Catholic Contextual urban Theology, Mimetic Theory, Contemplative Prayer. And other random ramblings.

Monday 28 March 2011

Sermon at St Mary Magdalene’s East Ham, Lent 3 2011


The Samaritan Woman at the Well

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42


Last June I had the great blessing of going on my first ever pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in company with some of my fellow clergy from the Edmonton area. The Holy Land in June is hot. The sun stands almost overhead at noon, and there is very little shade.
However, we were assured when we arrived that we would have an air conditioned coach with all mod cons to carry us around, and the driver had a great ice box at the front of the coach which would be full of bottles of water that we could buy on board. So the first day we piled on to the coach and set off into the furnace-like heat of the day.
When we’d gone a little way it transpired that something in the Middle Eastern supply chain hadn’t quite joined up. There was no water on the coach. Those few clergy who had been wise virgins and brought along their own supplies looked a little smug, while the rest of us started to experience mild symptoms of panic. You realise what thirst really means when you are in an intensely hot dry climate and you don’t know when you’ll next be able to have a drink. You realise that what you want is not a nice cup of tea, not even a gin and tonic, but water, pure clear refreshing water. In the event our crisis didn’t last long, and the first time we saw a kiosk laden with bottled water everyone descended on it like a flock of gulls.
Having felt the heat of the Judean summer I can really appreciate the force of today’s story from John’s Gospel. “Give me a drink” is not a request made simply for the purpose of illustrating a moral message. It is about real need and desire. But what Jesus wants to explore is the deepest desire of human beings, what we most fundamentally need. What we most deeply need is not the water that will leave us thirsty again, but the water that wells up to eternal life.
The life that God gives, which we call eternal life, is completely different from the biological life of the body. It is of the Spirit. It comes from beyond us, as God’s gift. We must be “born from above” as Jesus said to Nicodemus in last week’s gospel.
Today’s story follows the journey of the Samaritan woman, and indeed that of all her village, into belief, into the life that God gives. That life is not like water that will leave us thirsting again, because it is inexhaustible. God pours himself out for us without ever being diminished.
Water, of course, is necessary for the life of the body, our biological life. But that will not last for ever; it is a life which is limited and conditioned by death. And water itself is a limited resource, when you use up what you’ve got, it’s gone. And because it’s limited it can be a cause of rivalry and conflict, as it was in the reading from Exodus. As it may be, perhaps, in the future in some parts of the world as climate change causes more deserts to appear.
So the water the body needs, in this story, stands for the desires which cannot ultimately satisfy us. Those desires which are limited and bounded by death and so are the cause of rivalry and conflict.
The death-bound nature of this kind of desire appears in other ways in this story. The woman whom Jesus talks to turns out to have had five husbands, and the man she is with now isn’t her husband. Her complicated relationship history seems to have made her something of a social outcast, shown by the fact that she goes to the well in the heat of the day, alone, rather than early in the morning with the other women of the village.
Now we might think therefore that this woman has been living a loose life, that it’s her fault. But in a patriarchal society such as this, women had little say over what happened to them. It was men who decided who women would marry and men who decided to divorce their wives when it suited them. It’s much more likely that this woman was the victim of the rivalrous desire of a number of different men. She is now a social outcast because of the conflict that their desire has created.
Jesus’ perception of her history leads to the exposure of a deeper rivalry. The woman says, “Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you (plural) say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
Here is the age-old conflict between the Samaritans and the Jews cast in terms of a rivalry about God. And Jesus’ answer shows how this talk about God is really just a disguise for another desire bound up with death, a desire for something limited which cannot satisfy. God is not like that, says Jesus. God is spirit, breath. God is the life from beyond us which is without limit. All those who worship God worship in spirit and in truth. How foolish it is to be in rivalry over God. As if there might not be enough to go round.
So Jesus delivers us from our rivalrous death-bound desires, the desires which can never satisfy, by giving us the life which God lives. The life which gushes up like a spring of water to eternal life. The life which is not diminished in giving itself.
Which I think is what St Paul is talking about in today’s passage from Romans where he says that we will be saved through Christ from “the wrath”.  Paul in the Greek doesn’t actually say “the wrath of God”, just “the wrath”; the words “of God” were added by the translator who for some reason thought they should be there. (The King James Bible, in this instance, gets it right.)
“Wrath” in Greek is orge. “Orgy” comes from the same word. It speaks of desire which is never satisfied, desire out of control, desire collapsing in on itself in a spiral of self-destruction. Wrath is, if you like, the flip side of our death-bound desires, what those desires do to us if we are not saved from them. Our desires are fixed on what will never satisfy us, and so we experience wrath, rage, frustration. Because we are seeking life, true life, eternal life, where it can never be found.
But Jesus is saving us from “the wrath”. His gift is eternal life, the life God lives, which we receive as his gift because we cannot construct it for ourselves. We must allow him to liberate us from our death-bound desires so that we can be born from above and live according to God’s deathless desire, God’s desire which will satisfy us eternally because it is entirely without limit and without rivalry.
Towards the end of today’s Gospel Jesus introduces another image of the life that he gives, the food that his disciples know nothing about. Jesus will enlarge on that later in John’s Gospel in his teaching about the Eucharist: Jesus himself is the bread come down from heaven; the bread that he will give is his flesh for the life of the world.
In this Eucharist we feed on the deathless life of God, given in Jesus, who liberates us from our death-bound desires. That life is poured out for us without ever being diminished. By living from that source of life we too are enabled to live eucharistically. We can live in thankfulness rather than rivalry, because we receive our life as a gift rather than grasping it as a possession. We too can pour ourselves out for others without fear of being diminished because we know that the true source of our life is not in ourselves but is God’s gift.
Jesus said, “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Lord Jesus, give us this water, so that we may never thirst. Amen.

Thursday 24 March 2011

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2011


Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17


Last week in the Lent Group we were looking at two pictures, one of which was Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, which hangs in the National Gallery. Caravaggio uses the technique of chiaroscuro, light and shadow, to enliven the scene and draw us in. Last week at St Paul’s I mistakenly said that chiaroscuro meant “darkness and shadow”, but of course that wouldn’t work at all, it would result in something very dreary and indistinct. But use light and shadow and the whole composition comes alive. The picture becomes very vivid, we can imagine ourselves as part of the scene. And the light brings out what is true, the deeper meaning of what is being presented.
So too in John’s Gospel. Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. John’s gospel sets this whole scene at night, in darkness, a device which John uses more than once to illustrate the contrast between the light of God, which has come into the world in Jesus, and the darkness which endures where humanity refuses to receive him, or has yet to come into the light.
Nicodemus is hesitant. Has he come on his own account, or has he come as a representative of the Pharisees, to make discreet unattributable enquiries under cover of darkness? His position is one of partial faith, symbolised by the darkness in which he meets Jesus – he recognises that God is in some way at work in Jesus, because he has seen the “signs” that he has given, the miracles he has worked. But so far that is all that Nicodemus has seen, and Jesus wants him to see beyond external appearances. So Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above”. We have this image of Nicodemus sitting in the dark, and Jesus saying to him, you don’t yet see.
There’s a pun in the Greek in what Jesus says, the phrase translated “born from above” can also mean “born again”.  And Nicodemus only gets the second meaning, being “born again”, and he doesn’t understand how that can happen. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
Now, in terms of the life of the flesh, biological life, this is incomprehensible. But the “birth from above” that Jesus is talking about is the birth of the spirit, a new kind of life altogether.
John’s Gospel uses two different words which are both translated into English as “life”: psyche, which means biological life, the life which is inevitably limited, contained and conditioned by death; and zoe, which means the life that God lives. It’s always zoe which is meant when we see the translation “eternal life”. The life that Jesus offers is the life that God lives. And it is the birth into that life that he is talking about when he says, “you must be born from above” and “born of the Spirit”.
So the life that God lives, eternal life, which is what Jesus promises us, is not the same as biological life stretched out for ever. It is quite different, the life born of the Spirit, from above, which only those who are born of the Spirit know.
Nicodemus should have known this, because it is promised in the Jewish scriptures which he taught as a leader and teacher in Israel. But as yet his mind is closed. He is still in the “night” of not yet understanding and receiving the life from above. But don’t worry, we will meet him again in John’s Gospel, in the Passion reading on Good Friday, and then it will be during the day, by which time he is definitely a believer.
The life from above which Jesus gives us is the light of God shining into the darkness of this world. And that light has come because God loves us. We’ve heard today what is arguably the most famous verse in all the Bible, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
One of the themes that linked the two paintings we looked at last week was that of God giving his life to us in Jesus. Giving his life in the midst of our human mendacity, fear, violence and betrayal. All those things which somehow are bound up with our biological life in what the Church calls “original sin”. It was just the same at the last supper. It was in the same night that he was betrayed that Jesus took bread and said, take eat, this is my body which is given for you.
The light shining in the darkness reveals the truth: God’s love breaking in to our sinfulness. God shows his love by offering us his life. And that life is something that we must receive as his gift. It is not ours by nature and we cannot create it ourselves. It comes to us from outside, from above, drawing us out of ourselves and into the life and love of God.
That life is offered to all. God longs for all people to receive it. But we can reject it if we wish. We can stay with the life we construct for ourselves, the life of fear, violence and betrayal, the life bounded by death. And our choice is its own judgement. Our gospel passage today goes on to say, “And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. But because love has to be free in order to be love, the world cannot be forced to accept that love. The possibility of refusal remains. But the light shining into the darkness always reveals what is true. Whether we come to the light or reject it, we will see in that light what our choice has made of us. And that judgement is in itself a call to repentance.
But we are gathered here as those who know the birth from above. In our baptism we have been born of water and the Spirit. God has infused his life into us. That life is sustained and grows deeper as we live the life of grace in the Church. We are fed by God’s life in Jesus in the Eucharist. Our sins after baptism are forgiven through the sacrament of reconciliation, or by the acts of contrition and love that we make on a daily basis. In our life of prayer and reading the scriptures we breathe God’s breath, God’s Spirit.
Even in the life we live here and now, we are already beginning to share in the life of God. Some of the texts in our service books say this, for example “The Body of Christ keep you in eternal life” which is one of the alternative forms for distributing Holy Communion. We are already in eternal life, what remains is to grow deeper, to live ever more fully in the life of God.
That life is the light that breaks through into our darkness, both exposing our sinfulness and bringing us forgiveness. It is the life that brings us the new birth from above, transforming us with God’s love so that we too can bring his life and love to others.

Thursday 17 March 2011

The Sign of Jonah

Homily for Wednesday in the first week of Lent 
(And, finally, an explanation for the name of this blog...)


“Just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.”

What kind of sign is the “Sign of Jonah”? When Matthew’s gospel reports this saying of Jesus it provides an explanation, because Matthew doesn’t like loose ends and does like using Old Testament texts to shed light on Jesus. So Matthew says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.” So the Sign of Jonah becomes the sign of the Resurrection.

Certainly that’s an aspect of the Sign of Jonah, but Luke leaves it more open than Matthew. In fact the Sign of Jonah has many meanings. As we heard in the reading from the Book of Jonah itself, the main Sign that Jonah gave to the city of Nineveh was that he preached, “Forty more days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed, and repented, and the city was not overthrown, after all.

So the Sign of Jonah is in the first place the sign of preaching, and believing, and repentance.  And this is in fact exactly how Jesus begins his own mission.

There is another way in which Jonah was a sign. Jonah’s story begins with him running away from the call of God, and in an extraordinary scene he’s on board a ship which gets caught in a violent storm, and the crew draw lots to see who is to blame, who has offended the gods. And they discover it is Jonah, and throw him overboard, whereupon Jonah is swallowed by the fish, and the storm ceases.

So Jonah is also the sign of the scapegoat, the one whose apparent death restores peace and order to the little community of the boat once they have decided he was to blame and thrust him out. Which is if you like a type of what happened to Jesus on Good Friday, when he was thrust out of the city and killed by people who thought he was a blasphemer, under God’s curse, and a threat to their own society.

So the Sign of Jonah is the Sign of preaching, of repentance, of the scapegoat, and of the resurrection. In all of these ways, Jesus will fulfil that sign. And although this Sign has these four different aspects, it is still one sign. What Jesus preaches is the Kingdom of God becoming real in the world through his death and resurrection.

The gospel is preached to us and we are called to repent, because the death and resurrection of Jesus has exposed how complicit we are in the way the world makes victims and scapegoats.  But much more than that, it has revealed the generosity and love of God who longs to lead us from the old way of sin and death to new life in Christ.

In these days of Lent we seek to live more deeply the call to repentance we heard on Ash Wednesday,

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

Through that repentance we join ourselves to the Sign of Jonah, the Sign of Jesus, the dying and rising of Christ, through which we, and we pray this great city in which we live, will be saved.

Bible Study on 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10

Bible Study for the Kings Cross Ecumenical Fellowship, 16 March 2011


So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God in vain. For he says,
‘At an acceptable time I have listened to you,
   and on a day of salvation I have helped you.’
See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labours, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honour and dishonour, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

(Notes to introduce discussion)

The title for this week’s session on the CTBI website is “Order and Disorder”. There is a lot of material there, and we’re only looking at one of the suggested readings. But one of the things that the resource material says is that “order turns to disorder in an imperfect world”. Actually, what I’d like to suggest, considering St Paul and this reading, is not that the fallen world is disordered so much as differently ordered. It has its own kind of order which Paul is here exposing and undermining.

We don’t know if Paul was familiar with the Beatitudes, but there is a parallel between what he says in this passage (2 Cor 6:6-10) and what Jesus has to say in Matthew 5:1-12:

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

The Beatitudes are a proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven, and specifically of how the Kingdom is ordered. And the Kingdom of course is not an abstraction or something located in a future we have yet to reach; it is God’s reign becoming real in Jesus, God in Jesus acting in history in the world. All of the Beatitudes describe God’s reign as it is being revealed in Jesus. Jesus is pre-eminently the one who is poor in spirit, who mourns, who is meek, who is persecuted, and so on.

And all of the Beatitudes reveal the priority of the victim and the outsider. It is in these that the order of the Kingdom is found. And the point of the Beatitudes is that this is radically different from the way in which the world orders itself.

You may have heard of the Catholic anthropologist RenĂ© Girard. According to Girard, human society is ordered according to the imitation of desire (“mimesis”). I desire what Fred desires. And this can lead me and Fred into rivalry. Rivalry can lead into violence, which is itself a desire which gets imitated. Rivalrous desire can spread through and threaten the whole of a society. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. It protects itself from its own violence by finding a substitute victim. An outsider who can be conveniently blamed becomes the focus of the Society’s violence, so that the violence gets displaced outside a boundary of exclusion. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Girard is one of those people who has had one big idea. That one idea doesn’t of course tell us everything, but his theory has caught the attention of many Bible scholars. Once you are aware of the sequence:

Mimesis > Rivalry > Conflict > Scapegoating > Restoration of unity

You start to see it all over the place in the Scriptures.

And Jesus overturns this way of ordering the world by becoming its victim. He becomes the outsider, the excluded one, hanged on a tree and so, according to the law, under the curse of God. Which I think is what Paul means when he says that God “made him to be sin who knew no sin”. But Jesus is, in fact, the reign of God becoming real in the world, and that reign is made known on the outside of the boundary of exclusion that human society constructs to protect itself from its own violence.

The truth of this becomes apparent in the Resurrection. Jesus can preach the priority of the victim in the Sermon on the Mount, because God will vindicate the victim in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the definitive breaking through of the order of God’s Kingdom into the order of this world.

Which brings us back to St Paul. All of Paul’s teaching needs to be understood from the perspective of the Resurrection, which was the breakthrough of the vindicated victim into his life. Paul had been perfect according to the law, had persecuted the Church of Jesus Christ and made any number of victims. He had very much lived according to the order of this world, the human society which protects itself from its own violence by scapegoating the outsider and interpreting this as the will of God. And then Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus and was completely turned around. His whole world was shattered and he had to begin again, learning what God is like in Jesus, the risen victim. His conversion was so radical that Paul’s whole life became a testimony to the way God orders things in Jesus and overcomes the order of this world, as Paul puts it, “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus [sets us] free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:2).

Which is I think why St Paul says that the afflictions he is suffering are the way in which he is an ambassador for Christ, the way in which he makes the appeal to be reconciled to God. They are not incidental things which happen to him while he is proclaiming his message, rather they are absolutely integral to what that message is. Paul is identifying himself with Jesus, the outsider, the excluded one, the victim, the risen one. We go to Jesus “outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12-13) because paradoxically that place of rejection is the place of reconciliation, because that is what God’s kingdom, God’s order, looks like when it meets the order of this world.

Lent Group for Lent 1 2011 – “The Sacrifice of the Mass”

Notes for the Lent Group (the presentation was followed by discussion)

At every Mass the celebrant says,

“Pray, my brothers and sisters, that this our sacrifice may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.”

To which everyone replies,

“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his Church.”

What I’d like to explore in this session is what on earth we might be talking about when we say these things. We’ll be looking at two paintings which in different ways explore what happens when violence and the Eucharist come up against each other.

The last supper was a scene of betrayal. Jesus was about to be given up to death, and the supper was the set-up for a lynching. Judas had already given away the location of Jesus, and the route he would take to the garden after supper, where the temple guard would be waiting for him. At every Mass the celebrant, re-enacting the words and actions of Jesus, begins, “in the same night that he was betrayed”. The Eucharist was instituted as Jesus’ last act before the oncoming darkness of violence and murder.

It was at that moment that Jesus made his greatest act of love. He gave us himself. A few hours after the supper, he would no longer be free, and would no longer be in control of what happened to him. At the supper, he was still free, he could still just about have escaped and gone off to live quietly in obscurity for the rest of his days. But he chose to stay and give his life, freely, as an act of love. Before they were taken from him by force, he gave his body and blood. This is my body which is given for you.

The Jesuit theologian Maurice de la Taille argued that the essence of Christ’s sacrifice was found in the institution of the Eucharist. The supper was Christ’s oblation, that is his offering of himself, made while he was still free to do so. It was as it were the contract by which he bound himself to the death of the cross where the sacrifice was completed.

To whom did Jesus give himself up? To whom was the oblation offered? Jesus said, “This is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

I’d like to suggest that the sacrifice of the Mass has nothing to do with a victim offered to placate an angry God. In his life and teaching Jesus consistently rejected any such idea. He quoted the psalms and the prophets who said that God wanted mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings. He overturned the tables in the temple, not because he objected to trade, but because they were an essential part of the sacrificial system. He did so saying that the temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations. God did not want, did not require, the wholesale slaughter of animals that went on there.

According to the catholic anthropologist René Girard, ancient cults of sacrifice have their origin in violence, rivalry and fear. They are a way in which society protects itself from its own violence by finding substitute victims. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Jesus undermined that idea, and consciously placed himself in the position of our scapegoat. He subverted the murder that was coming his way by giving his life freely and forgiving his murderers. He was raised from the dead, not to exact revenge, but to bring forgiveness and new life to all. His death and resurrection is God’s life and light breaking through into our darkness and violence. It is humanity meeting God’s utterly generous, vivacious alive-ness, and being transformed. It is the life of Jesus given for us, not to propitiate an angry deity. And this is expressed, lived out, in a unique way through the Eucharist.

Every Eucharist takes place in this world, in some way or another amid the gathering clouds of human betrayal, violence and murder. And every Eucharist is the breaking in to that of God’s utterly vivacious alive-ness, the generosity that is completely free of rivalry and violence. The sacrifice of the Mass is God giving himself to us in Jesus, subverting and overturning the way in which human beings demand sacrifices and victims.

Last year in his homily for the feast of Corpus Christi, Pope Benedict said that the priesthood of Jesus was not the same as that of the priests in the temple. In fact, his sacrifice was “completely the opposite” of theirs. He concluded:

“It is divine power, the same power that created the incarnation of the Word, that transforms extreme violence and extreme injustice into a supreme act of love and justice. This is the work of the priesthood of Christ, which the Church has inherited and extends through history, in the dual form of the common priesthood of the baptised and the ordained priesthood of ministers, so as to transform the world with the love of God.”


It is that possibility of the transformation of the world from violence to love which we will explore in these two paintings.



Ramon Casas i CarbĂ³ (1866-1932)
Corpus Christi Procession leaving Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona 1896-98. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Barcelona in 1896 was part of a Spain in which a repressive government protected vested interests, one of which was the Church. Revolutionary groups had carried out a number of bombings and assassinations in Barcelona, culminating in the attack on this Corpus Christi procession. 12 people were killed. No-one knows who was to blame, but  anyone suspected of being an anarchist or revolutionary was rounded up and confessions extracted under torture. Several died under torture, five were executed, and 61 people who were acquitted were nonetheless sent to a penal colony. The so-called "Montjuic Trials" caused outrage around the world. Protest in Barcelona itself had to be subtle, but Casas, by the mere fact of painting and exhibiting this picture after the trials, was making a powerful statement.

So this is no mere street scene, but an image fraught with tension and impending violence and revenge. The dresses of the first communion girls look as though they are dissolving, about to be blown away. The group of men in the middle ground holding torches for the procession look as though they could be lighting fuses on bombs. And you have in the front and all around the Guardia Civil on horseback, figures of state authority and repression.  They appear again in another painting by Casas, The Charge, which shows mounted Guardia mowing down an unarmed demonstration. As has often been the case in the polarised history of Spanish politics, the Church and its clergy with some noble exceptions tended to side with the forces of repression, and indeed were complicit in the scenes of torture and "confession" which were a reaction to the equally outrageous and unjust acts of terrorism.

And yet this is a Corpus Christi procession, the Body of Christ about to be caught up in this storm of murder and revenge, the very scapegoating from which Jesus seeks to free us. That Body still given, freely, divinely, even into a situation where it is about to be betrayed once more. We are perhaps too used to images of Judas at the last supper, the first treacherous priest about to betray Jesus. He fails to shock us any more. This image of the Body of Christ caught up in violence in which some of his priests, too, will be complicit, brings home the darkness of that first betrayal into which Jesus, nevertheless, gave himself, the light of the world that the darkness cannot overcome.



Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) 
The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. The National Gallery, London.

(Image source: The National Gallery)

Caravaggio had a troubled life. He was passionate, jealous and violent. He’d killed someone in a brawl, been imprisoned, escaped and was on the run from a death sentence when he caught a fever and died. Some of his paintings show the dark and troubled side of his character. Beheadings which are all too vivid, perhaps from his reflecting on the possible fate that lay in store for him while he was in prison. Sexual desire bound up with death, sensual bodies already tinged with the green of decay.

And yet he painted this. In fact he painted this scene twice, and this is the earlier version which is in the National Gallery. He uses chiaroscuro to make the scene come alive and draw us in. It is the risen Jesus making himself known in the breaking of bread, after the disciples on the road had failed to recognize him while he explained the scriptures to them. Jesus does not look like conventional portrayals of him. Caravaggio used rough working men as models which scandalized some, but which helps to bring out the enigma of Jesus’ appearance here.

To me this is a hopeful picture. Caravaggio, for all his violence and sin, draws us into this scene and I can only think that he does so by seeing himself there too. It is a scene of recognition, of the possibility of redemption, the meeting with the Divine victim, risen from the death we inflicted, and offering us freely the life we thought we had to take. It says to me that violence and sin need not be the final word on Caravaggio’s life. Or on ours.

Saturday 12 March 2011

Homily at Mass, Ash Wednesday, 9 March 2011


In a short moment, we will have the imposition of ashes, which is accompanied by the words:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

These words are not accidental, and were not made up recently by the people who write services.  They consist of two quotations from scripture. The first is from Genesis 3:19. After the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, God says to Adam:

By the sweat of your face
   you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
   for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
   and to dust you shall return.

The second, slightly paraphrased, quotation is from Mark 1:14-15:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

In the simple words and action of the imposition of ash are contained the tragedy and the hope of the whole human story.

First, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. That is of course a reminder of death, a memento mori, that we should always live with eternity in mind, knowing that this life is transient. But those words also speak to us of our creation. God has created us out of the dust of the earth, which he called into being out of nothing. We are created in love, created with a purpose. God has created us in his image, the image of the Holy Trinity, to live life in all its fullness, in his creation which he made entirely good.

But sin has marred that creation, has damaged God’s image in us. Human disobedience and sin prevents us from living as God wants us to. We turn away from communion with God and one another, preferring our selfish interests, our rivalrous desires, the violent exaltation of the ego. Death has become for us not an aspect of the goodness of creation but a tyranny of fear and subjugation, the murderous mechanism that drives the whole human race into a cycle of cynicism and despair.

But God would not allow that his creation should fail.  When, in his providence, the fullness of time had come, he sent his Son into the world to put right what had gone wrong. This was foreshadowed in the Old Testament Rite of Atonement, when the priest emerged from the Holy of Holies to enact God entering his creation to bring healing and restoration.

And now Jesus has come, as our true High Priest, to make atonement for us once and for all. God in Jesus has reconciled the world to himself. And we receive that restoration which he has worked for us by repenting and believing in the good news, by turning away from our sins and being faithful to the Gospel.

And yet there is more. Jesus joins up the whole broken human story and brings out of the ruin of the fall something greater than what was lost. For God has now united himself with our human nature. The Body of Jesus, like our bodies, was made from the dust of the earth, and was returned to the earth on the evening of Good Friday. And yet, because of the incarnation, that human Body is also the Body of God. Here at the beginning of Lent we look forward to those tremendous mysteries of Holy Week and Easter. Jesus’ new commandment of love. The institution of the Eucharist, the Body of Christ given for us in a wholly new way. And the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Christ.

For that Body, formed from the dust of the earth, was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven, and lives now in the Church and in the Eucharist. The dust of the earth, our human nature, united with God, has been taken into the life of God for all eternity. And that is our destiny, too, united with Christ. That is the glorious completion of the entire human story signified in these short words:

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel.

Homily at Mass, Shrove Tuesday 8 March 2011


Mark 12:13-17

“They sent to him some Pharisees and some Herodians” to ask Jesus a question about paying taxes to Caesar.  Now that’s interesting. The Pharisees and Herodians actually were enemies, opposing parties. Herod was put in power and protected by Rome, and so were his circle of supporters and henchmen. So the Herodians would naturally have approved of paying taxes to Caesar.

The Pharisees were a strict religious party who would have wanted to get rid of the unclean foreign influences of Rome, with its emperor worship and images which they saw as blasphemous – just as on the coin. So they would have opposed paying taxes to Caesar.

The conflict between the Pharisees and the Herodians was a dangerous one. Supporters of Rome were unpopular and could easily get themselves killed by a mob while the Romans weren’t looking. Opponents of Roman rule could be denounced to the authorities as rebels and that would be the end of them.

The Pharisees and Herodians are rivals for power and control, and although they see themselves as opposites they are really mirror images of each other. Their desire is the same. They want power in the way they each understand power – something driven by rivalry, violence and the fear of death.

So they are enemies and yet they become united in trying to trap Jesus. They want him to fall into the trap of coming down on one side or the other, so that the consequences of their own rivalry and violence will devolve on him and not on them.

But Jesus pulls the carpet out from under them with his answer, “Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God”. 

What belongs to Caesar is not just the money, but the whole way of living in the world defined by rivalry and violence and the fear of death. Jesus says, give it back. Don’t let yourself be defined by it. Give it up.

And give to God what is God’s. To do that is not to portion out the things of this life – this belongs to Caesar, that belongs to God. Rather it is to recognise that everything we are and everything we have we owe to God. It is all God’s free gift. We simply receive life itself and everything that is ours as a gift, given by one we can completely depend on. God’s gift of life is without limit and will not be taken back, because he shares his own life with us in Jesus. And when we learn to receive life as a gift there is no longer any room for rivalry or fear.

Lent begins tomorrow. It is a season of living more simply, more sparingly, so that we can learn once again to receive our life simply as God’s gift.

This season of penitence and training is another opportunity to give back, to unlearn, Caesar’s way of living, the way of this world defined by rivalry and the fear of death.

Instead, our eyes turn towards the death and resurrection of Christ so that we can give to God what is God’s, that is, everything we are and we have. For it is in relinquishing those human claims of possession and rivalry and control that we are able to receive the life that God lives. It is in giving up everything to God that we receive everything from him.