12th Sunday in ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Zech 12:10-11.13:12; Ps 62; Lk 9:18-24
We all, I am sure, have different texts in the Scriptures that strike us every time we hear them. The first reading we heard today has one such verse for me:
"They shall look upon the one whom they have pierced"(Zechariah 10:10)
This is a text, as we heard, from the Old Testament. And it has, for the Christian, an obvious sense of being a prophecy of Christ.
Who is the one who was pierced? Christ, on the cross, with a lance that pierced His side.
And who were the ones who pierced Him? Literally, it was the Roman centurion. But mystically, it was each one of us -we pierced Him with our sins.
And every time I come to pray, every time I gaze upon a crucifix, I "look upon the One whom I have pierced". And when I hear those words it always makes me still inside.

The text is from the prophet Zechariah, and it is an obscure text in terms of what it must have meant in its original context. It refers to a prophet who is an shepherd of a flock doomed to slaughter (Zech 11:4), an unhappy shepherd who is betrayed for thirty pieces silver (11:12-13), who is maltreated and left with marks on his body, "These wounds I received in the house of my friends" (13:6) -another prophecy.

But, even more obscurely, the text goes on with a happy prophecy, that a “fountain” will open that will wash away the sins of the people(13:1). When we apply this, as the Gospel does (Jn 19:37), as a prophecy of Christ, the fountain that gushes forth is from the wound in the side of Christ. And it is a glad thing. It is from that fountain of love that gushes forth our salvation.

Our psalm today (Ps 62) adds another hermeneutical twist to interpret this. It speaks of our thirst for God, and of that thirst being satisfied.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that we are, in June, in the month of the Sacred Heart, and devotion to the Sacred Heart has often focused on the fountain that gushes forth from His wounded Heart. The prophecy of Isaiah is often quoted in this regard, "With Joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation" (Isaiah 12:3), and in fact the 1956 encyclical of Pope Pius XII on the Sacred Heart started with these very words, and proceeded to marvel at all the graces that have poured forth from people’s devotion to that Heart.
Then our Gospel text recalls the prophecy of the Lord Jesus that He would suffer and die and that anyone who would be His disciple must also, daily, take up His cross.

Let me simply draw these three strands together in thinking of His Heart:
Centuries of devotion to the Sacred Heart have indeed, as Pius XII noted, drawn forth countless graces for the Faithful. But these graces, from the wellspring of salvation, only pour into us, into in our hearts when we responds to His.
I do, indeed, as a physical fact, often “gaze upon the one whom I have pierced”.
But I do not always do so spiritually, I do not always look upon Him in a way that loves in return for love. The sight of the One whom I have pierced can leave me unmoved.
Or, as I do in my better moments, I can see the one I have pierced and realise WHO has pierced Him, that I have priced Him. I might then, "Mourn for Him, as for an only Son"(Zechariah 12:10), and "weep bitterly" (Ibid).
There are different sorts of weeping, and the weeping that responds to His wounds is a weeping of both sorrow and joy. Sorrow for my sins that have done this to Him. But joy in realising the love He has had, and still has, for me.
And, finally, that should move me to action, move me, in particular, to take my MY cross in a renewed way. To carry it with Him who carries it with me, who, in fact, first and foremost carries it for me. And to offer it to Him in reparation for my sins.

"These wounds I received in the house of my friends" (13:6)
"They shall look upon the one whom they have pierced"(Zechariah 10:10)
They shall "Mourn for Him, as for an only Son"(Zechariah 12:10), and "weep bitterly" (Ibid).
But, that Heart was pierced for me, it flows for me,
and, "With Joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation" (Isaiah 12:3)

11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 7:36-8:3
We just heard one of the most memorable accounts in the Gospels, one that has inspired many works of art.
The woman in the text is not named here, she is simply described as "a woman with a bad reputation in the town". Tradition identifies her as Mary Magdalene, a woman of loose living, who ‘knew’ many men, who had "loved much" to use what was quite possibly a deliberate play on words by our Lord.
But by the time we see her here in this Gospel text she has changed. She still has a "bad reputation", for such things change slowly. But her behaviour towards our Lord is not that of a loose woman, but of a woman who has come to love a man in a very different sense. And, this man is of course not just a man, He is the Lord God. She covered His feet with kisses and tears, wiped them with her hair, and anointed them with ointment.

This behaviour by the woman was seen as odd by the people present.
The Lord responded to their comments by pointing out not so much her behaviour as what motivated it, namely, her love. More specifically, He indicated what had led her to love Him: the fact that He had forgiven her sins, "her many sins".
She loved much because she delighted in the fact that she had been forgiven much. To know that you are forgiven is a very special way of knowing that you are loved, and such a knowledge of being loved is a POWERFUL motive for us to love in return. To love with such passion and exuberance that we don't care if we make fools of ourselves in front of others -as this woman might have been said to have done.

What of ourselves? If no one here is loving in the manner that the woman loved, what does that say of us?
It might say that we are just English, and that we keep our emotions tightly bottled up --heaven forbid that we should commit a social faux pas like that of this wild woman!
It might, however, say something more problematic. Maybe we have let our love for the good Lord grow cold. Maybe we have forgotten what He has forgiven in us. Maybe we have come to take Him for granted, and thus no longer love Him the way we once did.
Perhaps the most worrying possibility, however, is that our emotions are unmoved because we are like the man we just heard Jesus condemn, the Pharisee Simon: we love little because we have little realisation that we have been forgiven ourselves. Maybe it is not so much that our love has grown cold as that it never really reached much of a fervour to begin with.

Either way, this woman before us in this text should motivate us to want to fire up that love within ourselves. How do we do this? By looking at two things: (1) The Lord, and (2) Ourselves. We need to look at the Lord anew as the loving Lord who welcomes the sinner, who wants to welcome me, who wants to welcome you. And we need to look at ourselves anew too, to see our sins with an honesty that we haven't seen them with before. And to do that we need to be convinced that the good God loves us. It is only when know that God loves the sinner that we can have the strength to admit our sins. It is only when we know that He is strong that we can be comfortable admitting that we are week.

What this woman shows us, what the Lord's behaviour to her shows us, is one of many examples in the Gospels that demonstrate His love for the sinner, His love for all who turn to Him in humility.

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C, Shaftesbury

Lk 7:11-17; 1 Kgs 17:17-24
I want to say a few words today about what God looks like, about His Sacred Heart.
We, as Christians, claim to know what God is like, claim to know Him and not just have an opinion about Him. This, of course, is not considered to be an acceptable position in our post-modern culture. In post-modern thinking there is no single ‘truth’, only many different opinions that grasps partial truths, and many different opinions about what god is like. Such a view, however, is not compatible with acknowledging Who Christ claimed to be. He claimed to be God, and He demonstrated the reasonableness of His claim by the profundity of His teaching, the goodness of His life, and His miracles –chief among them being His rising from the dead.
The point I wish to make that follows about this is simple: We know what God ‘looks’ like because we see it in Christ, see it in His Sacred Heart. And the Church kept the Feast of the Sacred Heart this Friday, and the month of June that we’re now in is always the month of the Sacred Heart.

Jesus shows us what God ‘looks’ like. Let us look very simply at today’s Gospel text. How did Jesus act? How, to be more precise, how did He show Himself to FEEL in His passions?
He saw a widow, mourning “the only son of his mother”(Lk 7:12). And, “He felt sorry for her”(Lk 7:13).
Note, He didn’t feel annoyance at yet another problem brought before Him, He didn’t say, “all these people are going to worry me to death”.
Rather, “He felt sorry for her”. This shows us His heart, the heart of God. And so we truly know God.

The doctrine concerning the Sacred Heart is very profound. In concerns the Incarnation, the union of the human and the Divine in the one person of Christ.
In what sense can we say God has a “heart”?
Physically, God had no heart –He is pure spirit in His divinity. So, in the Old Testament the Scriptures can only refer to His ‘emotions’ in a metaphorical sense, symbolically. Literally speaking, He “felt” nothing for us because feelings and passions are part of what constitute our BODILY nature –and He had no body. And it might well have been wondered, in the Old Testament, what God’s passion would ‘look’ like if He had any.
All that changed in the Incarnation. When the Son, the second person of the Trinity, took a human nature He took with it a human heart, with the ability to experience and manifest human feelings and passions.

The point, however, is this: the feelings and passions in Jesus are those of God Himself, not feelings and passions belonging to someone other than God. Jesus is ONE person with TWO natures –one divine person, Jesus, with both a divine nature and a human nature. And the passions IN that human nature belong to that ONE divine person; show us what the divinity is like. We can note this: the one person of Christ could thus do things only God can do. His miracle of raising the dead that we heard today was thus worked differently from the raising worked through Elijah. Elijah had to pray to God, three times. Jesus, in contrast, just commanded, “get up”, and His divine power, His OWN divine power, worked the rising.

The ONE divine power was at operation in Him, in Jesus. There are not three rival powers in the Trinity but “one and the same operation”(Catechism n.258). And, when this operation is at work, as it is continually at work, it “makes known both what is proper to the divine persons and their one divine nature”(Catechism n.259) . So, when Jesus ACTS He makes the divinity known to us. And when Jesus FEELS He makes the divinity known to us. Because, as a result of the Incarnation, there is now a divine heart, showing forth the divinity in human form.

So, what does God ‘look’ like? He has shown us in the Heart of Jesus. As the vision to St Mary Margaret put it some centuries ago, inspiring so many of the statues of the Sacred Heart like that in our own Church here: God ‘looks’ like love, “behold this heart which has so loved men”.

Consecration of the Parish to Our Lady, on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, Shaftesbury

Today, I'm going to consecrate the parish to the Blessed Virgin Mary. I'm doing this now for a number of reasons: first, because it’s May, which is her month; second, because it’s something I should have already done during my 6 years here (even though I'm sure other parish priests have done this before me, it should be done and re-done, renewed); but, third, most directly, I'm doing this in union with Pope Francis who many of you will have read recently consecrated his papacy and re-consecrated the Church to Our Lady in the month of May -on the recent feast of Our Lady of Fatima.
I’m sure we all recall the image of him, the very first day of his papacy, directly going to the Church of St Mary Major to lay flowers at her shrine.

But what is a Marian consecration? How does it benefit us? and, how might it relate to today's feast of the Trinity?

A consecration is when something is dedicated to something. In a Marian consecration we dedicate ourselves to her. We offer her our lives, and all that is part of them: our hopes and fears, joys and sufferings, our good deeds, the crosses we carry –everything, we consecrate it all to her. The practice of doing this, of giving ourselves to Our Lady, is both ancient and new.
It’s new because it regained a new impetus after the call for this in the apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima in 1917, and the fact that Pope Francis had his consecration made for him in Fatima on that feast day is a reminder of that. We might also think of the motto of Pope John Paul II, “Totus Tuus” (‘All Yours’) –which meant “All Mary’s”.
But it’s also ancient. The phrase of John Paul II was a quote from a Saint Louis Marie de Montfort who is particularly known for the articulation of the meaning of consecrations and Marian consecrations. And we’ll be using a text adapted from him in a few minutes in our consecration.

The consecration prayer of St Louis de Montfort refers us back to an original consecration, the consecration that was made of us in our baptism. In that consecration God consecrated us to Himself. In that consecration, by the action of the Holy Spirit, we were conformed to the image of the Son, and became adopted children of the Father. When we, ourselves, make a prayer of consecration what this does is re-new and deepen that original consecration, it expresses our choice and desire to live out that consecration.

But who is the one who can best help us be consecrated to God? Surely, the one who was herself most perfectly consecrated to God, namely, Our Lady. On today’s feast of the Trinity we might recall how she was chosen before all time to be the Immaculate Mother of the Divine Son; made so by the power of the Holy Spirit whose spouse she was; and we can recall how all this made her the most perfect daughter of the Eternal Father. She was chosen and consecrated in this role not just for her sake, or for God’s sake alone, but for OUR sake, that God might enter our world through her, that we might become united to Him through the union of the human and Divine that occurred within her consecrated womb.

She is the one who was given to us as OUR mother too, “behold your mother”, said Jesus as He hung on the Cross for us, and saw His loving mother there at His feet. And now, she is the loving and powerful mother who looks out for us from heaven. And when we give ourselves into her hands we give ourselves into the hands of one who loves us more than we love ourselves; one who, as the Mother of Divine Wisdom, knows best what to do with what we offer her –our deeds, our prayers, our merits; one who will most effectively direct all things to the One Triune God to whom she herself was so beautifully consecrated.
So, who helps us grow in our consecration to God, well, as Pope Francis put it this month when he was recently leading the Rosary, “Our Lady is the mother who helps Christians grow”

So, in a few moments, in the conclusion of the bidding prayers, I will pray as your parish priest, consecrating the parish to her, that she will be our mother and lead us to God. And at the conclusion of that prayer I’ll invite you to join in the consecration words: renewing your baptismal consecration, making it your own, all through the hands of the one who was consecrated to God for our sake.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Consecration of our Parish
of the Most Holy Name and St Edward, King and Martyr, Shaftesbury 25th-26th May 2013
To the Immaculate Heart of Mary
in union of Pope Francis (on 13th May 2013)

The first part of said by the parish priest, the second by the whole congregation
Priest, kneeling before the Lady Altar:
O Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Queen of Heaven and Earth,
and our tender Mother,
in accordance with your ardent wish made known at Fatima,
and in union with Pope Francis’s consecration to you
of himself, his papacy, and the Church,
I consecrate to your Immaculate Heart:
myself,
and this parish entrusted to my care,
I consecrate and commit to you all the members of this parish,
beginning with the weakest:
the unborn, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly.
I commit to you our families, our children, our young people,
the single and the widowed.
I pray especially for dysfunctional, hurt and broken families,
for those seeking meaning in life but failing to find it;
for the unemployed, the lonely and the desperate.
I pray for those who are away from the parish,
and are distant from the Church.
Holy Mother, by your powerful intercession,
obtain for us all the graces we need,
And call down the Holy Spirit, your spouse,
to heal and sustain us,
To lead and conform us to the image of Christ your Son.

Please join me in saying together:

We, the parishioners of St Edward’s,
renew and ratify today in your hands,
O Immaculate Mother,
the vows of our Baptism.
We renounce forever Satan,
all his works,
and all his empty promises.
We give ourselves entirely to Jesus Christ,
to be more faithful to Him
than we have ever been before.
In the presence of all the heavenly hosts
we choose you this day,
for our Mother.
We deliver and consecrate to you,
our bodies and souls,
our goods, both interior and exterior,
and even the value of all our good actions,
past, present and future;
that you will dispose of them as you know best,
for the greater glory of God,
in time and in eternity.
Amen.
Adapted from St. Louis De Montfort's Consecration

Old Sermon link this week

There is no sermon this week because we have a letter from Bishop Budd.

The link to a sermon I gave on Our Lady and the Holy Spirit in 2008 is here: http://fatherdylanjames.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/11th-may-2008-pentecost-holy-spirit-and.html

Old sermon link for this week

We have a mission appeal from a visiting priest so there is no sermon text this week.

But you could look at my sermon from three years ago for this feast: http://fatherdylanjames.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/40-years-old-death-as-friend-16th-may.html

4th Sunday of Easter, Year C, Good Shepherd Sunday, Shaftesbury

Jn 10:27-30
Those of us who live in the country, as we do here, sometimes get puzzled by the description we just heard from the Lord Jesus about how sheep know their shepherd’s voice and follow it (Jn 10:27). He made the statement even more explicitly a few verses earlier: “the sheep follow [their shepherd], for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers”(Jn 10:4-5).
Now, such words might fool those city boys in London, who get no closer to sheep than seeing fluffy white dots out a train window. But for you and I who daily walk through the fields here about, we are bound to stop and say, “I’ve seen a lot of sheep in my time. Sheep are stupid. I’ve NEVER seen them recognise a shepherd’s voice” etc.
However, we tend to think this because we actually don’t know sheep as well as we think we do. The way we herd and treat our ENGLISH sheep, in large flocks, rather anonymously, gives them neither motivation nor opportunity to manifest their intelligence. Whereas, in fact, scientific studies have shown that, and I here quote Wikipedia, “Sheep can recognize individual human … faces, and [even] differentiate [human] emotional states, [and] sheep may learn their names and many sheep are trained to be led by halter for showing and other purposes”
So, in ancient Palestine, where flocks were smaller, and shepherds had a more intimate relationship with them and slept out in the fields with them to ward off wolves and other predators, in that context what Our Lord was saying would have seemed obvious to those who heard him.

You didn’t think you’d learn all this about sheep when you came to Mass this morning, did you? But I know many modern English people get puzzled by this, so I think it’s worth commenting on. More directly, let me focus this with a question:
Is your relationship to Christ like an English sheep or like those Palestinian sheep that Jesus spoke about?
And the test is whether we recognise the Shepherd’s voice. It is only those who “listen to my voice” that can be said to “belong to” Him (Jn 10:27).

For you to recognise your Shepherd’s voice you have to be CLOSE to Him. You have to live intimately with Him.
You can choose to be part of a large anonymous flock. As such, your intelligence will never be manifested, you’ll never be trained.
or, you can seek to live close to our Lord, intimate with Him.

We hear the voice of what we are intimate with:
If I am intimate with shopping and buying "nice" things, I will hear the voice of greed.
If I am intimate with myself, then like the stupid English sheep, I will just hear my own sheepy voice -it is the voice of selfishness that I will hear.
Whereas,
If I am intimate with the needs of my family members, then it is their inner voice I will hear even before they speak it.
If I am intimate with the needs of others, in general, then the voice of generosity will be readily heard by me -generosity calling me to love more freely, more givingly, more cheerfully. To not love with a slow grudging heart.
And, integrating it all:
If I am intimate with The Lord in His teaching, and in prayer, especially prayer at the start and close of the day, then it is HIS voice I will be able to hear.
And with such intimacy we shall be like trained intelligent Palestinian sheep, hearing and recognising our Shepherd’s voice.