but the attempt to become humble is painful indeed’.

Yesterday we reflected on  the empty space, the void that is at the heart of all our lives, where our desires never seem to be fulfilled.     Humility is about recognising that empty space, but not blaming anyone else, or myself, that it is there, and not trying to fill that space with more of anything – money, power, sex or whatever, but making that space a place of silence, a place for God to come and dwell in, so that his glory may be seen, and his love be experienced.

Humility is not about saying, ‘I am worthless’, but it is about saying, ‘I am not at the centre of the world’.   It is about allowing my centre to let go of the selfish and egotistical ‘me’ and allowing myself to be pulled and shaped by God’s grace.  Humility is not about my banging my drum louder and louder, or dancing on my own in the midst of a crowd, but about tuning myself in to the music of God, and dancing with others, not just alongside them, to the music given us by the Lord of the Dance.

Where you find humility, there you find a different kind of world in the making.  It is a world of community – communities where we are liberated from violence and competitiveness and the struggle for power, communities where each person flourishes because each contributes from their own talents, and each values the contribution of the other as if it were their own.   Where there is humility everyone knows that all they have is a gift from God.

Our reading from the letter to the Hebrews spoke to us about the humility of Christ.   You recall yesterday evening we spoke about how Jesus visited the temple in Jerusalem, but was not allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, the innermost room in the temple - that empty space symbolising the void in our lives that only God can fill.

The reading from the letter to the Hebrews today reminds us that even though Jesus was God, and without sin, as a human being he had to learn the path of humility, and it required much prayer from him, much pain and tears.   Learning to be humble is a lifetime’s task. Humility is about learning to want to fill the void at the heart of my life - not with what I desire, not by desiring things because others desire them - humility rather is about accepting with joy whatever God in his providence should send me, in the full knowledge that he loves me more than I can ever know.    When I have learned that, I will know what true freedom means.

    The letter to the Hebrews goes on to say that Jesus, through his life and death of humble obedience, actually passed through the Holy of Holies.   In other words, the writer is saying that Jesus not only entered into a real personal encounter with God, but made that encounter with God possible for us too.

In our liturgy today we do several things to remind us of our call to be humble.   At the beginning of the liturgy we saw the priest prostrate himself on the ground, symbolically becoming one with the clay from which he was created.   In a few moments we will say a long series of prayers.   They are God’s way of reminding us to open ourselves to the whole of humanity, because the freedom of humility is a freedom to be open to others, even those we consider to be our rivals or enemies.

Finally we are all invited to approach the cross, genuflect before it and venerate it.   Our walk to the cross is a symbol of our walk through life.   As we walk to the cross we bring with us the shortcomings and failings of our lives.   When we kiss the cross we are symbolically kissing all those shortcomings and failings in ourselves, because they represent our attempts to fill that empty space within us, that true self within ourselves that God loves, and longs to enter if only we will let him.

Today it is the Cross we venerate, without a figure of Jesus.   Jesus is no longer on the Cross.   He has taken our sins on himself.   He has returned to the Father and entered the real Holy of Holies, of which the one in the temple was only a symbol.   The cross lies empty now.   But we still have to carry our crosses, and we are invited to carry them in faith, and to see in our cross, whatever form it may take, the raw material that God uses to work out our salvation, and fill the void that is at the heart of our existence.

Homily: Holy Thursday 2007

You may have noticed a certain emptiness in the Church this evening.   Today the tabernacle on the altar is empty, and the familiar flickering red light is gone.    It is as if, in ritual, that uninterrupted presence of Christ between one Mass and the next, that we take for granted, is gone.    Over the next three days we experience this particular presence of Christ in the Eucharist as absent, except for a few hours this evening when we are invited to follow to the Altar of Repose after Mass, to watch and pray, just as the disciples were invited by Jesus to watch and pray with him in the garden of Gethsemane.

Let’s remain for a little while with this sense of absence and emptiness.      Every time that Jesus went to the courts of the Temple in Jerusalem he would have seen an imposing building which he was never allowed to enter.    The first time he saw it as a child he must have been quite curious, and longed to investigate it, but his parents would have told him that ‘like everyone else, we don’t go in, because that is the house of God, the place where  has chosen to dwell on earth with his people’.     Only one person was ever allowed in to this sacred space.    That was the High Priest, and even he only entered once a year, on the Day of Atonement.

Sixty years before Jesus was born a Roman general called Pompey had conquered Judea and visited the temple.   Being a powerful military commander who was used to getting his own way, he barged his way into the Holy of Holies, expecting to find a statue of the Jewish God that he could bring back in triumph to Rome as a trophy of conquest.   But when he walked into the innermost room of the temple he found – nothing – just an empty space.   Pompey had learned a profound religious truth – if he was able to grasp it - that the glory of God is to be found in a void, in empty space.

As Jesus and his disciples met for their last Supper together there was a void, an empty space, in their hearts and in the heart of their gathering.    For the disciples it was the emptiness of grief, knowing that they were about to lose their leader and friend.    It was the emptiness of lost ambition, and the knowledge that their lives, which had shown so much promise, were going nowhere.      For Jesus it was the emptiness of failure.  Having been with these disciples for so long, having spent to much energy trying to teach them, he knew that what they had learned was skin deep, and that despite their protestations they would shortly betray him, deny him and abandon him.      Above all, for Jesus, there was the emptiness of his own impending death.     There would be nothing left for him to hold onto, and he would cry out, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me’.

Yet it is in that very moment when we may feel utterly empty that the glory of God makes itself known and that God can do his greatest work.    It is in that emptiness, that invisible centre which earthly pride and power cannot fill, that we discover who we really are, our true selves.    And it is in that scene of emptiness that we discover who Jesus is too: we discover that he is not just a man with a great bedside manner, or a great prophet, or a great preacher, or a great miracle worker, or a great social reformer – these are not the things that reveal his true self.    In that scene with so much emptiness is revealed the invisible centre of Jesus’ life – the love with which he loved his disciples to the end.     John intends this to mean not just that Jesus loved his disciples until the end of his life, nor even that he loved them to the limits of human capacity, but that he loved them to the point where human love is not able to go.   Everything that Jesus said or did was an expression of that divine love flowing from his invisible centre which was in perfect unity with the Father.

That love is expressed in his washing of his disciples’ feet, and in his gift of the Eucharist.   This revealing by Jesus of his invisible centre, his true self, is symbolised in his laying down and taking up of his outer garment.      He takes off his garment to reveal to us the infinite love of God which expresses itself in humble service and the laying down of his life.   He takes up his garment again as a sign to us that such love and service is not the losing of life, but the free taking up of eternal life in all its fullness.

In the conversation that follows this episode in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks at length about his departure – the departure that will create such a void in the lives of his disciples.   He tells them in effect that only if he goes will they be able to remember and take in what he has been telling them, and that they will experience even greater things than they would have experienced had he remained with them.   

But he also tells them that his time on earth is but a stage on a longer journey, a journey that took him from the presence of his Father in heaven, down to earth and back to the Father.     And where he has gone, we are called to follow.    One day our earthly song with its many verses must end, and the many voids and empty spaces and disappointments and movings on that we experience in our lives are an advance sign of that final ending.

But the good news of this evening’s celebration is that God has given us the means to fill those empty spaces that lie within us all.    Our calling once again is to allow Jesus, the eternal word of God, to fill that empty space for us, and to let him come and dwell within us.  Our calling is to shape our lives around the Eucharist and around the mystery of divine love that it signifies.

We might think of our lifetime as like a song that we sing, and the many experiences of our life being like the different verses of the song.

When we celebrate the Eucharist regularly and try to live in accord with the mind of Christ we discover that our songs are not songs we sing in the isolation of our own bath tubs, rather they are but a small part of God’s great symphony, and his music is the self-giving sacrifice of Christ that is at the heart of that Eucharistic celebration.     And by listening to his word faithfully over the course of our years we discover that all our bum notes, all that emptiness of our lives, all our failings and shortcomings are never disregarded or discarded by God as rubbish, but mysteriously woven into his music, to produce in the end a harmony of beauty, something transfigured – transfigured by his divine love.