3rd Sunday of Lent

THE SAMARITANS

The Samaritans were descendants of Jacob, like the Jews, but they inter-married with other tribes and adopted some of their pagan traditions.  The Jews, God’s Chosen People, despised the Samaritans and would not associate with them.

No wonder the Samaritan woman was surprised when Jesus spoke to her at Jacob’s well.  Jesus, having asked the woman for a drink of water, developed their conversation as He spoke of giving her “Living Water welling up to Eternal Life”.  The woman recognised Jesus as a Prophet initially and confessed that she knew Messiah was coming.  When Jesus told her “I am He” she ran to tell her family and friends.  Then many Samaritans, who had heard the woman’s testimony, came to Jesus and persuaded Him to stay with them for two days.  Having heard Him speak, many more believed and declared: “We have heard Him ourselves and we know that He really is the Saviour of the world”.

It is amazing that while His own people rejected Jesus, the Samaritans recognised Him as the Messiah  we also know from the Acts of the Apostles, that the Samaritans were among the first people to accept the Good News of Salvation through the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Have we the faith to receive Christ as the woman and her people did?

2nd Sunday of Lent

Listening to the voice of God.

I had one of the most remarkable experiences of my life lately! Now, for those of you live in the United States what happened may not be regarded as spectacular, however coming from Ireland, it ranks as one of the most eventful happenings that I have ever been party to. Recently, I was in St Louis, Missouri, as part of a preaching course I am involved in. Travelling all day from Ireland, by time I got to the residence in St Louis I was really tired. I greeted some of the other members of the course and promptly went to bed, grateful for the rest, and feel aspeep. All of a sudden I was woken by a sound I had never heard before. It was a siren and it was accompanied by a voice you expect to hear at a train station. So what is the most sensible thing to do when you hear a siren in the middle of the night? You guessed it, I went back to sleep! There must be a train coming, we were near a train line. After a few minutes, this siren went off again, this time accompanied by a knock on my door, my name being called by a colleague, with the message "You gotta get up. There's a tornado warning! He have to go to the basement!" Well, as you can imagine, having never experienced anything like this before, there was a mixture of terror and excitement. When I saw the worried faces of the locals, the excitement was moderated and the fear exacerbated. We proceeded to the shelter until the storm passed. Luckily, there was no funnel in our immediate area, but for a period of time the threat was real, and the potential for danger high. The moral of the story: when the voice comes you have to listen!

The Gospel today presents us with a dramatic encounter with Jesus. I can imagine the three apostles climbing up the slopes of Mt Tabor. No doubt some of them were complaining. Why do we have to go up this stupid mountain? Could he not just bring us out on the lake? Its so hot....etc etc. After the climb, after cooling down and taking in the view something extraordinary happened - they got a glimpse of heaven.  A friend of mine and I were talking about the Transfiguration. He pointed out to me that one of the Fathers of the Church once stated that what the Apostles saw on the mountain was how Jesus looked all the time, only that on this occasion their eyes were opened. It was not as if Jesus was transfigured, they were changed. After all this big climb they were given the privilege of seeing Jesus, true God and true man in the company of some of the greatest figures from their history, and what were they talking about? What he was to do in Jerusalem. Already the stage was being set for the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets. Jesus was heading towards the Cross, by which humanity would be transfigured for ever.

When a tornado warning goes off in the middle of the night, you are best advised to take heed. Today we hear the voice from heaven saying "This is my beloved Son in which I am well pleased; listen to Him." As we journey through Lent we are given a chance to listen. The climb of Lent is often hard. The fasting, the prayer, the almsgiving can feel burdensome and difficult, but through them we have chance to get to know Jesus more and more. Through the discipline of Lent, everyone of us has the opportunity to allow Christ open our eyes, so that we can see Him as he really is, and allow ourselves the possibility of transformation and change.

Ss. Peter, James and John must have been terribly shaken by what they had seen and heard. They had been going around with this Jesus for a while now. They had seen the miracles, the healings. They had heard him speak and were moved to their depths, but now they had experienced Him in another way. Would they be ever able to relate to him in the same way again? And to top it all they couldn't even tell anyone. They were too were changed.

If we allow Him, God will give us the grace to listen to His Son. We will be able to see Him as he really is, to follow Him to the Cross and witness to the Resurrection. Lent gives us the space, time and opportunity to listen.


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I am reminded of the words of the Adoro Te, when St Thomas says something like, on the Cross the only thing that was hidden was your divinity, in the Eucharist the only thing that is hidden is your humanity.

And if you were wondering what a tornado siren, plus voice sounds like...!

1st Sunday of Lent

Sorry!

Over the last few weeks I have been doing a bit of study in the preaching field as part of a D. Min program at the Aquinas Institute of Theology, St Louis, Missouri, USA. They offer the only catholic  doctoral course in preaching in the world (as far as I know) We are a cohort of about 18 students from all kinds of back grounds, and from all over the USA, Canada and myself from Ireland. So apologies for not being up to speed.

A request for prayers:

Can you please pray for a priest of my own diocese who is ill. He is an eminent homiletician and teacher. He has been unwell in recent days. 


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I don’t know why it has upset me this much. I have no personal connection with Japan. It is on the far side of the world, culturally and socially it is even further away. I have never been there, yet still the very thought of the tsunami and earthquake that occurred last Friday, upsets me to the depths of my being. Why? I suppose there are the obvious reasons. The carnage has been immense. A country that we associate with Toyota and Sony, with economic power, with strength, has been brought to its knees by the power of nature. The devastation is unspeakable. Even at this stage, there is no way of knowing how many people lost their lives; no doubt the human cost will be high.

They were not the reasons for my disquiet, howerver. I will tell you what it was. It was the wave. Not the blue wave out in the sea, but the terrible wave that broke on the shore and pushed its way so savagely far into the county side. The pictures on the television were horrendous. House, cars, boats, roads; taken away without as much as an exertion of force. Field after field engulfed; and it never stopped, on and on. There was one clip on a news report that showed some horses being swept away. You can only begin to imagine how many people were mangled in that wave of death.

It seemed almost unnatural. Waves should not be like that. They should be nice and blue and gentle. They should be by the coast on holidays, in the sunshine. If they are going to be rough, at least they should remember their place; out at sea, not among us. The land is for people and animals and trees; not the ocean. The Japanese tsunami last Friday was a like a monster, a demon, a devil; something from hell not heaven or earth. It was terrifying. We came face to face with evil; natural evil, but still evil.  It is as if nature conspired against us. The beauty of God’s creation gone all wrong, so many people are now suffering the loss of homes, livelihood, loved ones, life itself. You cannot but be terrified in the face of it all.

The Gospel, on this the first Sunday of Lent, brings us face to face with evil. We are told that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. He spent forty out there, fasting and praying, all by himself.  Living here in a lush and green country it is hard to picture the desert, but we all can imagine it in our minds eye. It is dry, arid and lonely, cold at night, burning hot by night.  He goes there alone. Normally you expect Jesus to be crowded by disciples and sick people, in the desert he is with no one, but God….and the devil.

We see that three times the devil tempts Jesus. “Who are you?” he seems to say. “You are not like the rest of them, who are you?” He asks the Lord to change stones into bread, he dares him to jump from the very highest point of the Temple in Jerusalem and offers to him the kingdoms of earth. Again and again he offers to Jesus what is expected to bring happiness and again and again He answers the devil back until he is either bored or sore, and walks away. Christ is then alone with the angels, who care for him.  What were these temptations? It is almost bizarre to imagine Jesus being tempted to do something that was wrong. On the face of it, what the devil was asking Jesus to do does not seem that unreasonable. If he could feed five thousand men, to say nothing of women and children, I think it would be very easy for him to change a few stones into bread. If Jesus could change water into wine, he could change rocks into loves. Again, if he could go skipping across the Sea of Galilee, a fall from the Temple would be no issue.  But there is clearly something deep going on here. The stones and kingdoms are incidental to story. The stakes are much higher.

     So what was the devil doing? Jesus was about to being his ministry of proclaiming the Kingdom of God. He had just been baptized by John in the Jordon. He was on the verge of reveling himself to the whole world. He had heard the voice of the Father confirming what he had known for a long time – he was the Christ, the anointed one. Then the devil comes to him and puts him to the test. “If you are the Son of God….use your power. If you are the Son of God take control. Put yourself first.” He could have had, but he did not.

     We are good by nature. We were made good. I am sure that  even including the most vicious of people, no one is born bad. We are like the ocean that is full of energy and life. Sometimes we can be a bit choppy on the surface, but we all have incredible depths that only God can possibly understand. The storms of life can stir us up and we can hurl ourselves against the beach and cliffs, most of the time we stay within our limits. There are times, however, just like the tsunami, when we can be sources of great harm. When we give into the temptations of gospel, when we put ourselves first at the expense of others, we can be as bad and destructive as anything nature can throw at us.

     I believe that there is only one sin.  We call this sin by all kinds of names; theft, apostasy,  murder, dishonesty, adultery; but at the very core of things there is only one sin. When we put ourselves first at the cost and expense of others – then we truly sin. Jesus could have listened to the tempter and with a click of his fingers he could have reveled himself once and for all. There would have been no cross, no pain, no rejection; all could have been dispensed with. In a few weeks we see him in the garden; “Father, let this cup pass me by.” He didn’t, and why? WHAT GOOD WOULD THAT HAVE BEEN TO US? Jesus did not put himself first, because he came for us, not himself. He carried the Cross and suffered temptation because we do. Don’t forget he is truly God and truly Human.  Jesus did not come among us to take the cross away; he came to help us carry it. He did not come to remove our freedom, we can still sin, he came to forgive sin and give us all the strength to do everything we can to resist it. Sin brings pain. When I refuse to love, when I put myself first, when I do not listen to the Spirit, the beautiful ocean of my love gets stirred up. It becomes violent. It pushes in land and leaves in its wake a path of hurt, broken hearts, bitterness and disappointment. My personal tsunami can be as destructive as the waves that battered North East Japan.

     So where do we go from here? Have I painted an awful picture? Well, you know, this season of Lent can be a great opportunity for each of us as we try to become what God wants us to be. Even the name Lent offers us great hope. In other languages like Latin and Italian, this season is named after the forty days: quadragesima or quaresima.   In English Lent comes from an old English word for spring. The buds and flowers come to life when the light and heat of the sun increases. They don’t need to do anything, except to respond. In Lent we can do the same, we can put ourselves into the light God’s love, and we will grow. Fasting, self denial, prayer, almsgiving are the tools we use. The next few weeks give us a change to bloom and grow, to mend harm we may have done, to forgive and be forgiven.

     God knows what the final result of the earthquake in Japan will be. Many will die, many more will have lost everything (Please God the nuclear power stations will be controlled.) In the aftermath we will also see great heroism and self-sacrifice as a nation and world will rally to assist. As we move through Lent we will see the story unfold. As we move through Lent we too will witness the drama of faith play out in our lives. Out of the darkness the light will shine. May this Lent give us a chance to come into the light, for our own good and the good of others, as we journey to Easter through the desert, Jerusalem and Calvary.