Sacred Heart Catholic Parish, Teddington

Homily Second Sunday of Easter

In last Sunday’s Gospel you recall how we placed ourselves beside the three disciples who went to the tomb  on Easter morning, and how only one of the disciples correctly read the signs that told him that Jesus had risen from the dead.

In today’s gospel we are invited to move away from the tomb, to join the disciples elsewhere, locked in a room together, afraid to go out lest they are identified as Jesus’ disciples.   They have been told that Jesus is alive, and that one person has even seen him, but they don’t believe it.

One of those who doesn’t believe is Thomas.   Earlier in the gospel Thomas is heard to say, ‘Let us go up to Jerusalem with Jesus so that we may die with him.     Thomas is an idealistic young man, willing to die in the bloodbath of martyrdom, like so many young men who have got personally caught up in the troubles of the Middle East.

At the Last Supper, when Jesus tells the disciples that he is going away, Thomas simply cannot get it.   He cannot see that Jesus’ life’s work is complete and now he must return to his heavenly Father.

By the time we meet Thomas in today’s gospel, his idealism and misunderstanding have turned into a kind of cynicism….’Unless I see the holes made by the nails….I will not believe.  Thomas wants a sign, like the other disciples had, but he wants it on his own terms.   He wants to believe, but only on his terms.  Unless something changes, Thomas may receive the sign, but he will still not be able to believe.

By the end of this brief gospel story Thomas has made an extraordinary interior journey.   The distance he has travelled is summed up in his words, ‘My Lord and My God’.   For the first time Thomas finally knows who Jesus is, his Lord and his God, and he worships him.

So what happened?   What had changed for Thomas?     There are in fact no cut and dried answers to any questions concerning the Resurrection because it is a profound mystery known only to faith.    Therefore questions asked outside a context of faith will turn out to be the wrong questions, and answers given within the context of faith will always need to be qualified, and leave more to be said.

Within these limitations then, we can say that the first thing that happened was that Thomas met the risen Jesus, but he did so in a privileged way that will never be repeated.   When human language, even in the Scriptures,  tries to describe how Jesus appeared or what he looked like, it simply fails.   These appearances of Jesus are quite unique.   We cannot recreate them or reproduce them or re-stage them.   We either accept the testimony of the disciples that they ‘have seen the Lord’ or like Thomas at first, we don’t.

But there is more that can be said, about Thomas and his interior journey.    When Thomas joins the disciples in the room Jesus invites him to put his fingers into his side.    There’s something almost childlike about what Thomas is being invited to do.  We know how important touching things is for a small child.   It is by touching things, putting their fingers into something, that the child discovers the world.    By inviting Thomas to put his fingers into Jesus’ wounds Jesus was not just saying to Thomas, ‘I am the same person that you knew physically before my crucifixion’ (though he was saying that),   at another level Jesus was also inviting Thomas to enter into the reality of everything Jesus had said and suffered, to discover its deeper meaning, and relate to Jesus and his sufferings in a radically new way.

But notice how Thomas never actually takes up Jesus’ invitation literally to put his fingers into his wounds, like the child.    So he does not actually follow his own agenda of refusing to believe to its logical conclusion, even though Jesus had given him permission to do so.     What happens, I believe,  is that Thomas moves from a childish form of faith to an adult faith.   He expresses that faith in worship, in the words, “My Lord and My God”.

It’s as if Thomas has moved from thinking that ‘Seeing is Believing’, to acknowledging that actually, Believing is Seeing.    By making that small but gigantic movement of belief and trust Thomas has allowed himself to be opened up to see a whole new world that he could never have seen by going it alone, or standing on the outside and looking in in judgement – a  world in which Jesus is at the heart, drawing Thomas into himself.

But we haven’t exhausted all that can be said, so once again we must ask the question again, what happened for Thomas, and what changed?

By the time Thomas walked into the room, the other disciples had already seen Jesus, and this experience had changed them.   Jesus had given them peace.   He had given them the Holy Spirit, and promised them that those whose sins they forgave would be forgiven.   You recall that on this occasion Thomas had not been with them.   Why?   Because he had left the disciples.   He had given up, gone it alone, locked into his own agenda, playing the unbelieving hard man.

If Thomas was with them on the second occasion it can only be because this changed community of disciples had opened the door and let Thomas in to join them.   They had forgiven him for leaving their company.   They had forgiven his misunderstanding and his false heroics.   By forgiving him, letting him back into their company they gave Thomas the opportunity to meet the risen Lord.   In forgiving him they were preparing his heart to be able to respond when Jesus came to meet him.

And one final point.    Reading between the lines, when the community of disciples gathered together they were, effectively, at worship.    They were worshipping Jesus, their Lord and their God, just as we, this gathering of believers today,  are worshipping him now.    Worship is central, and vital, if we are to meet the risen Lord and enable others to meet him too.   ‘Indeed, unless we worship there is little that religion, or even Jesus’ resurrection, can say to us’

Homily at Easter Sunday Mass 2006

The story is told of someone visiting a building site and asking some of the people there what they were doing.   The answers were varied.    One said, ‘Can’t you see what I’m doing, I’m carrying cement’.   Another said he was working to pay off his mortgage.   Another said he was only there because he couldn’t find another job.   The last said that he was helping to build a nice home for a family to live in.

In our gospel this Easter morning we accompany 3 people who make their way to the tomb, expecting to find the corpse of Jesus.   First on the scene is Mary Magdalene.   She sees the stone rolled away from the tomb and immediately presumes the worst.   Jesus’ enemies have stolen his body.   She doesn’t even check to see if the body is gone.

The next to arrive at the tomb is Peter.    Actually he arrives second but because of his rank among the disciples he is allowed to go in first.   He sees not only that the body is gone; he also sees Jesus’ burial cloths, but we are not told how he reacted, if at all.

Finally a third disciple arrives, who is not identified by name.    When he had first arrived he had noticed the burial cloths lying on the ground but he had waited for Peter to go in to the tomb.   When he eventually goes into the burial cave he sees something else, the cloth that had been placed over Jesus’ head, and, says the Evangelist, he believed.

What did he believe?   He believed that Jesus had risen from the dead.
But what made the difference between him and the other two?   Why did they see yet not believe?

In Mary’s case, Mary loved Jesus dearly, but she had seen the hostile forces lined up against him, in the end killing him.   She had seen so much evil that she could only think of the worst case scenario.    Bitter experience had affected her mind and spirit.   Her spirit was so bruised by evil that she was in no position even to wait for good news, let alone receive it.

What about Peter?   Peter had a good heart.    He had promised Jesus he would even die for him, but Peter relied on a kind of false bravado.   When the crunch came he denied that he even knew Jesus.   Peter had not yet come to terms with what he had done.   His guilt left him unreceptive to good news.   So he sees more than Mary saw, but he makes nothing of it, and returns home.

In contrast to the other two the unnamed disciple looks into the tomb, then goes into the tomb, and sees something he had not seen before, the cloth that covered Jesus’ face.   Seeing that veil triggered something within the disciple that led him to understand what had happened to Jesus.  What it triggered was an old memory from the Scriptures about how Moses, after encountering God at Sinai, used to wear a veil over his face when he was with his people, because his face radiated the glory of God and this was too bright for the people to bear.    But when he went into the tent to encounter the presence of God he would take the veil off.

When the disciple saw the face veil that covered Jesus’ head taken off and carefully laid aside he recognised that Jesus had now taken off the veil that was his physical flesh in order to go to God and receive the glory that was his, as Word of God since before the foundation of the world.    The disciple may also have remembered that when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead Lazarus came out of the tomb still wearing his face veil, while the veil of Jesus was carefully put away.   So whereas Lazarus was temporarily revived, only to die later, what happened to Jesus was altogether different.   Now the disciple began to understand what Jesus meant by rising from the dead.   It was not a coming back, in the same form, like Lazarus.   Jesus had passed through death into a radically new life, the life of God, a life which still connects with our lives through the Holy Spirit.

Seeing is believing, we say.   But is it necessarily so?    In today’s gospel three people see, but only one believes.   Only one recognises the real meaning of what he sees, the  disciple who is not named.   He is also called ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’, not in the sense that the others were excluded from Jesus’ love, but in the sense that this disciple allowed Jesus to love him.   He allowed Jesus to teach him.   He hung on Jesus’ every word and gesture until he understood it.     And so, on that Easter morning, his heart was prepared to recognise the signs.

St Augustine once said, ‘Show me one who loves, and I will show them the resurrection’.   The resurrection of Jesus cannot be conclusively demonstrated.   It is only revealed in signs to those who have faith.  Faith comes from outside of us and leads us in the direction of the signs, but we must also work on ourselves interiorly in order to be able to read the signs and recognise them.   So faith is a gift of God, but it requires a human response.

Today our signs of the resurrection are the Scriptures, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and our communal experience of being the Church.   All of us here, praise God, have been given those signs.    But the signs will only speak to us if we are disposed to read them.

Let us deepen our appreciation of the signs God has given us, so that we may enter into them, as the Beloved disciple entered into the tomb, not just when times are good and we feel close to God, but especially when we suffer, or when faith is hard, or we are made conscious of our weakness.    Lord, we believe, help our unbelief.

Homily at the Easter Vigil 2006

We have journeyed together over the past three days, following Jesus as he washed the feet of his disciples, following Jesus as he transformed the Cross into the victory of God’s love and the triumph of his mission.     Now we stand by the tomb with the three women.    Mark tells us how, as Jesus was crucified, these women looked on from afar, the same women who followed Jesus closely and served him when he was in Galilee.   Now they had come to the tomb, bring spices to pay their last respects.

I would like to suggest that we see in these women images of ourselves, people who both follow Christ, at times getting quite close to him and serving him, yet at other times keeping our distance.  The women followed him on his journeys through Galilee, when he impressed the crowds with displays of healing and great power and his preaching of the kingdom of God.   At that stage the ministry of Jesus was on a roll.   It is easy to follow a successful Jesus who demonstrates his power in a very tangible way and we want to become part of the action.

As the opposition to Jesus grew, people began to hold back.  When the crunch came his closest disciples ran away – a sign of that deep tendency within all of us to be fair-weather friends of Jesus, to follow him only when the conditions are right.    As Jesus dies on the cross his male friends are nowhere to be seen, and the women watch at a distance.

And so, the women come to the tomb.   Jesus’ project is over, like so many initiatives that promise so much but get snuffed out by malice or expediency or politics or just personal weakness – all the things we heard about in the Passion story yesterday.   Now there is nothing left for the women except to say their goodbyes, and try to move on.   Yet even to do this will provide hassle.   There’s a big stone to be pulled away, and there’s no man around strong enough to shift it!

And then, the first surprise from a God of surprises.   “The man who can” has already arrived and is sitting in the tomb.  The stone has been rolled away.   The risen Jesus as we know would not have needed the stone to be rolled away in order to get out of the tomb, so the stone has obviously been rolled away for the sake of the women.   They need to know that there is hope where no hope seems possible – the first stage of their journey to faith in Jesus’ resurrection.

Then comes a second surprise.    The young man in the tomb says, ‘Jesus is not here, he is risen’.   These words are full of mystery indeed.   They are words intended to challenge and provoke faith.   Can the women dare to believe that despite appearances the dead one is not actually confined to the world of the dead?

But the surprises are not over yet.  ‘He is going to Galilee’, says the young man, ‘and you will see him there’.   But can the women believe, in spite of appearances?    If they do believe, will they act on their belief, and go back to Galilee, go back to the beginning, in the hope of seeing Jesus?

Our Gospel reading tonight leaves out the very last verse of the original gospel which speaks about the reaction of the women.   Their reaction was one of amazement and fear.   Mark never actually tells us that they went to Galilee to tell the disciples.   The story ends hanging in the air, so to speak. 

Instead Mark invites us to remain on that knife-edge between belief and disbelief, to go back and reflect on what we have heard these past three days.   Can we believe that in Jesus’ washing of his disciples feet and in his crucifixion we can see the love of God?     Or is there something in our culture, or in our experience, that prevents us from seeing that?     Can we open our minds enough to believe in a God of surprises, even little surprises, who sends people to roll our tombstones away and keep us from falling into cynicism or despair?    In the end, do we trust Jesus enough to love him?   Or do we love him enough to trust him?  In the end it all comes down to trust.   Once we trust Jesus, then the empty tomb will no longer be an enigma.    Like the cross and the footwashing it will be transformed into a sign that evokes our trust and confirms it.

‘Go to Galilee, you will meet him there’.   If we trust Jesus and take a step towards him, he will come to meet us.   For us, going back to Galilee means recapturing our former trust, going back and listening to his words in the gospels and the rest of the Scriptures as if for the first time – allowing the familiar to become new for us.     Going back to Galilee means revisiting  the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of the Church that we have not understood, trusting that he will reveal its meaning to us in his good time.  Going back to Galilee means allowing God to roll away the tombstones that are our prejudices - the things and the people we have made up our minds about, and trusting the light of the world to show us all these things again in a new light.

Footwashing, death and resurrection – taken together they make up what is called the Paschal Mystery, the great mystery of Christ’s ‘Passing Over’ from this world to the Father, through death to definitive, glorious life, where there is no more sin, no more tears, no more sadness.    What we have reflected on in the past three days is renewed for us every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, at the heart of which we proclaim, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again”.   Every time we celebrate the Eucharist together we are touched by the Paschal Mystery, we are invited to draw ourselves into that union of purpose and love that is the union of Christ and his Father; we are invited to accept the hand of God’s friendship, and extend our hands in friendship to one another, as Jesus extended his on the Cross to all of us.

Homily for Good Friday 2006

Yesterday evening we reflected on the last great gesture of Jesus to his disciples, which was to wash their feet.   We reflected on how Peter was shocked by this, because it challenged his worldly wisdom.   In the world all is not always what it appears to be.   Acts of service may say more about the needs of those who perform the service than about those who receive them, or they may reinforce relationships based on inequality and subservience.     We reflected on how Peter’s worldly wisdom and culture prevented him from seeing Jesus’ gesture for what it really was, a most profound act of love and friendship.   If Peter could not see what Jesus was doing when he washed his feet, how would he see his crucifixion? 

    What did the other people mentioned in the gospel story see?     For the Jews who bayed for Jesus’ death, they saw the end of a dangerous threat.    Jesus threatened their religion.  He threatened, they thought, their precarious existence under the Romans.   What did the disciples see?    The tragic end of their hopes for a better world, perhaps.   What did Pilate see?    An innocent man whose death he connived with, in order to safeguard his political position.  What did the woman see?     A terrible injustice which they were powerless to prevent.

St John, whose gospel we have just heard, sees the foot washing and the crucifixion as two aspects of a seamless garment that is the life and death of Jesus.   As Jesus  lived, so he died.  As he died, so he lived.    Jesus’ life and death together reveal the love of God the Father for us, made physical, in the body of Christ – Christ, who gave himself for us in humble service, and died for us on the Cross.    

So St John looks at the cross and sees in the crucifixion a double glorification.   The cross reveals the glory of God.   It takes the veil, so to speak, off  the unseen God and reveals Him to be a God of love, present among us, loving us without conditions to the utmost limit.    St John also sees the cross too as the glorification of Jesus; in other words there is more to the cross than what we see with our eyes.   The cross reveals Jesus to be the eternal Son of God who has carried out his Father’s mission of love to its perfection.

But why did John see the Cross as a glorification?   Let’s consider for a moment the last words of Jesus.    They are recorded differently in each gospel, but what is common to every gospel is that his last words were a prayer.    In Mark’s Passion last Sunday we listened to Jesus saying, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’    This sounds like a cry of despair.   Some of those standing near the cross took it as a call for Elijah.   But in reality Jesus was praying the words of Psalm 22, a great prayer of hope in God to deliver him from death.

In John’s version Jesus’ final words are, ‘It is accomplished – finished, ended, fulfilled’.    Again, these could be misunderstood, unless we bear in mind that Jesus saw his whole life as accomplishing the mission of the Father to reveal his love and not lose anyone who was given to him.   Reading through John’s gospel we see that between Jesus and the Father there is a tremendous unity of purpose –  Son and Father working together to establish friendship between God and us, the friendship that is eternal life.    On the cross that unity of purpose is brought to its fruition.   The final words of Jesus are the final words of a life offered totally to God.

So what we see when we look on the cross is not some tragedy, some terrible mistake – the tragic story of a good man where all has gone wrong.    What we see is the working out of the purpose of the Incarnation.  God’s Word became flesh to share everything we experience, including our death.     What we see is the final achievement of Jesus’ life and mission.   Seen through the eyes of faith, the cross becomes a triumph.   Hence in a few moments we will carry the cross in procession, raise it high in triumph, because the Cross is a real sign to us that God is truly here among us as a friend;  a friend for whom no act of service is too great, not even the giving of his very life.

Homily for Holy Thursday 2006

I invite you to dwell for a few moments on that conversation we just heard between Jesus and Peter.   We heard Peter objecting, in the strongest way possible, to Jesus washing his feet.    In reply Jesus tells Peter that unless he, Jesus, washes him, very serious consequences will follow for Peter, consequences of life or death.   So Peter replies, “Don’t stop then with my feet, wash me all over”     “Oh Peter”, says Jesus, you have missed the point.   You haven’t the remotest idea what I have been doing.

In Jesus’ time, When a guest arrived at a house after having walked in sandals along the dusty roads he would be invited to wash his feet – and pointed in the direction of the water.   To wash another’s feet was considered to be such a menial, even degrading, service that a Jew who had slaves would not ask his slave to do it.   However it was not unknown for disciples to wash the feet of their master out of love and respect.

So when Jesus interrupted the meal and began washing the feet of his disciples, Peter was appalled.    “You are not ever going to wash my feet.   What appalled Peter was not that people shouldn’t wash each other’s feet, but that Jesus should wash his feet.

Why was Peter so appalled.?   Perhaps Peter’s worldly wisdom had trained him to be very suspicious about gestures of service.     Service often presupposes a condition of inequality between 2 people and the giving of a service can reinforce that sense of  inequality.    The Jew who would not allow his slave to wash his guests’ feet would probably have had no problem letting a foreign slave do so, if he had one.

Or maybe Peter’s suspicion of service was more subtle than that.   Sometimes we do things that on the surface appear to be meeting other’s needs but in reality are meeting our own needs – a more subtle form of domination, under the guise of service, but domination nevertheless.

However, there is another model of service that is altogether more pure and altruistic, and that is the service that takes place between friends, and which is genuinely all about the other’s happiness.   Where there is true friendship my happiness is not the goal of the service I offer but its by-product.    There are no debts to be repaid for favours, nothing expected in return, no exploitation.

Jesus took a model of service then, the footwashing, which was so readily associated with inequality, power games and domination.    By washing the feet of his disciples Jesus was acknowledging, ‘Yes, I am superior to you in that I am your teacher and Lord – there is no point in denying that, but I choose to relate to you as a friend’.  By washing his disciples’ feet Jesus was overcoming by love the inequality that existed between them.    His taking off of his garments before the washing is a symbol of what his whole life was about – taking off his divine glory and the power that gave him, and becoming an utterly human friend in an utterly human way.   By washing his disciples’ feet Jesus showed that no form of service is too menial among friends who truly love one another.

Peter of course was appalled.    He was the leader of the disciples, and what Jesus did challenged his view of the world and how the world ticked.   Peter wanted to be number one.     He believed in authority as an exercise of domination over others.   He would probably have believed that there was one law for the rich and powerful, and another for the poor and weak.    Peter was basically corrupt, no more or no less than most of us.    Its very difficult not to be tainted by some form of corruption – hence many of the Fathers interpreted the washing of the feet to mean that even after the bath of baptism we have to put our feet on the ground, so we need to continue washing off corruption throughout life.

“If I do not wash you”, says Jesus to Peter”, you can have no part in me.”   In other words you can have no share in the eternal life I came to offer, unless you allow me to cleanse you of your corruption, which corrupts even acts of service and goodness.     This is not a physical washing, so you don’t have to be washed all over, but a washing of the mind, heart and soul.   

So by washing his disciples’ feet Jesus was telling us that in Jesus God is among us as a friend.    The way to salvation for all of us is to learn to be a community of friends around Jesus, our God become a friend.    And Jesus will go on to say, “I am the vine, my Father is the gardener, and you are the branches.    Cut off from me you can do nothing.

“You should wash each others’ feet.    I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you’    These words are addressed to us, today.    They tell us that our God revealed himself as one who delights to do even the most menial tasks for others, not out of some need to appear humble, or to exercise some subtle form of domination, but out of friendship and love.   The footwashing calls us to be living examples to one another of the love of Christ who washed his disciples feet out of friendship.    The Jesus of John’s gospel does not tell us to love our enemies, he tells us to love one another first.    Because love is not an abstract thing, it has to start and be grounded somewhere.   

In this humble gesture Jesus challenges us, as he challenged Peter, not to allow our culture and our worldly wisdom to prevent us understanding the true meaning of Christian discipleship.    We do not turn up here as individuals, seeking our own personal enlightenment but unaffected by others around us.   We come because Christ calls us to be friends, to cultivate our friendship, to grow in friendship, and to offer mutual service to one another in such a way that while the differences and inequalities between us are not cancelled out, they become irrelevant in the radically new context of love, Christ’s parting gift to us.

Such a calling is not easy for us, no more than it was for Peter, because the corruption of the world has a tendency to wrap itself around us comfortably like an old shoe.  Like Peter we have a tendency to think that if we are good according to the lights of our corrupt way of thinking, and if we don’t do something terribly wrong our out of character, that we have no need for the grace of God, no need to be washed by Jesus.    And Peter did not come to faith and understanding at the last Supper.   Despite his protestation that he was ok, that he would give his life for Jesus, he went on to deny his Master and ran away when the going got rough.

Which only goes to make Jesus’ gesture even more wondrous, and awesome.  Jesus knew what Peter would do, yet he still washed his feet.     Let us just for a moment imagine ourselves with Peter, having our feet washed by Jesus, and then imagine Jesus washing the feet of the person beside you, or the feet of someone you don’t get on with, or don’t value, or don’t even know.    Then imagine yourself going to them and washing their feet.     You now possess the eternal life Jesus came to give you.