#divinisation

[lawrenceop]

Heaven is not a space

HOMILY for 5th Sun after Easter (A)

Acts 6:1-7; Ps 32; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

Often we find ourselves speaking or thinking about heaven (or, indeed, the other place) as places. After all, Jesus begins by saying he will “prepare a place” for us, in his “Father’s house”. This would appear to justify our thinking of heaven as a location, some where that we shall also go to when Jesus comes to take us there to be with him. All this, it would seem, is the plain sense of today’s Gospel. And yet, if so, where is heaven to be found? Does talk of ‘going to heaven’ or even of Christ ascending into heaven, mean that one becomes a sort of spiritual astronaut? This kind of simplistic idea of heaven seems to lie behind the Soviet leader Khrushchev’s remark that “Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god up there”. 

Hence Jesus begins at the close of this passage from St John’s Gospel (and one would need to read on beyond this chapter) to lead his apostles into the mystery of heaven, or rather, of where it is that Jesus wants to take us; what kind of place he prepares for us, even as, already on Easter Sunday morning he had said to St Mary Magdalene: “Do not hold me… but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. So, in the final verse of today’s Gospel, Jesus tells us:“I am going to the Father”, to his Father who is now also our Father; to his God who is our God. This beautiful phrasing reminds us of the promise of the Covenant that one finds, like a refrain of love, throughout the Scriptures: “I shall be their God and they shall be My people.” Except now, Jesus adds the essential relationship which tells us how God is our God: He is our Father, Abba, and he has made known his friendship and personal love for us in and through Jesus Christ himself. Thus, Jesus says: “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.” Henceforth, we can and are to know God relationally, through the Son and in the Son and with the Son, who shares his Son-ship with us. And the Father and the Son give us the Holy Spirit so that we might know God by loving him, for the Spirit is the personal love of the Father and the Son. So, Christ has come to prepare our hearts so that we might have a place in the heart of God. The Song of Songs thus has this beautiful refrain: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”, which reveals where it is that Christ wants to take us.

Heaven, therefore, is not a location, and although it can be called a place, it is not a space as such, and so is not to be found in outer space as Gagarin observed. Rather, it is to be found in the expansiveness of God who is a Triune communion of love, who is relational, and who calls us into friendship with him, who calls us to love him. Thus Jesus says at the end of this chapter of St John’s Gospel: “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (Jn 14:23)

The Catechism therefore says that when we speak of heaven, and of “Our Father who art in heaven”, in fact “this biblical expression does not mean a place ("space"), but a way of being…” and then the Catechism cites St Augustine, saying, “God is in the hearts of the just, as in his holy temple. At the same time, it means that those who pray should desire the one they invoke to dwell in them”, in other words, we should desire to be just, righteous, freed from sin. Indeed, we desire, by grace, to become like Jesus himself. Thus he tells us that he is “the way, the truth, and the life”. So, to the human person who, by his God-given nature, seeks to know, and to love, and so to live, Jesus is the all-encompassing answer to the deepest desires of the human heart. This means that our minds, which naturally seek truth and seek to know, will come to rest at last in Christ the Truth; our wills, which naturally desire to do the good and to act well morally, will come to rest only in Christ’s Way; and our lives if they are to have purpose and meaning and dignity, will find it in Christ who, by his Incarnation and work of Redemption, has raised up Mankind to the dignity of the sons and daughters of God.

Hence St Peter reminds us: “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession”. Indeed, because of Christ and what he has done for humanity, we now belong to God, we are his beloved, and he has sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts, through the Sacraments of his Church, to sanctify us, so that we shall henceforth belong to him: “My beloved is mine, and I am his.” 

Therefore the late and great Pope Benedict XVI once said in a homily for the Ascension: “This word, Heaven, does not indicate a place above the stars but something far more daring and sublime: it indicates Christ himself, the divine Person who welcomes humanity fully and for ever, the One in whom God and man are inseparably united for ever. Man's being in God, this is Heaven. And we draw close to Heaven, indeed, we enter Heaven to the extent that we draw close to Jesus and enter into communion with him.” For “In Christ, ascended into Heaven, the human being has entered into intimacy with God in a new and unheard-of way; man henceforth finds room in God for ever.” 

This is how we can understand Jesus’s promise that he goes to prepare a place for us, that there are many rooms in our Father’s house, for it means that by his ascension into heaven, which we will celebrate liturgically in under a fortnight, Christ will take us with him into the intimacy of the divine love that is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This, the Catechism says, “this perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity – this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed – is called ‘heaven.’” and precisely because it is life in the eternal and loving God himself, so the Catechism says, it is “the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness. To live in heaven is “to be with Christ.” (CCC 1025)

Thus Jesus promises us in today’s Gospel: “I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” Let all who believe in Christ and who have received the Holy Spirit therefore place all our hope in this promise, no matter what befalls us in this life, even if we should fall into death. For Christ has called you and me “out of darkness into his marvellous light” and, by his resurrection, God’s “merciful love” is evermore upon us. So, as we hear in the Song of Songs, the beloved Soul has rightly spoken to God her Bridegroom of her longing for heaven: “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death”. (Sgs 8:6) In heaven, we shall at last hold on to Christ and be one with him for ever. 

[astranemus]

In gnostic myths, the mediate deity is often represented as external to the self. But the mediate deity is in fact the higher self. The externality of this higher self is only a necessity of the lower self’s embodied, historical existence. Throughout their lives, gnostics labor to “make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside.” They realize, in other words, that the mediate deity is the true self, and therefore not ultimately “other” at all.

M. David Litwa, Gnostic Self-Deification: The Case of Simon of Samaria

[anastpaul]

Quote/s of the Day – 28 June – The Memorial of St Irenaeus of Lyons (c 135 – c 202) Father of the Church

“Our way of thinking, is attuned to the Eucharist and the Eucharist in turn, confirms our way of thinking.”

“Jesus Christ, in His infinite love, has become what we are, in order that He may make us entirely what He is.”

“It is not you that shapes God. It is God that shapes you. If then you are the work of God await the Hand of the artist who does all things in due season. Offer Him your heart, soft and tractable and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you. Let the clay be moist lest you go hard and lose the imprint of His Fingers.”

“As long as anyone has the means of doing good to his neighbours and does not do so, he shall be reckoned a stranger to the love of the Lord.”

“The business of the Christian is nothing else but to be ever preparing for death.”

“Being obedient she (Mary) became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race. The knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience: what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith.”

St Irenaeus of Lyons (c 135 – c 202)

(via Quote/s of the Day - 28 June - The Memorial of St Irenaeus of Lyons (c 135 - c 202) Father of the Church)

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for the Epiphany

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ps 71; Eph 3:2-3,5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

At evening prayer today, the Church sings this antiphon: “Three mysteries mark this holy day: today the star leads the Magi to the infant Christ; today water is changed into wine for the wedding feast; today Christ wills to be baptized by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation.”

At first glance this seems puzzling and might even appear to be an odd conflation of three events in the life of Christ. But this only is problematic if we think about the celebration of Christmas and the feasts around it in a chronological way. Likewise with the Holy Rosary, when we think that this devotion is meant to present us with a chronological or sequential newsreel of the life of Christ. In fact, as I said on the 1st of January, the feasts of Christmas, like the Rosary (as I say in my book Mysteries Made Visible) need to be viewed theologically – they tell us about the person of Jesus Christ, about what God is doing for us in Christ, and about the life of grace now, and how we can thus receive from God, “grace upon grace” (Jn 1:14).

As such, today feast of the Epiphany is about the revelation to the nations that God has been born among us, that he is “true God and true Man”, truly God with us, Emmanuel. The cosmic-changing implication of the Incarnation is thus set out for us in the Second Reading today. St Paul says: “it was by a revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery. This mystery that has now been revealed through the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets was unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body, and that the same promise has been made to them, in Jesus Christ, through the gospel.”

Except that the reading doesn’t make explicit what is meant by “the inheritance” and the “same promise” that has been offered now to all peoples, all nations, both Jew and pagan alike. But if we pay attention to the Preface of the Epiphany, we will hear this: “today you have revealed the mystery of our salvation in Christ as a light for the nations, and when he appeared in our mortal nature, you made us new by the glory of his immortal nature.” We take it for granted, perhaps, that God should offer salvation to all peoples, and yet the fact is that until the coming of Christ, until the Incarnation of God as Man through which he took on our mortal human nature, it had been thought that salvation was only for a particular race, a chosen few.

The coming of God as a human being makes it clear that God has chosen humanity, even though we had fallen into sin and disobeyed him. God has chosen us for himself, and called us into his marvellous light, into intimate friendship with him through the person of Jesus Christ who is both God and Man. Why? So that we might be renewed by the grace of Christ, and so come to share in his immortal and divine nature as the Preface says. This is the theological heart of today’s celebration; this is the wondrous truth that is revealed as an Epiphany to the nations today.

The three mysteries that mark this day, therefore, express this theological truth and they invite us to think about it. Firstly, the Gentile Magi come to adore Christ and they offer their treasures before him. This tells us that salvation from God is now offered to all nations through the person of Jesus Christ. All peoples, therefore, are called to seek him, to journey towards him, and to offer to him, the God-Man, their treasures, their joys, their sorrows, their all. This is the principal sign of this feast that reveals the fact that salvation is now open to humanity, should one desire it, should we seek God out, and open our lives and desires to him.

All that Man can offer to Christ is like the water at Cana. All these, all that is of our human nature, God will transform by his grace and make like unto wine. Just as, in the Mass, Christ takes what we bring to the Altar and transforms it into his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so Christ takes all that we offer to him, all that is of our mortal human natures, and he transforms us by his grace and divinises us. The water changed into wine at Cana is hence a sign that Christ comes to make us “new by the glory of his immortal nature” as the Preface says. The fact that this takes place at a wedding feast tells us that in the person of Christ, God and Man is forever united, made one in a love and a bond that is like marriage. This reveals the interior sign of this feast, of the saving effect of Christ’s grace on the human soul and person; it tells us how we are saved interiorly, through the invisible action of grace.

And thirdly, the sign of Christ’s Baptism shows us the external sign, the Sacrament that causes and effects this grace. Baptism is thus called the “Sacrament of Salvation” because the Lord wills that it is through Baptism that we receive the grace of divine adoption, that we share in Christ’s life and divine nature, and that we are thus saved. The third mystery of this feast day, therefore, affirms that ordinarily we must be Baptised in order to be saved. Yes, salvation has been offered to all peoples, but God does not force himself onto us, so we express our acceptance of salvation by seeking Baptism. Christian parents can and should do this for their infant children, but the assumption of the Church, repeatedly expressed in the Rite of Baptism, is that baptised children must be brought up in the practice of the Faith so that they grow in knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. Hence the Collect today also prays: “Grant in your mercy, that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.”

For our Faith in Christ, and our friendship with God involves a journey: This begins at Baptism, and, as in a Marriage, it is a love that must be deepened and that will need to endure “for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” And at the end of the journey, if we are choose to persevere and walk by the light of Faith, a light which shines like a star in the night but which, like the stars, is not always so clearly visible, then we shall finally enter the home of Mary and Joseph, and there, in heaven, behold and adore Christ our God, face to face.

This is the journey of the wise men, the journey of faith that each of us, like them, are invited to make in our lifetime. So, at the start of a new year, let us press on in our journey; let us seek that elusive star in the darkness; and let us remember the words of the Lord: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Lk 11:9) Jesus, on this feast day, promises us not worldly or earthly things, not the luxuries and consolations of gold, or incense, or myrrh, but rather, understood theologically, Christ gives us his own self. Therefore, let us give him open our treasures, our whole self before him, and receive from his fullness of divine humanity, “grace upon grace”.

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for the 7th Sunday per annum (C)

1 Samuel 26:2,7-9,11-13,22-23; Ps 102; 1 Cor 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38

The newspapers carried an astonishing report on Friday of a man called Dr Adam Towler. One night in 2019, a teenager knocked on his door in Bristol, and when he opened it, he was pulled outside of his own home, and stabbed nine times. The man who did this did not have any previous acquaintance with Dr Towler, nor was there any apparent motivation for this unexpected act of violence. At the sentencing of his attacker last Friday, Adam Towler said to the man who nearly killed him: “I want to say that I am not upset or angry with you… I don’t think you owe me an apology or anything, but I do want you to know what it’s like for me.” And he told the Today programme on Radio 4 that “The fact we’re here talking today, I got lucky –I’m living a quite normal life, a comfortable life”, and he expressed a deep sympathy for his attacker who now has to spend the rest of his life (or at least twelve years) in prison.

I immediately thought of Adam Towler’s words when I read today’s Gospel: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly… Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” These words are so familiar to us, but perhaps we sometimes think of them merely as an ideal, but one that is rarely seen in action. Many of them, I am sure, struggle to live as Christ teaches us today. Hence, when a newspaper reports words like Dr Towler’s, it makes me sit up and reflect because these actions are, as the judge said, “extraordinary”; Dr Towler, moreover, does not hint at any explicit Christian faith. But, as the judge said to Dr Towler, “Whether it is the effect of intellect, or faith, or kindness and understanding, I don’t know. If it is the consequence of intellect, I admire it. If it is the consequence of faith, I envy it.”

There is much to admire in this situation, but I am not envious of another’s faith. Envy, after all, is the vice of experiencing sorrow for the good that another receives or shows. No, one does not envy the faith of another, nor their extraordinarily good will, nor their act of forgiveness, compassion, and empathy. Rather, one desires to emulate him, or at least, one should do! For this is at the heart of today’s Gospel: we can do all these extraordinary things because we want to emulate God our Father! So Christ says: “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate…  love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return… and you will be sons of the Most High.”

Indeed, Christ who is, by nature, the Son of the Most High God, shows us on the Cross how to regard one’s enemies: our compassionate God, the Son of God, makes excuses for sinners, he forgives, and he says, in effect, something like “I am not upset or angry with you… I don’t think you owe me an apology or anything”. In doing so, Jesus teaches us, who by grace are also sons of God, how we can respond to those who hate us and do ill. God gives us the grace to react with compassionate love, just as Jesus does, if we want to.

However, the problem I think is that most of us expect too little of God, too little of his grace, and certainly too little of ourselves. Perhaps we do not think we’re worthy to emulate God our Father and so we don’t really try. Or maybe we don’t think that we can actually be like Christ – we see only our own failings and weaknesses, but we don’t recognise the power of God given us in the Sacraments. “We’re not really cut out to be Saints”, people tell me but such talk, sadly, seems to despair of God’s power, God’s grace, God’s mercy which is only merciful because it moves us to change and improve and to become the sons and daughters of God that our Baptism calls us to be! The consequence of this is that the Gospel becomes just an ideal, a mythical story, but robbed of any power to radically change us and change our society. The consequence is that we remain in our sins, and will not allow God to draw near to help us and save us.

The example of Dr Adam Towler can, I think, awaken us to the possibilities. And lest anyone thinks that Dr Towler is (apparently) not a Christian, and so his actions only belie the power of secular altruism, or serve to prove that one doesn’t need God in order to be good or moral, I would ask anyone who thinks like this to pause a little. Pause and think, and look at this theologically. For it is simplistic and bad theology to think that God only helps Christians, or the virtuous, or those who are in his club. Rather, the compassion of Christ who died for all, and the incarnation of God who thus allies himself with every human being, shows that God’s grace is much more powerful and pervasive than the doctrines of religious tribalism would allow. Again, I think that if we expect too little of God’s grace, too little of God, then we would just say that Dr Towler’s extraordinary act of forgiveness was just a non-religious fluke. But I refuse to say so. Rather, I say with St Justin Martyr that the seeds of God’s goodness and reason are found throughout creation – God’s creation. And I say with St Cyril that the incarnate Word of God is active and present in every human person. And I say with St Thomas Aquinas that all good finds its origin and impulse and perfection in God. That is to say, no good is possible for anyone or anything at all were it not first caused and sustained by God. This is what a robust theology of God and divine causality looks like. And this is Catholicism.

So, we thank God that he moved Dr Towler to behave with such divine benevolence and empathy towards his attacker, in the hope that such compassion would move the attacker to repentance and to final salvation. For God, in his wisdom and providence, can and will use any one of us, not simply for our own good, but for the salvation of others. Again, a robust theology of Providence leads us to say that God is always in control, and he moves people, whether they are Christian or not, to do his will, always for a greater good that we do not see. In this case, I want to suggest, that Dr Towler’s example should chasten us Christians, give us cause for humility, and embolden us who are called by grace to be sons and daughters of the Most High God to behave more like our heavenly Father. In other words, Dr Towler challenges each of us to be more authentically Christian, and to emulate Christ more faithfully.

These, I think, are fitting lessons and reflections as Lent is soon upon us. How can I demand more of God, more of his grace, and so expect more for myself? Christ says today that “the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.” So, when we pray and ask for gifts from God, let us ask for a generous measure of God’s graces, that will change not our external circumstances but our interior being. For know this: God wants to make us Saints, he wants us to be his own beloved children, re-made in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ his Son.

Therefore Pope Benedict XVI said: “Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched… It is only by becoming children of God, that we can be with our common Father… When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment… We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes… For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly.”

So, as Lent approaches, let us be ready to learn to pray better, to be purified in our hopes and desires, so that we desire holiness, desire closeness with God, desire to become more like the Lord who is compassion and love.

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 16th Sunday after Pentecost

Eph 3:13-21; Luke 14:1-12

The idea that God is our father is not unusual, nor even unique to Christianity. And so when St Paul says in today’s epistle that all paternity comes from God the Father, this idea basically is not surprising. Neither are people shocked when we call God our Father, pater noster, not if it is understood merely in terms of nature, concerning our creation and our human existence, although, of course, the real significance of daring to call God our Father is much richer than that for it speaks of our spiritual regeneration through grace and the elevation of our human natures to a supernatural end in God, an end that we, as Christians, now share with Christ the Son.

However, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has a far more radical way of speaking about God’s relationship to us, one that goes beyond familial relations, one that is unique to Christianity, but it is a term that we tend to miss in the Scriptures. Indeed, one of my parishioners told me last week that although he had come round to thinking of Christ as not only his Saviour but also his brother (since God is our Father) he had never before heard of calling God his friend. But there it is in today’s Gospel: “Go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher’.” (Lk 14:10)

The Beloved Disciple makes explicit this revelation of Christ’s new relationship with us in his Gospel, a relationship established through grace, as St John records these words of the Lord to his disciples and so to us: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” (Jn 15:15) Christ comes, therefore to befriend us, to invite us into friendship with him. In today’s Gospel parable, Christ comes to the humble; he comes to sinners, to those who have taken the lowest place. And coming to us in love and mercy, Christ befriends us, calling us ‘Friend’. And then, by the working of his grace in our lives; through the gift of his grace and virtues, Christ lifts us up higher: “Friend, go up higher”, he says. And so our Christian life is about receiving gifts from God, receiving Christ’s holiness, Christ’s virtues, Christ’s holy sacraments so that, by the sanctifying action of his grace in us, we might go higher, nearer to God in friendship and in love. St Thomas Aquinas, therefore, said that Christian love, charity, is “the friendship of man for God.”

Aristotle had written that the very idea of friendship with God was absurd because friendship requires mutuality, a kind of reciprocity and equality, and man had nothing to offer God, and indeed, could not dream of being set on a par with God in any way. For Aristotle, for pagans, for all other religions, therefore, the idea of friendship with God is impossible, and even blasphemous. Yet, the Son of God has revealed this to be so: “I have called you friends.” Therefore the Church’s doctrine of grace explains that friendship with God is possible because the gift of grace, first given in Baptism, elevates our nature, making us to be partakers in the divine nature, incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ, and so adopted as sons and daughters of God and co-heirs to the Kingdom of heaven, with Christ.

But St Thomas Aquinas take a different approach, beginning with God’s desire to befriend us. For the astounding revelation that Christ makes to us in the Gospel is that God is not content just to be our Father and Creator; he does not want us to remain at the lowest place, lower than the angels, but he wills to be our friend, and so to share with us the joy and delight and love that the Holy Trinity enjoys in himself. Thus St Thomas says: “God is said to love all creatures insofar as he gives to all beings the good of their nature. Beside this, however, there is also true love in the proper sense, which is likened to friendship, by which God not only loves creatures as an artist might love his work, but also by a communion of friendship. God loves creatures as a friend loves his friend, to such a degree that he introduces us into the joy of communion, such that our glory and beatitude are precisely those by which God himself is happy. It is with this love that God loves his saints.”

The Christian life, and our moral life therefore is about responding to the friendship of Christ. It is about befriending God, by which I mean that we learn to love the things and the persons that God loves, in the way that God loves, for as Christians we begin to enjoy life and goodness and holiness as God does; our happiness comes from this deep and transformative share in God’s own life and way of being, which is love.

The Church, therefore, is a communio sanctorum, a communion of saints. But, of course, the same Latin phrase also means a common sharing in holy things. For God gives us a share in his life, his grace, his sacraments, his virtues, his holiness, which is what makes us to be truly a communion of Saints, united to one another and to God in charity. This sharing of the good, of the things that we love and enjoy, is a central feature of friendship, and so friendship should define how we relate to one another as Christians: together, we share in common a love for God and for the holy things of God. Charity as friendship also defines how we should relate to others, even our enemies. For as St Thomas Aquinas explained: “We love our friends so much that for their sake we love all who belong to them, even if they hurt or hate us; so that, in this way, the friendship of charity extends even to our enemies, whom we love out of charity in relation to God, to Whom the friendship of charity is chiefly directed.” So, we love our enemies, and we desire their good because we love those who God also loves. Charity, therefore, forms us in the image and likeness of the Son of God whose love “surpasses knowledge”, as St Paul says in the epistle; whose love reaches out to even the greatest of sinners in the lowest of places.

“Friend, go up higher.” Each day, the grace of God comes to us sinners, inviting us to renounce sin, to cling to Jesus, and so to go up higher, to take a better seat at his marriage feast. This is the invitation made to us today in the Holy Mass. For Christ comes to invite us to partake of the Sacrament of Charity, the Holy Eucharist. In friendship, Jesus communicates his holy things to us, even his own self, so that we might share a common life with him, share the blessedness and joy and love of the Holy Trinity himself. Thus shall we become true friends of God. Thus shall we be brought up higher to the heights of heaven itself.

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 18th Sunday after Pentecost (EF)

1 Cor 1:4-8; Matthew 9:1-8

Note again the way in which Christ addresses the paralytic in today’s Gospel. “Take heart, my son, your sins have been forgiven.” (Mt 9:2) A couple of Sundays ago, we heard Our Lord call us “friend”, thus calling sinful humanity to turn from sin, to turn from ways of behaving and thinking that are antithetical to genuine friendship with Christ. And so, as I said two Sundays ago, we have been called to befriend God by loving divine things as he loves, and in the manner that he loves.

But today, Christ calls the sick man, “my son”. Hence, Christ reveals that he has come not just to extend the love of divine friendship to sinners, but, even more astonishingly, God shows us that we have been called to share in the divine Sonship of Jesus Christ. So, through the forgiveness of our sins, through the liberation from sin that comes through grace and the sacraments, we have been set free by Christ so that henceforth we no longer belong to sin; we no longer belong to the world and the Devil, but rather now, by the grace of repentance and the gift of divine forgiveness, we have become God’s: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”, says the Lord to the soul in the Song of Songs. (2:16) Indeed, through the grace of Christ the Son, God has claimed us as his own Son, for we have been baptised into Christ. So St Paul says: “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptised into Christ have put on Christ.” (Gal 3:26-27)

Hence the Fathers of the Church have seen in this Gospel a defence of the ancient practice of infant Baptism. For, against the somewhat Pelagian idea that Baptism should be of my choosing, as if grace and salvation is something I can claim for myself as an individual, today’s Gospel presents us with the communal and Ecclesial dimensions of the Faith. For as St Thomas says: “this paralytic symbolises the sinner lying in sin. Just as the paralytic cannot move, so the sinner cannot help himself.” This is especially true of the baby born into a state of original sin. Just as infants cannot help themselves, and they need their parents to feed them, clothe them, and clean them, so all the more does this apply to the spiritual realm. The baby, born with the stain of Adam’s sin on his soul, needs to be forgiven and redeemed and freed from original sin through Baptism. Hence, lying there like a baby, a helpless child, the sinner is brought to God. So we can note that in the Greek text of the Gospel, Jesus calls the paralytic ‘teknon’, which literally means ‘child’.

So, the child, the sinner, the one who is lying helpless and paralysed by sin, is brought to Jesus Christ by his friends and family, by those who love him. And, according to the Gospel, Jesus, seeing their faith, forgives the man’s sins and heals him. Thus the Church readily baptises infants who are brought to the font, and through this action man is forgiven, freed from original sin. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “Baptism is the first and chief sacrament of forgiveness of sins”. (CCC 977) Notice though that this gratuitous act of God’s grace operates not through the explicit choice or faith or will of the baby, nor it would seem, the faith of the paralytic in the Gospel. Rather, seeing the faith of those who love him and have brought him to Jesus; seeing the faith of the child’s parents and godparents, Christ acts: the man is forgiven and healed; the child is baptised and thus forgiven; freed from the bondage of original sin, claimed from Satan and the world as God’s own son.

As the Father’s voice had been heard at Christ’s Baptism, saying “This is my beloved Son”, so at our Baptism, God the Father claims us as his beloved Son, and the Church becomes our Mother. “My beloved is mine, and I am his” says the Lord to the soul at his or her Baptism. In St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Gospel that we hear in this Mass, therefore, the Greek word ‘teknon’ is not translated as ‘puer’, child, but rather ‘fili’, son. This, I believe, is a deliberate choice of the Saint, so that we can hear the resonance of God the Father declaring Christ to be his beloved Son, and so that we should immediately be reminded of the grace of divine filiation, the grace of our adoption as God’s son, through the Sacrament of Baptism.

So, hear again today the words of the Lord to you and me, to the baptised: “Take heart, my son, your sins have been forgiven”. In Greek, the word translated as ‘take heart’ is ‘tharsei’, which the Lord says 10 times in the Gospels. It means, ‘Take courage, do not be afraid, cheer up’! Therefore, the Lord says to us who have been raised from sin through baptism into him, who share his divine Sonship: Take heart, that is to say, he calls us to have courage in the face of all the trials of this life, all the oppositions that would assail us, against sickness and ill health, and even against the struggle with our sins. With these words, we have his assurance that God’s grace is always at hand to help us, to strengthen and encourage us. Thus we hear in today’s epistle: “you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

For we are God’s, his sons, his Saints, his beloved, and he is ours! Therefore, let us be confirmed in our faith in God’s gift of divine Sonship given to us through holy Baptism. Hence St Josemaria Escriva declared that “If we are convinced of this marvellous truth, we will never lose our serenity. We will feel secure. And should we ever go astray, even seriously astray, as a result of one of the skirmishes of our daily struggle (since through frailty we can and in fact do go astray), we will [repent and] return to him.”

[astranemus]

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses