#divinisation
HOMILY for the 7th Sunday per annum©
1 Samuel 26:2,7-9,11-13,22-23; Ps 102; 1 Cor 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38
The newspapers carried an astonishing report on Friday of a man called Dr Adam Towler. One night in 2019, a teenager knocked on his door in Bristol, and when he opened it, he was pulled outside of his own home, and stabbed nine times. The man who did this did not have any previous acquaintance with Dr Towler, nor was there any apparent motivation for this unexpected act of violence. At the sentencing of his attacker last Friday, Adam Towler said to the man who nearly killed him: “I want to say that I am not upset or angry with you… I don’t think you owe me an apology or anything, but I do want you to know what it’s like for me.” And he told the Today programme on Radio 4 that “The fact we’re here talking today, I got lucky –I’m living a quite normal life, a comfortable life”, and he expressed a deep sympathy for his attacker who now has to spend the rest of his life (or at least twelve years) in prison.
I immediately thought of Adam Towler’s words when I read today’s Gospel: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly… Treat others as you would like them to treat you.” These words are so familiar to us, but perhaps we sometimes think of them merely as an ideal, but one that is rarely seen in action. Many of them, I am sure, struggle to live as Christ teaches us today. Hence, when a newspaper reports words like Dr Towler’s, it makes me sit up and reflect because these actions are, as the judge said, “extraordinary”; Dr Towler, moreover, does not hint at any explicit Christian faith. But, as the judge said to Dr Towler, “Whether it is the effect of intellect, or faith, or kindness and understanding, I don’t know. If it is the consequence of intellect, I admire it. If it is the consequence of faith, I envy it.”
There is much to admire in this situation, but I am not envious of another’s faith. Envy, after all, is the vice of experiencing sorrow for the good that another receives or shows. No, one does not envy the faith of another, nor their extraordinarily good will, nor their act of forgiveness, compassion, and empathy. Rather, one desires to emulate him, or at least, one should do! For this is at the heart of today’s Gospel: we can do all these extraordinary things because we want to emulate God our Father! So Christ says: “Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate… love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return… and you will be sons of the Most High.”
Indeed, Christ who is, by nature, the Son of the Most High God, shows us on the Cross how to regard one’s enemies: our compassionate God, the Son of God, makes excuses for sinners, he forgives, and he says, in effect, something like “I am not upset or angry with you… I don’t think you owe me an apology or anything”. In doing so, Jesus teaches us, who by grace are also sons of God, how we can respond to those who hate us and do ill. God gives us the grace to react with compassionate love, just as Jesus does, if we want to.
However, the problem I think is that most of us expect too little of God, too little of his grace, and certainly too little of ourselves. Perhaps we do not think we’re worthy to emulate God our Father and so we don’t really try. Or maybe we don’t think that we can actually be like Christ – we see only our own failings and weaknesses, but we don’t recognise the power of God given us in the Sacraments. “We’re not really cut out to be Saints”, people tell me but such talk, sadly, seems to despair of God’s power, God’s grace, God’s mercy which is only merciful because it moves us to change and improve and to become the sons and daughters of God that our Baptism calls us to be! The consequence of this is that the Gospel becomes just an ideal, a mythical story, but robbed of any power to radically change us and change our society. The consequence is that we remain in our sins, and will not allow God to draw near to help us and save us.
The example of Dr Adam Towler can, I think, awaken us to the possibilities. And lest anyone thinks that Dr Towler is (apparently) not a Christian, and so his actions only belie the power of secular altruism, or serve to prove that one doesn’t need God in order to be good or moral, I would ask anyone who thinks like this to pause a little. Pause and think, and look at this theologically. For it is simplistic and bad theology to think that God only helps Christians, or the virtuous, or those who are in his club. Rather, the compassion of Christ who died for all, and the incarnation of God who thus allies himself with every human being, shows that God’s grace is much more powerful and pervasive than the doctrines of religious tribalism would allow. Again, I think that if we expect too little of God’s grace, too little of God, then we would just say that Dr Towler’s extraordinary act of forgiveness was just a non-religious fluke. But I refuse to say so. Rather, I say with St Justin Martyr that the seeds of God’s goodness and reason are found throughout creation – God’s creation. And I say with St Cyril that the incarnate Word of God is active and present in every human person. And I say with St Thomas Aquinas that all good finds its origin and impulse and perfection in God. That is to say, no good is possible for anyone or anything at all were it not first caused and sustained by God. This is what a robust theology of God and divine causality looks like. And this is Catholicism.
So, we thank God that he moved Dr Towler to behave with such divine benevolence and empathy towards his attacker, in the hope that such compassion would move the attacker to repentance and to final salvation. For God, in his wisdom and providence, can and will use any one of us, not simply for our own good, but for the salvation of others. Again, a robust theology of Providence leads us to say that God is always in control, and he moves people, whether they are Christian or not, to do his will, always for a greater good that we do not see. In this case, I want to suggest, that Dr Towler’s example should chasten us Christians, give us cause for humility, and embolden us who are called by grace to be sons and daughters of the Most High God to behave more like our heavenly Father. In other words, Dr Towler challenges each of us to be more authentically Christian, and to emulate Christ more faithfully.
These, I think, are fitting lessons and reflections as Lent is soon upon us. How can I demand more of God, more of his grace, and so expect more for myself? Christ says today that “the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.” So, when we pray and ask for gifts from God, let us ask for a generous measure of God’s graces, that will change not our external circumstances but our interior being. For know this: God wants to make us Saints, he wants us to be his own beloved children, re-made in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ his Son.
Therefore Pope Benedict XVI said: “Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched… It is only by becoming children of God, that we can be with our common Father… When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment… We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes… For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray properly.”
So, as Lent approaches, let us be ready to learn to pray better, to be purified in our hopes and desires, so that we desire holiness, desire closeness with God, desire to become more like the Lord who is compassion and love.
HOMILY for the Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6; Ps 71; Eph 3:2-3,5-6; Matthew 2:1-12
At evening prayer today, the Church sings this antiphon: “Three mysteries mark this holy day: today the star leads the Magi to the infant Christ; today water is changed into wine for the wedding feast; today Christ wills to be baptized by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation.”
At first glance this seems puzzling and might even appear to be an odd conflation of three events in the life of Christ. But this only is problematic if we think about the celebration of Christmas and the feasts around it in a chronological way. Likewise with the Holy Rosary, when we think that this devotion is meant to present us with a chronological or sequential newsreel of the life of Christ. In fact, as I said on the 1st of January, the feasts of Christmas, like the Rosary (as I say in my book Mysteries Made Visible) need to be viewed theologically – they tell us about the person of Jesus Christ, about what God is doing for us in Christ, and about the life of grace now, and how we can thus receive from God, “grace upon grace” (Jn 1:14).
As such, today feast of the Epiphany is about the revelation to the nations that God has been born among us, that he is “true God and true Man”, truly God with us, Emmanuel. The cosmic-changing implication of the Incarnation is thus set out for us in the Second Reading today. St Paul says: “it was by a revelation that I was given the knowledge of the mystery. This mystery that has now been revealed through the Spirit to his holy apostles and prophets was unknown to any men in past generations; it means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body, and that the same promise has been made to them, in Jesus Christ, through the gospel.”
Except that the reading doesn’t make explicit what is meant by “the inheritance” and the “same promise” that has been offered now to all peoples, all nations, both Jew and pagan alike. But if we pay attention to the Preface of the Epiphany, we will hear this: “today you have revealed the mystery of our salvation in Christ as a light for the nations, and when he appeared in our mortal nature, you made us new by the glory of his immortal nature.” We take it for granted, perhaps, that God should offer salvation to all peoples, and yet the fact is that until the coming of Christ, until the Incarnation of God as Man through which he took on our mortal human nature, it had been thought that salvation was only for a particular race, a chosen few.
The coming of God as a human being makes it clear that God has chosen humanity, even though we had fallen into sin and disobeyed him. God has chosen us for himself, and called us into his marvellous light, into intimate friendship with him through the person of Jesus Christ who is both God and Man. Why? So that we might be renewed by the grace of Christ, and so come to share in his immortal and divine nature as the Preface says. This is the theological heart of today’s celebration; this is the wondrous truth that is revealed as an Epiphany to the nations today.
The three mysteries that mark this day, therefore, express this theological truth and they invite us to think about it. Firstly, the Gentile Magi come to adore Christ and they offer their treasures before him. This tells us that salvation from God is now offered to all nations through the person of Jesus Christ. All peoples, therefore, are called to seek him, to journey towards him, and to offer to him, the God-Man, their treasures, their joys, their sorrows, their all. This is the principal sign of this feast that reveals the fact that salvation is now open to humanity, should one desire it, should we seek God out, and open our lives and desires to him.
All that Man can offer to Christ is like the water at Cana. All these, all that is of our human nature, God will transform by his grace and make like unto wine. Just as, in the Mass, Christ takes what we bring to the Altar and transforms it into his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so Christ takes all that we offer to him, all that is of our mortal human natures, and he transforms us by his grace and divinises us. The water changed into wine at Cana is hence a sign that Christ comes to make us “new by the glory of his immortal nature” as the Preface says. The fact that this takes place at a wedding feast tells us that in the person of Christ, God and Man is forever united, made one in a love and a bond that is like marriage. This reveals the interior sign of this feast, of the saving effect of Christ’s grace on the human soul and person; it tells us howwe are saved interiorly, through the invisible action of grace.
And thirdly, the sign of Christ’s Baptism shows us the external sign, the Sacrament that causes and effects this grace. Baptism is thus called the “Sacrament of Salvation” because the Lord wills that it is through Baptism that we receive the grace of divine adoption, that we share in Christ’s life and divine nature, and that we are thus saved. The third mystery of this feast day, therefore, affirms that ordinarily we must be Baptised in order to be saved. Yes, salvation has been offered to all peoples, but God does not force himself onto us, so we express our acceptance of salvation by seeking Baptism. Christian parents can and should do this for their infant children, but the assumption of the Church, repeatedly expressed in the Rite of Baptism, is that baptised children must be brought up in the practice of the Faith so that they grow in knowledge and love of Jesus Christ. Hence the Collect today also prays: “Grant in your mercy, that we, who know you already by faith, may be brought to behold the beauty of your sublime glory.”
For our Faith in Christ, and our friendship with God involves a journey: This begins at Baptism, and, as in a Marriage, it is a love that must be deepened and that will need to endure “for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” And at the end of the journey, if we are choose to persevere and walk by the light of Faith, a light which shines like a star in the night but which, like the stars, is not always so clearly visible, then we shall finally enter the home of Mary and Joseph, and there, in heaven, behold and adore Christ our God, face to face.
This is the journey of the wise men, the journey of faith that each of us, like them, are invited to make in our lifetime. So, at the start of a new year, let us press on in our journey; let us seek that elusive star in the darkness; and let us remember the words of the Lord: “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Lk 11:9) Jesus, on this feast day, promises us not worldly or earthly things, not the luxuries and consolations of gold, or incense, or myrrh, but rather, understood theologically, Christ gives us his own self. Therefore, let us give him open our treasures, our whole self before him, and receive from his fullness of divine humanity, “grace upon grace”.
