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When I first came across the Charismatic Renewal back in the early 70's, in spite of the funny way they prayed, what delighted me was their accent on the Holy Spirit. It seemed to me that ordinary Catholic life is simply awash with the Holy Spirit, but its extent was unrecognised. Not only does the Holy Spirit make us Christians at baptism, change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, forgive sins through absolution and lead us to live a sacramental life, he turns the Bible into the Word of God. Whenever the Holy Spirit acts through the reading of Scripture and the celebration of sacraments, the celebrants, the proclaimers, the readers and the praying and singing community become instruments through whom Christ works, and he also fills Christians with his Spirit so that they can understand and be sanctified.
As Sacrosanctum Concilium tells us, Christ really does speak when the Scripture is read in Church, and, to the extent that they are open to him, he gives the Spirit to the preacher and to those who are listening, giving them a real insight into the Word of God.
Hence I believe we can look at our celebration of the liturgy during any week and ask what Christ has been saying to us doing that week. Of course, this is a highly personal collection of thoughts, and that Christ will have used the same texts to say different things to different people. Nevertheless, I think you will agree that he has given us a renewed understanding of the Christian life.
A Christian lives in two "worlds" at once. He has been born into one and baptised into the other. We were not asked to be born, and all of us who are so privileged will one day inevitably die. We are made to love and be loved and to enjoy the happiness of being alive, but these gifts are imperfect and transitory. The truth is that this world can only find its true meaning in the other world and is destined to be transformed by it so that, in the end, there will only be one world.
On becoming human
If the synoptic gospels give accounts of the institution of the Eucharist, St John places the Washing of the feet in their place and gives us plenty of teaching to inform us on the significance of the Eucharist. Within this central act of Christian worship, Christ offers himself totally and without reserve to each and all of us, as he teaches in chapter 6. He dwells in each of us, and we dwell in him. We share his eternal life, the life of his Resurrection, and shall be raised up on the Last Day. This only happens because he gives himself so utterly and thoroughly.
“Do you understand what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. 14 If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. 15 For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. 16 Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant[c] is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. 17 If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
In our turn, we must wash one another's feet. We are his servants and messengers, and if he is able to serve humbly, being master and lord, we have no justification to withhold our humble service. In fact, he gives us a new commandment, to love one another as he has shown he loves us.
33 Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ 34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Christ's love for us has its roots in his love for the Father and the Father's love for him. If we are to love as he loved, our love too must be rooted in our love for him who dwells in us and his love for us. This two-way love is nothing less than a participation by creation in the love of the Blessed Trinity and a reflection of the love of Blessed Trinity in creation; and, in the vocabulary of St John, in so far as it is visible and recognisable in concrete deeds and lives, it gives glory to the Father, revealing that "God is love," and also gives glory to the Son. Thus, Christ says of his impending crucifixion:
If we love as Christ loves, and that is our vocation as servants and messengers, we glorify the Father in the Son by reflecting God's presence in the quality of our love. Without our Christian love, our teaching can be reduced to an abstract doctrine: our love, rooted in Christ who dwells in us, can make it for the world a living Presence. Hence, we too share in his glory. Jesus prays in John 17:
My teacher, Pere C. Spicq O.P. used to say that, in St John's Gospel, the Church is made visible by the quality of its love. Where there is Christian love, the world can glimpse at the Church as Christ's body: without love, the Church is seen as just one other worldly institution.
Let us now turn for a moment to St Paul. Jesus died for us and in the act of giving himself to us and, by the same act. he was offering himself in loving obedience to his Father. This act of self-giving was total and is thus a characteristic of his risen self: he is "slaughtered and yet standing." We are on his wavelength and capable to actively participate in his divine-human love to the extent that we share in his death to self and his living for others with a death and life rooted in his; and in this way, we share in his resurrection. In the Eucharist, we share in his life to the extent that we share in his death, which is why we cannot separate communion from sharing in his sacrifice.
He has given us the "ministry of reconciliation". We have become "the righteousness of God" and instruments of the Father who is reconciling the world to himself in Christ. The presence of Christ in us by the power of the Spirit that is renewed and strengthened in the Eucharist becomes visible in the quality of our love, living for Christ and for all humanity in Christ and thus, in St John's vocabulary, sharers in God's glory. As we share in his life in the Eucharist, "becoming what we eat," so we share in his glory by loving as he loves. We bear witness by our lives that "God is Love", and show that all this is not just words, but a concrete reality.
In doing this, we help to transform society in this world by inserting into it the life of the resurrection, the life of the world to come.
Thus Rome was partly transformed by the love of Christians for the poor - in the time before the Last Coming the transformation is always partial and transient and always needs being renewed - and the Egyptian Desert was transformed by the lives of the monks who lived there. The transformation continues: in my country, the churches are responsible for a large part of the caring for the poor etc. If this is rooted in their faith and in their life in Christ, this isn't just social work, but Christ showing his love through their activity. Places become transformed by the Christian lives of those who live there. The Celts talk of "thin" places where eternity can be sensed in the world of time. Monastery guest houses get fuller every year, and more and more people go on pilgrimage, because people experience peace, tranquility and a sense of the sacred, even many secular people. This transformation isn't the immediate purpose of the Christian life. which is to live in communion with Christ, but it is an important effect of the Christian life.
As we wrote above, we inhabit two world, one we were born into and the other we were baptised into. In the first, we had no choice in being born into it, nor can we choose not to die. Likewise, it is the product of the Big Bang and will, one day, come to an end. Although it is very beautiful and is loved by God whose creature it is, it receives its meaning from human kind whose horizons are limited by death and distorted by sin.
The horizon is very different in the world of Christ's resurrection. We enter it of our own free will. Even if we were baptised as babies, we are always free to opt out: even the gates of hell are locked from the inside. To the degree we share in Christ's death, to that degree we share in his resurrected life which is eternal and, moreover, a participation in his infinite divine life.
In the world we are born into, where my horizon ends in death, humiliation is nothing more than humiliation, suffering nothing more than suffering, pain nothing more than pain, and death is the end of it all. In the world we are baptised into, humiliation is glory, a share in Christ's humiliation, suffering a share in his suffering, pain in his pain, and death is the gateway to eternal life Hence Christ's words make sense:
Gospel Mt 5:38-42
This world, which is the reality brought about in Christ's own body by his resurrection and into which we are baptised, embraces heaven and earth by his Ascension and is called the "Kingdom of heaven" or the "Kingdom of God" in so far as it is open to God's action. "Kingdom" does not mean a territory, as in "United Kingdom" but rather where God is actually ruling, implying God's present activity. For St Matthew, it is where God's will is done on earth as it is done in Heaven. It is especially present on earth at the Eucharist in which the Church on earth joins the Church in heaven in its liturgy that is both heavenly and earthly, where angel choirs and human beings on earth sing, "Holy, holy, holy.." Living the Christian life is living the Mass. God is Love and the Cross glorifies God by manifesting his very nature as self-emptying love as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This love is manifested to us sinners as forgiveness. The will of God is done on earth as in heaven when we love as Christ has loved us, as God loves all of us, each of us, and his whole creation: hence the following passage:
This forms the perfect context for understanding the "Our Father". After addressing the Father and asking that his Name be hallowed, we ask that his kingdom come. Here, it is an equivalent of invoking the Holy Spirit, the hypostasis of God's self-emptying Love, an epiclesis, so that the Father's will is done on earth as in heaven. Then we pray, "Give us this day our epiousion bread," which we translate as "daily bread" because it is the easiest translation though not the most probable. The Douai Bible translated it literally as "supersubstantial bread"; but it could be translated "bread of the Coming" which, since the whole prayer is about the Kingdom, is highly probable. As it is a Jewish prayer, it most probably has all these meanings at once. Hence, "supersubstantial" and "bread of the Coming" mean the Eucharist. That the central petition should refer to the central sacrament of the Christian life is very likely. Thus there is a theme, the Coming of the Kingdom and the hyspostasis of love, the gift of the Eucharist which is vehicle of Christ's total gift of himself, our forgiving one another in love, and our deliverance from the evil one who is the very opposite of these things.
Finally, there is a warning. All that glitters is not gold, and not every good work manifests the Kingdom. We have noted that the kingdom is where God is active: where he is excluded by our egotism or lack of openness to God, where we are not mere instruments of God, allowing him to do as he pleases, where our works give glory to some cause or other, to our political party, to our country or to ourselves, and not to God, then these works are not works of the Kingdom and are being wasted, even if what we are doing is God's will, and the obstacle to God's activity is ourselves. Hence:
This seems to be directly contrary to Christ's command to let your light shine among men so that they will see your works and give glory to God. However, as kingdom people, we are mere instruments in God's hands; and, if he wants to use us as a torch, he will know when to switch us on and switch us off. We must concentrate on renewing our resolve to be his instruments.
Finally, we have come to the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
That great feast of the divine-human love of Christ for humankind and for the whole of creation tells us that the love which holds the universe in existence is not only a divine love that is beyond our understanding, but also a human love, because of the Incarnation.
The church fathers teach us that,at the profoundest level of human existence, in each human being, there is the place where God is loving us into existence and where Christ prays to the Father in the Holy Spirit. They call it the heart. They invite us to enter the heart and unite our prayer to that of the Spirit.
Christ is a human being and therefore has a heart in which God becomes man, and from where the Holy Spirit unites him to every human being in all times and places. This heart is the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Read more about the feast here.
An acquaintance of mine who is the brother of two Chilean boys with whom I was at school constructed a huge hand in the Atacama Desert. When I asked him why he did it, he said that it was an attempt of an artist to humanise the desert. The feast of the Sacred Heart reminds us that, with the Incarnation, God has humanised creation. At the heart of creation and in the heart of each one of us, in the divine Love by which all creation and each one of us are brought into being, the human heart of Jesus Christ is loving in harmony with God.
31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.
If we love as Christ loves, and that is our vocation as servants and messengers, we glorify the Father in the Son by reflecting God's presence in the quality of our love. Without our Christian love, our teaching can be reduced to an abstract doctrine: our love, rooted in Christ who dwells in us, can make it for the world a living Presence. Hence, we too share in his glory. Jesus prays in John 17:
20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
My teacher, Pere C. Spicq O.P. used to say that, in St John's Gospel, the Church is made visible by the quality of its love. Where there is Christian love, the world can glimpse at the Church as Christ's body: without love, the Church is seen as just one other worldly institution.
Let us now turn for a moment to St Paul. Jesus died for us and in the act of giving himself to us and, by the same act. he was offering himself in loving obedience to his Father. This act of self-giving was total and is thus a characteristic of his risen self: he is "slaughtered and yet standing." We are on his wavelength and capable to actively participate in his divine-human love to the extent that we share in his death to self and his living for others with a death and life rooted in his; and in this way, we share in his resurrection. In the Eucharist, we share in his life to the extent that we share in his death, which is why we cannot separate communion from sharing in his sacrifice.
(2 Cor. 5, 14-21)
The love of Christ impels us, once we have come to the conviction that one died for all; therefore, all have died. He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
Consequently, from now on we regard no one according to the flesh; even if we once knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.
And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
He has given us the "ministry of reconciliation". We have become "the righteousness of God" and instruments of the Father who is reconciling the world to himself in Christ. The presence of Christ in us by the power of the Spirit that is renewed and strengthened in the Eucharist becomes visible in the quality of our love, living for Christ and for all humanity in Christ and thus, in St John's vocabulary, sharers in God's glory. As we share in his life in the Eucharist, "becoming what we eat," so we share in his glory by loving as he loves. We bear witness by our lives that "God is Love", and show that all this is not just words, but a concrete reality.
In doing this, we help to transform society in this world by inserting into it the life of the resurrection, the life of the world to come.
Thus Rome was partly transformed by the love of Christians for the poor - in the time before the Last Coming the transformation is always partial and transient and always needs being renewed - and the Egyptian Desert was transformed by the lives of the monks who lived there. The transformation continues: in my country, the churches are responsible for a large part of the caring for the poor etc. If this is rooted in their faith and in their life in Christ, this isn't just social work, but Christ showing his love through their activity. Places become transformed by the Christian lives of those who live there. The Celts talk of "thin" places where eternity can be sensed in the world of time. Monastery guest houses get fuller every year, and more and more people go on pilgrimage, because people experience peace, tranquility and a sense of the sacred, even many secular people. This transformation isn't the immediate purpose of the Christian life. which is to live in communion with Christ, but it is an important effect of the Christian life.
As we wrote above, we inhabit two world, one we were born into and the other we were baptised into. In the first, we had no choice in being born into it, nor can we choose not to die. Likewise, it is the product of the Big Bang and will, one day, come to an end. Although it is very beautiful and is loved by God whose creature it is, it receives its meaning from human kind whose horizons are limited by death and distorted by sin.
The horizon is very different in the world of Christ's resurrection. We enter it of our own free will. Even if we were baptised as babies, we are always free to opt out: even the gates of hell are locked from the inside. To the degree we share in Christ's death, to that degree we share in his resurrected life which is eternal and, moreover, a participation in his infinite divine life.
In the world we are born into, where my horizon ends in death, humiliation is nothing more than humiliation, suffering nothing more than suffering, pain nothing more than pain, and death is the end of it all. In the world we are baptised into, humiliation is glory, a share in Christ's humiliation, suffering a share in his suffering, pain in his pain, and death is the gateway to eternal life Hence Christ's words make sense:
Gospel Mt 5:38-42
Jesus said to his disciples:"You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow."
This world, which is the reality brought about in Christ's own body by his resurrection and into which we are baptised, embraces heaven and earth by his Ascension and is called the "Kingdom of heaven" or the "Kingdom of God" in so far as it is open to God's action. "Kingdom" does not mean a territory, as in "United Kingdom" but rather where God is actually ruling, implying God's present activity. For St Matthew, it is where God's will is done on earth as it is done in Heaven. It is especially present on earth at the Eucharist in which the Church on earth joins the Church in heaven in its liturgy that is both heavenly and earthly, where angel choirs and human beings on earth sing, "Holy, holy, holy.." Living the Christian life is living the Mass. God is Love and the Cross glorifies God by manifesting his very nature as self-emptying love as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This love is manifested to us sinners as forgiveness. The will of God is done on earth as in heaven when we love as Christ has loved us, as God loves all of us, each of us, and his whole creation: hence the following passage:
Gospel Mt 5:43-48
Jesus said to his disciples:"You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect."
This forms the perfect context for understanding the "Our Father". After addressing the Father and asking that his Name be hallowed, we ask that his kingdom come. Here, it is an equivalent of invoking the Holy Spirit, the hypostasis of God's self-emptying Love, an epiclesis, so that the Father's will is done on earth as in heaven. Then we pray, "Give us this day our epiousion bread," which we translate as "daily bread" because it is the easiest translation though not the most probable. The Douai Bible translated it literally as "supersubstantial bread"; but it could be translated "bread of the Coming" which, since the whole prayer is about the Kingdom, is highly probable. As it is a Jewish prayer, it most probably has all these meanings at once. Hence, "supersubstantial" and "bread of the Coming" mean the Eucharist. That the central petition should refer to the central sacrament of the Christian life is very likely. Thus there is a theme, the Coming of the Kingdom and the hyspostasis of love, the gift of the Eucharist which is vehicle of Christ's total gift of himself, our forgiving one another in love, and our deliverance from the evil one who is the very opposite of these things.
Finally, there is a warning. All that glitters is not gold, and not every good work manifests the Kingdom. We have noted that the kingdom is where God is active: where he is excluded by our egotism or lack of openness to God, where we are not mere instruments of God, allowing him to do as he pleases, where our works give glory to some cause or other, to our political party, to our country or to ourselves, and not to God, then these works are not works of the Kingdom and are being wasted, even if what we are doing is God's will, and the obstacle to God's activity is ourselves. Hence:
Gospel Mt 6:1-6, 16-18
Jesus said to his disciples:"Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father.When you give alms, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streetsto win the praise of others. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms,do not let your left hand know what your right is doing, so that your almsgiving may be secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
"When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street cornersso that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
"When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to others to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.
This seems to be directly contrary to Christ's command to let your light shine among men so that they will see your works and give glory to God. However, as kingdom people, we are mere instruments in God's hands; and, if he wants to use us as a torch, he will know when to switch us on and switch us off. We must concentrate on renewing our resolve to be his instruments.
Finally, we have come to the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The church fathers teach us that,at the profoundest level of human existence, in each human being, there is the place where God is loving us into existence and where Christ prays to the Father in the Holy Spirit. They call it the heart. They invite us to enter the heart and unite our prayer to that of the Spirit.
Christ is a human being and therefore has a heart in which God becomes man, and from where the Holy Spirit unites him to every human being in all times and places. This heart is the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Read more about the feast here.
An acquaintance of mine who is the brother of two Chilean boys with whom I was at school constructed a huge hand in the Atacama Desert. When I asked him why he did it, he said that it was an attempt of an artist to humanise the desert. The feast of the Sacred Heart reminds us that, with the Incarnation, God has humanised creation. At the heart of creation and in the heart of each one of us, in the divine Love by which all creation and each one of us are brought into being, the human heart of Jesus Christ is loving in harmony with God.
God is Love, and any time that our love is more than a chemical change in the brain shows us to be made in the image of God. God is Love, and we cannot know him without loving him, and, as the Byzantine Rite reminds us, we cannot recite the Creed together with one heart and mind for long without loving one another. The history of schism and heresy is, more basically a history of failure to love. Greeks and Latins failed to love a long time before the schism, and both sides failed in charity at the Reformation. We are able to love God and our neighbour because God first loved us and revealed his love to us on the Cross.
Reading 2 1 Jn 4:7-16Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another.No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us, that he has given us of his Spirit. Moreover, we have seen and testify that the Father sent his Son as saviour of the world.Whoever acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him and he in God. We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.
God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.We live in two worlds, one we were born into, the other we entered through baptism: one is destined to end, the other enjoys eternal life and is destined to transform the other into itself, and we Christians have the job meantime in transforming it by our lives, little by little. However, we will have no effect if our morality is no different from those among whom we live. Our morality cannot be that of the scribes, the pharisees and the pagans.
Gospel Mt 11:25-30
At that time Jesus exclaimed:"I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.
All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.
"Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."
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