While the leaders of the G7 countries are convened in Cornwall, purportedly to make the world a better place, today’s gospel promises something comparable but of a different order, the Kingdom of God. Two projects, one for the short term, the other for the long! Can they be reconciled? Can we be citizens of both the secular city and the kingdom of heaven?
In the first reading, from the prophet Ezekial, we are presented with a parable about the Jewish people exiled in Babylon. In the name of the Lord, Ezekial declares, ‘From the top of the cedar I will take a shoot and plant it on the high mountain of Israel’. By this is meant that God, the Lord of history, will see to it that his own people are returned to their homeland, safe and sound, as foretold by prophets, to live there as God’s special people. Ezekial’s listeners surely welcomed this. In our own day some comparable good tidings are the promise of a billion free doses of vaccine, the consolidating of alliances and furthering the deal on reducing carbon emissions. Plans, ancient and new, for a better world.
Today’s gospel takes up this theme, but with more modest language. To elucidate the kingdom of God Jesus uses two parables. Firstly that of a tiny seed, the so-called smallest is a sign of the beginning of the kingdom of God! Despite its puny size we are not to lose heart for its future! Secondly: a stalk of grain, for which we are not to lose heart despite it being so slow to bear fruit! Such parables of the kingdom give us pause to think. They are telling us not to put our trust in appearances, God’s plan on earth is progessing inexorably towards a successful future. He is at work though we may strain ourselves to see it. We must keep faith, not be distracted or betray ourselves by the allurements of quick, concrete, progress.
There are many ways we could give up on the kingdom of God! God-fearing peoples, ancient and contemporary, may feel frustrated by the long wait; or they may postpone working for the kingdom till a more convenient time. We could resign ourselves to a merely idealistic kingdom: one that it is already mystically present in our interior lives, leaving us with little or nothing to do, in practical terms.
Finally, there is the temptation to reduce our ambitions and locate the kingdom quite simply on the level of morality, restrict it to the field of ethical action. Pushing this idea further some may try to remove God altogether from the stage for wellbeing here and now, yielding to a wholly secular, post-Christian, shadow of the kingdom of God. Mankind’s positive energies would be harnassed solely for the satisfaction of immediate needs, social calm and the conservation of creation. It seems dangerously close to the third temptation of Christ: ‘taking him to a very high mountain the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. And he said’ ‘I will give you all these if you fall at my feet and do me hommage’. Such is a utopian dreaming but lacking a foundation in truth, rudderless in a sea of conflicting demands, each person more or less self-centred.
But today’s gospel speaks of another kingdom, the Kingdom of God – where the Lord is active in history and guiding his people, inviting them to live in truth and justice, in the love of God and neighbour. And his kingship over the world and over history transcends the moment, indeed transcends and reaches beyond the whole of history. And yet at the same time it belongs absolutely to the present. It is present in our liturgy, in our moral action, it is present as a life-shaping power through the believer’s prayer and being. By faith the Christian already participates in the world to come.
With Christ this kingdom is already here and finds expression in gospel statements like ‘the kingdom of God ‘is at hand’, ‘it has come upon you’, or ‘is in the midst of you’. From this we can see that in Christ, God has drawn near to us and He is the one who acts, ruling in a divine way, without worldly powers.
To conclude let us consider just one example: the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. They both pray in the Temple in their very different ways. The Pharisee, like the secular city, can boast considerable ethical achievements; but the tax collector knows he cannot boast before God; he prays in full awareness of his debt to grace. The pharisee does not really look at God at all, because he does everything right by himself. He has no real relation to God, who is ultimately superfluous. But the tax collector sees himself in the light of God, knows that he needs God and that he lives by God’s goodness. He draws life from being-in-relation to God. He will always need the gift of goodness and in receiving it he will learn to pass it on to others. The grace for which he prays does not dispense him from moral action; it is what makes him truly capable of doing good in the first place. In other words the good actions of the secular city are recognised but for the citizen of heaven those same achievements are done in the context of a relationship of love. He needs God and because he recognises that he begins, through God’s goodness, to become good himself. That makes all the difference.
So, planted in love and built on love, let us make our contribution to the advent of God’s Kingdom!
Fr John
Fr William shares his thoughts on how and why we work in the monastery according to Saint Benedict’s Rule: https://youtu.be/cGRtqmjJl64
Father Columba shares here some thoughts on the place of communal and private prayer, the foundations of our life in the monastery: https://youtu.be/MwI_vezL_uU
BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST Glenstal 3rd June, 2018.
YR B Ex 24:3-8; Heb 9:11-15; Mk 14:12-16.22-26
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood –
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
A text such as this, if read out of context, can sound rather creepy.
Similarly, those who are unfamiliar with the language and images of the Scriptures, those who are not tuned into the idiom of the liturgy, may find the talk of blood in today’s readings, particularly in the first and second readings, a little morbid.
In the Semitic world, and in particular the Hebrew world, blood was synonymous with life. And so, in today’s first reading from the Book of Exodus, the blood of the sacrificed animals, their life, is offered to the Lord as an image of the peoples’ own life. Sanctified by the sacrifice on the altar, this blood is then sprinkled on the people, a symbol of God’s response by offering his own life and way of life to his people. The sprinkling symbolizes and brings God’s covenant with his people and the promise of another, everlasting covenant to come.
In the letter to the Hebrews, today’s second reading, the writer explains that the sacrifices of the Old Testament, with their use of animals, were anticipatory images of the real life-giving sacrifice which is the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The efficacy of the sacrifices of the Old Testament, however limited, is not denied, and their role as pre-figurations of the one really efficacious sacrifice of Christ is acknowledged. But now, we are told, ‘(Christ) brings a new covenant, as the mediator, only so that the people who were called to an eternal inheritance may actually receive what was promised…the blood of Christ, who offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to God through the eternal Spirit can purify our inner self from dead actions so that we do our service to the living God.’
How we have access to this amazing reality is laid out in today’s gospel. This describes what we call the Last Supper, during which Jesus, taking the bread and wine, anticipates what is to happen on the following day, the Friday we call good. He foretells his death. But he also foretells what will happen on Easter Sunday, his resurrection. And he tells us that whenever we perform this same action of taking, blessing, breaking and eating the bread and taking, blessing and drinking the wine, the power of His Spirit will make these realities present to us. The Last Supper becomes the First Supper of many which will continue until the end of time.
Those who have celebrated attentively the liturgy of the Easter Triduum, the great making-present of the Paschal Mystery of the life, death and resurrection of Christ, may wonder why it is necessary to have a special feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, since this has already been celebrated only two months ago – and indeed is celebrated at every Mass.
Many of the Church’s feasts have their origin in historical circumstances. In the course of the centuries leading up to the thirteenth century, the practice of the faithful receiving communion at every Mass became less and less frequent. Along with this came a concentration on the Mass as primarily the action of the priest, the congregation being reduced to the status of passive onlookers rather than active participants. Increasingly, what was regarded as the moment of consecration became central, at the cost of other elements of the Mass, such as the readings, which in any case, being in Latin, were incomprehensible to most present. For almost all the faithful, seeing and adoring the elevated Host became the centre of the liturgical action. The denial by many of the Reformers in the 16th century of the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic led to an even greater emphasis in Catholic belief and practice on this concentration on the Host.
But, enough of the history lecture. What was formerly called the feast of Corpus Christi, or the feast of the Body of Christ, concentrating on adoration of Christ really present in the consecrated host, is now called the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. It is a feast that reminds us as we blossom into Summer of that blossoming of life that followed Jesus’s death. It reminds us of our own blossoming, begun at our Baptism, boosted at our Confirmation and the other sacraments, all constantly fertilized, nourished, by the bread/body broken for us and the wine/blood poured out for us. It is a happy and gentle reminder that even if we might we like to think
that we are, in the words of the poet, sound, substantial flesh and blood, the fact is that,
On this table of the King,
Our new Paschal offering
Brings to end the olden rite.
Here, for empty shadows fled,
Is reality instead,
Here, instead of darkness, light.
Fr Henry OSB
Join our daily round of prayer, work, study and community life in the monastery which Saint Benedict calls a ‘School of the Lord’s Service’ – https://youtu.be/ldhi9jLBwfY
The Most Holy Trinity (B) 2021
Lots of priests and pastors are nervous about preaching on the feast of the Holy Trinity. The feasts of Ascension and Pentecost that we celebrated over the last two weeks mark seminal moments in the story of our salvation. We have accounts of them in the Gospels. But the feast of the Holy Trinity is different. It can sometimes feel like what we’re celebrating in this feast is an idea, a theological definition or a doctrine. And while definitions and doctrines are important, celebrating them as feasts can seem strange.
On one level, the Holy Trinity is simple enough for a young child to understand – God is three and God is one: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are three persons, but one God. That’s an elegant and balanced statement, but if we dig deeper and try to understand exactly what those statements mean, we come up against some questions that are pretty hard to answer. How can three be one? How can the Holy Spirit be a ‘person’? How can Jesus be both God and Son of God? It can get very confusing very quickly. Theologians down the ages have come up with all kinds of technical language, much of it in Greek, to speak of the three persons of the Trinity and their relationships – words like consubstantial and co-eternal, hypostases and perichoresis, are important for theologians, but they don’t provide much inspiration for an 8-minute Sunday homily.
Because the language surrounding the Trinity is so technical, it’s very easy to say incorrect things about it. In preparation for today I read a book with the amusing title, The Trinity: How Not to Be a Heretic. In it, among other things, I learned about weird and wonderful heretical – incorrect – understandings of the Holy Trinity down through the centuries, such as Arianism, Sabellianism, Adoptionism, Subordinationism, and the magnificent-sounding Modalistic Monarchianism. All very fascinating, but again not much use as we attempt to break open God’s word on Sunday morning.
A handy cop-out is to say that the Trinity is a mystery and that you just can’t speak about it in normal language. Maybe it’s better to remain silent, then? The author of the book I just mentioned wryly suggested that it’s so hard to speak about the Holy Trinity without putting your theological foot in your mouth that maybe Alison Krauss (and later Ronan Keating) had the right idea when she sang: ‘You say it best when you say nothing at all’….He was being sarcastic, of course. But he had a point. Because, the celebration of a feast day in honour of the Holy Trinity doesn’t demand words or thoughts from us, but wonder and awe. Today’s feast doesn’t call us to discuss obscure Greek or Latin concepts, or to speak of God as if he were a mathematical formula or a geometric shape. Today’s feast calls us to worship and adore. No more, no less. And often, that adoration is beyond words and definitions and explanations. Silence is indeed what is called for. Saint Anselm reflected: ‘The truth is, I am darkened by myself and also dazzled by you. I am clouded by my own smallness and overwhelmed by your intensity; I am restricted by my own narrowness and mastered by your wideness.’
Silent adoration is indeed the only fitting response in the face of such an overwhelming experience of simultaneously knowing and not knowing God.
I was struck by the antiphons – the refrains at the beginning and end of the psalms – that we sang at Vespers last night. All four of them were calls to praise. We sang them in Latin, but there was no mention of words like consubstantialem, circumincessio or filioque. Just praise and glory… ‘Glory be to you, O Trinity of equal Persons, one God, before all ages, now and forever’; ‘Praise and eternal glory be to God the Father and to the Son, together with the Holy Paraclete for ever and ever’; ‘Let glorious and everlasting praise resound from every voice to the Father, to his only-begotten Son and to the Holy Spirit’.
We can praise him so exuberantly because the Lord our God is a god who reveals himself. Though utterly other and unapproachable, he draws near to us and makes himself known. In today’s First Reading, Moses reminds the Israelites at Sinai of how close God came to them, choosing them as his people and leading them out of Egypt. Moses instructs them to ‘acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other’. They are to praise him because he has revealed himself to them. For our part, we Christians celebrate the Holy Trinity, not because it is an important idea or doctrine, but simply because that is how God has revealed himself: As the Creator; as the Eternal Word, made flesh for our salvation; and as the Spirit of Truth, the bringer of consolation. That is who God has shown himself to be. That is the name in which Jesus commanded his disciples to evangelise the world, ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’.
Encountering the God who reveals himself to us as three persons but one god, we worship and adore, not trying to understand complicated definitions, but simply, as the hymn puts it, ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’. God, Pope Benedict once said, ‘is not solitude, but perfect communion’. The good news today is that there is a place for us in that communion. When we cry out, ‘Abba!’, the Spirit is bearing witness that we are God’s children, and his co-heirs with Jesus. So let us cry out to the Father, knowing that in so doing we are sharing in the life of the Trinity. ‘From him and through him and to him are all things; to him be the glory forever.’
Fr Martin OSB
