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Solemnity of Saints Peter & Paul

HOMILY for the Solemnity of St Peter & St Paul

Acts 12:1-11; Ps 33; 2 Tim 4:6-8. 17-18; Matt 16:13-19

There’s no place like Rome: Every time I visit Rome in the course of my work as Promoter General of the Rosary, I find myself charmed by that city despite all its chaos and dirtiness and the hordes of people who throng its cobbled streets – because Rome is simply unique in the history of the world, and of the Church. The liturgy of today’s feast constantly alludes to this history: These twin founders of the Church, St Peter and St Paul, are allusions to Romulus and Remus the fabled twin brothers who founded the city of Rome itself. And in the Office hymn sung at Vespers, the city is referred to henceforth as “felix Roma”, happy Rome because the “precious blood” of these great Princes, leaders of Christ’s Church, has been shed in this city and so ennobled it, (“purpurata pretioso sanguine”). And the opening stanza of this hymn begins by evoking the “golden light and rosy beauty” which one often sees in the city of Rome, and, at least for my photographer’s eye, it is the quality of this light which gives Rome its perennial beauty. 

For many, today’s feast seems to evoke the grandeur of Rome – just think of the unparalleled sight of St Peter’s dome – and the glory of the Papacy – Rome is full of reminders of the power and prestige and wealth of the popes over the ages. Cardinal Wiseman, for example, when he wrote his somewhat ultramontane hymn for Roman pilgrims, entitled, God bless our Pope, praised and evoked the vision of “the golden roof, the marble walls, the Vatican’s majestic halls”! And all this splendour is seemingly  justified by the words of today’s Gospel which one finds emblazoned around the drum of the dome of St Peter’s in letters that are 9 feet tall: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” (cf Mt 16:18a, 19a)

However, there is something missing from that quotation: “And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18b). And this suggests to me that the Church over which Peter and his successors preside, and for whose sake Paul laboured and taught, will be  constantly opposed and attacked by the powers of hell, and this will be felt by the Church as an institution but also, personally, by St Peter and his successors, ie, the Popes, and by St Paul and his successors, meaning, the Bishops. Hence we can notice that the readings for today’s feast focus on the hard work of St Paul, whose life has been “poured out” like a sacrificial offering to God, and on the “terrors” which beset St Peter, through torture and imprisonment, and which also afflicted St Paul. Indeed, St Paul recounts his sufferings as an Apostle in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians: “Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.” (11:24–28) There is, then, little that is externally majestic or glorious about the life and apostolic labours of St Peter and St Paul. And if you know where to look in Rome, you will see many reminders of this too: the Mamertine prison near the Forum, for example; the chains of St Peter enshrined nearby; the chains of St Paul displayed above his final resting place; and the obelisk of the circus near the Vatican hill where St Peter was crucified upside down – this obelisk was probably the last things he saw alive and it’s now in the centre of St Peter’s Square. Were it not for them and their brave witness and their tenacious fidelity to the vocation given to them by God, we would not have received the true Faith, and the Sacraments of the Church, for ourselves and for our forebears. Hence, it is right that we offer this Sacrifice of Thanksgiving and honour them today. For they are the giants on whose shoulders we stand. 

Nonetheless the focus of the Liturgy today isn’t so much these two Princes of the Church, as such, but rather the Lord himself. The psalm response sums it up for me: “From all my terrors the Lord set me free.” As such, we’re being called to look to the Lord in the midst of all our fears, to seek him in the darkness, to trust in God’s Providence as these men did. There are many things that one can read in the Media, or on WhatsApp groups, or online that will make one anxious and fearful. There are many of these fears which might oppress and terrify us; demons of our sins and of our past which haunt us and tempt us. But these powers of hell will never prevail, Jesus promises, if our Faith in him is as firm as a rock, as firm as Peter’s faith. And although there is a note of triumph today, of course, the virtue that is being exalted is humility, a humility that enables Peter to hear the Father’s revelation of Christ’s identity to him, and he is then able to proclaim Jesus as Messiah, Christ, Saviour. So the psalm says: “This lowly one called; the Lord heard, and rescued him from all his distress.” Hence, today’s feast calls us to imitate the virtues of St Peter and St Paul, which is to be humble before God and men; to be willing to sacrifice our time, our talent, and our treasure for the sake of the Gospel; and to trust in the power of Christ to save us, even from physical dangers. For whatever it is that comes against us, whether it is geopolitical or personal and intimate, our faith promises us that the Lord is at hand to set us free; his angels will come and rescue us, even as Peter was rescued from prison. Above all, if we are bound by our sins, habitual sins, we are exhorted to turn to the Lord for help. For as St Paul says: “The Lord stood by me and strengthened me… So I was rescued from the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom.” (2 Tim 4:17-18) 

And this, it seems to me, is what it means for the Church, governed by the Pope, to hold the keys to the kingdom of heaven. It doesn’t mean that St Peter and the popes can arbitrarily decide what is right and wrong, or forgive sins as though they’re dishing out personal favours. Rather, it means that they model for us, by their humble lives as slaves of Christ and the Gospel, how the gates of the prisons of sin that isolate us from God and from one another, can be opened – We’ve been set free for charity, to love and serve one another better, as St Paul says (Gal 5:1). And St Peter and St Paul show us, therefore, when we’re freed from sin, how the gates of heaven are opened to us: Through grace-filled endurance and discipline, like an athlete running a race, we shall grow in charity, in the love of God and neighbour, until we receive at last the “crown of righteousness”. Thus heaven’s gates are opened to us, because the Lord shall have been at work in us, through sanctifying grace, to purify us of sin, and to renew us in his holiness until we are humbly bound to him, and take refuge in him, our Lord and our only Saviour. 

Hence the psalmist says: “Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed the man who seeks refuge in him.” So today, through the Holy Mass, may we taste the goodness of God, may his sweet grace be increased within us, and may St Peter and St Paul encourage us and pray for us so that, like them, we may in all situations humbly turn to God our as refuge. Thus shall we also be called by the Lord, “Beatus”. For Rome might be hailed as Felix, happy, but we desire something even more transcendent and lasting: We want to be called, like St Peter, “Blessed”. 

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HOMILY for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 

Eze 34:11-16; Ps 22; Romans 5:5b-11; Luke 15:3-7

One of my favourite churches in Rome is the ancient Basilica of St Lawrence, located outside the walls of Rome, a good 45 minute walk from the Colosseum and next to Rome’s main cemetery. In the retrochoir of the Basilica is the tomb of Pope Blessed Pius IX, who shepherded Christ’s Church on earth for almost 32 years; the longest serving pope in history. Pius IX was initially buried in St Peter’s Basilica while the retrochoir was being decorated with mosaics and prepared for the transfer of his body to his final resting place in San Lorenzo, four years after his death in 1878. He is one of three popes buried in this basilica, and he chose this basilica because it was his favourite. Similarly, we saw recently that Pope Francis was buried in his favourite basilica, St Mary Major. 

Looking down at the body of Pope Bl. Pius IX is a beautiful mosaic of a youthful Good Shepherd, like one of those found in the Roman catacombs, and he carries a docile sheep over his shoulders, and from his breast burns his Sacred Heart, surrounded by golden rays. For it was Pius IX who in 1856 had made the feast of the Sacred Heart a universal feast of the Church, and he had beatified St Margaret Mary Alacoque, visionary and messenger of the Sacred Heart in 1864, and he also consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1875; this year thus marks the 150th anniversary of that act of consecration and the 350th anniversary of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart to St Margaret Mary in 1675. Devoted to the Sacred Heart, Pius IX had often prayed: “Open your Sacred Heart, O Jesus! Show me its beauty, and unite me with it forever.”

This image of the Good Shepherd combined with the Sacred Heart are so apt given the readings we have heard today. For Pope St Pius IX also established the Commission for Sacred Archaeology to care for and to conduct research into the ancient cemeteries and Christian catacombs of Rome that were being excavated in the 19th century. Among the paleo-Christian images discovered in the catacombs, one of the most popular is that of a young shepherd carrying a lamb across his shoulders. For Christ is that Good Shepherd (cf John 10:11) who carries us, his sheep, from the wolf’s jaws of death into the safe pastures of eternal life. Christ, motivated by divine love symbolised by his Sacred Heart, has come to protect us, rescue us, and lead us to salvation if only we, like docile lambs, will allow him to graciously carry us on his shoulders. Christ is thus shown holding the lamb still with his two hands: He gently but firmly holds on to us, and his touch, mediated through the Sacraments of the Church, imparts his grace and virtues so that we will not struggle but rather hear his voice and so follow him. As Pope Francis said in his fine encyclical on the Sacred Heart: “The Lord knows the fine science of the caress. In his compassion, God does not love us with words; he comes forth to meet us and, by his closeness, he shows us the depth of his tender love.” (Dilexit Nos, 36)

In this mosaic image, the sheep carried by the shepherd looks out at the observer as if to invite us to follow its example of docile obedience to Christ. But perhaps it also stands for the Lamb of God himself who lays down his life for us (cf Jn 10:17). As such it calls us to consider that Christ, out of the fathomless love he has for sinners, had humbly allowed himself to be bound and offered as the lamb of sacrifice for our salvation. As we recall the costliness of our redemption from sin, then, we are invited to make reparation for sin, and for the indifference to God’s love and mercy of so many. As Pope Francis, inspired by Bl. Pius IX’s words, said, “The natural desire to console Christ, which begins with our sorrow in contemplating what he endured for us, grows with the honest acknowledgment of our bad habits, compulsions, attachments, weak faith, vain goals and, together with our actual sins, the failure of our hearts to respond to the Lord’s love and his plan for our lives. This experience proves purifying, for love needs the purification of tears that, in the end, leave us more desirous of God and less obsessed with ourselves.” (Ibid., 158)

This call for reparation for our sins which have wounded the heart of Christ, and which have necessitated his sacrifice on the Cross goes back to the apparitions of St Margaret Mary. In June 1675 Our Lord pointed to his heart and said: “This is the heart that so loved human beings that it has spared nothing, even to emptying and consuming itself in order to show them its love. And in return, I receive from the greater part of them nothing but ingratitude, by the contempt, irreverence, sacrileges and coldness with which they treat Me in this Sacrament of Love.” Jesus thus told St Margaret Mary to institute today’s feast day to honour his Sacred Heart, and for us to make amends by receiving Communion in a state of grace, and with great devotion and love and a spirit of reparation for the neglect and indifference of so many. I would think that this call, made 350 years ago, is even more urgent today which is why Pope Francis left us what was effectively his last testament, the very fine encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Dilexit nos, calling the whole Church to revive devotion to the Sacred Heart, which is nothing less than a devotion to the Holy Eucharist, the heart of Christ present for us sacramentally, and the heart of the Church.

Thus, a verse from St Thomas Aquinas’s Sequence hymn for the feast of Corpus Christi,  which we sang in this church on Sunday during the Corpus Christi procession prayed: “You shepherd us, and you protect us, so that you can let us see good things in the land of the living.” For the many who are lost, may the Lord find them and bring them home. May we who have stayed close to Jesus generously offer reparation and sacrifices for their return. And today, especially, may God in his mercy draw us ever closer to his Sacred Heart, and may Jesus our Good Shepherd hold us firmly and gently, strengthening the weak, and feeding us in justice, as Ezekiel says.  

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Life is Worth Living!

Reflection for Radio Maria England ‘Word for Today’ - 'Live' at 1:15pm on June 23rd, 2025.

At least in my corner of the social media world, there has been much reportage on the revival of Christianity in France, Ireland, and even in England. In fact, it’s not only social media buzz – which is often not so reliable – but even newspapers and diocesan statistics have reported an upsurge of adult baptisms in these countries recently. And perhaps anecdotally, Radio Maria listeners might have noticed that churches were quite full this year during the Easter Triduum. As I am sure you’ve heard, we Dominicans in England are also preparing to receive one of our largest intakes of novices in living memory this coming September. So, for England at large – at least in the cathedrals and well-known parishes around the country – and for me personally, I have noticed that there is factual evidence behind these initial reports about a rise in numbers for Catholics in England (and elsewhere in Europe). So for the good that is happening, as always, we give thanks to God and we praise him for his mercies. 

But even as I was pondering over these numbers and pictures online, in the back of my mind I wondered what the “push-back” might be. Let me explain. A number of years ago, when I was doing my graduate degree at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington DC, I had the chance to take classes about Exorcism with an experienced exorcist. These classes were put on for the priests of the diocese and for those who applied to audit the class. One of the very interesting exercises we had was to read the Gospels through the lens of the demons, ie the enemies of God. So, everytime we saw a victory for God and his grace, we noticed some “push-back”, a kind of retaliation – not that the Devil could ever win, of course, but like a child, he has tantrums and tried to show his limited powers. And so, the exorcist who taught this course trained us to be aware of “push-back”, of the way the Devil might try and retaliate and win little battles against God, even though even he knows that, in the final reckoning, Christ is victorious. As Pope Benedict XVI once said in a tweet: “The Lord wins in the end.”

So, last week in England, we saw the “push-back” of the Culture of Death, already warned about by Pope St John Paul II. Last week, while we were focussed on the Third Reading of the Assisted Suicide bill, and while we were responding to the Bishops’ call to fight against the State-sponsored killing of our elderly and chronically ill, which would necessitate the closure of Catholic care homes, suddenly we heard that an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill would  decriminalise abortion up to birth. On Tuesday last week this bill was passed,  which, as Bishop Sherrington said, “effectively decriminalises abortion in England and Wales… This decision significantly reduces the protection of unborn lives and will result in grave harm for pregnant women. Women will be even more vulnerable to manipulation, coerced and forced abortions. This legal change will also discourage medical consultation and make the use of abortion pills for dangerous late-term, at-home abortions more likely.” 

I have heard from many women about the pressure they already feel from the NHS to have an abortion for purported potential medical problems with their babies, problems which don’t in fact materialise. I have even heard of mothers being advised to terminate because they have supposedly “too many” children! This new proposed legislation will only make things worse. As the Bishop said: “Abortion is often chosen because of the personal challenges that a woman faces, as well as the lack of proper suitable guidance and support. The enacting of New Clause 1 will result in women being more alone, vulnerable, and isolated.” 

During the Spring, I was on a Lenten preaching tour in Louisville (Kentucky), and near our Dominican parish in that city I had the tremendous joy of visiting a facility for supporting mothers that was set-up and funded and staffed by professional lay women of the parish. They had bought property and built a bright, modern, well-equipped facility to offer professional support, counselling, medical care, and listening for any women who dropped in or were referred to them. The goal was to care for women in a safe, non-judgemental space, and although the place was staffed by many Catholics, they made the place inviting and non-religious, with only a Rose as their emblem, to refer to Our Lady and to St Therese of Lisieux; there was also a small prayer room with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Next door to this clinic, they had just bought another house, beautifully decorated, and staffed with a team of female volunteers to provide a place for young mothers to drop in for coffee and cakes, chats and talks, and just to hang out and have some help with caring for their new babies. They also provided food, diapers, cots, prams – all donated by benefactors – and everything that a mother might need if they couldn’t afford it themselves. I was greatly edified by what I saw, and above all by the vision and passion of the women who set it up. They loved deeply the young mothers whom they served, and they loved unconditionally, without any pressure on the women to keep their babies. But they wanted the mothers to know that they were loved and would be supported to give their baby a chance on life. Because Life is what we’re about as Christians. As our Lord Jesus said: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (Jn 10:10)

And so, last week in the UK Parliament, we saw the thief, acting through the misplaced compassion of a majority of our Parliamentarians, to kill and destroy, for after the Pro-Abortion vote on Tuesday, we saw the passage of the Assisted Suicide bill on Friday, with the NHS now having its mission as not merely the saving of lives but the taking of life in the name of compassion. 

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe that the people who voted for these two pieces of anti-Life legislation are evil per se. As St Thomas Aquinas would say, no rational human person chooses that which they know to be evil. Rather, evil acts are always masked by a perceived good, and when we myopically focus on this perceived good, without due consideration for the final good, then evil can be done. Sin, after all, is always parasitic on the good, and the Devil is rightly called “the Father of Lies” by Jesus. It is a shame that we continue to buy into the Devil’s half-truths, and thus some politicians have made decisions that masquerade as compassion, but which fail to recognise that the broader more fundamental issue. This is the fact that Life is always worth living, as Venerable Fulton Sheen said, and this becomes obvious when we recognise that our days on this earth are but a preparation for life in communion with God. Life, therefore, is about learning to love, and indeed, to love sacrificially, as Jesus has shown us. As Bishop Sheen said: “Life is Worth Living when we live each day to become closer to God.” And this is never more apparent than when, in our final days on this earth, we undergo suffering and pain. But with hope in God and with faith in Christ, we undergo the Cross with Jesus, and so we grow closer to him, the Crucified Lord; we undergo death with him, confident that we shall then rise and reign with him, as Scripture tells us. Suffering, therefore, conforms us more closely to Jesus – and this is the transcendent purpose of life. 

This is why we Catholics have long proclaimed the immeasureable worth of redemptive suffering, and Our Lady of the Rosary even appeared at Fatima to remind us of this, asking the little child-saints of Fatima to “offer yourselves to God and bear all the sufferings He wills to send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and of supplication for the conversion of sinners”. We have much need in our days to remember this, and to give witness to this, especially as Christians; to offer up our sufferings for the conversion of our nation.

And all this happened on the cusp of the feast of Corpus Christi. Truly, as the Sequence hymn for Easter says: Mors et Vita duello, Death and Life have contended. For while the Devil pushes back and offers only death, we Christians gave witness to the One who is the “Living Bread”, the true Life, who gives us life in abundance – not only now in this passing world, but eternal life, Life in God the Blessed Trinity, sharers in God’s divine Life. Our nation needs to know this truth, and the revival must continue, we must take this truth into the streets and our daily lives, as our Eucharistic processions yesterday symbolised. For the truth is that, as Pope Leo XIV said yesterday, “Christ is God’s answer to our human hunger, because his Body is the bread of eternal life: Take this and eat of it, all of you! Jesus’ invitation reflects our daily experience: in order to remain alive, we need to nourish ourselves with life, drawing it from plants and animals. Yet eating something dead reminds us that we too, no matter how much we eat, will one day die. On the other hand, when we partake of Jesus, the living and true Bread, we live for him. By offering himself completely, the crucified and risen Lord delivers himself into our hands, and we realize that we were made to partake of God.” 

Only this awesome truth will make Life Worth Living!

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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

In less than a fortnight we will be marked with ashes and hear these words pronounced over us: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. We, who by our nature are related to the “first Adam”, a “man of dust”, all come from nothing, and indeed without God and his mercy we are nothing and have nothing. But God, in his mercy, has made us something, he creates us and gives life to these dry bones, and makes us to “bear the image of the man of heaven.” This is grace. And this is all gift, for as we sang in the psalm response: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious.”

If we remember this, our common dusty nothingness, then we shall remember that we are not in any position to judge or condemn another fellow person. I don’t mean by this that one cannot have reasoned opinions and ideas, and that one cannot hold that another’s ideas might be ill-conceived or mistaken or plain wrong, or even stupid!  As such we can argue and judge the positions that others have, and we might even condemn their ideas and behaviour if these are wrong or sinful. However, in doing so we are still powerless to judge or condemn another person. We are not to be identified with our ideas, or our politics, or our positions even if these influence our actions, and our deeds form us in virtue or vice, and thus cause us to become either virtuous or vicious persons. Nevertheless, God is the just Judge, and it is he who is merciful. It is God who first had compassion on sinners, bending down in the person of Jesus Christ towards our wounded humanity and assuming our human condition, the condition of a slave. This the Son has done in all humility, and so he, our Master teaches us, to treat others with humility, especially when we disagree with what they think, or do, or say. For this is what is meant when Jesus says: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” 

For this is not so much a call to imitate God, as such, but rather, like that impending Lenten refrain, it is a call to remember our humble human estate: We are men and women of dust, and to dust we shall return; without the mercy of God who has made us something ex nihilo we would be nothing; as creatures, we have no being apart from him. This, I think, is the force of the phrase “even as your Father is merciful”, enjoining us to remember the mercy of God to each and every one of us. The Father has been merciful, and so he has given us life and being. The Lord has been compassionate, and so he has given us his Son to be our exemplar and to restore the integrity of our humanity. The Lord our God has been gracious and so he elevates us beyond our human nature so that as St Paul says, “we have borne the image of the man of dust… shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” God’s grace shall cause us to become like Christ, divinising us. So generous and fulsome is this gift of God, exceeding human and angelic expectations, that it overflows, as Jesus says: “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap”. 

If we, who are nothing, have received so much from God, and moreover if we, who are baptised into Christ, have received the “good measure” of Christ’s fullness and grace, then, mindful always of God’s mercy and generosity, we are called to “be merciful” to one another, and so, to judge not, condemn not, and perhaps most challengingly, to forgive. 

I think this is the hardest because we can perhaps accept that we cannot judge or condemn another’s person – this is the divine prerogative we can say, and we accept this rationally. And we might even manage to restraint our thoughts and words when someone does things we find despicable or damnable. However, the call to forgive is  necessarily preceded by an action that is much more personal, that affects us and even offends us, angers us, wounds our person. As Jesus illustrates, we might have been hated upon, cursed and insulted, abused or struck, or robbed! The injury caused, therefore, is not like something we can just walk away from, or turn off, unlike arguments or ideas, but somehow that which needs forgiving stays with us, haunts us, besets us, and sometimes has an ongoing debilitating effect. How to forgive the insult, the injury whether bodily or spiritual, when it continues to affect me now? How to walk away, as David did, when the chance for revenge is given us?

“Give”, says Jesus: Give love; For-give; Be merciful. 

And none of this is easy. Because none of this is human. The human thing would be to give like for like, or maybe even give a bit harder for the smack we received. The human thing is to seek domination and victory over our enemy and to enjoy the satisfaction of seeing him downtrodden. The human thing is to cancel and exclude and de-platform the ones we disagree with. Humanity, without God, is typically merciless. But without God, without mercy and love and forgiveness, we return to the dust from which we came – there is only death without God.

But God is mercy. Thus he is merciful and loving in his deeds. And so when Jesus calls us to be merciful, he is calling us to receive from God’s being; to be transfigured and changed by divine grace; to live in Christ and so to become as God our Father is. Christ calls us to a life in God that is therefore super-natural, beyond the merely human. Hence Jesus doesn’t just ask us to act mercifully but to be merciful. And the Greek word used here comes from ginomai meaning ‘to become’, ‘to come into existence’. Therefore a new me, a new way of being human, a new creation must come to be so that we will become merciful like our heavenly Father, like Jesus. This new creation is a work of God’s grace, which creates us anew in the image of Christ, the “man of heaven”. For grace alone can raise our bones from the dust and give us a heart of flesh, making something from our nothingness. 

Earlier this month we had the feast day of St Josephine Bakhita, a Canossian sister in Italy, but she started life in south Sudan where she was kidnapped, enslaved, and often physically tortured by her eight different captors before she was taken to Italy and freed through the intervention of the Patriarch of Venice and the Canossian sisters. Her life, Pope Francis said, became “an existential parable of forgiveness” as she forgave her captors, and forgave those who inflicted deep sufferings upon her. This grace came from her meditation on a Crucifix, which had been given to her by the Sisters and which was the first Gift she’d ever had. Looking upon the face of Christ she came to recognise the fundamental Gift of divine mercy that so many of us can take for granted and forget. Her example and her words help us to remember that although we are dust, yet with the grace of Christ, we are bound not for the earth but for heaven. Hence, as the Saint of Darfur said: “God’s love has always accompanied me in a mysterious way…The Lord loved me: you have to love everyone… you have to have pity!” 

Truly, to forgive is divine. 

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 6th Thu per annum (I)

Gen 9:1-13; Ps 102; Mark 8:27-33

The reading from Genesis is full of little nuggets of truth, intriguing details which might distract us from the basic truth that is being conveyed, which is that God is the Lord of Life. He is the Giver of all life, and as such, life and the lifeblood of creatures is sacred. In particular God gives life to men and women who are made in his image precisely so that they can mirror his activity, and give life and perpetuate the human race. Hence, we’re called to be fruitful and multiply, to spread life. And because human beings are made in God’s own image, so we’re made to enjoy life from God not just for our current lifetime in this world but, moreover, through our immortal souls conjoined to our bodies raised up at the resurrection of the dead, we are meant to enjoy being alive in God eternally. God, then, is the Life, and as such he is the God of the living, giving life and sustaining life and protecting life, especially the eternal life of the human person. 

The sign of the bow in the sky is a beautiful reminder of this fact, that God gives life to all living creatures, and he promises to sustain and not destroy life. After all,  who, after a storm, is not uplifted by the sight of the rainbow? The rainbow, then, is the ensign of God’s promise of life and a reminder for us to be fruitful; a sign of hope and a reminder that God is faithful to his promises even when we are unfaithful and fall into sin. Never, then, should the rainbow be appropriated as the ensign of sinful behaviour contrary to God’s design, nor should it become a sign celebrating those whose actions would be inherently contrary to human fruitfulness, or thus lead one away from life. 

Yet, even when humankind turned away from God, and even when we rejected God’s designs and were in our sins, God sent his Son to redeem us. So the Gospel tells of the costliness of the life promised to us. The rainbow, some scholars have said, is in fact the warrior’s bow which God places in the sky, but it is now pointing towards the heavens, to himself, so that God’s response to sin is not to send floods to destroy the earth but rather to find the remedy to sin in himself. God is Life, and so when Man chooses death, he sends the One who is the Life and who alone can defeat death and sin.

Thus “the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” God in the person of Jesus Christ, dies in the flesh, gives his life so that we sinners can be saved from eternal death and truly live. So Christ sheds his lifeblood for our sake, and under sacramental form gives us his blood to drink so as to restore the image of God in us which had been defaced by sin. For “the life is in the blood”, Scripture says, and so Christ our God, willing to give us a share in his divine life, says: “Take this, all of you, and drink: for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant”. For “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” (Jn 6:53b)

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Parrhesia

HOMILY for 3rd Thu (I) per annum

Heb 10:19-25; Ps 24; Mark 4:21-25

Every morning we gather for Holy Mass, and whenever we receive Holy Communion, we “enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus”, through his flesh, we come before God, the Triune God. It may seem like we receive the Eucharist into our own bodies, and so God comes to us, or that we unite him to ourselves. But recall these words of the Lord recounted by St Augustine, “You will not change me into yourself like bodily food; but you will be changed into me”. The Eucharist, therefore, makes us like Christ, it unites us to him and so he is the Agent, it is Christ who changes us, elevating our relationship with God, so that together with him, “through his flesh”, through this “new and living way” that is the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we can enter into communion with the living God. And we do so with confidence. This word, parrhesia in Greek means, in the words of the Catechism, “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved.” (CCC 2778)

How marvellous it is to ponder again this wonderful and beautiful truth: Because of Christ’s incarnation, and his coming to us in the flesh, in this Sacrament of the Eucharist; because Jesus unites us to himself in this Sacrament, so he has opened for us the way to God, and now we have access to God through him. Baptism into Christ has washed us and purified us of sin so that we can now come before God “in full assurance of faith”, and we come before God as his own beloved sons and daughters, with confidence, with parrhesia. Again, because I think we all need to hear this repeatedly, through Christ and with Christ and in Christ we can come to God with “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved.” 

This certainty, this faith, this assurance of God’s loving mercy and the gifts of his grace to sanctify us and save us from sin is not the same as presumption. But rather, it is the lifting of our eyes and our hearts to God our Father, turning to him with “filial trust” so that we desire more and more to conform our lives to Christ’s, and show by our way of living and acting that we are God’s. As St Ambrose says, “Suddenly you have received the grace of Christ: all your sins have been forgiven. From being a wicked servant you have become a good son… Then raise your eyes to the Father who has begotten you through Baptism, to the Father who has redeemed you through his Son”. For we have been restored to his likeness by grace, and so we must respond to this grace. We respond by drawing near with confidence, with parrhesia, and asking the Father for his gifts, confessing our weaknesses and failings but so remembering our utter need of the Saviour. And “he who promised is faithful”, and so he acts through the Eucharist and the other Sacraments, and through the gift of his Spirit to save us, to change us into himself. We can hope in the promises of Christ. So, in this passage there is reference to the virtues of faith and of hope. 

And finally, in the final sentence there is reference to the virtue charity, to the works of love that we should find among us, within the communion of the Church: “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works [and] encouraging one another”. May this reminder from God’s holy Word of what God does for us daily, and may this daily Liturgy and our prayers together, and our fellowship in the refectory and elsewhere increase true charity among us. 

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Hodie!

HOMILY for the 3rd Sunday (C)

Neh 8:2-6, 8-10; Ps 18; 1 Cor 12:12-30; Luke 1:1-4, 4:14-21

I wonder if anyone else here is an expert in procrastination? As Bursar of the priory, I know that some of my brothers, like me, suffer from this, putting off for weeks the reconciliation of our monthly credit card statements. Or perhaps, in the more serious realm of the spiritual life we can be like St Augustine who once prayed for the virtue of chastity but “not yet”. Often we put off until tomorrow, or another day, or next Lent what in fact we need to give our attention and energies to today, for the good of our soul, for the sake of our relationship with God and also one another. 

There is in fact a saint, popular around Turin, called St Expeditus, a 4th-century Roman legionary who was martyred under Diocletian, and he is the patron saint of procrastinators (as well as students and people facing legal and financial difficulties). An Italian friend of mine gave me a silver cross inscribed with the word “Hodie”, which is Latin for ‘Today’, and he explained that it’s said that when St Expeditus was wanting to become a Christian the devil appeared to him in the form of a crow, and it seemed to say “Cras” which means “tomorrow”. The saint then held out a cross, saying “Hodie” and so the crow fled. So, the ‘Hodie’ cross became a symbol of St Expeditus and his victory over the devil. 

If we think about it, for us temporal creatures, who have no control over the future, nor any certain knowledge of what is to come, tomorrow does not have any reality. We can hope, of course, and we can legitimately have certain expectations for tomorrow, but we have no certainty; tomorrow isn’t real. What is real is now, today. God, who is not bound by time and who is Pure Act is, therefore, the eternal Now. And as our lives move from the past into the present, into the Now; from yesterday into Today, so we enter from potentiality into the Pure Act of being and goodness that is God. We stand in his presence now, today, so let us be open today, now, to his grace. For the present moment, now, today, is pregnant with God’s grace, full of his gifts which enable us to  do his will; to act, to be, to choose the good, to choose to obey God and his commands, and so to empower us for virtue. 

The 17th-century French Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade called this the “sacrament of the present moment”, in which we discern now, today, what God asks of us as his disciples, and how we should act, what we should do now, today so as to become more united to God and his will. Hence he says: “The present moment is ever filled with infinite treasures; it contains more than you have the capacity to hold. Faith is the measure. Believe, and it will be done to you accordingly. Love also is the measure. The more the heart loves, the more it desires; and the more it desires, so much the more it will receive. The will of God presents itself to us at each moment as an immense ocean that no human heart can fathom; but what the heart can receive from this ocean is equal to the measure of our faith, confidence and love… When the will of God is made known to a soul… then under all circumstances the soul experiences a great happiness in this coming of God, and enjoys it the more, the more it has learnt to abandon itself at every moment to God’s most adorable will.” 

Hence the readings of today’s Mass highlight two moments in which God’s will is made known to his people, which brings joy and consolation to them. Firstly Ezra reads from the book of the Law, and the people respond as if God is present speaking, acting, teaching them. Hence the people are told “Today is holy to the Lord”, that is to say that God is present and active now, today, and he guides us through the Scriptures. And so, it is in each present moment that we can seek the Lord, seek his strength and grace and knowledge to do what is right and good by listening to his Word, reading the Bible, and we shall find our joy in this. This is what is meant by “Eat the fat and drink sweet wine… And do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength”, for we are to be fattened by God’s grace, and to taste the goodness of his revelation and wisdom in the Scriptures which are like sweet wine. And then in the Gospel, Jesus, having recalled the wonders that are done by the Messianic Servant in Isaiah, says: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And it is to us that he speaks directly: Today, now, in your life, Christ, the eternal Word is present; present in the eternal Now of the present moment, especially whenever you read or hear the Gospel and contemplate divine Truth. Thus Origen said: “If scripture is true, it was not only to the Jewish congregations of his own generation that our Lord spoke. He still speaks to us assembled here today… Here too in this synagogue, that is, in this present assembly, you can at this very moment fix your eyes upon your Saviour if you wish. Whenever you direct your inward gaze toward wisdom and truth and the contemplation of God’s only Son, then your eyes are fixed upon Jesus.”

Since 2019, Pope Francis has set aside this Sunday, the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, as ‘Word of God’ Sunday. In doing so, we are being reminded to turn to the Scriptures daily, and to seek God’s will and God’s wisdom for our present moments. For today God has a word for us, today he comes to us to speak to our hearts, and today he reveals his will to us. “Your words, O Lord, are spirit and life”, we said, and so let us be sure to turn to God’s Word, to the Scriptures, today, and day after day. Hodie! Today, let us seek the Lord’s will and act upon it by his grace. Today, let us turn to him and away from the crowing of the devil! Today, let us embrace the victory of the Cross like St Expeditus. Hence, as we friars sing every morning, in the Invitatory psalm (95): “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” Amen.

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 30th Tue per annum (I)

Eph 5:25-33; Ps 127; Luke 13:18-21

Marriage, we say, is a sacrament. And so, within and through the marital relationship, God is present and active to transform our human ways of behaving and relating with his grace; we’re being opened up to God’s ways of seeing how we should be human, how we are to live as husband and wife. And “this mystery is profound… it refers to Christ and the Church.” (Eph 5:32) As such, the language of how a married couple relates to each other is like that of the head to its body, and this must surely imply mutuality and co-operation, and mutual need while respecting constitutive difference as well. For elsewhere St Paul reminds us strikingly that “the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’” – not if we want to get somewhere – but at the same time each part of the body has its own proper and distinct part to play. Hence, husband and wife, united in the sacrament of marriage, are being formed by God’s grace in mutual love and partnership, helping one another to grow in holiness. So, St Thomas Aquinas describes marriage as “the greatest friendship” because husband and wife are “partners in the whole of daily life”.

But at first glance the language of submission found in today’s passage from Ephesians comes across as somewhat grating, and no doubt it has, when misunderstood, led to situations of abuse, and to the servile domination of women by their husbands. So is St Paul to blame for creating such conditions with his words? We might note that further on in this chapter, St Paul then looks at the relationships between children and their parents, and then between slaves and their masters. And again, one doesn’t find anything as such to forbid the Greco-Roman norm of slavery although Paul does remind both slave and slave owner that they have one Master, and they should both render due service to God. It seems to me, then, that the Apostle, in writing to the Ephesians, is not principally setting out rules nor seeking to change social norms in themselves. 

Rather, we see what we might call “pastoral accompaniment” in action, as Paul seeks to change first the attitudes and the perspectives of the first Christians. For it is an interior conversion of the heart that St Paul seeks, a work of God’s grace, because only the converted heart, that places Christ first, can generate genuine change in a person and in a society. For the Apostle (and the Church) has to be a pastor of souls, a doctor of hearts, and not a politician. And the gradual work of God’s grace in our human society is to change us from within, giving us hearts of flesh in place of stony hearts, converting us so that we will act to change our cultures and human contexts. Thus the grace of the Gospel is like yeast that silently and invisibly leavens the flour, causing the advent of God’s kingdom. But, as we know, changing our lives and living up to the vision of the Gospel is a slow process and earthly revolutions seldom change hearts for the better.

So, marriage, which in the Greco-Roman world is an unequal relationship in which the man owns the wife as his own chattel, is being re-envisioned in the light of Christ and his Gospel. Thus St Paul says: “let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” No longer is the husband to see his wife as his property, or as one whom he dominates, and who is there for his service and enjoyment. Rather – and this turns the pagan notions of marriage on its head – the wife is to be loved as an equal, as his own self, even as his own body; “nourishing and cherishing” her. Indeed, he is to be Christ to her, which means the husband is called to be willing to lay down his life for his wife; he must love her sacrificially. And the wife in turn is called to love her husband like Christ, giving herself to him, and so loving him sacrificially. So, there is a fundamental call within marriage of mutual self-gift; a call to learn the way of sacrificial love, which is what the Christian vocation is essentially about. 

Thus we can speak of Christian marriage as a sacrament and a vocation to holiness because in and through their marital relationship, God’s grace is at work to teach husband and wife to love as Christ loves, to be friends who are thus willing to lay down their lives for the other. For “greater love has no one than this”! Indeed, in the verse that precedes and rightly frames today’s passage, we find the lens for interpreting St Paul’s teaching on marriage, and indeed all our Christian relationships: “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Eph 5:21).   

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Homily for the Feast of St Cedd

HOMILY for 29th Sat per annum (II)

Eph 4:7-16; Ps 121; Lk 13:1-9

Memorial of St Cedd

The saints strive to build up the Body of Christ, the Church on earth, even to the remotest ends of the earth. So it was that St Cedd, brother of St Chad, had consecrated his life to God as a monk of Lindisfarne in the 7th-century. At this time Anglo-Saxon England is being gradually evangelised, with missionaries coming from Rome, spreading across the land from the south, and also from the north, with missionaries coming from Ireland and from Celtic monasteries like Lindisfarne. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, St Cedd would advocate deferring to the customs of Rome, which is a sign of his regard for the unity of the Church centred around the Bishop of Rome. This Mass in the language of Rome, and following the current Missal promulgated by the Bishop of Rome, very much follows in the spirit of St Cedd – it is a sign and an expression of our love for the unity of the Church, and for the venerable traditions and chants that come down to us from that apostolic Church, ennobled by the blood of SS Peter and Paul.

And St Paul thus says that there are those apostles, and pastors, and evangelists and so on who use their gifts from God to build up the Body of Christ, to lead us to “come to unity in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God”. St Cedd is a shining example of such a person, gifted by God, for this mission as an apostle and preacher and pastor of souls, a man who was “fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.”

Hence he was chosen by St Finan of Lindisfarne to preach the Gospel in Essex, and then, having been consecrated Bishop of the East Saxons, he built churches and monasteries and ordained priests and deacons to bring the Sacraments to the people of Essex until his mission was disrupted by the Vikings. I suppose the task of evangelising Essex today is no more challenging than it had been in the 7th-century! And so the parable we hear in today’s Gospel gives us pause for thought and prayer. For while we might be impatient for results, and while we might wish that our evangelising efforts were more fruitful, or that more might share our enthusiasm for Latin Liturgy, the Lord counsels us to be give it one more year, that us to say, to strive and work hard, and to allow the Lord’s grace to work invisibly and even imperceptibly, bringing about true good and genuine fruit. This parable is, in other words, an invitation for us to work to build up Christ’s Church, using the gifts he has given us, but to remember it is Christ’s Church, his Mystical Body, and so he will grant the growth and the increase and the fruitfulness in his good time. Our job, then, is not so much to be successful but to be faithful.

St Cedd knew this well. Every one of his monasteries would be destroyed, and he would die from a pestilence that struck him and his community at Lastingham in Yorkshire where he ended his days on the 26th of October in 664. And yet, although to earthly eyes it seems like he hadn’t accomplished anything lasting, it is clear that the fruit of holiness is found in persevering faithfully and heroically to the end, as St Cedd did. Holiness, indeed, is found simply in love, in giving oneself entirely to Christ and to his service. As St Paul says: “If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ.”

Therefore, in our times, let us strive to love Christ with all our heart. As Pope Francis reminded us in his beautiful encyclical Dilexit nos let us do this today by renewing our devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, present in the Eucharist. For here, Pope Francis reminds us, “the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart… Hearing and tasting the Lord, and paying him due honour… is a matter of the heart. Only the heart is capable of setting our other powers and passions, and our entire person, in a stance of reverence and loving obedience before the Lord.” To this end, may the Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us, and may St Cedd pray for us. 

[lawrenceop]

Homily for the feast of St Frideswide

A few years ago there was a wonderful exhibition in the British Library called ‘Anglo Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War’. However this somewhat bland title masked the fact that the exhibition was really about the light that the Christian Faith and Christian culture brought to these lands during a time that is still referred to as ‘the Dark Ages’. For the Art that was featured came from illuminated Gospel books and psalters and were depictions of Christ, the angels, and Saints; the Word that was preserved was written by Christian monks and scribes, whose fine uncial script copied the words of Scripture, and the Rule of St Benedict, and the thought of Beothius, and the lives of the Saints, including of course, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People written by St Bede in the 8th-century. All this was written in Latin, the language of the Western Church and of Roman civilisation, and the ancient rite of Mass we celebrate today connects us to our common heritage. 

And the War referred to in the title of this exhibition involved Christian kings and their realms struggling against pagan ideas and the pushback of pagan powers – the war for Christian civilisation in other words, which we in our generation are called to take up, for the Gospel has to be heard anew in every generation, and the light must shine through our lives and our example in order to keep the darkness at bay. Here in Oxford, which has St Frideswide for its patron saint, and in its venerable University, whose motto declares the Lord to be our light, we must strive to live up to that motto and to the example of St Frideswide.

For the saint we celebrate in today’s Mass comes from that ancient pre-Norman Christian world, and she is numbered among those Anglo-Saxon saints whom we do well to recall because they remind us that the Catholic Faith, founded on the faith of St Peter and linked to Rome, is truly the “faith of our fathers”. It is for this ancient and true Faith that the Oxford Martyrs shed their blood, after all. Our procession this afternoon to the site of Blessed George Napier’s martyrdom serves to bear witness to this, and to honour their sacrifice. Indeed, the Oxford Martyrs died defending the Catholic Faith which had been brought to this island by missionaries sent by Pope St Gregory the Great himself. In 597, St Augustine had come to England and the succeeding centuries had witnessed the establishment and flourishing of Christian civilisation in these lands. So from the beginning this Christian culture in Britain had, as the exhibition catalogue observed, “an umbilical link between England and Rome that persisted until the Reformation.”   

St Frideswide is very much a part of that first flourishing of the Faith in Anglo-Saxon England. She was a princess of Wessex in the kingdom of Mercia, and her name is probably pronounced Frithuswith (rather than Frideswide), and she was born c.650. Like quite few other royal women of her age, she became abbess of a monastery she had founded with her parents’ help in Oxford, on the site that is now called Christ Church Cathedral. This suggests to me the close links between the Church and the political rulers of the time. But after the death of her parents, King Aethelbald of Mercia sought to marry her, disregarding her vow of celbacy. When she refused, he tried to abduct her so she fled to Bampton and then to Binsey. Aethelbald is thwarted when he is struck blind by God so he gives up. But a well springs up in Binsey, and people go to Frithuswith for prayers and healing, and she later returns to Oxford to her monastery where she was buried after her death on this day in 727. Later on, in the 1440s, some 200 years after the Dominicans first arrived in Oxford, St Frideswide is declared patron saint of Oxford, and the friars in Oxford back then would have celebrated the first solemn feast days of St Frideswide in the rite that is being used here today. 

St Frideswide’s relics are still somewhere in Christ Church Cathedral but they had been scattered after the Reformation and so they’re not possible to locate, but we do well to visit the location of her medieval shrine, and to seek her intercession as countless other Catholics have done before us.

For we have much need of the help and example of the saints to inspire us and to fortify us as we seek to build the kingdom of God in our times and in these lands. And so we too need now to take up the weapons of our spiritual War and contend with the powers who seek to pursue us and silence us. Thus we need to pray and to fast and to struggle against the political powers who want to ban us from even praying silently. We need also to proclaim the Word faithfully and confidently, to seek Truth in places like the University, and in this Dominican House of Studies, Blackfriars, and to joyfully preach the Word and prudently refute error. And finally we also need in our time to pay attention to Art, that is to say, to Beauty which draws souls to Christ – beauty in the Liturgy, beauty in the sacred arts, and above all, beauty in lives of holiness and Christian friendship. 

It seems to me that one beautiful gift from Our Lady sums up war, word, and art and this is the Holy Rosary. Pray it daily, as Our Lady begs us to do, and know that it is the most powerful weapon for banishing the darkness. These are dark ages, indeed, but the light of our one true Faith shines brightly whenever the Rosary is prayed. So, in the words of  one of Oxford’s most well-known residents, J.R.R. Tolkien, “May [this] be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out”.

[lawrenceop]

Do you not care if we perish?

HOMILY for the 12th Sunday per annum (B)

Job 38:1. 8-11; Ps 106; 2 Cor 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41

“Do you not care if we perish?” (Mk 4:38). What disciple of Christ has not cried out like this? The suddenly-stormy sea reflects life and its vicissitudes; it reflects the storms in our heart and the disturbances in our faith journeys when we’re suddenly met with danger, disease, and disaster. In life, everything seems sunny one moment and the next moment a squall comes over us; we’re devastated. Christ is with us, but often God seems to be asleep, distant, and even, uncaring. “Do you not care if we perish?” we think, as the Tempter’s voice tells us that God doesn’t care or doesn’t even exist. Where is God, we wonder? Why is he aloof from our troubles and worries (– and these seem to daily increase in our world)? Does Christ not care if we perish?

But an answer is found, I think, in St John’s Gospel. How much does the Lord care for us? Well, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). God cares so much that he gives himself to us so that we should not perish. And he continues to do this day after day in the miracle of the Mass, in the gift of the Eucharist, which is called the “source and summit of the Christian life”. So, huddled together in the boat, that venerable symbol of the Church, and in the middle of the storms of life, both external and internal, we, little apostles of the Lord, would perish were it not for the Lord who lovingly gives himself to us in the Mass. But the Lord’s Eucharistic Presence is hidden, humble, and veiled. It is as though he were asleep; passive and unremarkable. And yet, in this little white Host, God is with us. 

St John says, “whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And so, looking at the Host, gathered here for Mass, we come in faith, and we go to Christ who is loving present, remaining with us until the end of time, and who thus cares that we shall not perish, neither in body or in soul. Yet the Lord said to his apostles, “Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?” These words of Our Lord haunt us. How is it that we have no faith? We will all know those moments when we have felt frightened and alone, when the stormy challenges of life cause the tiny flame of faith to gutter and flicker perilously; and we can be sure that sudden gusts of wind will arise and threaten to extinguish what faith we have.

But recall those wise words of St John Henry Newman in one of his best known hymns. Although beset throughout his life by uncertainties and fears and difficulties, he learnt that faith is often the gift of having just enough light to make one step forward on life’s journey towards the safe harbour. So he wrote: “Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.”

Often, the issue is not that we no faith at all, but rather that we do not see far enough. We want to see further than just one step, further even than the horizon, to transcend our human limitations. We would like to see ahead, to know what is to come, to foreknow the future, so that we can plan ahead and avoid mishaps. This, of course, is quite prudent and reasonable. But in seeking to control the future we tend to trust in our own ingenuity and skills, and fail to see that there is a much more fundamental virtue that we need, namely confidence and trust in the God who is with us always, and who has promised to give us the virtues we need to weather the storm, to endure the temporary trials of this life.

Fundamentally, then, faith, such as Jesus speaks of in the Gospel, is believing that God is with us and so he, who lives eternally, shall not let us perish; he shall never abandon us, not even in the grave. St Paul thus speaks of a “new creation”, calling us to “regard no one from a human point of view” but rather to believe and know that Christ “died and was raised” for our sake. And so, he will not even abandon us in death but rather, by his falling asleep in death, he has destroyed our death. Thus Scripture calls Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2), that is to say, faith in the Resurrection; faith in the final end that Christ has promised us if we believe in him for he is with us so we shall not perish; faith in the new creation that lies beyond the horizon of our human mortality and all its sorrows. So fr Bede Jarrett put it: “And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight. Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further; cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly”. 

So, how does Christ lift us up and help us to see? How can we have a deeper trust and faith in the God who leads us on with his kindly light? How, like Newman, can we be content to see just one step forward at a time, knowing that Christ is not asleep but is ever with us, leading us to salvation? 

In the 1830s Newman writes in a letter to a Catholic friend that knowing the presence of God in the Eucharist helped him. He says,“after tasting of the [awesome] delight of worshipping God in His Temple, how unspeakably cold is the idea of a Temple without that Divine Presence!“ Newman marvelled that God was present for us in the Tabernacle, lovingly awaiting us, seemingly asleep, as it were, but always actively present for us. Thus, in his difficulties and stormy times he wrote that “to know that He is close by – to be able again and again through the day to go in to Him” is “such an incomparable blessing.”

Hence the Holy Father Pope Francis reminded us in his first encyclical Lumen Fidei that “Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives.” So, when the storms suddenly arise in our hearts and in our lives, let us, like the apostles, be found kneeling beside the Lord, kneeling before the Tabernacle, gathered around the Holy Eucharist, crying out to him in our need. Perhaps we can make St Peter’s words our own: “Lord, I do believe, help thou my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24) And in his presence, we shall hear him say to our turbulent hearts and minds: “Peace! Be still” (Mk 4:39).

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for Beato Angelico

Heb 11:1-7; Ps 144; Mark 9:2-13

A few days ago, the Rosary Shrine welcomed its first group of pilgrims of this year: five women and one Dominican friar had come on pilgrimage to England, and they were devotees of Fr Bede Jarrett OP who had served as Provincial for 16 years; revered as a retreat giver, spiritual writer, and tireless in his work of expanding the Dominican mission in this country. Like all good Catholics, Fr Bede had a great aesthetic sense, a love for beauty, which is inherent in human souls, and also in beautiful things made by the ingenuity and hard work of human hands. He once spoke of beauty being found “not as a secret but as a gospel, not as a thing hidden but as a friend revealed.” 

This love for beauty, which must be both spiritual and material in order for it to reflect the splendour of the incarnation of Christ, a splendour glimpsed in its magnificence by the three disciples on Tabor, is ultimately a love for God, for the Son who is the splendour of the Father, the icon of the unseen God. As such, when Dominicans preach the Word, they don’t only focus on what is spoken, nor even just on what is written, but also on what is seen, expressed artistically through the painter’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel, or the photographer’s lens! 

For the Dominican seeks and preaches beauty, “not as a secret but as a gospel”, as good news in a world darkened by sin and destruction, and in moments when we might be tempted to cast our eyes downwards in the face of so much ugliness and brokenness. In such a world, beauty is needed all the more, to give us faith in God and his goodness and beauty and power to save and redeem. Thus Christ revealed his divine beauty to his disciples, transfigured on the heights, to help them look up and give them hope of the Resurrection in advance of the terrible suffering of his Passion and Cross which was to come. Likewise, the Dominican find and makes manifest beauty “not as a thing hidden but as a friend revealed”. For the One who has befriended us, and who has revealed his glory to us, even when we were made ugly by sin, is Christ, who is Beauty himself and the greatest Friend of humanity. Dominican preaching, therefore, calls us to look and see that God is with us, and his grace fills this world with divine light, to dispel the darkness, and to beautify us. 

Bede Jarrett thus wrote to an aspiring Dominican who did not think he was much of a public speaker that “Fra Angelico used his paint brush” to proclaim the Gospel, and “these [paintings] are effective” and perhaps more so than the voice. For spoken sermons fade and become mere memory but, he implies, paintings live on. Clearly the painted sermons of Fra Angelico (or Blessed John of Fiesole, as he is properly called), this blessed Dominican friar who we commemorate today, and who is the patron saint of artists, have an endurance and an interior beauty that powerfully communicates the Gospel to us even today. Indeed, many, who would not read a sermon or spiritual writing, do still flock to the museums and churches that are blessed with Fra Angelico’s works, and there they can see in his frescoes and paintings a world transfigured by divine light, and a beauty that gives hope and draws us forward in life’s journey, calling us to look up towards heaven. 

In part due to the example of Fra Angelico, who himself was inspired by the preaching of St Antoninus, Dominican bishop of Florence in his lifetime, beauty, then, has been firmly established in our Dominican life, especially in our churches and in every aspect of our liturgical life. So, I want to momentarily pay tribute to our Dominican Sisters of the English Congregation of St Catherine of Siena, who are based in Stone (Staffordshire), and who were renowned for their beautiful and painstakingly embroidered vestments and liturgical furnishings. This past week, a significant part of the Sisters’ beautiful heritage was handed down to us to be used in the Rosary Shrine, for the glory of God. My hope is that we can have an exhibition of these works in October this year. Such things are, unfortunately, regarded these days by many people, even Catholics, as unnecessary luxuries that shouldn’t concern serious Christians. After all, we should be feeding the poor! However, the Sisters who educated the poor (and fed them) knew that Catholics also couldn’t neglect beauty and art. For the human person needs to be fed in body and soul; the human heart longs for beauty, longs for God and so looks for his beauty to be revealed as gospel and as friend. 

Hence, the austere observant Dominicans, of which Fra Angelico was a member, also had paintings in their monastic cells at San Marco in Florence for we pray not just with our lips and in our minds, but also with our eyes, and indeed, our whole bodies. The goal, therefore, was that such external beauty would lead to interior beauty, so that as we look on the face of Christ and Our Lady and the Saints, our lives would be transfigured by the gospel of Jesus Christ, made beautiful by his grace as, through beauty, we befriend Jesus and so we are made beautiful. For as St Thomas Aquinas says the divine communication of beauty is beautifying, ie, the revelation of divine beauty and our recognition of it  produces beauty in things; Beauty himself acts to make us truly beautiful. 

May Blessed Fra Angelico pray for artists today, and for create beautiful things in this world. May God use the work of their hands to reveal himself to us. Amen. 

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for the 4th Sat per annum (I)

Heb 13:15-17,20-21; Ps 22; Mark 6:30-34

Jesus today has advice for his apostles, to those who minister in the Lord’s vineyard by preaching and teaching the Gospel. As such, he is speaking to us priests first of all, but since a priest is first of all a Christian and a disciple like you, then what Jesus says to us, to his apostles, can also be applied to every one of us Christians gathered here today. So the Lord says to us after we have been engaged in work and ministry and the service of the Gospel: “You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while”. 

Many of us in the world today fear loneliness; we fear being alone, or having no one around us. But to be in a lonely place all by ourselves, as Jesus put it in the Gospel, is not to become isolated and without support and friendship. The Greek word for the lonely place is eremos, that is to say, a place that is uninhabited, where nobody else is present. So, it is a place of solitude, and Jesus calls us to be by ourselves so that we can truly be ourselves, taking off our masks and our ‘brave faces’ which can be the cause of so much anxiety and stress. All of us will know, I think, that in our dealings with other people, whether as priests, or as mums, or nurses, or teachers, or shop assistants, people come to us looking for help, advice, or sometimes to offload their grievances, or to ask questions. Not infrequently, I think, we have to think on our feet, and speak in our ‘professional’ capacity, even if we don’t really have the answers. And so we put on a persona, one that is projected onto us, or which is somehow expected of us; we put on a brave face and a facade for others to see as we go about our work. 

Perhaps this is what the apostles had been doing, as they went out on their mission of preaching and exorcism and healing – after all, they hadn’t been trained for any of this, but they just went and did what they could, trusting in the Lord who had called them and sent them out, and hoping for the best. We know that when they returned they were often amazed and elated at the fact that God worked through them, frail and weak vessels that they were. As St Paul would say: “we have this treasure in earthern vessels” (2 Cor 4:7)

The Lord, full of mercy and compassion, knows our weaknesses, and that we often have to adopt a persona in carrying out our work. And what does he say, then? “You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while.” Why? Because, in a place of solitude, where nobody else is present, we can be ourselves, we can let our guard down, we can relax. But we are never really alone. For God is present, God is with us. So Christ is calling us to follow his example, and to go off to be alone in prayer with God. Prayer, therefore, must be authentic: we can be ourselves, we can speak freely, openly, and honestly to God, and we must lower our barriers, our pretence, our facades so that we can allow God to look upon us, and to shine his grace and light on our face. Prayer, then, is coming away from the world and from work, in order to be with God, and indeed, to rest in God. Thus St Augustine says, “our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you.” 

Jesus, knowing what the human heart needs, and knowing what we long for, thus calls you and I to retreat in prayer, and to find rest in God. It is God who will restore us, and heal us, and strengthen us; He will love us after the knocks and bruises and negligence that hurt us in our daily interactions with others. And this is what we need: to rest in God. 

The Gospel tells us that, however, Jesus is followed by a crowd who he teaches. But what about the apostles? Are they there too, hard at work again? The next verse which is not included in today’s passage suggests that they were not. So, Jesus himself ministered to the people, and he also ministered to his apostles by making sure they were able to steal away and be by themselves, and so find rest in God. Hence, I found the advice of Pope Francis, given on 2 February to the priests and seminarians and religious of the Democratic Republic of the Congo very timely, and he gives us some practical reminders on how we can follow Jesus’s command to go away to a lonely place. 

The Holy Father said: “The Presentation of the Lord, which in the Christian East is called the “feast of the encounter”, reminds us that the priority in our life must be our encounter with the Lord, especially in personal prayer, because our relationship with him is the basis of everything we do. Never forget that the secret of everything is prayer, since the ministry and the apostolate are not primarily our own work and do not depend solely on human means. You are going to tell me: yes, true enough, but commitments, pastoral priorities, apostolic labours, fatigue and so on risk leaving us with little time and energy for prayer. That is why I would like to share a few pieces of advice. First of all, let us remain faithful to certain liturgical rhythms of prayer that mark the day, from the Mass to the breviary. The daily celebration of the Eucharist is the beating heart of priestly and religious life. The Liturgy of the Hours allows us to pray with the Church and with regularity: may we never neglect it! Then too, let us not neglect Confession. We always need to be forgiven, so as then to bestow mercy upon others.

Now, a second piece of advice. As we all know, we cannot limit ourselves to the rote recitation of prayers, but must set aside a time of intense prayer each day, to remain “heart-to-heart” with the Lord. It may be a prolonged time of adoration, in meditation on the word, or with the Holy Rosary, but a time of closeness to the One whom we love above all else. In addition, even in the midst of activity, we can always resort to the prayer of the heart, to short “aspirations” – which are a real treasure – words of praise, thanksgiving and invocation, to be repeated to the Lord wherever we find ourselves. Prayer takes the focus off ourselves, it opens us up to God, and it puts us back on our feet because it puts us in his hands.”

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for Conversion of St Paul

Acts 9:1-22, Psalm 116:1-2, Mark 16:15-18

My parents named me Paul. So, for many years, today was a special feast day for me because this was St Paul’s day - not shared with St Peter, but just St Paul. And as I had also been a convert to Catholicism, so this feast of the Conversion of St Paul has always resonated with me, and it was a festive, joyful day. But ten years ago, in 2013, that changed. Ten years ago I was woken from sleep by my mobile phone ringing repeatedly; it was my mother. And with her voice breaking with emotion she told me that her mother, my grandmother who lived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, had unexpectedly died in her sleep. My uncle had found lying peacefully in her bed on the morning of the 25th of January, and they couldn’t wake her up. She was aged 81 and had not been suffering any particular illness; she had just passed away in her sleep. So, since 2013, today’s feast has become bitter-sweet, a poignant day full of memories. 

My earliest memories of my grandmother are of the view of her sitting at the desk in her room; as a child I slept in a bed facing her bed in her room. I would open my eyes early in the morning, and see her seated at her desk as the sun rose, and she would be reading the Bible or deep in prayer. My grandmother took me to church and thus she taught me to pray, much as Lois in the Bible taught her grandson Timothy to pray - St Paul mentions this in his 2nd letter to Timothy. And so, as I think of St Paul who was brought to faith in Christ in such a miraculous way, on this day I also remember the more ordinary ways in which we come to faith in Christ: we are led by the good example and teaching of others, especially family members who love us, and teach us, and discipline us. Indeed, as we mark the Day of Prayer for Christian Unity today, it is fitting that I remember and give thanks for my grandmother’s example of Christian life: though she was not a Catholic she was baptised into Christ as we all are, and she imparted that faith in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour to me. 

For in the first decade of my life, I had been brought up by my grandmother. Hence, I learnt to love music from the 1950s, learnt the table manners and decorum of an older generation, and I also learnt to love God and Jesus and the Gospel. Many of us think of St Paul’s ‘Damascus moment’ as an explosion of converting grace that happened once-and-for-all. However, such experiences of grace are extraordinary. After all, St Paul’s mission to the Gentiles was extraordinary. But for the rest of us Christians, we have the grace of a series of Damascus moments, or rather, the grace of St Paul’s singular moment of conversion is being drawn out over our entire lifetime. And this is what we want, what we need, and what we can pray for: that God’s grace will be granted us over a lifetime, daily deepening our love for Christ until death. And we pray that death will not be so sudden and unexpected as to leave us unprepared. Many Catholics rightly worry about an unprepared death, and we should be careful not to die without the strength and consolation of the Sacraments.

But I subsequently learnt from my grandmother’s younger sister, a devout Christian woman herself, that she and my grandmother would pray every night for the last decade of her life for a peaceful death; my grandmother prayed to just fall asleep in Christ. For a non-Catholic Christian who do not understand nor know the necessity of the Sacraments, to pray to fall asleep in Christ peacefully, means to pray for the grace of final perseverance in Faith. Hence I believe that my grandmother was thus prepared to meet her Lord and Saviour; and I trust that she was granted the grace of the kind of peaceful death that she had prayed for. 

The end of a life that was marked by daily prayer and surrender to Christ rightly ends with Christ, with a coming to rest in his peace. Over the years, I saw my grandmother change and grow and develop in her love for God, and her love for others – her temper mellowed, she became deeply forgiving even though she had suffered greatly at the hands of others, and she had a deep humility and simplicity. This, too, is the path of conversion. Indeed, this is the ordinary, by which I mean, the normal and proper way, by which we Christians are daily and gradually converted to Christ. There is no short cut, no sudden change, no once-and-for-all Damascus moment but often a process, a deepening and intensification of our relationship with Jesus Christ, so that gradually we grow into a deeper friendship with him, a more intense love for God. Therefore, each day, let these words of St Paul inspire us: “He [Christ] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” [So] I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor 12:9-10)

What faith St Paul had! His encounter with Christ on the Damascus road shaped the rest of his life, empowered him through his graced friendship with the Risen Lord, to endure all things for love of God, knowing that Christ was with him, abiding in him through grace. This same faith I realised lived in my grandmother, and she imparted that to me, by God’s grace and providence. And as a priest and Friar Preacher my hope is to hand this Faith on those I meet and catechise and teach. I hope it is your goal too. For Christ has ultimately called on us, the Baptised, to “go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News to all creation.” My grandmother was no street evangelist, though, but in her own quiet way, seated at her desk in prayer, or helping her neighbours and bringing them gifts, she was, quite definitely, proclaiming the Gospel. For her life had quite evidently been touched by the grace of the Risen Lord, and so people knew her to be a believer. And as Christ says in the Gospel: “He who believes and is baptised will be saved”.   

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for 2nd Wed per annum (I)

Heb 7:1-3, 15-17; Ps 109; Mark 3:1-6

At the start of last week I was invited to join the priors and bursars of our Province in Oxford for a meeting on fundraising. At the end of the week, someone came from Detroit to view our church and to speak to me, again, about fundraising. With the current spike in the cost of living in London, and as the living wage has gone up, and as we reviewed our budgets this week, much of my time in the past few days, then, has been spent thinking about raising funds for the maintenance and also for the extension and improvement of the work that we do here at St Dominic’s. Visitors from outside the UK, when they see the size of this historic church, its many beautiful features and details, and when they consider the range of services and works we do from this church and priory, always wonder about how we manage to keep this church open and in relatively good condition.

My answer is always the same: by the providence of God, because this is Our Lady’s house and Shrine, and it is her work and mission to preach the Rosary, and her Son’s Gospel of salvation. And so, my basic outlook is that if we do our part and are faithful to the ministry and work given to us, to the best of our ability given the time and energy we have, then God will give us what we need through the donations and contributions made by the community who worship here regularly, through the donations that come from visitors around the world, and through the gifts that are occasionally left to us in legacies. Last year I had expected a shortfall of over £30,000 but thanks to a legacy and some increased work on our part, and thanks to increased giving and Gift Aid, we were able to close that budget deficit. Bit by bit, God provides for our needs, and I continue to trust in God’s providence and the generosity of so many people, of your good selves. 

Now, you might wonder, why am I telling you all this and what has this to do with the Scripture readings we’ve heard? 

In the letter to the Hebrews, a reference is made to an incident recounted in Genesis 14: Abraham, who is our “father in faith”, had just been victorious in battle and, as was the custom, he had “brought back all the goods” he had won in battle. On his way home, Abraham encounters Melchizedek, the mysterious ‘king of peace’, and this priest-king offers a sacrifice of bread and wine to God, a sacrifice of thanksgiving for the victory. He declares: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!” Melchizedek has been seen as a forerunner of Christ, an image of the priesthood of Christ and of the sacrifice of the Mass, wherein we now offer bread and wine to God, in a great act of thanksgiving for Christ’s victory over sin. Hence, Abraham and Melchizedek are both mentioned in the ancient Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer) of the Mass.

Immediately after Melchizedek offers the sacrifice of thanks to God, we’re told that “Abram gave him a tenth of everything.” So, from the goods that he had won in battle, from his surplus, then, Abram gave a tenth to God, entrusting a tenth of his goods to Melchizedek the “priest of the Most High God”. This is the first instance in the Bible of what came to be called tithing, which means, giving a tenth to God. In many Catholic parishes in the USA, tithing – giving ten percent of one’s income after all essentials and needs have been accounted for – is not at all uncommon, and it is expected in Bible-based Protestant churches. This is why my visitor from Detroit told me that a parish of our size and demographic in the USA would have a weekly collection of around $40,000. So, my friends in the USA and S.E. Asia are often quite bewildered when I tell them that our weekly collection is 4% of that on a good week! How, they wonder, can we possibly keep things going? 

Most of our parishes in the UK can only dream of receiving tithes, but tithing is a Biblical practice, mentioned in both Old and New Testaments. The letter to the Hebrews just states: “it was to him that Abraham gave a tenth of all that he had.” This point, therefore, might give us pause for thought and reflection. I may not be able nor even want to give a tenth of all my goods, but what proportion do I give of my surplus income, or my time, or my service? Do I consciously set something aside to offer to God? How can I help my parish and Church community? For it’s not just money that we can offer to God and his Church, but also, our time and our talents. Each of these - time, treasure, and talents - after all are given us by God. As the Gospel says, the Sabbath itself was given us by God to be used to do something good, beautiful, and life-giving. So, as an act of thanksgiving to God for his blessings, we’re being invited by the example of Abraham, our “father in faith” to offer our goods to God. 

Personally, I am grateful for whatever comes to us by God’s providence and by your generosity especially in these frightening and difficult times. Thank you for trusting us to use your gifts and donations to do something good, beautiful, and life-giving here at Our Lady’s Rosary Shrine, at St Dominic’s. 

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for the 1st Wed per annum  (I)

Heb 2:14-18; Ps 104; Mark 1:29-39

I hope that at least some of you will have watched The Chosen which is now in its third season and which portrays the life of Christ in a fresh and appealing way, bringing new life and insight to many familiar stories from the Gospels. The Chosen is available online for free. In one episode in season 2, Christ has spent the whole day healing and praying over the crowds who flock to him. 

I was reminded of this because in the Gospel passage we’ve just heard, St Mark depicts a very full day’s work for the Lord. Right after calling his first disciples, he enters a synagogue and teaches, and then he casts out demons, and “immediately” after, he heals Simon’s mother-in-law. All this has happened in one day, it seems, and at last we’ve come to the evening and still “the whole city” comes, and Jesus heals many and casts out demons from many. 

But after all this activity, Mark lets us into a precious glimpse of Jesus’ life: “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed” (Mk 1:35). Prayer, time alone with God the Father, gives strength and new life and vitality to Jesus so that he can carry on his work. So prayer, the Lord is showing us, is as necessary as food and fresh air and rest. For prayer is, ultimately, resting in God, being with God, and so receiving from God all the good that he desires to give us. Prayer, indeed, is the “daily bread” for which we pray since prayer sustains the life of our souls in faith, in hope, and in charity. 

Tragically, we often think of prayer as a luxury, as something we fit into the gaps in the daily schedule of activities, but the example of Jesus shows that we need to make prayer part of our schedule - to set aside time to pray just as we make time for the other important things and people in our lives. I am reminded of a wonderful story in which a journalist had interviewed Mother Teresa and spent the day observing her works. At the end of a long and tiring day, he asked the Saint what empowered her daily schedule, and she said she spent an hour in adoration each day. The journalist said: “But what about your really busy days?” And St Teresa of Kolkata replied: “On those days I spend two hours in adoration”. 

The letter to the Hebrews today tells us that “because [Jesus] has himself been through temptation he is able to help others who are tempted.” So in prayer, coming before the Lord with all our weaknesses and addictions and temptation, we receive help from Jesus.  The saints, like St Teresa, all bear witness to the importance of prayer to enable them to do good works, to live their daily lives. 

But this help from Jesus may not always be the instant quick-fix that we want, in that our flaws and failings are not immediately removed, nor are the obstacles and problems of life instantly solved. Rather, we are helped in the manner that is best suited to us human beings, so that we grow in virtue and become better, more wise and loving people. And so this takes time, and perseverance, and a firm desire to change and improve, and to trust in God’s goodness and wisdom. Many people, it seems to me, give up on prayer and think it to be a waste of time because they do not see instant change and improvement. But maybe this isn’t because prayer is impotent, but because we human beings need time, because we need to learn patience and perseverance and fortitude, we need to mend and grow slowly so that the growth is durable and the break is well-healed. 

In The Chosen, Jesus is shown at the end of the exhausting day turning to God in prayer - but he does this in the arms of his mother Mary who silently cradles his head. We can do the same: pray the Rosary daily, set aside time for this, and pray it meditatively, and so let Mary cradle you and lead you into the rest that is our compassionate and loving God who, as the letter to the Hebrews says, has come to “set free all those who had been held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.”

[lawrenceop]

HOMILY for The Baptism of the Lord (A)

Isaiah 42:1-4. 6f; Ps 29; Acts 10:34-38; Matt 3:13-17

The other time that St Matthew tells of a voice being heard from heaven, it declares: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (17:5). We hear the exact same declaration today, but there is an interesting difference. Today, at the start of Jesus’s public ministry we’re not explicitly being told to listen to Christ. Rather, we’re presented today with Christ, our God, who has come to listen to us. As Ven. Louis of Grenada observes, Christ spent thirty years in silence – we know nothing of his so-called ‘hidden life’ – and then, from his Baptism onwards, three years of preaching. In this way, Christ shows us that he “valued the silence of recollection”, and I would add, he spends this time observing us, listening to us, coming to understand our human condition and human experience.

For at Christmas, we celebrated the Incarnation of Christ; God’s eternal Word taking flesh, being born as a baby. And as such, the Word is helpless, needy, and wordless if not silent. Thus, God humbled himself to share in our humanity; he comes to listen to us, becoming one with us. And today, on the last day of Christmas, we see the depths to which Christ shares in our humanity. By descending into the waters, a symbol of death, we see a prefiguration of the death that Jesus will choose to undergo in order to ‘listen’ to what it is to be mortal. And also, in humbling himself even to accepting John’s baptism of repentance, Christ shows that he chooses to identify himself with sinful humanity. So, our God chooses to humble himself to become Man, and not just to stand apart from us as a perfect human being, but to stand alongside us sinners; standing with sinful humanity in the Jordan, joining us in the waters of repentance. 

As the late great Pope Benedict XVI said: “Jesus loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon his shoulders: he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan. He inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners. His inaugural gesture was an anticipation of the Cross.” So, Christ identifies with sinners for our sake, in order to save us from sin. For as St Gregory Nazianzen says: “What has not been assumed has not been healed”.

However, we note that Jesus also says to John, more specifically, that he comes to be baptised in order to “fulfil all righteousness” (Mt 3:15). So, it is for God’s sake, for the sake of his justice, in other words, that he comes to the Jordan. Hence we hear in Isaiah that God’s faithful servant comes to fulfill God’s righteousness; to “bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa 42:1). So when Christ comes to the Jordan he does this, not by sitting in judgement, but by lowering himself into the river and listening to us, to our experience. For, as Isaiah says, the reed has been bruised by sin, the wick burns dimly. And so Christ doesn’t come to break us or extinguish the light. On the contrary, God’s justice and holiness is served when he comes to heal the wounds of sin and to fan our wavering love into an ardent flame. And this, too, is why Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptised: For Jesus comes, like the doctor, to listen to us and to observe our symptoms but, more importantly, he also comes to cure our diseases; to heal and vivify. And what he prescribes is baptism. Or, to be more, precise, Christ himself is the cure. For our fundamental disease is sin which cuts us off from the life of God.

So, today, Christ descends into the waters and dies alongside sinners, joining us in the depths. But he also rises out of the waters, and we, too, are called to rise up from our sins, and to rise with Jesus to new life; the sinner becomes a beloved son or daughter of God. Hence when Jesus goes up from the water, St Matthew says that “the heavens were opened”, the Spirit descends, and a divine voice is heard (Mt 3:16f). So, too, in the sacrament of baptism we have died with Christ and rise to new life in him; we are healed of sin and filled with the Spirit of God’s love; heaven is opened to us, and we hear this declaration said about each of us individually: “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased”. Therefore, when Jesus comes to the Jordan and says “thus it is fitting for us to fulfil all righteousness” (Mt 3:18), he is speaking of the righteousness he will bring about in us, in all peoples, through baptism and the other sacraments of his Church. 

So, although we’re not told explicitly in today’s Gospel to listen to Christ, in fact, if we’re attentive, there is something we’re being called to listen to today: Christ’s own example, and we’re called to follow him, and to share in his divine life. So Baptism, a vital sacrament that begins our Christian life, is still only the start of a new life, indeed, it inaugurates a new relationship with God. For through the Son of God, Jesus Christ, we can now be called sons and daughters of God. If so, then we need to receive the grace of God the Son, the graces and virtues and gifts that flow from Christ, and which makes us holy as Christ is holy. This requires from each of us a daily, on-going response – a life of faith and prayer in order to sustain and cultivate a living relationship of Faith with Jesus Christ. 

In particular, speaking of the baptism of infants and the role of the parish, Pope Benedict XVI said: “after Baptism [children] must be educated in the faith, instructed in accordance with the wisdom of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church so that this seed of faith that they are receiving today may grow within them and that they may attain full Christian maturity. The Church, which welcomes them among her children must take charge of them, together with their parents and godparents, to accompany them on this journey of growth. Collaboration between the Christian community and the family is especially necessary in the contemporary social context in which the family institution is threatened on many sides and finds itself having to face numerous difficulties in its role of raising children in the faith. The lack of stable cultural references and the rapid transformation to which society is constantly subjected, truly make the commitment to bring them up arduous. Parishes must therefore do their utmost increasingly to sustain families, small domestic churches, in their task of passing on the faith.”

This, in a nutshell, is my hope and my plan and my intention for this parish and for our long-term catechetical plan for St Dominic’s. Please pray for this plan, and for the spiritual renewal and support of our families, and please do what you can to help make this church and this place a living community of the Baptised where we can come to know God, hear his Word, and grow to love God more deeply. Thus the prophet Isaiah says to you and me, to us Christians today, that “I, the Lord, have called you to serve the cause of right; I have taken you by the hand and formed you; I have appointed you as covenant of the people and light of the nations.” We can only do this if we are lit up from within by the grace of Jesus Christ, with a burning love for God, and a desire to obey God’s commandments, as a faithful child of God:All this is what Baptism leads to.