There is a tendency for us to play down the second of the two comings of Jesus that I mentioned at the beginning of Mass, so as to give emphasis to his first coming, over 2000 years ago. While it gives us a warm feeling, and gives our children a lot of excitement, to prepare for the Christmas event, we must never forget that due emphasis must also be given to Christ’s return at the end of time, when he will bring world history to a close and usher in the fullness of the kingdom of heaven. We live in between those key moments in history. Note that the word “history” can be spelt as “his story”, in other words, Christ’s history. Pope St John Paul II once wrote that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment and center of all history, the world’s history and our own personal history. If our lives are centered simply on what happens to us, and what we can achieve in this world, we have missed the essential point of our life and our history.  Put simply, our life and our story are determined by Christ’s life and his story. The beginning of our real life and our personal story happens not at our natural birth, but at our new birth, our supernatural birth, in other words, at our baptism. That primary sacrament, coupled with confirmation, consecrates us to God, adopts us into His family as his sons and daughters, brings forgiveness of the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and our own personal sins, restores the life of the Holy Spirit, the life of grace within us and qualifies us for everlasting life in heaven. 

The consequence of our baptismal anointing,  if we build on it, means that, when Christ does come at the end of time to usher in the kingdom of God, it should not be a time of mortal fear for us, as it will be for many, as Jesus says in the gospel today: “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world”. … Read more...

We have had, in the course of world history, many kings and queens, especially in my home country of England. Some of them have been good rulers, saintly even (e.g. St Stephen of Hungary, St Edward the Confessor, Queen Margaret of Scotland). But many have not been quite so saintly. True is the saying of Lord Acton over a century and a half ago: “Power corrupts, Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. There is something about earthly power and authority that can go to a person’s head, and when that power belongs to an absolute monarch, with life and death in their hands, it can lead to some terrible atrocities. It is why countries with traditional monarchies have long understood the need to establish various restrictions against abuse of power in their leaders. 

Pilate understood the danger of allowing a king to arise in Israel, which would be a threat to him and to the Roman emperor. In our gospel today, Pilate questions Jesus to see if he represented a danger to Roman rule. In answer to such an accusation, Jesus states that the kingship which he wields is of a different order to earthly rule. It looks to an allegiance of the heart and a spiritual sovereignty which in no way is competitive with earthly power. But there is a self-awareness and an acknowledgement from Jesus that he is a king, that he does come to bring in the reign, the kingdom, or rather kingship of God. To deny that would be to deny the supreme truth of who he is, and since Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, (John 14:6), he cannot lie, he has to speak the truth. Pilate realizes that he is in the presence of greatness and a true majesty, although he declares to the Jewish leaders that he sees no political threat in Jesus.… Read more...

Our first reading, describing the final judgement before the throne of God, talks about those being saved, who were found “written in the book”.  God, it seems, has a book of names of those who are going to heaven.  This book, called the “book of life” or “the book of the living” is mentioned in several places in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New. In the final book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation, for instance, we are shown a vision of “a great white throne and the one who sat on it; …with the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books” (Revelation 20: 11,12).

That image, of the whole human race, myself included, standing before the throne of God at the end of time for judgement, haunted me throughout my young years. I could so easily picture myself, sweating and trembling, as the recording angel skimmed through the pages of the book, searching for my name in it. It didn’t help at all that I was an altar server as a boy, and used to serve at funerals. In those days, before the liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council, funerals were dreadful, gloomy occasions. Everyone wore black vestments, there was a black pall on the coffin, the readings all spoke of punishment and hell, the music was dirty, and there was, above all, the intoning of the “Dies Irae” (Latin for “The Wrath of God”), from the prophet Zephaniah: “The great day of the Lord is near … that day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry” (Zephaniah 1:14-16). … Read more...

The great Franciscan saint, Padre Pio, was raising money to build a hospital in the area where he lived, in Italy. One day, he was approached by an elderly widow, who pressed a few lira notes into his hands for his fund. The donation only amounted to a few dollars, but that wasn’t the reason Padre Pio was reluctant to take it. He knew that it was probably all of the woman’s savings, and she didn’t have any money left to take care of her needs. So, when he tried to return her money, the widow nodded and sighed “Yes, Father Pio, I guess it isn’t very much money, is it?” At which Padre Pio changed totally and snatched up the money, saying “Dear lady, this is the best gift I have ever received for my fund”.

Perhaps at that moment, Fr Pio remembered the story of the widow in our gospel today, and of the widow in our first reading also. Perhaps he also recalled the words of our responsorial psalm, that God “upholds the widow and the orphan”, and he stopped worrying how the woman before him, proffering her life’s savings, was going to be able to live without any money. God would take care of her, as he always seems to do for the poor and needy, who put God first in their lives. We are not told what happened to the widow in the gospel after she left the temple, having deposited into the treasury “all she had to live on”.  In a way, we really don’t need to know. I would bet the last dollar I own that she was taken care of thereafter. Because one of God’s titles in the Bible is “Yahweh Jireh” – “God provides”. “God upholds the widow and the orphan”, says our psalm today, Psalm 68 echoes that thought: “God is the father of orphans and the protector of widows”, it says, “in your goodness, O God, you provide for the needy”.… Read more...

This gospel passage we are reading today is actually astonishing.

It does not unfold as we might have thought. I doubt that even Jesus could have foreseen the direction his conversation with the scribe would go. For a start, the scribe is a lawyer, an expert in the Jewish Law. From the outset of his ministry, Jesus has been plagued by endless questions about the Jewish Law, and his interpretation of it. These questions come from the various religious and spiritual leaders of Israel, all with university degrees in the Jewish Scriptures, who try to catch Jesus out by showing up his own lack of knowledge of the Law. Jesus, after all, has not been to university or rabbinic school as they have, so he cannot possibly know as much as they. Wrong, so, so wrong. One by one, Jesus turns the tables on them, and shows that he is smarter, more knowledgeable , wiser and shrewder than all of them put together Should  we pay taxes to Caesar, can a man divorce his wife for any cause whatsoever, if a woman marries each of seven brothers, whose wife will she be in heaven, and, today’s gospel, which is the greatest and first commandment? Jesus shows he has the answer, and more, to each of the challenges they put to him. 

But, in today’s gospel, something incredible is happening. 

For here comes a lawyer, who actually is not trying to catch Jesus out. He genuinely wants to know the answer: “Which commandment is the first of all?” That is not as easy a question to answer as we might think. We think there are only ten commandments. In fact there were no less than 613 different commandments in the Jewish Law by Jesus’ time, many of them the result of added interpretation by various rabbis and scholars of the Law throughout the centuries, since God wrote down the original ten on tablets of stone for Moses to give the people.… Read more...

HOMILY FOR THIRTIETH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR

Did you know that in the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples of Jesus are known as “followers of the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9m 23)? That is the earliest title given to these followers of Jesus, even before they were known as “Christians”. Why? Well, first of all, Jesus described himself, in John 14: 6 as “the Way” as well as “the Truth “and “The Life”. He is the way to the Father, the truth from the Father the very life of the Father.  He is the Way to the Father, for he said “No-one can come to the Father, except through me “(John 14:6).  To follow the way of Jesus, in other words, to become a disciple of Jesus, is to come to have personal relationship with God as His Father, and our Father. So, we see, in our gospel today, that Bartimaeus, “follows Jesus on the way”.  He could have chosen not to, once he received his sight. Jesus left him totally free to choose, as he does with each one of us. “Go”, he says to Bartimaeus, in other words “you are free to go whichever way you choose”. This is very important for those who think that somehow God forces us to become a disciple of Jesus. No, God has left us free will, and he will not interfere with that, or ever take it away from us.

Then, to follow the way of Jesus is to follow the “way of the cross”.  When Jesus and his disciples leave Jericho in our gospel, they are only going one way – to Jerusalem, where Jesus has made it abundantly clear, over and over again, that, there, he is to face persecution, arrest, torture and death, but after three days, he will rise again from death.… Read more...

In my seminary back in England there was a professor of theology called Fr. Charles Acton. The only reason I bring him up is because he was the great-grandson of a certain Lord Acton, a Catholic historian, politician and writer. It was Lord Acton, who in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887, coined the famous saying: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.  It is a statement whose truth we see confirmed time and again throughout history, up to and including today. It is the reason why Jesus takes such a strong line with his disciples in our gospel today, when he discovers that they have been arguing about which one of them is the greatest. Ironically, their argument on the topic comes hard on the heels of Jesus’ own declaration that he will not be going into Jerusalem to garner praise and glory for himself, but to lay down his life in service of his fellow men. 

Having restated the essence of discipleship, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all”, Jesus startles his apostles even further, by taking a child and placing him in their midst. Understand that this is not setting up a photo-op, Jesus is not doing a politician’s turn and kissing babies. The child, which meant someone under 12 in those days, i.e. before bar mitzvah, the child had no power, no rights, no influence. Children were just seen pretty much as a nuisance, just another mouth to feed, and detailed to do the most menial of tasks in the household, until they were of an age when they could go out and earn some money for their family. Remember how the apostles tried to turn the children away from bothering Jesus when their parents wanted to bring them to him for a blessing?… Read more...

In order to understand the significance of this episode in our gospel, it is important to know a few facts. This place where Jesus takes his disciples, Caesarea Philippi is located at the northernmost point of Israel. From there, Jesus and his followers would have a wide panorama of the whole country spread out before them. It was a place known in antiquity for being a shrine to various gods, including the god Pan, pictured as half-goat, half-man. Human sacrifice was offered to the gods at this place in ancient times. In Jesus’ time, this location, Caesarea Philippi was renovated by King Philip, and dedicated to Caesar Augustus, who insisted on being treated as a god, and to be referred to by various titles such as Son of God, Redeemer, Savior, all titles that would eventually be attributed to Jesus Christ.

So, in this shrine with so many associations with divinity, Jesus asks the crucial question: “In this place associated with various gods and idols, where do you put me? Am I just one of many gods to be worshipped at this site, or do I have a unique and special status?”  Jesus has already asked his apostles “Who do others say that I am?”  The various answers offered to that question represent good guesses on the part of the crowds, but they fall short of the full truth about Jesus. Jesus is more than John the Baptist, or Elijah or one of the many prophets in Israel’s past. I wonder if we went out now to interview people in the streets and ask them “Who is Jesus to you?”, what answers do you think we would get. Probably answers like “He was a good man” or “He was a great teacher” or “He was someone who had a lot of good ideas at the time”.… Read more...