The Immaculate Conception of Our Lady

The Immaculate Conception of Our Lady helps us to understand our relationship as human beings to the God who created us and who has redeemed us in Christ.  Today, we celebrate that Mary’s sinlessness is not something she could secure by her own power; it is a gift of God, a work of grace which became effective at the very first moment of her conception.  We might almost say it was in the genes!

The event we celebrate today affirms that, by the grace of God, Mary was shielded from the original sin which is remitted in baptism; from that sin which all humankind inherits at the very moment we begin to live in the womb.  It means that Mary was not burdened with a defective human nature; she came into the world with a perfect human nature like that of the mythical Adam and Eve before they decided to use their God-given free will for their own selfish ends; before they ‘fell from grace’, as we say.  God gave Mary this gift not as a reward for anything she did, nor on account of any merit on her part.  She was graced in this way solely in view of the singular role she was to play in life, namely, to be the mother of

God’s own Son.  Whilst the Immaculate Conception tells us something about who Mary is, it tells us much more about who God is and his disposition towards his sinful people.  In Mary, God prepared a dwelling place on earth fit for his Son, as the Collect for today’s Mass says.

So belief in the Immaculate Conception is belief in a provident God who prepares the way for his saving plan to unfold.  God prepares his children for their assigned task in life, even before they are born.  God foresees and equips us with all the natural and supernatural qualities we need in order to play our part in his ongoing drama of human salvation.  He told the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations’ (Jer. 1:5).  God doesn’t simply throw us into the world to get by as best we can; he graces us with all that we need.  If we could really believe that, what a difference it would make to Christian witness and proclamation; no longer would we undervalue ourselves and think that we are of no real importance – we would be confident and bold, and we would give the praise to the God who gives us his grace.

As we rejoice with Mary, God’s most favoured one, the one who is ‘full of grace’, on her feast day, let us thank God for his love and mercy which embraces us from the first moment of our own conception.  He fills us with his grace when we are baptised; and then, when we turn away from him through sin, he forgives us through the sacrament of reconciliation whenever we turn to him in true repentance – he renews our baptismal innocence all over again.  Everything is gift; everything good in us is the work of God’s grace.  For we all, children of God, are also favoured ones and heirs to a share in God’s own life.

Commemoration of All Souls

There is an intrinsic link between All Souls Day, which we celebrate today, and All Saints Day, which we celebrated yesterday.  It would be completely wrong, even heretical, to imagine that the saints are the spiritual superheroes, whereas the faithful departed, for whom we pray today, are the ordinary mortals; and that each category, so to speak, has a different end.

When we pray for the faithful departed, we pray that, through the purifying action of divine grace, those for whom we pray will be made ready to meet God face to face in the beatific vision so that, at the final resurrection of believers, they may share the life of the saints.  Those we celebrate as saints on 1st November are those who have already been brought, by the same grace, to Christian fulfilment; today, we are praying for the same end for all the faithful who have passed from this life.

There is a very ancient tradition of Christians praying for the departed; and around the tenth century this was formalised in the establishment of a particular day in the calendar upon which prayer would be offered for all the faithful departed.  For the next few hundred years, this date varied from place to place, and at various times, but by the sixteenth century, it became settled on 2nd November.

We know that, whilst human nature is fundamentally good, created by God as it is, it is nevertheless marred by sin.  We know, too, that whilst we can repent of sin during our Christian pilgrimage through this life, our repentance can never be perfect.  This means that, when we die, there are always going to be residues of sin in us; we know that we are not perfect and therefore not ready to meet God face to face at the hour of our death.  So we continue to need the cleansing, purifying grace of God to purge away our sins so that we can be made ready to meet him in the eternal vision of the blessed.  We pray on All Souls Day that all the departed faithful are brought to the same end as that already enjoyed by those we venerate as saints.

The most perfect and powerful prayer of intercession we can offer is the holy Mass because here, the sacrifice of Jesus is made present through the action of the Holy Spirit and at the hands of the priest.  Jesus' sacrifice, his offering of himself for the sins of the world, is the only perfect act of intercession and offering to God the Father that has ever been made.  So when we offer Mass on All Souls Day for all the faithful departed, we are doing here on earth the very most we can do for them.  We ask God to cleanse them of all that keeps them from the full sharing in the divine life that he has in store for them; and we ask God to make them perfectly one with all the saints in the eternal vision of the blessed.

Religion, Secularism and Peace

The late and deservedly eminent Professor Lisa Jardine, who died last Sunday (25th October), is reported to have regarded religion as the 'root of all evil'.  It's fair to say that many people today agree with her.  We are familiar with news reports of the activities of organisations such as the so-called ISIS; and for years we have heard of atrocities committed in the name of religion in many parts of the world.  Some of the most intractable political conflicts have some intrinsic connection with religious convictions.  It has to be said that, whenever religion presents itself in a fundamentalist guise, it always seems to lead to entrenchment and suffering.  The simple reason for this is that fundamentalist religion, divorced from reason as it invariably is, can never conceive of even the merest possibility that it may be wrong or that its impulses might need to be tempered.  Jardine's view, in the light of this, appears to be gaining more and more support among observers in the secularised West.

Some of those who support this view say, additionally, that such intractable situations based upon the unreasonableness acknowledged above, are not caused by atheism and secularism.  They argue that people are never killed in the name of atheism.  Influential commentators such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens have made exactly this point.  Even when those who take issue with them by citing the twentieth-century examples of, say, Stalin, Mao, Kim-il-Sung and Pol Pot, the secularists respond by pointing out that the atrocities committed by these individuals were not committed in the name of atheism as such - in the sense of not having been committed in order to advance a secularist philosophy or worldview.

Whilst they may be right, though, it cannot be of no consequence at all that each of these mass-killers rejected religion altogether, believing (it would seem) that morality can be constructed by human-beings without a transcendent reference-point.  It's fair to say, I think, that all human attempts to ground and construct a morality without this reference point have failed.  The tyrants mentioned above, moreover, would seem to have more in common with their fundamentalist-religious counterparts than might at first seem to be the case - precisely in the sense that they cannot conceive of any possibility that they may be wrong and that their convictions may need to be tempered by reason.  Instead, any and all of their actions, however grotesque, are justified by appeal to their over-arching project, in precisely the same kind of way that ISIS, for example, justifies its treatment of 'infidels'.

The idea that, left to its own devices, and with religion ('the root of all evil') banished, humankind would naturally construct a peaceable paradise on earth, is quaint beyond belief.

Thoughts on the mystery of the Ascension of the Lord

Ascension of the Lord 2015

I don’t know about you, but when I read, or hear read, some of the more fantastic Bible stories, I find myself trying to rationalise them so as to make them more reasonable, or thinking of them as stories whose details are unimportant but whose message remains salutary.  The Ascension, which we celebrate today and which is recounted for us in the first reading, is one of them.  Years ago, I couldn’t help but think of the chapel of the Ascension at Walsingham, which tastelessly featured Jesus’ feet sticking out of the ceiling – how it was ever thought that such an image might nurture people’s faith I can’t imagine.

In the story, which St Luke relates to us in the Acts of the Apostles, we’re told that Jesus took his leave of the apostles, having instructed them to wait for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which we celebrate next Sunday.  The Spirit would empower them for the mission which they were to take over from him and which he had entrusted to them.  It’s so easy to get bogged down in the details of the ascension account itself, and find ourselves rather nonplussed by it.  And when we do this, we easily miss the message of the event and the feast.

The ascension is a major feast of the Church and has attracted the attention of many theologians and Christian thinkers down the centuries.  It’s an article of faith in the creeds and, of course, rooted in scripture.  In a famous homily written way back in the fifth century, St Leo the Great speaks about the period between the resurrection and the ascension as a time which points to the truths that were revealed by God in Christ. He says, for example, that it was during this period that the fear of death was taken away from Jesus’ followers, since they had seen him in his risen life.  It was during this period that Jesus established the apostles in their leadership roles and entrusted the keys of the kingdom to Peter.

Again, it was during this time that the risen Lord joined two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, rebuking them for their timidity and lack of faith and fearful hesitation, before disclosing to them the truth about himself.  St Leo says that ‘their enlightened hearts received the flame of faith; cool before’, he goes on, ‘they glowed when the Lord unfolded the scriptures to them’. And, ‘as they ate with him, their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread’.

So, God used these days between the resurrection and the ascension to teach the followers of Christ that the Lord Jesus, who was truly born, truly suffered and truly died, should be recognised as truly risen.  And this is why the Easter season is regarded with the significance and importance it is – it is truly the heart of the Christian Year.  We are given a concentrated period of 50 days to celebrate that Christ has triumphed over all that is at enmity with him – all sin, suffering and death; and in addition, every Sunday is to be understood as a celebration of the resurrection; this, in turn, is why Sunday has the importance it has, and why we need to recover this sense today.

St Leo reminds us that ‘all the disciples had been filled with fear by [Jesus’] death on the cross, and [that] their faith in the resurrection had been hesitant; but [that] now

they gained such strength from seeing the truth, that when the Lord Jesus went up to heaven, far from feeling sadness, they experienced a great joy’.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the disciples perceived what has been articulated by theologians ever since, namely, that at the ascension, human nature itself was exalted above the dignity of all the ranks of heaven, that it would truly be admitted to the Father’s eternity in all its fullness.

We can see, too, if we look, that what we celebrate today correlates with what we celebrate at the Annunciation and at Christmas – there, we celebrate the taking of human nature by God in the virgin mother’s womb; here, we celebrate the taking of our nature into the life of God.  Or, to put it another way: God shares our human life so that we might share his divine life – the marvellous exchange which lies at the heart of our faith.

However we choose to think of the ascension, what we can be certain about is that there is no unbridgeable gulf between God and human-beings; any perceived gap has been bridged, and definitively closed by Christ.  And, in turn, this means that there is no person who lies outside the scope of God’s saving grace.  It means that we cannot, as it were, ‘bring God into’ a discussion or a situation, precisely because he is already there. And it means that there is no necessary distinction between the sacred and the secular when we talk about the world.  There is only one world, and it is the world brought into being by God.  It means that human nature is inherently conducive to God and his grace.  Of course, there are many who reject this and who resist divine grace; but we might reasonably say that they are acting against their nature, which is why they can never find a lasting and genuine fulfilment and why they are likely to look for fulfilment in the wrong places.  Of course, we are all prone to this error whenever we act against our nature and forget the God who made us.

After the ascension, the apostles and Our Lady waited in prayer for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that they could live and witness in the power of the divine life that gift would bring to them.  They were able to go out and bring people everywhere to faith.  We have received the same gift and, when we celebrate Pentecost next Sunday, we have an opportunity to consider afresh the nature of this gift and the capacities it bestows upon us.  For, following the Lord’s ascension, his active work in the world and his message of redemption falls upon his followers in each place and time.  It is now our time, and we have been set where we are to be his witnesses.  We have been given all the resources we need to ‘proclaim the Good News to all creation’.

Some thoughts as the end of the liturgical year approaches.

The following is a sermon preached at Choral Evensong in Blackburn Cathedral on Sunday 17^th November 2013

At the beginning of the Confessions, written by St Augustine at the end of the fourth century, are some very famous words which became axiomatic for Christian people’s self- understanding in relation to the Creator: ‘Thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee’.  These words remind us that, as human beings, we are constituted in a certain way; we are reminded of our contingency, and that our true home is in God.  We have a built-in supernatural destiny which we cannot secure by our own unaided effort, but for which we have a natural affinity precisely because of the way we have been made.

Pope Francis said recently that, in western culture especially, human hearts have become anaesthetized – that they no longer search for God.  And it certainly seems to be a feature of modern secularised society that people live as if the present reality around us, and which we perceive through our senses, is all there is.  This means that this present reality takes on an exclusive significance – it is all that matters; the sum total, indeed, of all that is.

So powerful and all-pervasive is this tendency to effectively dethrone God in favour of human pre-eminence, that it would be naȉve in the extreme to imagine that Christian people, and indeed the institution of the Church itself, have been entirely insulated from it.  It is so easy to find that one has slipped into a kind of ‘practical atheism’, where we live most of the time as if we are self-sufficient and self-contained, as our culture would have us believe.  How different, really, are our lives, from the lives of those whose lives we share and interact with but who do not share our faith?  The danger then, of course, is that our faith easily becomes a kind of veneer over the top; an extrinsic, incremental add-on which is not actually essential to normal human functioning.  If this is so, then we have lost sight of something absolutely fundamental about ourselves as humans: namely, that we are oriented towards an eternal sharing in God’s own life.  To lose sight of this is bad enough, but then how do we possibly commend the faith to others when it is seen as not even ‘essential’ to ourselves?  Here, we set ourselves up, ironically and unwittingly, as agents of the secular default position which increasingly dominates us and actually polices the divine, so that faith claims are scrutinised and evaluated according to the extent to which they corroborate the preconceptions of society at any one time.

At this time of the year, when we reach the end of one liturgical year and prepare to begin another when we get to Advent, the scripture readings and the liturgical texts are timely.  They call us from indifference and complacency, from cultural compliance and worldliness, to a deep repentance and a renewed wakefulness.  They call us to recognise afresh that our fulfilment comes not ultimately ‘in the world’ but in union with God hereafter.  The collects – today’s for example - make reference to eschatological hope, to the appearance of Christ in glory, and our desire to be one with him.

This evening’s first reading (Daniel 6) is to do with the faithful Jew being ready to suffer martyrdom, if need be, rather than give up fidelity to God.  It is an example of what the scholars call ‘witness literature’, in which God comes to rescue his faithful servants, saving them from certain death, which is then inflicted instead upon those who would harm them.  The story ends with the pagan king acknowledging the power of Israel’s God.  Texts such as these provided solace and encouragement for those undergoing religious trials: God would protect them, even against apparently insuperable odds; for their part, they were to remain faithful; and, like the Christian martyrs of later generations, they would embrace the principle that God, rather than humans, must be obeyed, for ‘he delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth’.  There was a more fundamental reality yet, than what they were experiencing in their trials; and God would secure their future, even beyond the present order of things.

In the second reading (Matthew 13:1-9, 18—23), it’s easy to miss its eschatological point, as indeed does the interpretation of the parable of the Sower provided in St Matthew’s text and which is generally reckoned to have originated in the primitive church.  What is important to recognise is that the beginning of the parable describes a different point in time from its end.  Initially, it is a description of sowing seeds; but at the end it is already harvest-time.  On the one hand, we have the frustrations of the sower’s labours; but then, we have the dawn of the Kingdom of God compared to the harvest.  The tripling of the harvest’s yield (thirty-, sixty- and a hundred-fold) signifies the eschatological abundance of God, surpassing all human measure.  To us, much of the labour seems futile and fruitless, but Jesus is full of confidence; for God’s hour is coming, and will bring with it a harvest of reward beyond all our imagining.  God brings from unpromising beginnings the glorious end that he has promised.  We are called again to look beyond, to a future reality far exceeding anything that we can conceive of.

The culture we now inhabit is a culture in a state of crisis.  In spite of the years of economic downturn, we still live in a situation in which life in this world, for most people in the west, is relatively amenable and pleasant.  It’s natural for people to want to hold on to it and, indeed, to become inured, blinded, to the Christian imperative to bear witness to a different set of priorities and values.  It’s natural for people to concentrate their efforts upon making life better for themselves, in the temporal sense.  But it’s also characteristic of our culture that, for all our advancement and apparently-increasing sophistication and material well-being, people do not seem happier; there is always something missing – something which this world can never provide and which always keeps people restless.  The Israelite people of old were urged to grasp that only God could satisfy their deepest needs and that they may well have to be prepared to look beyond the present reality.  Jesus’ parables similarly are parables of the Kingdom, which although already present among us is not as yet fully realised.  Our liturgical texts and readings over the next weeks, along with St Augustine’s famous insight, call us to look beyond ourselves and help others to do likewise.  This is, fundamentally, the mission of the Church.

Wednesday of Holy Week

Today's Gospel reading opens with Judas planning his act of betrayal, seeking his payment from the chief priests; and it ends with a head-on confrontation between Jesus and his betrayer.

Thus the passage is a kind of antecedent to the drama which is about to be played out, in which Judas does the betraying and the events which unfold reach their culmination in a direct confrontation between good and evil.  Jesus, the Son of God, and the embodiment of the goodness of God, is judged, flogged, and crucified at the hands of the wicked.

The betrayal of Judas itself is an antecedent to the betrayal of all the other members of the band of Jesus' disciples.  Yes, they had travelled around with him, listened to his teaching and witnessed his healing encounters with all sorts of people.  They had wondered who he was, and grown in their apprehension of his true identity.  Peter, indeed, had answered Jesus' question, 'Who do you say I am?' by saying: 'You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God'; and Jesus had attributed this insight to a revelation from God.  And yet, following Jesus' arrest, Peter - as Jesus had predicted - denied him three times.  The rest fared no better.  After following Peter in their protestations of loyalty, St Matthew tells us that, before Peter's denials, that 'all the disciples ran away'.

During Holy Week, Catholic Christians re-enact, in a sacramental way, the events of our Redemption.  We read the passages which lead up to the Passion and Death and then, on Holy Thursday, we celebrate the Mass of the Lord's Supper, followed as it is by the Transfer of the Holy Eucharist to the Altar of Repose and the keeping of a watch of prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.  On Good Friday, we celebrate the ancient liturgy of the Lord's Passion and Death, before waiting at the tomb and preparing for the Easter Vigil.  And we re-enact these events, not purely as a dramatic re-presentation, but so that we might actually participate in them. Through this participation, we find ourselves challenged: how would we have coped as one of the Twelve?  Might we even be Judas?  Can we enter into the heart of Mary as her Son suffered and died?  Might we have joined in with the mocking of the crucified Jesus, just going with the flow?

Human nature is basically good, but flawed and easily deceived.  It has always been so.  A faithful participation in the events of Holy Week teaches us profound truths about the human condition and the nature we all share, and even more profound truths about the grace of God which, as St Thomas Aquinas famously stated, 'perfects' nature.  Whenever we turn to God, seeking his grace, he will always infuse us afresh so that we can begin again to be the disciples of the Lord Jesus.

Tuesday of Holy Week

At the Supper, Jesus knows that he is to be betrayed by one of his own, and he knows which one.  He hands a morsel of bread to Judas Iscariot.  Fellowship is broken, Judas goes out and - the evangelist tells us, in a phrase of terrifying symbolism - that 'Night had fallen'.

It's interesting that whilst evil seems to have gained the ascendancy and the events of Jesus' passion and death unfold, there is a clear sense that Jesus remains in control somehow, a theme prominent in St John's Gospel.  Jesus knows in advance who it is who will betray him: he hands the bread to this individual.  Jesus speaks of the Passion as his glorification; to the casual onlooker, the whole business has not the slightest hint of glory about it; on the face of it, it is a miserable story of the cruel death of an innocent man.

But this innocent man, subject as he was to the judgement of Pilate, knows what is really going on.  He knows that Peter, of all people, will betray him three times over, just as he knew the identity of the betrayer.  And this innocent man, judged by the powers of darkness, is the One who actually brings God's righteous judgement to bear upon the world.  The one who is subjected becomes the one who subjects.  When people would look upon the crucified Christ, they would be confronted with a choice to make as to which side to place themselves on.

Whilst human beings were responsible for the arrest, judgement, suffering and death of Jesus, he gives his life willingly to show the depth of God's love for the world and for sinful human beings.  And whilst the Passion confronts us with a choice, the righteousness of God's judgement means that Peter, for example, - the one who repeatedly denied Jesus - can be restored to his place of pre-eminence among the Twelve and be the rock foundation upon whom Christ's Church would be built.  Because of the depth of the divine love, each one of us, regardless of what has been before, can be rehabilitated by God's righteousness.  We can, of course, choose to place ourselves elsewhere (like Judas), for God never compels anyone.  But if we turn to Christ in penitence and faith, and place ourselves under his righteous judgement, his grace will exonerate us and renew in us a sense that he is the One we must follow, and that the 'night' which 'had fallen' can be replaced by endless day.