Author: Simon Sleeman

Fr. Henry O’ Shea:

Not a gate that’s gently hinged or deftly hung,

Not like the ones you planed at Joseph’s place…

Not like the ones that closed in Mary’s face

From house to house in brimming Bethlehem,

Not like the one that no-one may assail,

The dreadful curtain, the forbidding veil

That waits your torturing in Jerusalem….

 IT IS AMAZING HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE SURPRISED TO LEARN THAT REAL COWS, MOO-COWS, AND REAL BAA-BAA BLACKSHEEP STILL EXIST. AS A CHILD BACK IN THE DARK AGES I REMEMBER BEING AMAZED AT THE REACTION OF A YOUG AMERICAN COUSIN FROM NEW YORK WHEN HE SAW A REAL COW FOR THE FIRST TIME. HE WAS INTRIGUED TO LEARN THAT MILK DID NOT COME PRIMARILY FROM BOTTLES OR CARTONS ON A SUPERMARKET SHELF

FOR MOST OF US THE WORD SHEEP SUGGESTS WOOLY BRAINLESSNESS ON FOUR LEGS – OR, I IMAGINE FOR MANY OF  US,  ON TWO LEGS. 

FEW OF US WOULD FEEL PARTICULARLY HAPPY TO BE COMPARED TO OR WITH A SHEEP. 

THE IDEA OF A SHEPHERD IS LESS THREATENING BUT PROBABLY CALLS TO MIND LITTLE MORE THAN THE CHRISTMAS CRIB OR GREEN WELLIES, OR MORE RECENTLY HERE IN IRELAND, BLOCKADED STREETS AND ROADS.

IMAGINE THE HOLY LAND – MODERN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE – AT THE TIME OF OUR LORD. THERE WAS PRECIOUS LITTLE LAND TO CULTIVATE. LIVESTOCK AND THE SHEPHERDS WHO TENDED THEM WERE IMPORTANT ELEMENTS IN THE ECONOMY. OUR LORD’S LISTENERS WOULD HAVE HAD LITTLE DIFFICULTY IN UNDERSTANDING THE NEED FOR A SHEPHERD WHO IS TRUSTWORTHY, DILIGENT, ALERT AND ATTENTIVE TO THE NEEDS OF HIS FLOCK. THESE LISTENERS WOULD HAVE HAD NO DIFFICULTY UNDERSTANDING OUR LORD WHEN HE SPOKE OF SHEEP RECOGNIZING THE SHEPHERD’S VOICE AND CALLING EACH SHEEP BY NAME. THIS PHENOMENON CAN STILL BE EXPERIENCED IN THE HOLY LAND AND ELSEWHERE TO-DAY.

THOUGH IN SEVERAL PLACES IN THE GOSPELS JESUS DOES DESCRIBE HIMSELF AS A SHEPHERD, IN TO-DAY’S GOSPEL HE PRIMARILY CALLS HIMSELF THE GATE. HOW CAN A PERSON BE A GATE? HERE, AS IN MANY PLACES IN THE BIBLE OUR QUESTION IS NOT SO MUCH ‘HOW CAN THIS BE?’, BUT, ‘WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?’

JESUS DOES NOT SAY THAT HE WILL SHOW ANYONE THE WAY TO THE SHEEPFOLD WHICH IS, PERHAPS, THE CHURCH. NOR DOES HE SAY THAT HE WILL GUARD THE GATE TO THIS SHEEPFOLD. HE SAYS, RATHER, THAT HE IS THE GATE ITSELF.

A GATE OR DOOR MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE TO GO IN AND OUT. IT GIVES ENTRY, USUALLY TO THOSE WHO ARE INVITED OR HAVE A RIGHT TO ENTER. IT PROTECTS THOSE WHO ARE INSIDE AND EXCLUDES THOSE WHO DO NOT BELONG, THOSE WHO WOULD DO HARM. AS THE GATE ITSELF/HIMSELF, JESUS IS THE MAKER POSSIBLE FOR ALL, SHEEP AND SHEPHERDS ALIKE, TO GO IN AND OUT.

THE THIEVES AND BRIGANDS OF WHOM OUR LORD SPEAKS ARE THOSE WHO TRY TO GAIN ACCESS TO THE SHEEP AND THE SHEEPFOLD BY BY-PASSING HIM, JESUS THE GATE.

THIEVES AND BRIGANDS ARE THOSE WHO TRY TO GAIN ACCESS BY THE FALSE ENTRANCES OF FAKE VALUES, EASY ANSWERS, SELFISHNESS, COWARDICE, LUST FOR POWER, ARROGATED AND ARROGANT AUTHORITY AND FUNCTIONS, ENTITLEMENT, ILLUSIONS AND DELUSIONS OF ALL KINDS, EMPTY PROMISES, INVENTED SALVATION. THESE FALSE SHEPHERDS CAN ONLY STEAL, KILL AND DESTROY. THEY DO NOT FEED THE LORD’S LAMBS, THEY DO NOT FEED THE LORD’S SHEEP – THEY SIMPLY SHEAR THEM AND DEPART. AND ONE CAN EVEN DO UNIVERSITY COURSES NOW ON THIS AND, INDEED, OBTAIN ACADEMIC DEGREES IN IT.

THE SHEEP OF JESUS’ FLOCK HAVE AN EAR FOR THE VOICE OF A SHEPHERD WHO PREACHES NOT HIMSELF BUT THE DEAD AND RISEN CHRIST. THIS SHEPHERD’S VOICE RINGS TRUE – REAL VALUES, GENUINE, IF DEMANDING, ANSWERS; SELFLESSNESS, COURAGE, REALISM, WELL-FOUNDED HOPE, TRUE LOVE, DISINTERESTED AVAILABLITY – REMEMBERING THAT THE WORD ‘DISINTERESTED’ MEANS NOT ON THE MAKE AND ‘UNINTERESTED’ MEANS ONE COULDN’T CARE LESS.

THE TRUE SHEPHERD DOES NOT BULLY. THE TRUE SHEPHERD DOES NOT BELIEVE IN VIOLENCE, SUPERIOR FORCE, OR THAT THE UNIVERSE IS DIVIDED INTO WINNER AND LOSERS. AND ONE DOES NOT HAVE TO HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO BE A BULLY. LOOK AT ANY KINDERGARTEN, ANT SCHOOL, ANY WORKPLACE.

THE  TRUE SHEPHERD LEADS THE TRUE SHEEP THROUGH THE GATE WHICH IS CHRIST, TO THE SECURITY OF CHRIST’S LOVE, TO THE FREEDOM OF ONE’S BEST SELF, TO THE NOURISHMENT AND CHALLENGING PEACE OF A LIFE WITH REAL PURPOSE – TO SURE PASTURE.

WHO ARE THE TRUE SHEEP?

IN TO-DAY’S FIRST READING WE HEARD ST.PETER SPEAKING IN A LOUD VOICE ABOUT JESUS THE LORD, THE CHRIST, OF WHO THIS CHRIST WAS AND WHAT HAD BEEN DONE TO HIM. PETER’S HEARERS ASKED HIM WHAT THEY SHOULD, WHAT THEY COULD DO HAVING HEARD THIS.  HE SAID THEY SHOULD DO TWO THINGS. THEY SHOULD REPENT AND SHOULD BE BAPTISED IN JESUS’S NAME. IN RETURN, THEY WOULD BE GIVEN THE HOLY SPIRIT.

TRUE SHEEP REPENT. THAT IS: THEY LOOK ON THE FACE OF JESUS AND LISTEN TO HIS WORD. THEN THEY LOOK AT THEIR OWN LIVES AND NOT ONLY ADMIT THEIR SINS AND ARE SORRY FOR THEM, BUT, MORE IMPORTANTLY THEY ACCEPT A WHOLE NEW WAY OF BEING HUMAN. THEY ACCEPT A WHOLE NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS AND A WHOLE NEW WAY OF BEHAVING. CHANGE OF MIND AND HEART LEADS TO CHANGE OF SEEING AND DOING.

BY BEING BAPTISED, THE TRUE SHEEP ARE TAKEN SYMBOLICALLY AND REALLY INTO CHRIST RISEN FROM THE DEAD. THIS CHRIST NOW BECOMES THE TRUE GATE FOR THEM. IT IS ONLY BY GOING THROUGH THIS GATE THAT THEIR SINS AND WHAT FOLLOWS FROM THEM CAN BE TAKEN AWAY.

THIS GATE ALONE OPENS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF A TRULY NEW VISION AND A NEW BEHAVIOUR. BY GOING THROUGH THIS GATE, THE SHEEP ARE GIVEN THE HOLY SPIRIT AND FROM HIM RECEIVE THE STRENGTH AND GUIDANCE TO PERSEVERE IN THIS CHANGE OF MIND AND HEART AND ACTION – DESPITE BACKSLIDING AND OCCASIONAL DEAFNESS TO THE TRUE SHEPHERD’S VOICE.

Not a gate you made 

but one you always were and have become:

Load-bearing, balancing, a weighted beam

To bridge the gap, to bring us within reach

Of your high pasture. Calling us by name,

You lay your body down across the breach,

Yourself the door that opens into home.

Abbot Columba McCann: I wonder:  when is the last time you threw a tantrum? Can you remember throwing a tantrum, perhaps as a teenager?  Imagine a young person is really angry at their parents.  When the parents are out he takes some eggs out of the fridge and flings them at the kitchen wall.  That feels good! So he goes a little further.  He takes a slab of butter and uses it to write obscenities on the kitchen floor.  Then he really gets into the swing of it.  He slits open a bag of flour and throws it everywhere.  Then just to make it even worse he throws sugar on the floor so that it will crackle under his parents’ feet.  Finally, to make it all look a bit dirtier, he takes a tin of cocoa and empties it around the room.  Then he leaves the house, slams the door and goes off to meet his friends.

Well you can imagine the reaction when the folks get home, faced with utter chaos in their brand new designer kitchen.  Pretty awful, to put it mildly.

And yet you have in all that chaos all the right ingredients to make a beautiful chocolate cake.  I know because I have made them myself.  All you need is to put them together in the right way.  And so you create a chocolate cake.

It’s not a million miles away from the description of how God creates, as recounted in the first reading from Genesis.  This particular piece of writing, more like a poem than a documentary, is not too interested in ideas like creation out of nothing, or the big bang, or how long it really took, and so on.  It’s hard to find the right English words to translate the original Hebrew description of what it was like before God got to work:  tohu vavovu.  Formless and empty, void, desolate, waste and void, without shape.  And it was dark, with some kind of watery mass.  All a description of chaos, you might say.

But the breath of God, the Spirit of God was breathing, blowing like a wind over all of this incoherence.

There are chaotic moments in all our lives:  moments when things don’t make sense or are empty; moments when you don’t have a clear shape about what is going on; moments when you may feel out of control, where everything is uncertain.  But all the ingredients are there, and God is ever-creative.

God brings light into the darkness; God brings order out of chaos; God brings beauty out of wasteland; God brings forth life where there was none.  And how?  God’s Spirit hovers over everything that happens.  And God speaks.  When God says ‘Let there be light’, there is light.  When God speaks, it happens.

Amid the awfulness and chaos and sheer depravity of what was done to Jesus on Good Friday, the Spirit still hovered.  The Spirit raised Jesus from death.  The same Spirit hovered over the waters of our baptism.  Tonight we baptise John and Sara’s baby:  Fionbarra Edward John.  The Spirit hovers over him tonight and for the rest of his life.  The same Spirit accompanies us.  The word of God continues to speak.  Every time we hear the voice of Christ and respond, God continues to create in us and through us.  Every time we respond to the words of Jesus with faith, our world becomes a better place.  If we keep responding, always open to God’s Spirit, attentive to the presence of Christ, we finally grow up into what we were always intended to be:  the image and likeness of God himself.

The amazing fact of the death and resurrection of Jesus is that God, not chaos,  always has the last word, and it is always a word of light and life.

Abbot Columba McCann: Moving house is a high-stress event.  It’s there alongside changing job or losing a life-partner.  Letting go of the familiar and having to adapt to the unknown.  Wondering what it is going to be like.  It’s a kind of bereavement, and it’s also a moment of uncertainty.  A leap of faith into the dark.  Wondering:  will I survive?  Will I get through this?

In ancient times this kind of transition was a regular event for nomadic herders, who moved their flocks every now and then into new pastures.  It was a risky moment, and there was the tradition of offering up one of their lambs and painting the doors of their tents with its blood as a sign of divine protection for the journey ahead.

Small wonder then that this becomes the ritual for the Jewish Passover, celebrating a really extraordinary journey, an amazing transition, out of the slavery of Egypt to freedom, from darkness to light, all under God’s guiding hand.  And every year the Passover meal brought it all back again:  the memory of what God is like:  the one who sets free, the one who protects us on life’s journey.

Around the time of Jesus’ earthly life there was an expectation that the Messiah would finally show himself at Passover, that a new and greater moment of liberation would happen.  And here he is, this evening, at table with his friends at Passover time, about to complete the greatest journey of all before our eyes, the journey all of us must make, the journey from this life to the next.  But for him it’s not a comfortable slipping away under palliative care; it’s the worst possible way to go:  condemned as a blasphemer by his own religion, and crucified like a criminal by the Romans.  Tortured to death and abandoned.

It is perhaps his way of saying:  no matter how dark it gets, no matter how hopeless it looks, I have been there before you.  I have been through the worst that human life can throw at you, and I am alive.   I am your Passover Lamb.  The blood I shed is the sign that I am with you now as your protection on life’s journey.  My lifeblood is not something sprinkled on the outside, but something for you to take into yourself, so that you take me into yourself and begin to live by my risen life.  No matter whatever passage you may walk through, my life will sustain you and lift you up.

Abbot Columba McCann: After such a long and moving gospel account, I will simply share one idea.

We may often think we know the meaning of what the Bible says, but sometimes the real meaning can be surprising and liberating.

When Jesus speaks of Judas, the one who betrays him, he says ‘Alas for him’ or ‘Woe to him’ and goes on to say, ‘It would be better for him if he were not born.’

It can sound like a word of condemnation, suggesting that Judas is going to get what is coming to him in retribution for his betrayal.  But one day a scripture scholar opened my eyes to what Jesus was really saying.

In the language of his own time and place, Jesus’ words ‘Alas for him’ or ‘Woe to him’ meant,  ‘I’m really sorry for him, he’s in a dreadful situation.’

What about the words ‘better for him if he had not been born’?  Does the Bible itself give us any clue as to what this might be about?  These are the words of Job, in the book of Job, the story of a man who goes through intense suffering.  In his pain, Job cries out, ‘Better if I had not been born!’   Jesus is commenting on the sufferings of Judas.

It seems that Jesus is really saying something like this:  ‘I feel so, so sorry for this man.  He is suffering terribly’.  No condemnation.  Words of compassion about the one who betrays him.  This is the kind of Messiah we acclaim waving our palm branches…

Fr. Henry O’Shea:

I, Lazarus, have seen the brickwork sky,

Its throne is made of night!

Its salt and lime are drying to the eye,

My wandering… 

a sound! a rumble, and a flash of light!

Andrew Fairchild

In exactly two weeks time – despite all current existential terrors and dangers in and from Iran, Ukraine, South Sudan, Washington, Doonbeg and Moscow, just to name a few – we hope to be celebrating the greatest feast of the year – Easter. 

Is Easter for us just one of the growing string of bank-holiday weekends here in our country; a chance to gorge on Easter-eggs, get sozzled and/or stoned, eat too much or take a quick break in the Bahamas – or Bundoran – or all of these together?  

In the night from Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday morning, from the 4th to 5th April we, the Church, will re-tell once again, in the Great Vigil, the wonderful story of what God has done for us in the past, what he is doing now and what he promises for the future. And in re-telling the story, we will re-live it. And in re-living the story we will renew our looking forward to all that it promises. 

One of the most stirring readings in the Easter Vigil is the account from the Old Testament Book of Exodus of how Moses led the people of Israel through the Red Sea – as the account says, ‘water to the right of them, water to the left of them’.   In the course of subsequent centuries the people of Israel – not to be confused with the present Zionist regime – meditated on this experience and came to realise that this text was not just about a political or historical event. This reading was not just about the rescuing of an oppressed minority from a hostile, unwelcoming environment in Egypt, the land of exile.   Rather, they began to see that this account was about God’s leading them into a new way of being with him.   

This account was and is about their, about our, being rescued from the Egyptian captivity of an aimless, hopeless and endless circle of human inadequacy, greed, injustice, exploitation, dissatisfaction, despair and fear.   This account was and is about a saving of the people of Israel from themselves, the saving of us from ourselves. This account is about their and our being made able to imagine, being made able to believe, being made able to live, being made able to love, and above all, being made able to hope.   

In all the gospel passages in the weeks leading up to Easter, we are told something about the mind and workings of the God whose great deeds we are going to sing about this Easter and at all our Easters, including those that happen outside the actual season.  And in this singing we are also told about the demanding possibilities opened to us by the mind and workings of this God who, we believe, became man in Jesus Christ. We are reassured that what we might regard as humanly impossible can become incarnationally possible.

Today’s gospel, with the story of the raising of Lazarus, is a kind of preview, showing as it does Christ’s capacity to give life, to be the life of the believer.  The writer of the gospel passage has Jesus say: ‘I am the resurrection. If anyone believes in me even though they die, they will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.’ And then Jesus asks Martha, asks each one of us, ‘Do you believe this?’ And then Jesus goes on to call on the Father in whose power he raises Lazarus to life. This speaks to the Lazarus in all of us.

Remembering that all the readings at Mass have to be listened to through the echo-chamber of their reference to Christ, today’s first reading from the Prophet Ezekiel promises that our graves will be opened, that he will put his Spirit in us and we will live. In the Letter to the Romans St Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, has made his home in us and that it is this Spirit who does give and will give meaning and resurrection to our own living, meaning and resurrection to our own dying.

When Christ promises to settle us in our own land, on the soil of the new Israel of the baptised, he is not promising only a bodily resurrection. He is also promising to bring us – and reminding us that he has already brought us – safely across the Red Sea of the officially nice and holy, bringing us safely across the Red Sea of the any current consensus, safely away from those who want to snatch from us our responsibility for our own lives and hearts – those who want to  diminish us, confine us, within the constraints of their own frightened, regulating, essentially tiny minds and shrivelled hearts.   We are told that along with this liberation, we are beckoned across to a responsibility which is big-minded, big-hearted, honest, open to the truth; able to recognise that truth with a sensitive and sensitised conscience; able to do that truth.

In the situations in which we find ourselves, one might ask if what has just been said doesn’t sound like so much bluster, bad poetry or whistling in the wind. One thing is sure: this is not a time for glib, superficial answers, fraudulent explanations, not a time for scoring theological or anti-theological points. 

The present world crises are proving not just a challenge to do, a challenge to live the truth. All day every day we experience examples of thousands of people risking and even laying down their lives for others. Crises can bring out the best in people. Crises require us to put our hearts and hands and, indeed, our money, where our mouths are. Crises such as the one we are going through in these weeks and months, these Red Seas we are crossing, put things in perspective. Crises challenge us to use our intelligence, ingenuity and generosity to conquer them but also force us to ask ourselves what is really true, what is really valuable, what is really worth living for what is really worth dying for. We are challenged to love our fellow humans not just in a milk-and-water theoretically benevolent way –‘be kind’ – but by doing, or sometimes not-doing; by being there for one another, however much we may differ in areas of belief and aspiration.    

As the community of those who are saved from ourselves, from our smallnesses, from our absurdities;  as the forgiven community of those rescued by the skin of our teeth from the death of our sins, we Christians try to be worthy of Jesus’s compassionate words, ‘This sickness will end, not in death but in God’s glory, and through it the Son of God will be glorified.’ 

This is what we are looking forward to singing about at the great Vigil on Holy Saturday night.

O bright the door that leads me back to life!

But, bidden! I must change my sleep for strife!

Thank you, heart-friend!

I thought that you’d forgot!

Who made me breathe, ‘I AM!’ when I was not.

Forgive!  I cannot hear, my head’s like snow,

AH!  That’s it, ‘loose the man, and let him go!

Andrew Fairchild