Love Me Now

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the Gospels for the next few Sundays constitute the Trial of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s a courtroom drama all the way from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. But we can see it’s something of a rushed trial, because the Prosecution never completed the essential task of evidence-gathering. The Lord’s enemies desperately wanted to do away with him, and quickly, but they didn’t have quite enough to ensure a conviction, so they try something reckless: they attempt to get Jesus to condemn himself with his own words. That’s the point we arrive at today. The Pharisees have plotted and schemed, and devised the perfect question. We might imagine them almost giddy with glee, as they invite their sworn enemies, the Herodians (that is, those in league with the Roman occupying forces) to witness their frontal attack on the rabbi from Galilee. How delicious that with just one question about the lawfulness of paying tax to Caesar, the Lord would be forced either into sedition (against the Law of Rome) or heresy (against the Law of Moses). Truly, a trap. It’s also a dirty trick. Many of you know that I am a barrister, and I was trained as a trial lawyer in the art of cross-examination. If I were the Lord’s defense counsel at trial, I would object to this question, and claim privilege against self-incrimination: nemo tenetur seipsum accusare. But no-one stepped up to defend the Lord that day: he answered for himself - and, in a way only he could, turned tables on his accusers, to put them on trial. He was on trial for his life: they are now on trial for all eternity. You see, burning a hole in their respective pockets (were they to have pockets) was the very image of their hypocrisy: the Roman denarius bearing Caesar’s head and his inscription. The same Rome they despise holds the power they truly crave. Intriguingly, the Pharisees brought this condemnation upon their own heads with their false flattery of Jesus: We know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not regard a person's status. It’s this last phrase that is the hook. St. John Chrysostom, in his Sermon No. 70 on Matthew’s Gospel, observes the rather sly allusion to both Caesar and Herod - but please be aware this translation is rather loose. More than regarding a person’s status, they literally say: “ you do not look upon the face of men ”. You see now how asking them to produce the coin turns their comment on its head: Christ may not look upon the face of men - but the Pharisees do. They carry the face of men on the very coins that own them. In asking this question, the Pharisees are hoping to manipulate Caesar into doing their bidding. We will see later in the story how the Jews no longer have the authority to put a man to death for infringement of the Torah - only Pilate has this power under Roman Law, so they need Caesar if they are to do away with the Christ. In this one phrase, the Lord shows them their true allegiance to the power of the world: “ render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God’s ." The tragedy of this encounter is caught up in the question of image and belonging. On a deeper level, the Lord sets up a comparison for them, and for us. On the one hand is the image of the world on a small silver coin; whereas in Christ himself we see the image of the invisible God, to whom we actually belong. If sin consists of a failure to render to God the things that are God’s, then we see clearly now how the Lord is asking us to offer ourselves to him, because truly we belong to him, since from the beginning we bear his image and likeness. This is not about politics; it’s about worship. Redemption is seen therefore more than simply recognizing our failures, but more fundamentally recognizing to whom we belong. The Pharisees thought they were exceptionally clever in crafting the perfect, loaded question in cross-examination, to elicit incriminating evidence from the Lord’s own mouth, but it is they who inadvertently furnished the evidence against themselves. The one who bears the perfect image of God stands before men in his own court, and they seek to destroy him. Caesar's image is stamped upon his coin; God's image is stamped upon every human soul. They have come face to face with the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ, in his Temple, and he makes them reveal their hand: “ render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God’s." The tragedy is they have found what they are searching for, and yet cannot see him for who he is. As St. John put it: “ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him. ” In Christ we find the trustworthy image for those who have eyes to see it, and in him we even see ourselves as God sees us.  Caesar may have his coin. But God will have his image.

Taken in isolation, the Parable of the Two Sons seems to have a rather simple message doesn’t it? The message is that your actions speak louder than your words . It is what you do that ultimately counts, not what you say you’re going to do; and if ‘ actions speak louder than words ’ is the message that you take home today from your attendance at Holy Mass, that’s all well and good, isn’t it? Not really. It's not enough. You see, the context of the message is missing from the Gospel extract. It’s not simply a smattering of good advice of the Lord wishes to dole out to us, and we need to understand that context in order to understand precisely what is meant by this exchange. Simply to come home having listened to wise words the Lord once offered is really little more than therapeutic deism. The message is much more urgent. We are in Holy Week my friends! You may not know it, but we are. This dialogue between the Lord and the chief priests and elders happens in the Temple in Jerusalem, a day or two after Palm Sunday. The Lord has entered the Holy City of Jerusalem from Bethany, riding on a donkey and the colt of a donkey He has been acclaimed by the masses with the messianic shout Hosanna! Hosanna to the son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. The crowd is in a frenzy. Here he is, the King has entered triumphantly into the city and he is found now in the very Temple itself. What does he do? He overturn the tables of the moneylenders in the outer court; he curses a fig tree that gives no fruit, and for all of this, he receives opprobrium from the custodians of the Temple, who should have welcomed the rightful king and heir. So for the next eight weeks of the Lectionary we see in slow motion what is essentially the trial of Jesus Christ. You will see the case being made by the prosecution and the answer of the Lord in his defense, given in a series of parables, the first of which is the Parable of the Two Sons. You and I may not immediately recognize the reference here, but the chief priest and elders of the people did. They knew exactly what was being referred to in the Parable of the Two Sons, namely the prophecy of Malachi. Written 450 years before the coming of Christ, Malachi prophesied that the Messiah would appear in the Temple, and when he appeared in the Temple, it was for judgment of the priests who had gone astray. The Lord, is of course the expected one, he is the Messiah and he has come to the Temple. The evidence surrounding his entry into the Temple is unambiguous. The crowds acclaim him as Messiah. Hosanna to the son of David! Here he is. What are you going to choose here? Here is the evidence! Here is John the Baptist in the wilderness: even the tax collectors and the prostitutes are convinced by John’s preaching (the promised forerunner, also in the prophecy of Malachi) they are convinced that the Messiah is imminent and here he is. The evidence is the repentance of sin on the part of the tax collectors and the prostitutes. They change their ways. They do something different. They said they weren’t going to do it, but hearing John’s message they did it. The contrast with the chief priests and the elders of the people is clear. They say they’re going to do it but they don’t do it. They pay lip service to the Lord of Hosts and that is the choice that the Lord presents before them in the Temple, today. It will lead to his crucifixion. It will lead to his Passion and death on Calvary in just a few days time from this very conversation, but the choice that is made; the choice that he offers the chief priests and the elders of the people is the choice that he gives to you and me every single day. What are you going to choose?

The Miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand is the only miracle which appears in all four Gospels. This is no trivial detail. The convergence on this event shows us how central it is to understanding who Jesus is, and what he came to do. But as with all of the Lord’s miracles and parables, it needs to be unlocked. Most sermons this weekend will focus on God’s generosity - indeed, his superabundant generosity, in meeting the needs of desperate people who would otherwise have suffered hunger. It’s not wrong to start there, but to conclude this is only a story about being kind and feeding the hungry is to miss a better point. You see, it’s really about the Word of God, and the ministry of the Apostles. How do I know? Well, two clues to start off with: (1.) the number of the items: five loaves and two fish, and (2.) this crucial piece of dialogue: “you give them to eat” The disciples realize that there is an impending problem: the crowd has followed Jesus into a desolate place, and unless they disperse into surrounding villages before nightfall they will go hungry. This is all entirely logical, but Jesus does not want them to do that, not because he has the power to provide food in this situation (of course he does; he is God and created everything out of nothing) but more because in performing the miracle he will teach the Apostles something about what they already have, something about what he can do, and something about what they themselves will be able to do through him. So typical of Jesus’s teaching: he uses one thing to explain another. So the disciples are aghast at the Lord’s command “you give them to eat” - their response is “we only have five loaves, and two fish”. Can you hear the tension? This is not a calm exchange; they are panicked. They are thinking in human terms - unless we make everybody happy, the mission is imperiled! Five loaves, and two fish. What do you think those things might represent? What do the Apostles already have to feed the people? The clue is in the loaves. What could specifically five loaves represent if not the Torah itself, or ‘Pentateuch’ in Greek, because it is divided into five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. To assign this meaning to the loaves is most appropriate, since the traditional author of the Torah is Moses, who feeds Israel with the bread of heaven in the desert. What then of the fish? The Hebrew Scriptures are traditionally divided into three parts: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (or Wisdom literature). Some modern biblical scholars have suggested that the combination of the five loaves and the two fish forms a kind of Hebraic code: five plus two makes the perfect number seven, and that the original hearers of Matthew would have understood this as the fullness of the Scriptures. On that reading, the two fish represent the Prophets and the Writings. Praying with this passage, I have found this insight quite compelling, because, unlike the Torah, both the Prophets and the Writings seem to come from somewhere more mysterious—like fish drawn out from the depths of the sea. They have flesh, but they also have bones. They nourish us richly, yet they are often harder to digest than the ‘bread’ of the Torah. This is what the disciples have to give them: the Bible. And what does the Lord instruct them to do with it? First - “bring them here to me” - then he looks up to heaven, blesses them, and breaks them, thereafter he does not distribute them to the people himself, but gives them to the disciples to distribute them to the people. Now the miracle begins to reveal what it is really about. The Scriptures must be brought to him, where he in his person blesses and breaks it open for the Apostles, who are then instructed to feed the people with it. Scripture is not self-interpreting; it is brought to Christ, who opens it, and then entrusts it to the Apostles to feed the Church. When they do, what happens then? Well here’s where it gets really interesting, first of all, there is an abundance. Everyone may eat whatever they can, but also there are fragments left over, which are gathered in (indeed, in John’s account, Christ commands the fragments be gathered in). The fragments. The klasmata in Greek. The Apostles are the ones who are able to break the Word into klasmata, and they are also the ones to gather in the fragments as well. St. Augustine in his commentary on this Miracle interprets the fragments not simply as the leftovers people did not want, but rather the pieces they could not eat - the bits that were too hard for them, and thus gathering the fragments is a symbol of the Church not throwing away the hard teachings, but keeping hold of them, to be distributed at another time. The breaking of the bread into fragments ought immediately to resonate with us as a Eucharistic community - and here the full meaning of the Miracle is revealed in what the Lord commands we do in memory of him until he comes again. What you receive from this Altar, is the Lord’s Body and Blood, and since the Lord is the Word who is both with God and is God, in a very real sense, you feed on the Word of God every time you receive Holy Communion. For my part, I am entrusted with the fragments. My role in leading the assembly is both to break and to gather. Note that I am charged to break, but not to shatter. The breaking of the bread is not a destructive action, but a constitutive one. In breaking the bread, we are made one in it, because the broken Christ is not a diminished Christ. He is not made weaker by being broken, instead we are made stronger. But back to the fragments. From this Miracle, we could say that the clergy are ‘men of the fragments’ - and this is rather satisfyingly even more true than first appears. You see, it’s in our very title. You may call me a ‘cleric,’ of which clergy is the collective noun. But the word, ‘cleric’ is not of English origin, nor is it Latin. It is in fact Greek - deriving from the word ‘klerikos’ This word carries the idea of a portion broken off and allotted - the original way of casting lots. A cleric is one to whom a portion has been given, and who is then charged to break and distribute further fragments. A cleric is thus the man who breaks, who apportions, and who gathers, because the example was given to him from the Apostles, to whom the portion was given by Christ himself. I stand here as a man of the fragments. Not because I possess abundance, but because I have been given a portion and charged to break it for you without shattering it. The Church needs men willing to keep the hard pieces and to keep feeding the people with them until Christ comes. That is the work of a cleric. That is the lot that has been apportioned to me, and as the Psalmist said: it is truly a ‘goodly heritage’. This, then, is the mystery into which you enter into every Sunday at Mass. Here Christ still takes what he has entrusted to his Church: he opens the Scriptures; he feeds his people; and he gathers up every last fragment. In so doing we see that the Word is not simply a text, but a person: the Word made Flesh, broken yet undivided upon this altar. Come, then, and receive the Bread of Heaven that has been broken for you, trusting that nothing Christ breaks is ever shattered, only multiplied, so that you may have life, and have it in abundance.

Are you afraid of flying? I was. It was totally debilitating. Every time I wanted to travel somewhere I was a nervous wreck for days, even weeks, before. Sleepless nights, chills - the lot. It was awful, and I’m very sympathetic to anyone who suffers with it. Now I’m completely calm, even if there’s awful turbulence. I still don’t like flying at night much though - and the reason for that will become clear. The cure for my fear of flying came when I traveled on a short flight with a friend who used to serve in the Royal Air Force. He loved everything about the whole experience - and the bumpier the better. His advice was simple: “look for the horizon”. What feels like dropping a thousand feet, in reality is nothing like that. And the shakes and bumps - that’s just the fuselage flexing, as it’s designed to do. If it didn’t flex and bend, it would shatter. In time, all the things that used to terrify me so much became background noise most of the time, and - if I think of them - I’m thankful for them. The disciples, of course, were not sitting comfortably inside an airplane. They were in a little boat, at night, with the wind against them. But they had the same problem I had: they could no longer tell the difference between what was frightening and what was actually dangerous. If you look carefully at the text, they are not afraid of the waves pounding the boat, they are afraid of two things: the wind — and Christ himself. Fear can make us absolutely certain we have understood a situation correctly, when in fact we have understood it completely backwards. Fear does not merely make unpleasant things frightening. Eventually fear can make even Christ frightening - and there’s the lesson this Gospel wishes to impart. The best interpretation of this miracle is very ancient. It’s a sermon given by St. Augustine and dates to the early 5th century in North Africa. It was preached in the context of the Liturgy, because it refers directly to this Gospel having been read, and in it, Augustine uses every part of the text to paint a vivid allegory of the Church battling with the prevailing winds of society. This sermon underscores the idea of the Church being the ‘Barque of Peter’ - reminding ourselves that the one we most often associate with a shepherd’s crook is really a fisherman, with his hand on the tiller of the Church, plotting the best course through the waves of time. But there’s one more detail that’s easy to miss. Do you see how the Bible tells us the Lord walks on water in the fourth watch of the night? What does that mean? Do you know? Well, the night is divided into four watches, and so we’re talking about the time between 3 AM and 6 AM, when the night is at its darkest. So by analogy the Church is battling all through the night, and Christ seems to be far away, even having abandoned us, but it is at the last moment he comes to us, showing that the things which frighten us are no obstacle to him, at all. What does this even mean? Well, notice another detail: the Lord made the disciples get in the boat without him. He commands it. He wants us to undertake this journey. As Augustine said ‘nemo quippe in hoc saeculo non peregrinus est’ - which means ‘no one in this world is not a pilgrim’. The journey is part of the plan. It involves engaging with the turbulence of the wind and waves, but in a vessel designed to withstand them. No accident, then, as Augustine also points out, that our feet stand on wood when we traverse the waves - for the boat is the Cross of Calvary. This is the vessel that permits us, with Peter at the helm, to push on towards dawn. So this Miracle is not simply a remarkable story of what happened to Jesus’s friends on Lake Galilee one day. It is a mirror, for us, of our lives in the Church. We are in the boat with Peter, it is dark and Christ seems far away. We cannot see the horizon, and all we know is that the wind is against us. But in the story, we may also cling to hope, because Christ is coming towards us, unperturbed by the roaring of the waves or the raging of the sea. By Faith, we can even walk out to meet him. But the moment we fail to fix our eyes on him, and we imagine the strength of the wind, we begin to sink. Why did you doubt? He asks, as he gets into our boat. Faith does not mean pretending there is no turbulence; it means refusing to confuse turbulence with catastrophe. The Church being tossed about by powerful unseen forces from outside of her is not a sign of imminent danger. Why not? Because we have Christ. Not Christ watching from the shore. Not Christ waiting for us when eventually we reach the other side. Instead Christ coming towards us in the darkness, in the middle of the night, walking upon the very thing that frightens us the most. Perhaps then, the next time the plane shakes, you might still grip the armrest. Faith doesn't necessarily stop you being frightened. Peter was frightened, too. But maybe you should remember this: I am experiencing turbulence; but that does not mean that I am experiencing catastrophe. That is also something worth remembering when the turbulence is not in an airplane, but in your marriage, your family, your work, your finances, your health, or even your Faith life. The wind is real. The waves are real. But they are no match for the Lord. When we find ourselves in the boat, in the dark, my friend’s advice is as good for you as it is for me: look for the horizon! The Christian is not someone who experiences less turbulence. The Christian is someone who has learned where to look for reliable data. The storm may not change, but your understanding of the storm can change. When you cannot see where the sea ends and the sky begins, when every familiar landmark has disappeared, it is precisely there you discover your horizon is none other than Christ himself.

I beseech you brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, unto God, well-pleasing; which is your reasonable worship. Romans 12:1 is one of the most important verses of the entire Bible. From it, Holy Church receives her mandate for active participation in the Sacred Liturgy, encapsulated by the mysterious phrase ‘a living sacrifice’. Combined with 1 Peter 2:5, we understand from the twin Apostles of Rome that the ‘living stones’ are built into a ‘spiritual house’ in order that we might become holy: a living sacrifice acceptable unto God. In a few moments I will address you from the Altar before I make Christ’s sacrifice present before you. I will beseech you in a similar way to St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans. Indeed, the words of my exhortation derive unhesitatingly from his. I will turn to you and say: “Pray, brethren that my sacrifice and yours be acceptable to God the almighty Father ” My sacrifice and yours. What an audacious thing for the Church to say. The sacrifice upon the altar is Christ’s sacrifice: the one perfect sacrifice, accepted once and for all upon the Hill of Calvary. It cannot be repeated, improved or supplemented. And yet the Church dares to call it my sacrifice and yours, because Christ does not desire for us to observe as as spectators at the foot of his Cross. Instead, like the Blessed Virgin he desires for us to be drawn actively and completely into his offering. To understand this, we have to re-examine what we mean by sacrifice. There’s a musical setting of Romans 12. It comes at the end of a choir anthem called Greater Love Hath No Man by the Edwardian composer, John Ireland. He sets the words ‘a living sacrifice’ really rather wonderfully - he allows the music to arpeggiate into the word ‘holy’ in a way that is most faithful to St. Paul’s emphasis. The living sacrifice is the mystery which interrupts like the dawn. We choirboys were not always that angelic. Musical scores are littered with, let’s say, ‘marginalia’ if the words or text are particularly evocative. In Exeter Cathedral, the phrase ‘living sacrifice’ in Ireland’s score has been ‘illustrated’ quite imaginatively. It must have coincided with the release of the movie The Wicker Man because the boys decided St. Paul had in mind a towering inferno with a hapless victim caught inside. He didn’t. But their conclusion - the surface reading of ‘living sacrifice’ uncovers a deeper truth. It’s a nonsense. How can you possibly have a living sacrifice? It doesn’t make sense. If you sacrifice something (and the word means to make holy) you have to give it up, don’t you? The Temple in Jerusalem was built all around the idea of animal sacrifice - thousands upon thousands of animals slaughtered and burnt. Hardly a sacrifice if it doesn’t involve the permanent destruction of the offering. But St. Paul in writing to the Romans has a totally new perspective on sacrifice. A perspective that is the innovation of Christianity - a truly sacrificial system based upon the perfection of the God-man, Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh. Romans knew what sacrifice meant - but the Apostle says to them, Christ’s is the only sacrifice acceptable to the Father, only he is good enough to atone for the sin of all humanity, because he is perfect. But what Christ offers in the Liturgy is the pathway for you and me to participate in that one, saving act. The night before he died, he instituted the Eucharist, and commanded us to do this in remembrance of him. This remembrance is not simply a calling to mind of a historical event, but a making present of a singular pivot in time, in order that we might share in it. Being liturgical is therefore what gives us access to the well-pleasing sacrifice of Christ. Being liturgical is not an optional extra, a hobby, or a pageant. Being liturgical is the only way we can offer the sacrifice of praise that the Father accepts because of the goodness of the Son. Paul tells the Romans that their way of life is what unites them to Christ’s sacrifice. If you imitate Christ in his goodness, you will endure suffering in this world. If you are of the world, the world will leave you alone, if you are not of the world, the world will hate you, persecute you, and accuse you of all kinds of falsehoods on account of his Name. Brothers and sisters, this suffering is the content of your offertory. When I turn to you and say “Pray brethren that my sacrifice and yours…” I am not talking about the collection. I am talking about your life - your trials, frustrations, forbearances, failures, insults, oppressions, hardships and illnesses. The world has no answer to this suffering. None at all. It’s purely meaningless, and to be avoided at all costs. But you and I are not of the world. Our sufferings, whatever shape or size they may be, are not meaningless. On the contrary, they are the content of your living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God. Do you see now how the Sacred Liturgy is not governed by our preferences? ‘I like this’, ‘I don’t like that’: all irrelevant. We don’t worship in this way because it expresses our communal identity, or because we like the sound of this kind of music. We worship in this way because the Church discerned over centuries this way best expresses the reality of the living sacrifice. The moment we start to express personal desires is the moment we demonstrate we have not yet understood what the Sacred Liturgy is all about, because our taste has nothing to do with whether the worship is true, or reasonable. That phrase, translated as ‘reasonable worship’ at the end of this passage sums up our activity here this morning. Presenting our bodies to be accepted by the Father through the perfect sacrifice of the Son is indeed rational, it makes sense! Logikē latreía is how the Apostle describes it, where the adjective derives from ‘logos’ which means word and also ‘reason’. Christ is the Word of God, and thus he is in himself God’s reason, but at the same time God’s communication of himself to us. So St. Paul describing our worship as logikós is exceptionally deep. Yes, the Liturgy is reasonable on an everyday understanding, but it is also Word-like worship, logos-like worship: Christlike worship. Presenting our bodies as the holy living sacrifice at Mass is the most Christlike thing we ever do. This is what active participation in the Sacred Liturgy really means. It does not mean that everyone must perform some activity. Active participation means that everyone offers his body as part of the one living sacrifice, which is holy to God. So when I turn to you and say, “Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours…” do not let the words wash over you as they may have done week by week. Place upon the altar everything you have carried into this Church. Let Christ take what is yours into what is his: many bodies made one Body; many sufferings made one Sacrifice; our whole lives made holy, well-pleasing unto God, which is truly our reasonable worship.

Lord, how often does my brother sin against me, and I will forgive him? Up to seven times? Jesus says to him: I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven! Many of you here are numbers guys, or numbers gals. I’m not a numbers guy, I’m a bluesky-20,000 feet kind of guy - but the Apostle Peter is clearly a numbers guy. Put aside the translation discrepancy - the New American Bible says we must forgive seventy-seven times, whereas I think the Greek says seventy times seven, i.e. four hundred ninety times - Peter wants to know - what is God asking of me? How do I know I’m right with God? And to answer that question, like a good and faithful son of the Covenant he looks to the Law. If I do what the Law requires, I’m good with God? Yes. But you still cannot share God’s life. Sharing God’s life means not just that you receive God’s forgiveness in the world, but that you become God’s forgiveness in the world. Not because forgiveness is an especially good virtue. It’s more basic than that. It’s because forgiveness is what love looks like when it encounters sin. This means, if I cannot say I am reconciled to God if I do not forgive my brother, my neighbor, or even my enemy, from the heart. The New Covenant, in Christ’s blood, does not permit a chamber of the heart to be set aside for vengeance and hate. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and since in Biblical anatomy the heart is the seat of the will, my heart must be pure if I am to see God. Let’s dive deeper into the numbers a moment. Peter and the Lord are actually having a ‘typological’ conversation with these numbers. There is a code language going on here - because each number calls to mind a specific instance of forgiveness and reconciliation in the Scriptures. Peter is actually being rather generous according to the Law. Leviticus 19:17-18 gives us the mitzvah about forgiveness and bearing a grudge, but doesn’t give a number. The rabbis interpreted this as requiring forgiveness three times, and thereafter the matter would be considered closed. We can safely assume that observant Jews will have known and understood what Leviticus 19 required. Peter, in proposing up to seven times is being more than twice as generous. He proposes more than double what the Law requires, and in so doing calls to mind the mark of Cain. You remember that God puts a mark on Cain that anyone who harms him will receive sevenfold vengeance. How do I know this is the reference? Because of the Lord’s answer. The Lord choosing ‘seventy times seven’ in response to Peter recalls the deepening of blood vengeance proposed by Cain’s descendant Lamech in Genesis 4:24 “If Cain shall be avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” Man had entrenched violence and hate, deepening it an infinite number of times; God proposes a reversal of this abyss, requiring infinite forgiveness as a condition of reconciliation with God. In so doing, the Lord also touches upon the messianic prophecy of Daniel: Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place Daniel 9:24 The ‘seventy weeks’ is a number play on seventy ‘sevens’ after which the sovereignty of the one Daniel describes as ‘like a Son of Man’ begins: the true, messianic jubilee - that is, the ‘year of the Lord’s favor’ where everything is reset. So in all this, what looks like hyperbole is in fact deeply, deeply significant numerology. The dialogue between Peter and the Lord establishes: The insufficiency of the Law The pitiful condition of man locked in vengeance The infinite love of God looks like infinite forgiveness Such forgiveness is the meaning of the Messianic jubilee. We misunderstand everything if we forget that forgiveness is essential to Christianity. If we do not forgive, we have not yet been reconciled to God. If we have received mercy - and we have - every single one of us is a grave sinner in need of God’s mercy, no exceptions - then we must be merciful in response to what we have received. No ifs, no buts. To illustrate the point, Jesus tells a story for the numbers guys like Peter. One servant owes ten thousand talents: sixty million days’ wages—something like two hundred thousand years of work. It is not a large debt. It is an impossible debt. No repayment plan could touch it. The master simply forgives it. Then that servant finds a man who owes him one hundred days’ wages. That is not nothing. Jesus does not pretend that the sins committed against us are nothing. Some of them are grievous. Some leave wounds that last a lifetime. But the proportion is six hundred thousand to one. That is the point. Christianity does not ask us to say that evil does not matter. It asks us to see the evil done to us within the immeasurable mercy God has shown us. Forgiveness does not mean pretending that nothing happened. It does not necessarily restore trust, remove consequences or return an unsafe person to intimacy. Forgiveness means that I renounce vengeance; I refuse to make another person’s destruction my good; I surrender the debt to God. Cain demanded vengeance sevenfold. Lamech demanded it seventy-sevenfold. Humanity multiplied vengeance until the earth was soaked in blood. Christ now reverses the multiplication: not vengeance without limit, but mercy without limit. Peter asks, “How much forgiveness is enough?” And Jesus answers: “As much as you have received.” For forgiveness is what divine love looks like when it encounters our sin. And if that love has truly entered us, then forgiveness must become what our love looks like when it encounters the sins of others. And before we excuse ourselves, the unforgiving servant can hide in us in several ways. “I have nothing for God to forgive”—that is blindness. “Nothing will happen if I refuse to forgive”—that is complacency. “I simply do not want to forgive”—that is the will choosing vengeance. And “I have said that I forgive, but I intend to keep the debt alive forever”—that is forgiveness only with the lips, not from the heart.  Christ does not command us to feel differently on demand. He commands an act of the will: that we surrender the debt, renounce vengeance and entrust justice to God. The wound may remain; trust may have to be rebuilt; reconciliation may require repentance. But hatred may not be given a permanent room in the Christian heart.

To understand this parable, the most important line is this: Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with what is mine? Because, what is required of us in hearing the message is a firm recognition of the sovereignty of God. God does not require your permission to be generous. Since he is goodness itself, if his goodness appears unjust to you, it is your vision—not his justice—that needs correction. As the Psalmist says: Our God is in heaven; he does whatever he wills. The Lord’s manner of telling this story is a clever literary device, because almost everyone who hears it will instinctively conclude that it is unfair to the workers who arrived early. It deliberately provokes that reaction, because it requires a change of heart if we are to accept its teaching. In other words, you cannot hear it, and go on thinking the same as you did before. Deeply ingrained in our collective conscience is the idea that equity requires equal pay for equal work. Ordinarily, that is quite right. But such a judgment belongs to a world measured by hours, days and years: a world with a yesterday and a tomorrow. But this parable concerns eternal life, in which there is no yesterday, and no tomorrow; only now. You cannot possess more eternal life than anybody else, any more than you can be eternal for longer than somebody else. It is a one-coin reward: the eternal denarius, so to speak. Whether you accept God’s offer early or late, what he gives you is eternal life. That is the generosity of God. But the parable also warns us about the corrosive power of envy, resentment and bitterness. Is your eye evil because I am good? Our translation renders it: Are you envious because I am generous? The literal expression of the Greek is stronger, because it evokes the temptation to look over the fence at our neighbor, to see if what they have is better than what we have. But if our response to divine generosity is envy, then this calcifies into resentment, for as long as we remain convinced that we are right and God is wrong. Hold on to that judgment, and you will never be at home in God’s household. But what of our sense of justice? Does not justice require some proportionality between our work and our reward? Yes, and here we may perceive another dimension of the parable. Eternal life is offered by God to all, but that’s not the end of the story. Although it is given whole and entire to every soul that dies in God’s friendship, not every soul possesses the same capacity for the glory of God. Put simply, in heaven each of us participates in God’s life according to our capacity to receive it. Let me help you with an analogy. Imagine every soul in heaven as a vessel filled completely with the life of God. No vessel is half-empty. Each one is filled to the brim, and overflowing. Yet the vessels are not all the same size. Each soul is perfectly happy according to its capacity, but those capacities differ; and therefore the blessed are happy in heaven in differing degrees. It is our cooperation with grace whilst we live on earth that enlarges the soul’s capacity for God in heaven. This is the labor in the vineyard. The great saints are not given a different heaven; they receive more deeply the one, undivided life of God. Our wrestling with God on earth is therefore not work done in expectation of payment. It is the work of grace forming within us a greater capacity to receive the divine life for all eternity. God doesn’t offer a goal-oriented system: the struggle is the point. And this permits me to make an extraordinary claim: God loves some people more than others. This does not mean that God experiences stronger and weaker emotions towards any of us, nor that he is capricious, whimsical or arbitrary. His act of love is one, eternal and unchanging. But to love is to will the good of another; and, as Aquinas teaches, God loves someone more when he wills a greater good for that person. Since he gives differing measures of grace and glory, his love has unequal effects. You and I love people because of the goodness we find in them. God’s love is different. He does not discover goodness in us and then decide to love it; by loving us, he creates the goodness that he loves. A soul does not receive greater glory because God discovers it to be more lovable. It is more lovable because God has produced greater goodness in it, and the soul has freely cooperated with his grace. God doesn’t offer a goal-oriented system: the struggle is the point. A longer span in the vineyard gives us more opportunities to make that response—but there is no mechanical correlation between years of service and heavenly glory. A person may spend his whole life in the vineyard, while resisting grace at every turn. Another may arrive at the eleventh hour and respond with heroic love. The decisive question is not simply how long you have been present, but what you have permitted grace to accomplish in you. There is no advantage in a deathbed conversion. To enter the vineyard early is already a privilege. It means more years spent in service of the living God, and more opportunities for grace to enlarge the soul. This helps us understand why heaven is a hierarchy. The saints and angels are not equal in glory, because they do not all participate in God’s goodness to the same degree. Consider the Blessed Virgin. No creature has been loved by God with a greater love; no creature has received a greater fullness of grace; and no one has cooperated with grace as perfectly as she did. She therefore possesses the greatest capacity to receive the life of God. This is what makes her the Queen of Heaven. Would it be fitting for any one of us to claim equality of glory with Our Lady? Our instincts should answer, by no means. Yet the least soul in heaven and Our Lady herself both possess eternal life equally. Each is filled completely, but each according to a different capacity. Each is perfectly happy, but Our Lady enjoys a greater degree of beatitude, because she is capable of receiving more of God. God’s ways are not our ways. We look at the vineyard and ask, “How much will I get?” God asks, “How much of my life are you becoming capable of receiving?” That is the real test. Do we resent grace when it overturns our expectations? When God welcomes the latecomer, forgives the sinner or changes arrangements to which we have grown attached? Or do we rejoice in what grace can accomplish, both in others and in us? If we desire what grace can make of us, then we might even sing a song as we toil beneath the heat of the midday sun. Our stability does not depend upon preserving the routines of this passing world. It depends upon Christ, who is constantly urging us more deeply into his life.  The labor itself is already a gift. To spend one’s life in the vineyard is not to be cheated when another arrives at the eleventh hour. It is to have allowed the service of God to enlarge the soul until, in eternity, it can receive as much of him as it is able to bear.

The three ‘kingdom’ statements in the Gospel this week are vivid descriptions that really spark the imagination. The Lord tells us the kingdom is like buried treasure, the pearl of great price, or a net full of fish of every kid. But have you ever thought of them as applying to the Church specifically? It’s sometimes important to decouple the idea of the institutional Church (be it Parish, or Diocese) and all the paperwork and (sometimes very necessary) bureaucracy that goes with that, from the spiritual concept of a community of believers. Now, the Kingdom and the Church are not precisely the same thing, but the Church is the visible evidence of the beginning of Christ’s reign as King - and, as Vatican II taught, the universal sacrament of salvation. It looks like one thing (a ragtag mixture of saints and sinners, who at times barely seem to get along) but is in fact another (Christ’s own body…and bride, perfect and unspotted). In all its incongruity, the Church is the vehicle of the Kingdom - it’s how God’s Kingdom comes about - not by any other means. So let’s look at each image - first the buried treasure. Well, the idea that being part of God’s Kingdom is valuable is obvious enough - of course it’s treasure - but buried…now this is intriguing. It tells us that this valuable thing is not immediately obvious. It needs to be sought out, and discovered, and whosoever uncovers this treasure possesses everything, because he possesses Christ. Secondly, the pearl of great price - again, the idea that it is valuable is obvious, but here it’s also beautiful, and rare. That the Church must be beautiful is not accidental - beauty is not a ‘nice thing to have’ - it’s essential. Of the essence of the Church. For this reason ugly churches, and ugly liturgies are not faithful to the Kingdom. But the image is even deeper. A pearl’s beauty is the price of irritation - the grit in the oyster shell that turns into a perfect, iridescent sphere. The Church’s beauty comes at a great cost, and is born out of suffering. Finally, the net. We describe ourselves as Catholic, and for many of us being Catholic is a defining characteristic of our family lives. How many of us say “I’m Irish/Italian/Polish/Croatian/Latino/Filipino…of course I’m Catholic” - but in saying that we must always be careful to understand that our idenitity as Catholics comes from the rich diversity of peoples who all belong to the Church, each with their own traditions and customs.  To be proud to be Catholic is to defend unity in diversity, and to appreciate the customs and heritage of others. Or, to put it another way, because we are Catholic, someone else’s customs become mine to enjoy. The Church is not Catholic because she contains many cultures. She is Catholic because Christ gathers every nation into one Body. Therein lies the beauty of the Kingdom: it is made stronger by recognizing the numerous ways God blesses his people; and therein also lies the beauty of the Church: where the Kingdom is already breaking into the world: many peoples, many customs, but one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism. Deo gratias.

I’m sure you’ve heard a number of times: the Bible is a library, not a book. But even within books of the library we can further discern direct speech of the Lord, and its surrounding narrative or commentary. The three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) so-called because they represent a synopsis, or compilation, of the Lord’s teaching, are clearly designed to act as a resource, or aide-memoire, for the authentic transmission of the Faith. Take the Parables, for example. Last week, we encountered the Parable of the Sower, with its private explanation to the Apostles following immediately afterwards. This week we have the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, with its accompanying private explanation. This is very unusual. In fact, with the exception of fragments and comments from the Lord, these are the only two examples of Jesus authoritatively explaining his parables. That is not to say the other 37, or so, parables of Jesus have no authoritative explanation, and it’s up to you to interpret it as you like. Instead, it’s important to realize that we have a snapshot, with these two parables, of how Jesus taught the people, and how he passed on the key to his teaching to the Apostles. We can be certain, because Scripture tells us, that not everything Jesus said was recorded - and it’s a fair deduction that this pattern of public teaching, and private explanation, was typical of how the Lord delivered the Word. Indeed, Scripture also says: he said nothing to [the crowds] without a parable. From Matthew 13, Jesus explains why he teaches in parables: (1.) because in his own words: it has been given [to the Apostles] to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to [the crowds] it has not been given, and (2.) this method fulfills what was revealed by prophecy. In other words, the presence of the Apostles to receive the Word, both publicly and privately, is indispensable for us to understand accurately what the Lord meant. The Lord did not simply leave behind inspired words. He also established inspired hearers—those to whom he entrusted the mysteries of the Kingdom and to whom he explained what the crowds could not yet understand. Scripture itself therefore points beyond private reading to the apostolic ministry of interpretation. This has enormous implications. One of the key demands of reformers from the 15th Century onwards was the proclamation of Scripture in the vernacular, in a language people could understand. You might even think to yourselves - how was it ever sensible to proclaim the Scriptures publicly in a language people didn’t understand? That’s a very logical observation! It has two main answers: The first is the Liturgy was never seen as the primary place for catechesis. From the earliest archaeological evidence we possess, Christian communities were already adapting their meeting places for distinct ecclesial purposes, rather than treating worship and Christian formation as one and the same activity. The liturgy was never expected to carry the whole burden of catechesis. But the second is a consequence of Matthew 13, and Christ’s own pedagogical method. If (as Scripture reveals) the Lord teaches in parables, which require private interpretation to those to whom the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been entrusted, then to proclaim the written Word to a public assembly without immediate commentary would be to give only half the story - and delivered parabolically too! The danger would be that the hearers would all come to their own conclusions as to what the Scriptures meant - and such an approach would elevate private judgment over what holds us in communion. Now, before you get your pens out to write the Bishop or the Pope, I’m not advocating for going back to routinely proclaiming the Scriptures in Hebrew, Greek or, dare I say it, Latin. You will not find a priest who is more enthusiastic about Biblical literacy amongst the Lay Faithful than me. I think it’s essential you know your Bible, and I intend to offer more and more ways for you to do just that in our Parish. You have told me you want more adult formation, and more adult formation you shall have! But that’s the point - at the very least, public proclamation of the Scripture in a language people understand requires careful preaching on the Scriptures themselves - not simply comforting anecdotes, or pious platitudes. Preachers must engage the texts deeply - and to do this, they themselves need to be experts in the Bible too. But in addition to good preaching, we need excellent catechesis too - so that hearing the Word becomes a lifelong journey of discovery for every Catholic Christian. Perhaps an argument could be made that in being cautious about private interpretation, the pendulum swung too far, and the treasures of the Scriptures were not as freely available. But I think that does a disservice to the catechetical methods of the medieval and early modern periods. If you went back to 14th century England and met a typical laborer, he probably could not read or write, but he did know his prayers, and he did know his Bible stories. How? Because of oral catechesis that has left little trace in archaeology or text-based history. So if private interpretation is out, let me offer you a different way of inhabiting the Scriptures - one that comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius encourages his followers not simply to observe the scenes passively, but to inhabit them actively, or, in his words ver con la vista de la imaginación el lugar corpóreo ‘to see with the sight of the imagination the physical place’. To do that, we need to know the background - for example, today’s Gospel is not delivered in a lecture hall, or even a synagogue, but outside. The narrative tells us the Lord comes out of a house (probably in Capernaum) and begins to teach by the lakeshore of Galilee. On account of the crowd, he gets into a boat, but then returns to the house in order to give the private explanation to the Apostles. Looking out at the crowd, don’t you think he noticed that some were with him, and some were against him? When you know the physical surroundings, the image of the wheat growing amongst the weeds makes perfect sense - Jesus is looking at them! Now let Ignatius take you one step further. Don't remain sitting in the pew as a spectator at the theater. Place yourself by the lakeside. Hear the waves against the boat. Feel the heat of the Galilean sun. Look at the faces around you. And then ask yourself a far more important question than, "What does this parable mean?" Ask instead, "Where am I in this crowd?" Am I listening in such a way that I am content merely to hear the story, or do I want to follow Christ into the house, with the Apostles, to receive its fuller meaning? That is how Catholics read the Scriptures—not as detached critics, nor as isolated interpreters, but as disciples, who hear the Word proclaimed liturgically, allow it to engage both mind and imagination, and then ask the Spirit to lead ever more deeply into the mysteries of the Kingdom.