Category: Year A

This Sunday Churches celebrate the feast of the Ascension, the return of Jesus to immediacy and intimacy with his Father. A reflection on this feast:

If you were to open the Cambridge Dictionary and look at the entry for ‘step into somebody’s shoes’, the entry states, “to take someone’s place, often by doing the job they have just left.”

The Amandus Church in Freiberg Germany is a late Gothic fortified former village church. Situated on a hill above the old village centre, it is notable for a diversity of architectural styles and for its paintings and organ. One such painting is by the Czech artist, Hans Stiegler.

The north gallery of the Church is dominated by a painting titled, ‘Resurrection of Jesus and Ascension’.  On first inspection the painting appears like many other ‘Ascension’ paintings with the faithful followers of Jesus gazing upwards as Jesus begins to leave this earth.

However, a closer look reveals that Jesus has left his sandals behind! Might I suggest that the feast we celebrate today is as much about us as it is about Jesus.

As persons committed to following in the footsteps of Jesus the Christ, we are called (maybe even challenged!) not to look up, rather to look down!.

The shoes have been left behind, in order that we may ‘take someone’s place, often by doing the job they have just left’.

And, surprise, surprise, one size fits all!

A note of caution, these shoes have a mind of their own and might well take you to places and persons you would rather not go, e.g. tax collectors, the poor, the needy, the forgotten, persons with a physical or psychological disability; you may be taken to the hospital, the prison, the street corner.

How could Jesus say, “This is my commandment, that you love one another?”  (Jn. 15:12).

How can you be commanded to love?

Surely love has to be a free response, not an obligation

Dominican theologian and writer Meister Eckhart (1343 – 1416) threw a clear light on this conundrum. He said, “When I am thirsty, the drink commands me; when I am hungry, the food commands me. And God does the same [when he commands me to love].”

In other words, the command to love is not a command that is laid on us from the outside; it is an inner command, an inner urgency placed in our very being by God – like hunger and thirst; or, you might say, like the urgency that an oak tree has to develop as an oak tree. It is not something alien; it is our own, yet it is totally from God.

Jesus’ command to love contains a critical subordinate clause, “as I have loved you!” What was unique in the way Jesus loved?

Where Jesus stretches us beyond our natural instincts and all self-delusion is in his command to love our enemies, to be warm to those who are cold to us, to be kind to those who are cruel to us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who won’t forgive us, and to ultimately love and forgive those who are trying to kill us.

More than any creedal formula or another moral issue, command, love, and forgive your enemies is the litmus test for Christian discipleship.

We can ardently believe in and defend every item in the creed and fight passionately for justice in all its dimensions, but the real test of whether or not we are followers of Jesus is the capacity or non-capacity to forgive an enemy, to remain warm and loving towards someone who is not warm and loving to us.

John B Keane was an Irish playwright who lived in Listowel, Co. Kerry. He wrote some very hard-hitting plays.

However, he was a man of deep faith. Towards the end of life, he was diagnosed with cancer, and the cancer was terminal.

Around that time, he was asked on a TV show if he believed in life after death. By way of an answer, he told the following story.

He had a friend, Jack, who lived in Co. Donegal.

The trouble was they hadn’t seen one another in years.

One day, John B phoned Jack.

They arranged to meet in Galway at a certain place they knew.

They arranged a particular day and time. Galway is about halfway between Kerry and Donegal.

As John B was about to leave home, his wife said, ‘But how can you be sure that he’ll show up?’ to which John B responded, ‘Jack is a reliable man. If he says he’ll be there, he’ll be there.’

Then, turning to the interviewer, John B said, ‘As for your question. I firmly believe that Jesus is a reliable person. He has told us that he has gone to prepare a place for us. He will be there. And so will our loved ones..

“Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (Jn. 14: 1 3 )

Where in John’s Gospel this passage sits is worth noting. This saying was not uttered on some sunny morning when all is going well, but on the night Jesus was betrayed; Judas has left the group, and in that poignant scene he shared their pain, and shares with all us the sheer tragedy of our mortality. But even as  he prepared them for the sorrow of parting, he also instilled in them the hope of resurrection, the hope of Heaven and homecoming which they could not yet see.

This passage in John is very often chosen, and rightly so, as a reading at funerals, because it expresses both empathy and hope.

The priest/poet Malcolm Guite reflects on these words of Jesus, in sonnet form:

Let Not Your Hearts Be Troubled
Always there comes this parting of the ways
The best is wrested from us, borne away,
No one is with us always, nothing stays,
Night swallows even the most perfect day.
Time makes a tragedy of human love,
We cleave forever to the one we choose
Only to find ‘forever’ in the grave.
We have just time enough to love and lose.

You know too well this trouble in our hearts,
Your heart is troubled for us, feels it too,
You share with us in time that shears and parts
To draw us out of time and into you.
I go that you might come to where I am
Your word comes home to us and brings us home.

(from ‘Parable and Paradox’, Canterbury Press, 2016)

 

 

I am a great gatherer of stories that might provide a ‘stepping off point’ for my and others’ reflections. I recall studying in the US and attending a Sunday Mass in the Diocese of Trenton, NJ. The Gospel of the day was the Gospel we proclaim today about the Good Shepherd. (Jn. 10: 27 -30). It is, somewhat surprisingly, no more than four verses long; however, further proof that the best things come in small packages! The homilist began with these words:

“There was a practice among shepherds in Israel that existed at the time of Jesus and is still in use in parts today that needs to be understood to appreciate what Jesus says about God as the Good Shepherd. Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, if a shepherd senses that this particular lamb will be a congenital stray and forever be drifting away from the herd, he deliberately breaks its leg so that he has to carry the lamb until its leg is healed. By then, the lamb becomes so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again!”

Through quite an extensive search, I have found no evidence that the practice ever existed, and for me, it sounds rather barbaric.

However, it has provided me with some worthwhile reflection. I am of the period when “you put on your Sunday best” to attend Church on a Sunday (and, of course Holy Days of Obligation). The ‘dressing up’ I consider an important symbol – a symbol of bringing  your ‘good self’, your ‘washed and polished self’, a self that would ‘prove acceptable’ into the presence of your God

When I read and reflect on the Gospel stories, I notice it is the broken people who come to Jesus, (deaf, dumb, blind, lame, issue of blood, demon possessed, and many more). They arrive ‘in their brokenness’ and leave healed, some even leave their sleeping mat where it lies.!

Maybe there is a deliberately “broken bit” in me that actually is my conduit into my relationship with Jesus.

Through my silly theology have desperately tried to hide away this “broken bit” to present an acceptable and pleasing face to Jesus.

The question may well be: will I let Jesus carry me, with my broken pieces, until I am healed?

Today is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations.

Let us not reduce this day of prayer to a day of prayer for a select few discerning a call to the religious life, or to ordained ministry. Let us be broad and expansive in our prayer.

Let us pray for a listening ear and a generous heart for women and men throughout our world, attentive to the vocational call of the Good Shepherd – a call to the single life, to life lived in the commitment of married love, to a life lived through the vocation of religious life, to a life lived through the vocation of ministerial priesthood.

Let each of us hear again the foundational call of Christian women and men through the Baptismal grace which names us as daughters and sons of God.