Good Friday 2011

Good Friday 22 April 2011

The question that I keep wrestling with as I have been pondering on the Passion narrative we have just heard, is that question that someone asks Peter after Jesus has been arrested and is being detained for questioning at the High Priest’s house: “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” St John is alone of the four evangelists in using this word garden- today’s Passion opened with Jesus crossing the Kedron valley to go to the Mount of Olives, and immediately we read “There was a garden there, and he went into it with his disciples”. At the end of the Passion too, we are back in a garden- because John tells us “at the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried”. What are we to make of this? What is this garden?

I am sure your minds have immediately turned to the first time in the whole Bible when we hear about a garden- the ancient account of the creation of the world that we have in Genesis chapter 2 where the best way the Jews of those distant centuries could think of to describe the way things ought to be, the easy, harmonious relationship humanity ought to have with God, was to call it a garden. A place of beauty, order, calm. We read “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden….and there he put the man whom he had formed”, (Gen 2 viii). Of course, this happy innocent state of being at peace and at one with God did not last, for as we know the garden was the place of the yielding of Adam and Eve to the blandishments of the Devil, of the initial and far-reaching disobedience of mankind, which resulted in exile from the garden. From now on, our human destiny was going to be a far more complicated affair, our relationship with God hard to discern and maintain, our basic sinfulness forever getting in the way – “therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden….to till the ground from which he was taken”. (Gen 3 xxiii).

All this has been discussed by the Holy Father in his latest book- I quote “John’s use of the word garden is an unmistakeable reference to the story of Paradise and the Fall. That story, he tells us, is being resumed here” (J of N II p149). The place of Adam’s disobedience will now be the place of the new Adam’s obedience – “even to accepting death, death on a cross”. The place where Adam and Eve are tempted and decide just to do their own thing and hang the consequences will be the place where Our Lord was, as it tells us in Hebrews “tempted in every way that we are, though he is without sin” and where he prays to the Father “Not as I will, but as thou wilt….thy will be done” (Mt 26 xxxix, xlii). As Pope Benedict comments “It was in the garden that Jesus fully accepted the Father’s will, made it his own, and thus changed the course of history”. (ibid p150)

Of course in the garden of Eden everything depends on one thing: the Tree. What is this tree, and what is our attitude to it? Genesis speaks of “the tree of life….in the midst of the garden….the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2 ix). This tree is what everything revolves around in the drama of the Fall, everything depends on it, hangs on it- God says to Adam and Eve leave these things to God, accept that there are moral absolutes of good and evil, that it is not a question of “Does it feel good to me?” but “Is it good?”. Accept these limits to your freedom and all will be well. Do not interfere with the Tree! Do not start rearranging what is good and what is evil, leave well alone or we shall have chaos, a world where nothing is certain but everything, good and evil, just a matter of opinion. Well, we’ve got that!

And now in another garden there stands another Tree, a Tree on which everything depends, a Tree on which everything- everyone even- hangs in the tortured body of Our Lord Jesus himself. This Tree, the Cross, is the Tree of Life isn’t it, this is the place where good and evil are known, where good and evil meet for their ultimate combat. As we shall shortly be singing “This is the wood of the Cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world”. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem, I think from the 9th century, “The Dream of the Rood”, one of the glories of the pre-Reformation devotional literature of this country, in which the Tree, the Cross, speaks. Here is a bit of it: “Men shifted me on their shoulders and set me on a hill….I saw the Lord of Mankind hasten with such courage to climb upon me. I dared not bow or break there, against my Lord’s wish, when I saw the surface of the earth tremble….Then the young warrior, God Almighty, stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind.” The poet shows us a Christ who is not coerced by soldiers, not forced onto the cross, but a Jesus who is serenely in control, “firm and unflinching” as he climbs onto the Tree as a warrior ready to do battle.

Dear friends, we are in that garden today, at this Solemn Liturgy we step, as at every Mass, outside of time and stand in eternity- this is the hour, this is the moment! We are in the garden, we are up against the reality of the garden, the reality of how we can be reconciled to God and live again in his friendship, that reality as we know is the Tree, the Cross! How we want to stay in this garden, to live our lives always in friendship with God, in the garden of his intimacy. And at the end of our earthly lives, when we too come to die, let us have our answer ready to that question put to Peter- “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” “Yes, I was there, I was there when they nailed him to the Tree”. Dear Jesus, help us! Help us to stay close to you in the garden, even if that means, as we know it does, that we have to stay close to the tree that is your Cross. Amen.

SS Peter and Paul 29 June 2008

Homily for the Solemnity of SS Peter and Paul and the Start of the Pauline Year Sunday 29 June 2008 This weekend the Holy Father proclaimed the opening of the Year of St Paul, because historians place St Paul’s birth at some time between AD 7 and AD 10 and so this special Pauline Year commemorates the 2000th anniversary of his birth. The Holy Father hopes that as this year unfolds we will find occasions to reflect more deeply on the person of St Paul, his life and his thought that we have preserved for us both indirectly in St Luke’s account of the Early Church in the book of Acts and directly in the Letters of St Paul that form such a major part of the New Testament. Because of all this information, Paul is the person in the New Testament times that we know most about- apart that is, from Our Lord himself. And these letters are in fact the earliest Christian writings we have, all of them written before the Gospels came to be written down. No wonder Pope Benedict once described St Paul in this way; “He shines like a star of the brightest magnitude in the Church’s history”. For me, part of the attraction of St Paul is that he is a follower of Our Lord who is exactly in our own position- remember he never met Jesus during Our Lord’s earthly life, unlike the other apostles who knew Jesus personally and who had been with him all through his ministry. We too have never met Jesus in the flesh, have we, our encounters with him are all of a supernatural nature- chiefly of course when we meet him in the sacraments, when he comes to us in Holy Communion and when we come to spend time alone with him before the Tabernacle and let him gaze upon us and speak to us. Probably, alas, our encounters with Our Lord in this way are not, or at least not often, of the dramatic nature of the great encounter that Paul- then known as Saul- had with the Risen Lord in the famous incident on the road to Damascus. Luke gives a full account of this decisive moment in Paul’s life, “when a light from Heaven flashed about him”. Paul himself is more reticent. In his Letter to his converts at Philippi he just refers to when “Christ made me his own”, in the Letter to the Galatians he says God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me” and in his second Letter to his converts in Corinth he says “it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts”. His experience of this supernatural encounter with Our Lord was so vivid to him that he asks them “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” How wonderful it would be if we too could sometimes feel all this fervour and conviction! If we reflect on what we are really doing when we come to communion, what is really happening on the altar at Mass, who we are really talking to when we lament our sins in the confessional, maybe we too could come away from receiving the sacraments feeling that “Christ has made me his own” and saying “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” We are always in a sense on the road to Damascus, going about our routines, caught up in all the concerns of our lives, usually to some extent in all the compromises of our lives, let’s face it- and the sacraments are there as so many possible lay-bys and halts on that road that is our daily life- can Jesus speak to us too when we come to Mass? Will we too when we drop into church for a few minutes before the Blessed Sacrament feel so drawn into the presence of Christ that we will sense a light from heaven flash about us? Or are there just too many distractions? Well, the other thing I really like about St Paul is that he is very frank with us about his frail human nature. He is certainly one of us, no superman! Listen to him writing to the church in Rome: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” Sounds familiar? That is certainly often my own situation- full of good intentions, then swept away by some old stupid habit of thought into the very behaviour that afterwards appals me. That is the dilemma of human nature isn’t it, that we all are familiar with, the fatal flaw that we know as original sin. Paul goes on: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”. All of that makes Paul seem a very honest, ordinary human being, who has to battle with himself in order to be a faithful follower of Our Lord. And that is also our own position entirely, isn’t it. I leave to other occasions in the coming Pauline Year the various strands of St Paul’s theology; today as this momentous year in the Church’s history opens I want merely to remind us of how like us he is- a Christian, a follower of someone he has never met but only experienced in supernatural ways, a man caught up in the daily struggle within himself to be not just a follower, but a faithful follower, of Our Lord. As the Pauline Year unfolds may we share in some of St Paul’s experiences, may we too experience God shining into our hearts and know from our encounters with Our Lord in the sacramental life that “Christ has made me his own”. I close with the wish that St Paul enshrines in his first Letter to the Corinthians: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ”. Amen.