Good Friday, Shaftesbury

Jn 18:1-19:42
Among the many things we just heard in that account of the Passion was about how Our Lord’s side was “pierced with a lance”(Jn 19:33), a wound to join the wounds already made by the nails in His hands and feet.
Catholic devotion has often focussed on the wounds of Jesus and I want today to say a word about what it means to ‘hide’ in those wounds –a phrase used in many prayers, and as we’ll sing later in the service when we sing the ever-popular hymn ‘Soul of my Saviour’: “Deep in Thy wounds Lord, hide and shelter me”.

Having a shelter as place to turn to in difficulty is perhaps something we might not think about too much if we live in secure houses, and even more if we work indoors. But for those of us who work outdoors on the land, and even more so for the Scriptural context of someone like a shepherd spending many hours outdoors at the mercy of the weather, to have a shelter when a storm comes over is very important. So, a cleft in the rocks that you can hide in, a cave you can shelter in, a home where you will be welcome –all these are very important.
And there are many things in life we must shelter from that are not just the weather: Problems at work, with family, of loneliness, of sickness. Is there a shelter we can hide in from these and other ‘storms’?
It is in the wounds of Christ that we can securely ‘hide’ and ‘shelter’.

Now, before I say anything more, let me concede that to some people it might seem a little grotesque or messy to speak of ‘hiding ‘ in the wounds, wounds that bled, so let me note a distinction: between the wounds as reality and the wounds as symbol.
As something to hide in, the wounds are symbolic -I cannot enter them physically.
But those wounds matter as a symbol BECAUSE of the reality they refer to: the real physical wounds on His body. These matter as symbol because of what they so powerfully testify to: His love for me, and, also vitally important, His power to aid me.
They are a sign of His power because of the Resurrection. As you recall, after His Resurrection He displayed His wounds to His disciples and He even had doubting Thomas put his hand into His side and his fingers into the holes in His hands. Those wounds still exist in His Risen body. Yet, in His risen and glorified state those wounds are not like wounds in OUR bodies –those wounds bleed and suffer no more. Those wounds thus testify to His power, to all He has conquered by His Resurrection.
This matters because we need somewhere secure and powerful to shelter in from life’s storms, and His power testifies that His wounds are places of such power and security.

But today, on Good Friday, let me return to the first of those things that His wounds signify, namely, His love for me.
There is little value in having a shelter that is powerful to hide in unless we know that we will be welcome there. What His wounds show is that we ARE welcome. His wounds show that He loves us enough to die for us, for me and for you. His wounds show that He welcomes us not because we are worthy of shelter, but simply because He wishes to shelter us: “He died for us while we were still sinners” (Rom 5:8).

One final thought, Who is doing the hiding? Who is sheltering us from the storm? We are not sheltering ourselves, no, He is the one active and strong and caring, He is the one who is sheltering us. As that hymn puts in, “Deep in Thy wounds Lord, hide and shelter me”.
As Scripture puts it, “He will hide me in His shelter in the day of trouble”(Ps 27:5). Yes, it may well be that we turn to Him, as indeed we must for Him to aid us, but He is the one who does the sheltering.

So, whatever my problems in life, whatever storms beset me, let me turn to His wounds, that He might “hide and shelter me”.

Maundy Thursday, Shaftesbury

Jn 13:1-15
There are a great many things in the Scriptures that seem obscure to us but would have had a meaning for the people who heard Jesus speak and watched what He did. The washing of feet at the Last Supper is one such action, as are the words that surround it. I want to explain a few things using a commentary from the well respected convert from Judaism and New Testament scholar Alfred Edersheim who notes certain connections between what Jesus did and said and the Temple priesthood of Jews –references that must have been obvious to His hearers. The basic point is that would seem to follow from his commentary (though Edersheim doesn’t make the point himself) is that this ritual would have been yet another indication that Jesus was instituting a new priesthood to replace the old priesthood of the Old Temple, and consecrating His apostles as the new priests of the new covenant, to offer the Eucharist.

In the Old Covenant, at the time of Christ, there were a great many priests who were called upon to take their turn to offer the sacrifices at the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem. At one stage of this process of being chosen they would have waited during the night, asleep, but needing to be ready when they received their nighttime summons. The rabbis thus used words very similar to those of our Lord when He said, “Blessed are those servants whom the master will find on the alert when he comes; ... Whether he comes in the second watch, or even in the third”(Lk 12:37-38).
The priests would already be fully bathed before they lay waiting, bathed in special large bath-rooms for the priests of the Temple, as had previously been constructed by King Solomon for the first temple (2 Chron 4:6). As a consequence, if they were called they did not then need to wash their whole bodies but only their hands and their feet. Alfred Edersheim thus says, “It was, no doubt, to this that our Lord referred in His reply to Peter”: “No one who has taken a bath needs washing, he is clean all over”(Jn 13:10) (Alfred Edersheim, The Temple: Its ministry and services as they were at the time of Jesus Christ, Updated edition (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Pub 1994), p.113, or viewable online at p.78 PDF version http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edersheim/temple.html)
There are also other texts that link the washing of the feet as a distinctive act that the priests and levities had to perform before the offering of sacrifice (c.f. Ex 30:19; 30:21; 40:31)

What this means is that we have another detail pointing to how Christ was establishing a new covenant, with a new sacrifice, and new priesthood, establishing it in Himself, with his Apostles and their successors to act as His ministers of the New Covenant.
The Old Covenant of bull’s blood and goats blood, as the letter to the Hebrews put it, was “useless to take away sin” (Heb 10:4). The New Covenant offers something better by means of a new sacrifice, and the consummation of that sacrifice comes with the consuming of it. It was offered once of Calvary, that sacrifice is re-presented again on the altar, and we ratify our incorporation into it every time we receive the Eucharist.

That sacrifice, being more than that of bulls or goats but the very “Lamb of God”, Christ Jesus, was something else too: it was an act of service from the Lord to us. For “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”(Mt 20:28). This service was also reflected in the act of foot-washing, to be inherently connected with His new priesthood. The Old Covenant priests washed both hands and feet, but Jesus specifically chose to focus on the feet –making the act of service more clear.

So, in summary, what do we recall tonight in the washing of feet?
The rubrics of the liturgy of this night tells us that it focuses on three things: the gift of the Eucharist, the gift of the priesthood to the Church, and the symbolism of the washing of the feet.
If Edersheim’s interpretation of the allusions to the Old Temple priesthood and footwashing is correct, then it would seem to follow that all of these 3 did not merely happen at the same event but happened together because the Lord had a meaning connecting them all:
He used a ritual of the old priesthood to make a connection to the new priesthood He was establishing. He did this while establishing the Eucharist that was to be the commemoration and sharing in the sacrifice that takes our sins away. And He did this in an act of service because He came to serve.

Palm Sunday, Year B, Shaftesbury 2012

Mk 14:1-15:47; Isa 50:4-7
We just heard in that account about how there was darkness “over the whole land” (Mk 15:33). I wish today to say a few words about the experience of darkness, reflecting particularly on the words we just heard uttered by our Lord, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And to say this with the aid of some reflections from Pope Benedict.

All of us, of course, know moments when we experience a sense of ‘darkness’ in our lives. It is, I think, a peculiar characteristic of such times that we can almost simultaneously feel abandoned by God and alone, and yet close to Him as we experience our distance from everything and everyone else.

Pope Benedict, in a recent General Audience (8 Feb 2012), noted similarly that there is an ambivalent experience of darkness in the Old Testament Scriptures. For example, God came to Moses in a “thick darkness”(Ex 20:21 c.f.19:9) and yet in was precisely “out of the midst of the darkness” (Deut 5:23; c.f. 4:11) that the voice of God spoke to Moses.

The darkness we just heard of in the Gospel was a much greater darkness, a darkness that came “over the whole land” (Mk 15:33), a darkness whereby the cosmos itself seemed to reflect the horror of mankind’s rejection of its God.
It was in that moment of darkness that Mark specifies that Jesus cried out. Unusually, the Evangelists are not content to give us a Greek translation of what Jesus said (Greek being the language it seems the Evangelists wrote the Gospels in), rather, they give us words in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic that give us the very sound uttered by God from the Cross: “Eloi, EIoi, lama sabachthani?”(Mk 15:34). “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Gospel writers took this care to transmit these exact words to us because they thought they were important, because they recognised a meaning in them that was important for understanding the whole event. What was that meaning?
Pope Benedict articulates the classical interpretation of this text in noting, as the liturgy itself does in using Psalm 21 as our responsorial psalm today, noting that the words uttered by Christ would have been familiar to His hearers, familiar as the first line of that psalm, familiar as a prayer that while it seems to start in situation of despair nonetheless confidently anticipates that God will rescue him. As Pope Benedict put it in his book, “The cry of extreme anguish is at the same time the certainty of an answer from God, the certainty of salvation — not only for Jesus Himself, but for ‘many” (Pope Benedict, Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. 2 (San Francisco: lgnatius Press, 2011), pp.213-4).
What then is the meaning of that cry from the Cross? That Christ knew God to be active n the midst of darkness, even in the midst of that darkest of all dark moments in human history.

It would seem, judging from the reaction of those who thought He was calling on Elijah, that at least some of those who heard Him failed to understand.
If WE would hear Him and understand, then we need to understand the truth that God is active in the darkness, as He was for Moses, and as the Son of God knew Him to be even in His crucifixion.

For Christ, His certainty was rooted in His relationship with the Father, in His knowledge of His divinity.
For us, our certainty that God is with us in OUR darkness must be rooted in seeing that God has suffered for us, with us, such that darkness is not the last word. Our moments of darkness remain places of silence, not places of ease. Yet, if they are places where we are silent WITH HIM then they can be a place of trust, and we can make the prayer of the prophet Isaiah that we heard in our first reading our prayer too: “I know I shall not be shamed”(lsa 50:7).

5th Sunday of Lent, Year B, On Confession, Shaftesbury

Ps 50:3-15; Jer 31:31-34; Jn 12:2-30
We are now approaching one of the pivotal points in our Lenten journey, in our preparation for Easter, namely, our penitential service this Thursday evening, when there will be 5 priests here to hear your confessions. Of course, there is an opportunity to go to confession every Saturday morning, at the times indicated in the newsletter both here and elsewhere, including Saturday evening, or by appointment calling me for another neighbouring priest, and it is important that we go to confession not just at Lent and Advent but regularly through the year –monthly confession being the standard advice.

There is, however, a particular relevance to confession in the season of Lent. In Lent we are seeking by our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we are seeking to purify our hearts, to purify them of sin. We heard that beautifully expressed in the classic penitential psalm that we heard as our responsorial psalm, “A pure heart create from me, O God"(Ps 50:12).
If we would have a heart that is pure and clean, a heart that is made new, then it's important that we PRAY to God for such a thing, as we prayed for it the reciting of that psalm.

In addition, we also need to ACT in such a way that we "create" a pure heart with us. To have a pure heart means that we need to change from having the heart that we have at present, it means that we need to both recognise and repent of the various evil deeds that we do. Now I know that, for many people, it can be difficult to recognise the evil that we do. We might recognise that we are not perfect, realise that there is something we need to change, but still fail to be able to identify and articulate what that means in specific practice, what that means in specific things we have done, and specific things we have failed to do. Things like the written examination of conscience in this Sunday's newsletter can be a helpful external reminder to help us look into a mirror for our soul. But we also need to join this with prayer, with turning to the Lord and asking that He send His Holy Spirit to enlighten us, to use the words of Scripture, to "convict us" of our sin (Jn 16:8).

In our first reading, we heard of the promise made through the prophet Jeremiah of the coming of a "new covenant"(Jer 31:31). We, as Christians, as those who live as followers of the promised Messiah, we have the privilege of living in this "new covenant". This privilege gives us the grace that comes through Jesus's death and resurrection, the transforming grace can create a new heart, a pure heart.
But we first need to do the other thing that the new covenant offers, namely, seek forgiveness for our “iniquities”(Jer 31:34), our sins.
And that offer of forgiveness, as we know, is offered to us in the sacrament of forgiveness, in confession. In that sacrament in which we confess our sins to the priest who stands in the person of Christ, who stands so closely identified with Christ that in the words of absolution he does not say "Christ gives you", but rather "I absolve you", acting in persona Christi capitis (Catechism 1548).

But in order to receive that absolution, to receive that grace of a pure, clean and new heart, we first need to want to change. And that means that on so many levels we need to turn from the person we are now, and the life we live now to something else. As we heard Jesus say in today’s gospel, the grain of wheat must die in order to yield a harvest; we must hate our life in this world if we would have the new life eternal; because sentence has been passed on this world, this sinful world, and the prince of this world has been overthrown.
As long as we refuse to overthrow our present Iife, as long as we refuse to change, as long as we fail to see what in our life NEEDS changing, then this "new covenant" cannot take root within us.
But if we pray for the grace to change, if we pray for the grace to see what we need to change, and if we bring that to the Lord for healing and forgiveness in this great sacrament of confession, then reconciliation, a pure heart, can be ours.
“A pure heart create for me, O God”

4th Sunday of Lent, Year B, Mothering Sunday, Shaftesbury

Jn 3:14-21; 2 Chron 36:14-16.19-23
We’re now over 3 weeks into Lent, over half-way, and its possible at this stage to have lost sight of what we’re doing in Lent. Maybe you’re staying faithful to your Lenten resolutions, but struggling in them rather than remembering what they’re aiming at. Maybe you’ve been faithful to what you’ve given up, but just feeling a little miserable about it. And, no doubt, more than a couple of us have broken our resolutions, and are not really sure whether its worth returning to them.

Regardless, today’s reading give us a helpful chance to re-focus on the END that Lent is aiming at. We have set before us the ultimate ‘lifting up’ that Lent aims at, and we have this set before us in slightly different ways in each of our 3 readings. In the Gospel we have the Lord refer, by means of reference to prophetic symbols in the Old Testament, to His coming crucifixion. He looked ahead to His being ‘lifted up’ upon the Cross and compared it to how Moses ‘lifted up’ the miraculous bronze image of the serpent on a pole. All who turned and looked at that image were saved, saved of the poisonous bites they had received. And the Lord Jesus makes the comparison that all those who turn and look on Him, Him ‘lifted up’ upon the Cross, turn to Him with the eyes of faith, “everyone who believes [in Him] may have eternal life in Him”. This being lifted up is what Lent looks towards on Easter Sunday.

There is another thing going on here, however, another thing that we need to remember if we are to understand what Lent is all about. We need to recall why we need ‘lifting up’ at all: Because of our sins. Because our sins mean that we have cast ourselves from God. And in this we join the universal state of all mankind since the dawn of time, the sinful state of all humanity except Our Lord Himself and His Blessed Mother.
There can be a real fear within us, a fear of admitting that we have sinned, that we have cast ourselves from God. Jesus referred to this in the Gospel text we heard when He referred to men preferring “darkness to light... for fear [our] actions should be exposed”.
This very point, this fear of admitting our sins, can be because we have forgotten one of the key things that Lent aims at, namely, being PURIFIED of our sins, being enabled by God’s grace to be changed.

Our first reading from Chronicles gives us a reminder of hope in this regard. It started, somewhat sombrely, with the account of how the Jewish people had turned form the Lord, had “added infidelity to infidelity, copying all the shameful practices of the nations... until at last the WRATH of the Lord rose so high against His people”. And they were punished by being cast into exile.
The point, however, is that that was not the end, rather, it was new beginning. It was a time of purification for them, so that when they were restored to the Promised Land they returned as a purified and better people.
Such PURIFICATION is what Lent seeks. Our prayer, fasting and almsgiving, our ‘giving things up for Lent’, all aim at a purification of our hearts such that the new life of Easter may come forth.
In the midst of the desert it is possible to forget that.
I the midst of the time of exile it is possible to forget the purification it can achieve within us.
In the midst of Lent and being mindful of our struggle with what we have given up we can forget that goal.

So, let me conclude by returning to that image of being ‘lifted up’ in a new angle:
Each and every thing we are doing for Lent needs to be ‘lifted up’ in prayer to God as we do it, ‘lifted up’ to Him as an spiritual sacrifice, lifted up in union with Him who was lifted up upon the Cross,
And if we do that, the ‘new life’ He brings will take root in our hearts.

I’d like to offer a final little thought about mothers.
We keep today, in England, Mothering Sunday. And I know many of you are specially here to be with mothers. And others of you will be thinking today of your mothers, living and departed, even if you can’t be with them.
And let me briefly apply that same imagery mentioned to our mothers:
God purifies and disciplines us to make us better, and mothers, as we know, do the same.
When you are child a mother’s discipline seems tough, and we often don’t see its purpose. But its actually one of the many signs of love shown to us. So as we think of God’s love for us manifested in our Lenten discipline let us also give thanks to God for the discipline our mothers gave us, and thank Him and them, for the many other things they have given us too.

Letter concerning Same-Sex 'Marriage' Proposal

This Sunday we had a letter read from Archbishop Nichols and Archbishop Smith on marriage, calling on us to oppose government proposals to introduce same-sex 'marriage'.

The text of that letter can be read at: http://www.catholic-ew.org.uk/Home/News-Releases/Archbishops-Letter-on-Marriage

The text of a similar article by Cardinal O'Brien, Britain's senior Catholic prelate, can be read at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9121424/We-cannot-afford-to-indulge-this-madness.html

The Bishops' Conference of England and Wales have called on us to sign the online petition at: www.C4M.org.uk

2nd Sunday of Lent, Year B, Shaftesbury

Gen 22:1-18; Rom 8:31-34; Mk 9:2-10
Who here would be willing to sacrifice their son? No one.
But, if we are to understand Abraham, and the significance of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac, we’d do well to ask ourselves WHY we wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice our sons.
After all, for much of human history pagan religions had human sacrifice, and it seemed ‘normal’ to them. Why does it not seem normal to us?
You might first say that such a thing is repugnant to ‘reason’, and it is.
But I would like to point out that it is a ‘reason enlightened by Faith’ –it is our Judeo-Christian Faith that has taught us that human and child sacrifice is an abomination.

Let us cast our minds back to Abraham, in particular, to Abraham before this incident. We need to do this if we are to understand how this event was both a test of Abraham, and, a revelation of what God is like.
Abraham did not yet truly know the Lord our God because God was only beginning to make Himself known to him. In particular, Abraham did not know that the God who had called him was a God unlike other gods. He did not know that He was a God who found human sacrifice an abomination. So, when the Lord God asked him to sacrifice his son, it was a tough thing, but a thing that would have made a sort of sense to him. This means that it was true test.
But, like so many things in the Scriptures, it was an event with a deeper purpose, in this case that deeper purpose was the purpose of revealing that the Lord God is a different God, a god who does NOT require human sacrifice. Thus, as the rest of the Old Testament shows us, one of the things that separated the Jewish religion from its Canaanite neighbours was precisely the fact that it did NOT have human sacrifice.

So, this was a test for Abraham. But it was also, and more so, a revelation of the fact that the one true God does not accept human sacrifice.
In as much as it was a test of Abraham, it was a test on many levels. (1) It was a test of his obedience to God. (2) It was a test of his faith and trust –God had already promised him many descendents (Gen 12:2; 13:16), and how could that happen if his one and only son was dead? (3) It was a test also of his generosity, being willing to give back to God what God had given him. Abraham passed the test.

(pause) Let us shift the focus here, and turn to our second reading where this whole thing is turned on its head. Here we are reminded of how “God did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up to benefit us all” (Rom 8:32). Far from God wanting us to sacrifice our sons to Him, He sacrifices Himself to us –the Father and Son in their jointly-willed (for God has only one Will) plan for our salvation. Here we see God’s great generosity to ourselves, His great plan to show us the depth of His love.

(pause again) Generosity in sacrifice is something we need to strive for in Lent. A week and half into Lent and we might already be struggling in our Lenten resolutions, in our faithful to what we have “given up”, in our planned generosity to the poor, in our generosity in prayer in this holy season.
Abraham was tested and shown to be willing to be generous in sacrifice. As a result he was showered with blessings. The blessings of descendents, of land, of “all the nations of the earth blessing themselves by” his descendents.
If we are generous in our Lenten offerings then we too will be showered with blessings.

Finally, we are offered that other reminder of the importance of persevering in the gospel text we heard of the Transfiguration: The vision of future glory given to Peter, James and John to sustain them through the trials that lay ahead when Christ would be crucified.
If we persevere then that same glory will be ours, the glory of sharing in Christ’s Transfiguration, the glory of sharing in His Resurrection.
Which means that, for now, it is worth our staying the steady course through the Lenten desert with our Lord, through the Cross, to Easter glory.