Sermons by Fr Guy Nicholls (Cong Orat), our Chaplain

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, what exactly is a ‘prophet’? The word ‘prophet’ comes from a Greek word literally meaning ‘one who speaks forth’, a mouthpiece. It is in this sense that we understand the prophets in sacred Scripture, as those who do not only speak in God’s name, but also specifically speak what God has given to them to say. We often hear their writings read to us in the first reading on Sundays in Ordinary or Green time, as now. They are God’s spokesmen, His messengers. In the Creed we say that the Holy Spirit ‘has spoken through the prophets’. This means that God has chosen them for a particular ministry to His people, above all else speaking to God’s people in a time when God’s voice is not being listened to or obeyed. There is, then, often a note of rebuke, even of warning, in what they say to the people. The essential message is: ‘you have stopped obeying God and now God has sent me to remind you of your duty to Him and the dire consequences of ignoring Him.’

Today’s first reading comes from one of these. Ezekiel, a priest of the Temple, wrote 600 years before our Lord, at a time when the chosen people were living in exile after Jerusalem had been conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. Ezechiel addresses the Israelite people, and the prophet’s message is that their difficulties, although they seem to come from foreign kings and armies, are all in reality self-inflicted. The people of Israel, he says, have been unfaithful to God. They have forgotten Him or have compromised their faith in Him, mixing it up with service of other, false, gods. The people have sinned, and so are now paying the price. The calamity of exile is not God’s vengeance, but the result of the people’s folly.

Now that they are living in Babylon among the Assyrian pagans, many of the Israelites are being tempted to abandon faith in God and to worship the Assyrian deities. After all, it seems to them that the Assyrian gods proved more powerful than the God of Israel who apparently failed to save them from defeat. So, now that they are living virtually as slaves in a foreign land, maybe the gods of the Assyrians will favour them, and don’t people often simply like to back a ‘winner’?. This is where Ezechiel speaks prophetically to the Israelites, to call out their unfaithfulness and to urge them to repent and return to the worship of the One, True God.

But how is it that Ezechiel comes to take on such a role as God’s spokesman? Well, he has received several extra-ordinary revelations from God, in which the Lord says such things as we have heard in the first reading: ‘the Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet; and I heard him speaking to me. He said to me, Son of man, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day. The descendants are impudent and stubborn.’ These words set the scene, describing the Holy Spirit’s entry into Ezechiel’s mind and heart to call out the Israelites’ apostasy, their revolt against God. Then the Spirit announces Ezechiel’s mission: ‘I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, “Thus says the Lord God”: Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.’

Ezechiel will now go out among the exiles and shake them out of their spiritual sloth. He will summon them to change their ways, to abandon false gods and to prepare themselves for their return to Jerusalem because God is about to free them. At the time God judges right, He will indeed most wonderfully restore them to Jerusalem where they will re-establish the Temple worship of God as in the past days of glory and faithfulness.

Now the message of the prophets, men like Ezechiel, is never ended when they and the people they addressed died, but through them the Holy Spirit speaks to the Church ever afterwards. This is why we still read these texts to this day, over two and a half thousand years later. They are not merely ancient historical documents; they are ever-relevant expressions of faith, of reproof, of divine judgement, of encouragement, and of hope and mercy. But the mercy only comes after the people recognise sin, and hope only comes after repentance has at least begun in earnest.

It is necessary to add a brief word about the importance of being able to distinguish between true prophets and false. When the wicked King Ahab was trying to discern whether it was God’s will for him to attack a neighbouring kingdom, he sought advice from as many as four hundred prophets who all told him to go ahead and he would win. Surely, if so many agreed then they must be right? Yet one prophet alone, called Micaiah, stood out and warned Ahab not to attack, telling the king both that he would suffer a terrible defeat and that he had heard God saying that He would deceive the four hundred false prophets in order to trick the wicked king into going to his downfall and death. In his anger, king Ahab ordered that Micaiah should be imprisoned until he, Ahab, returned in triumph. Micaiah’s answer was simple: ‘if you return in peace, the Lord has not spoken through me.’ And so it turned out; Ahab marched out at the advice of the four hundred false prophets and was killed in battle. The truth of Micaiah’s prophecy was proved in the event.

In recent weekday readings we have also heard how even earlier still, Amos preached a similar prophetic message of reproof from God to the Samaritans and was told by the royal priest of Samaria to go away because his message was not welcome; it was disturbing and not pleasant to listen to. Amos replied that he was not there of his own accord but only because God had called him away from his usual job as a herdsman and had sent him to preach to the Samaritans.

Our Lord Himself also taught us to distinguish between true and false prophets, saying; ‘Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.’ And ‘Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.’ Those words are a strong warning. How often do we, any of us, want to be spoken well of? Yet our Lord tells us that to be spoken well of is a sure sign of not speaking God’s words but one’s own. Instead, those who speak God’s words must expect to be excluded and reviled, mocked, and as say nowadays, cancelled.

Exclusion, mockery and cancellation; these are things which a true prophet should expect to experience rather than the adulation and approval of the powerful and of the many. Men like Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezechiel, not to mention our Lord Himself, all experienced rejection and persecution on account of speaking the truth in God’s name. For that is what a true prophet is. And thus will a true prophet be treated.

I say all this now, because I sense that a time is coming very soon when such things will become more frequent and more pressing in this country. This is indeed a time when God’s truth is most certainly being attacked and His laws most defiantly not being obeyed. Just to take a few instances: even now, simply to speak publicly the truth that each of us is either male or female from conception and not from personal choice; to speak openly about marriage being between one man and one woman for life and for the procreation and upbringing of children; to speak about the wickedness of destroying innocent life in the womb, or destroying the innocence of children with so-called sex education and by foisting on them celebrations of pride in something that is offensive to God; or to speak about the danger of seeking to end life by assisted suicide; to speak about all these things already arouses the displeasure of those who exercise power over us, and brings down the wrath and fury of many people among whom we live. Even now there are already those who, having witnessed silently in the streets to the abomination of killing innocent human life in the womb, have been arrested for it. If such silent witness were soon to be made illegal by Parliament, then it would undoubtedly issue in even more than arrest: imprisonment or crippling fines.

In the years ahead I foresee that it is more than likely that we will find our Christian faith not just being attacked and mocked in the media as is already increasingly the case, but that we will in all probability see those who openly profess it cancelled, ostracised, excluded from the public arena and even imprisoned for speaking the truth against laws that may come to be passed. Our Lord in the Gospel today says that ‘a prophet is despised in his own country among his own relations and in his own house,’ meaning among his own fellow citizens. He also says elsewhere, ‘Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.’ Since these are the explicit words of our Lord, then know that we must prepare ourselves for a time ahead when we will be increasingly called upon to be resolute in the face of more and more vehement attacks. Furthermore, we have already seen vastly increasing in number and influence in our midst those who fulfil our Lord’s words, ‘Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think that he is offering service to God.’

In years gone by, we used much more often to sing Fr Faber’s hymn, ‘Faith of our fathers, living still in spite of dungeon, fire and sword.’ Who knows but that such times as once were endured bravely by our fathers in the faith only a few hundred years ago, may not soon return with equal fury and violence, and may try our resolution to the limit? (and indeed our Lord warns us that many will fall away under the pressure.) Well, even if such trials were to end in death, they are not for ever. Remember the words of St Paul in today’s second reading: ‘I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong’ and remember how the Apostle St James reminds us of what comes after such times of trial: ‘Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.’

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we keep festival in honour of the two greatest Apostles, Peter and Paul. Both of them do in fact have other feast days of their own apart from this one, but they are quite different from the feast days of any of the other Apostles. On February 22nd, for instance, we celebrate the Feast of St Peter’s Chair, that is, the seat representing his teaching authority in the Church. On January 25th we celebrate St Paul’s conversion.

It is hard to find two men of the foundational period of the Church, the Apostolic era, who are more different than these two. Peter, or to call him by his given name, Simon, was a fisherman; not an educated man, impetuous and flawed. After all, it was he who denied Christ three times and ran away before the crucifixion. Paul, or to call him by his given name, Saul, was a highly educated Pharisee, a doctor of the Jewish religious law, who trained under one of the best known Rabbis of the entire ancient world, Gamaliel, and who became the most fanatical and zealous persecutor of the new religion of Christ the Redeemer being preached by Peter and the other apostles, before his extraordinary dramatic conversion to Christ on meeting him supernaturally at the gates of Damascus.

Yet the vast differences between the two men are not so great as those things which unite them. They were brought together by a burning love for Christ, an awareness of their frailty and weakness as men, their total reliance on the grace and power of Christ, and their final witness to Christ in the shedding of their blood as martyrs in Rome.

Rome is the key to this great feast. It is the bond that binds them together on the same day. It is in Rome that both men are buried, awaiting the resurrection on the Last Day. There, too, both are venerated in the magnificent churches built over their mortal remains by the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine; St Peter’s basilica on the Vatican Hill, which was also the site of his crucifixion; and St Paul’s outside the Roman city walls on the way towards the Roman seaport of Ostia, close to where he was beheaded.

As the early Christian historian Eusebius of Caesaria tells us, St Peter came to Rome from Antioch, where he had lived after leaving Jerusalem. He lived in Rome as leader of the Church there for around twenty five years, teaching the faith assisted by St Mark who wrote his Gospel on the basis of all that he heard Peter preach. It is that Gospel which we are hearing read to us Sunday by Sunday during the course of this year. Finally, it was in the great persecution by the Emperor Nero beginning in 64 A.D. that, along with many of this flock, Peter was put to death for his faith in Christ.

This had been foretold to him by our Lord who, according to St John, had said to Peter after the resurrection, ‘”Truly, truly, I say to you, … when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.” (This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God).’ That was after the dreadful night in which Peter had utterly failed to stay faithful to Jesus at His arrest and trial, swearing three times, ‘I do not know Him’. Just as little as an hour or two before Jesus had said these words to Peter: “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your own faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Paul, three years after his conversion, had met Peter in Jerusalem and, as he tells us in the Letter to the Galatians, they would not meet again for another fourteen years until they met with several of the other Apostles, notably James and John, and there recognised that God had given each of them a distinct mission in the Church: Peter was to continue preaching to the Jews, just as he had done since the day of Pentecost, while Paul would continue his mission throughout the Mediterranean world preaching principally to the gentiles. As the Preface of today’s feast says: Peter was ‘foremost in confessing the faith… who established the Church from the remnant of Israel’ and Paul the ‘outstanding teacher’ of the faith… and ‘master and teacher of the gentiles’. That is why to this day it is predominantly the wonderful letters of St Paul that we hear read at Mass on Sundays throughout the year.

After Peter had been in Rome for many years, Paul also arrived there. He had been in dispute with some of the most powerful Jews in Jerusalem and, arrested by the Romans on a charge of breach of the peace, he appealed to have his case tried by the Emperor in Rome. This he could do on the strength of his rare privilege of being a Roman citizen. It is this status of Roman citizen that meant that when the time came for his execution, whereas Peter the Galilean fisherman was crucified like a slave, Paul was to be given a quicker death by beheading.

As we will hear in the final blessing at Mass, this feast celebrates the steadfastness of our faith in Christ set firm on the solid rock of Peter’s faith. We celebrate, too, the clear instruction in the faith brought to us by ‘Paul’s tireless preaching’. Peter is the Apostle to whom our Lord committed the keys of authority, to bind and loose, that is to govern the Church and to celebrate the sacraments of forgiveness and healing. Paul is the Apostle whom our Lord chose to be His principal teacher, to make clear the mystery of Christ, God made man, and the dignity of our membership of Christ in His Body which is the Church. And so we pray for their intercession on this day, when by their martyrdom Peter and Paul began the long transformation of Rome from the capital of the greatest human empire on earth to the capital of God’s kingdom on earth, the Catholic Church. May we all be brought by their intercession to the heavenly city where God and the saints forever dwell in glorious light.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in the Salve Regina, the familiar anthem that we often sing to our Lady, we sing these words in Latin which you will recognise from this familiar translation: ‘Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy; hail, our life our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ I want to draw attention to those words, ‘banished’ and ‘exile’. I don’t think that, although we pray this prayer often, we really think closely about what those words are telling us. To be banished is to be sent away from home, away from the place where we belong, into a place and state of pain and punishment. To become exiles is to be displaced, uprooted, insecure, forced to eke out an existence far from home and loved ones. Is that really what this life is about, we may ask?

Well, in the second reading today St Paul tells the Corinthians that that is truly our state in this world. Even though we have never known another world, another life, St Paul is adamant that here in this life we are in exile. But if this is exile, what are we exiled from? St Paul says that simply to live ‘in this body’ is to be exiled from the Lord. In other words, our proper state of existence is one that we do not even know by experience, but can only have knowledge of by faith, by trust in God that He, the Lord, is indeed our true home, our true destiny. Our life’s work, then, must be finding out how to get to our true homeland. There’s the real point of the here and now!

Let’s recognise that St Paul proclaims this not with alarm and despondency, as you would expect an exile, a banished person, to do; no, he says that ‘we are always full of confidence when we remember that to live in the body is to be exiled from the Lord.’ What is the meaning of this confidence, then? Why should we be confident about being exiles? It is because of what we know about our true home by faith and not by sight. That faith is what gives us confidence which means that we can grow to want to be exiled from this world, from the world of the body, so as to make our home with the Lord.

We know, of course, that at our death we will for a time lose our bodies. They will be treated not as rubbish to be thrown carelessly away, but as precious vessels where the Holy Spirit has dwelt in us, and where the Blessed Sacrament has so often taken up His home in us. That indeed makes of this life in the body something more than just a sad exile. It is the cause of our joy and confidence that if we have received the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the living flesh and blood of Christ into our bodies, then even they are sanctified, are made holy, because they are not to be lost to us for ever.

After our death we will indeed go, not with our bodies, but with everything that we have been in this life – our deeds, our thoughts and emotions, our joys and sorrows, the things we have sacrificed and the things we have failed to do – with all these we will stand as souls before God and be judged by Him. Note how St Paul, having spoken of confidence in this future we must all prepare ourselves for, now mentions the ‘law court of Christ,’ in which all the truth about us will be brought out into the open, and then we will be given the just deserts for what we have done in the body, that is, during this life, whether these things were good or bad.

Now we also know that beside the many things that we do that are good, there are also many others that are bad. No one can avoid sin altogether. St John says that to say we do not commit sins is in effect to call God a liar! What we must do, therefore, is to prepare for our judgement not just when we are on our deathbed, much less if we are taken suddenly and without due preparation, God forbid, but daily by examining our conscience. We must make a habit of confessing our sins and doing penance so as to eradicate them and thereby also learn to increase the good we do.

The judgement that we all receive in the law court of Christ is what we call our immediate personal judgement. That is what will determine our eternal destiny. If we are judged worthy of eternal life by Christ then we may still have to make atonement for those things we have done or failed to do and for which we have not atoned. That is what we mean by Purgatory, which is a state and period of preparation in which we make amendment for our sins and grow in holiness so as to be able to enter our true homeland which is to live with God in heaven.

We also speak in the Creed of Christ as the one who ‘will come again in glory to Judge the living and the dead.’ What does that mean for those who have died already? Will they be judged again? No. The final judgement is that which brings to a close the age of this world of exile and trial for everyone, living and dead alike. For remember, even the dead who go to heaven, the saints, are still without their bodies. It is only at the Last Judgement that all of us who have long since died will receive our bodies, glorified after the pattern of Christ’s glorious risen body, and then the true homeland will be revealed to us in all its glory, for then we shall no longer have to believe in it by faith, but we will see it from our own flesh. We will no longer have to believe in God, because we will see Him face to face. This is why we should understand that this present life, even with whatever joy there may be, is still only an exile, a banishment, and that our true homeland is in heaven where our bodies, too, will be glorified.

I want to begin today with a detail which belongs to every Mass, even though it is always, or nearly always, different every time we come to Mass. I mean the Collect. The Collect is a Prayer which comes fairly early in the Mass. Sometimes it is called the ‘Opening Prayer’, but that is not quite accurate, since we have often been praying one way or another for a few minutes by the time we get to the Collect. But it does represent an important stage in our Mass. In this relatively short prayer the priest brings the opening rites of the Mass to an end by addressing God the Father through Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The Collect is the prayer which ‘collects’ or brings us together. As a part of the Mass, it is very ancient; not quite as ancient as the Eucharistic Prayer, but even so, some of the prayers we use as Collects at Sunday Mass are about fifteen hundred years old. Take today’s Collect prayer, a masterpiece in its own right: It opened with a call to ‘God, from whom all good things come.’ All collects begin in a way more or less like this, with some particular characterisation of God as He is: in this case, we address God as the author of all good things. This reminds us that all that exists comes from God, and also that it is good as it comes from him. So whenever we come across anything that is not good, we must wonder where that comes from. Is it from something other than God? Is there another power that brings evil things into being fro nothing? The answer is, of course, No. There is no other God, no other such creative power. We have heard in our first reading this morning part of the 3rd chapter of the Book of Genesis, and it may remind us of the very opening chapter of that first book of the Bible, which, in all probability, you will have heard most recently at the Easter Vigil, when we were told that after each successive day of creation, God saw that it was good.

But the chapter we heard in today’s first reading is all about the coming of evil into that good creation; how our first parents were beguiled into wilful disobedience to God’s command given to them. The one responsible for that dire event, which we call the Fall, and the Original Sin, was Satan. He had been created good, an angel of light, but through envy of God and of God’s plan for creation, and most particularly his utter hatred for the plan God had for us, made in His own image and likeness to prosper, Satan became God’s implacable enemy, and strove to enlist us in his plan to wreak havoc in God’s good creation, and to spoil what was beautiful for no other reason than out of pride and envy. Hence Satan appears in today’s reading as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, and he is so named again in the very last book of the Scriptures, the Apocalypse, as the ancient serpent, the evil one, God’s enemy even though he is God’s own creature.

We picked up the story of the Fall just now in the first reading after the temptation, after Eve had been beguiled by the Serpent’s treachery into disbelieving God’s good purpose when He had forbidden Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of that one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and after Adam had been seduced into following Eve’s example through his own weakness. Note how Satan had come in disguise as a Serpent. Satan had deceived Eve by appealing to the attractiveness of the tree and its fruit. He had said that God forbade them to eat this fruit because God feared that it would make them into other gods, just as powerful as Himself. Eve was fooled by Satan, and believed him. She then seduced Adam into sharing this act of disobedience with her. We may well wonder what was so special about this tree, and why this command not to eat its fruit should have mattered? Well, God had said that if they did eat it, on that day they should surely die. Yet it seems that they did not die after all. Instead, Adam suddenly realised that he was naked, and hid himself from God because, as he says, he was afraid. Disobedience had introduced something horrible into the once beautiful relationship between God and humanity: fear and alienation. This is what death means.

Ever since that time, humanity has suffered a radical alienation from the friendship of God, and knows not purely what is good, but also what is evil – whatever is contrary to God’s plan and His goodness. This knowledge, which Satan presented as something desirable and liberating, has enslaved and deceived us ever since. This is what Original Sin does to us – it brings us into the world in a state of alienation from our maker, from the One in whose Image we have been created, and so it introduces not only fear of God, but in a sense also a lack of understanding of what and who we are. We no longer see ourselves as especially created by God in His loving goodness to be His friends. We no longer recognise His likeness in us; at least not unless we are given a radically new beginning in God, which we call grace, and which first comes to us in Baptism to renew God’s friendship, to restore His image in us, and to give us a new sense of our true nature, identity and purpose. This is the work of our Saviour and the reason why He who is Almighty God the Son of the Father, willingly came to be a man as the son of Mary, and so to transform our human nature precisely by living as one like us in every possible way excepting one thing only: sin.

But we should never think that sin is a necessary part of human existence; as though it is necessary to experience sin so as to be fully human. That idea is part of the fruit of the forbidden tree, in which we are given knowledge of good and evil. Knowing evil does not make us better, does not make us more sophisticated, but diminishes us, thwarts our true freedom, and makes us enemies of God, of each other and even of our true selves. This is why there is so much confusion in the world today concerning what it means to be a human person. This is why people hate what God has made them to be, and wish to be converted, or ‘transitioned’ into something else, anything else, so long as it is not what God has made them. This is why we live in a society which also believes that it is perfectly justifiable to treat some other human beings as problems to be got rid of, as for instance babies in the womb who are falsely denied their true human status by being referred to as things, foetuses, embryos, but not persons like you and me. All this has come about because the image of God is darkened in our minds and hearts through sin brought into our world and into our lives by Satan, who is no friend to us any more than he is to God who made him.

And so it is that we need God to untangle this mess into which we have been dragged by Satan’s hatred and envy. We need Christ to show us what being human really means. Hence Pope St John Paul II said that in Christ, He who is God made man shows to humanity what being human really, truly is. Hence the words of the Collect prayer today in which we prayed our Almighty Father to ‘grant that we, who call on you in our need, may at your prompting discern what is right, and by your guidance do it.’

This beautiful prayer helps us to understand something precious about God and us: first, that we need His help to discern what is right, for without Him that knowledge has become confused in the human race as a whole. For we no longer know naturally, simply, what is right, but have often been blinded by false principles like ‘the will of the majority’, as though the greatest number must always be in the right, or that the strongest should always prevail over the weakest, or as though might is right. Secondly, we learn from today’s Collect prayer that we need God’s guidance not only to know what is right, but also to do it. For we need God’s grace in all our actions as well as in all our deliberations. We cannot act rightly without God’s grace. So then may God grant us that enlightenment and guidance which only He can give, and also bring the whole human race to turn away from the false freedom brought us by the knowledge of evil. And so I finish with that magnificent prayer in full: O God, from whom all good things come, grant that we, who call on you in our need, may at your prompting discern what is right, and by your guidance do it. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today’s great feast day, Corpus Christi, meaning ‘The Body of Christ’, is a celebration in honour of Him who comes to us at Mass in Holy Communion. This is what Our Lord Himself taught His followers: that He is the living bread from heaven; and that the bread which He would give His Apostles at the Last Supper was His flesh; and that all those who eat His flesh and drink his blood have eternal life; and that He will raise them up to new life in the resurrection on the last day. Later this summer, over a period of five Sundays from the end of July, we will hear in chapter six of St John’s Gospel our Lord’s teaching concerning the gift of His Body and Blood that He was preparing for His followers, a teaching He gave soon after miraculously feeding five thousand of them with five loaves of bread and two fish. As we will hear then, that wonderful miracle was very closely connected with the Holy Communion He was going to give to the Church.

But that is still a few weeks away. Today is a celebration of pure joy, gratitude and deep devotion. That is the fitting response to such a magnificent Sacrament. In all the seven Sacraments which Christ left to us as channels of His grace and goodness He is present by His divine power, but in this one He is present in a unique way personally, for what we receive in Holy Communion is not bread or wine, not a mere token in memory or in honour of Him, but is truly Himself: His Body and Blood and also everything that He is Himself in person; that means therefore also His human soul and, yes, even His Godhead, His divinity! What more could He give than all of Himself? Just think for a moment, that when we come to Communion, we are receiving God made man, in person, into our mouths for our nourishment and joy!

And we must be aware of this truth as well: He whom we receive in Communion under the appearance of a piece of bread is not dead. We receive Him, not as He lay in death in the tomb, a dead body, but as He rose glorious from the dead and now reigns in glory in heaven, fully alive! Even in the small particle that is given to us at Communion, we still receive everything that He is. So, whether it be a round altar bread, or a tiny fragment of the larger host, it makes no difference, it is still all of Him, whole and entire.

For the appearances that we perceive with our senses are not the reality we receive into our bodies and souls. We see what looks like bread because when it was made, and when it was brought to the altar, it was bread. But since the moment when the words our Lord spoke over the bread at the Last Supper were pronounced over it, the words we call ‘the words of consecration’, it has been completely transformed in its innermost being in a way that our senses cannot perceive. We cannot see any change, it still tastes like bread, that is what our senses tell us, but from that moment when the priest proclaims the Lord’s words: ‘this is my Body which is given up for you’, it ceases to be bread and becomes totally the Body, Blood, soul and divinity of Christ in person.

Since we cannot detect this change in the substance of the bread, because we can only see the outward appearances of the bread – how do we know that this change has taken place in the bread? It is because of the words of our Lord. When He says ‘this is my Body’, He does not mean ‘this is a representation of my body’. No; He means what He says, and He intended us to understand those words in no other sense at all. No wonder we should be extremely joyful, grateful and devout when we receive Communion.

Yet of course we cannot celebrate the Body of Christ without the presence equally of the sacred and precious Blood. In the same way, too, when these words are spoken over the chalice containing wine: ‘This is the chalice of my Blood’; then, at that instant, what was until that moment wine become completely transformed into Christ’s Blood, ‘which will be poured out … for the forgiveness of sins.’ This is why the feast which we still familiarly know as ‘Corpus Christi’, the Body of Christ, is now officially designated ‘Corpus et Sanguis Christi’, the Body and Blood of Christ.

The Precious Blood of Christ was from the outset an essential aspect of what we celebrate on this feast. For it was in the Sacrifice on Calvary that the Sacred Body and Precious Blood were separated, and then in the glorious Resurrection reunited once more in Him, never to be separated ever again. Hence, too, when we receive Him in Holy Communion, we can never receive His sacred Body without simultaneously receiving His precious Blood. For even though we receive under one sign or the other, that is, either under the appearance of bread or under the appearance of wine it makes no difference to what, or rather to whom, we receive into us. It is always the living and glorified Christ, the Lord whose final parting gift to His disciples was indeed His precious Body and Blood.

I have made this point particularly today because this Year’s readings are indeed especially focused on the Precious and Sacred Blood of Christ, the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant, the Blood poured out for the many for the forgiveness of sins. So we heard in the first reading the account how Moses sacrificed bullocks at the foot of Mount Sinai. These sacrifices were intended to bring about communion between God and His people, to unite them in a bond and a covenant more powerful than simply one of words. Hence we were told that Moses took the blood of these sacrificed animals and poured some on the altar. But this was not all, for then we heard that Moses took the rest of the blood and, after reading aloud the Law of God to the listening people, he then sprinkled them with that blood, saying as he did so: ‘this is the blood of the Covenant that the Lord has made with you.’

Having heard the importance of the Blood of the Covenant in the first reading, we moved on to hear a reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, in which St Paul tells us how Christ’s Blood utterly surpasses the blood of heifers sprinkled on the people by Moses. Christ’s blood is the price of our redemption, by which we are truly at last set free from sin in a way which the blood of the old covenant could only look towards with hope and longing until fulfilled in the Blood of Christ poured out on Calvary for us.

So finally we turned to St Mark’s account of the Last Supper. The first words are those with which we are familiar from every Mass, that after He had taken the chalice in His holy and venerable hands Jesus gave thanks to God and then gave the chalice to the disciples, saying to them: this is my Blood, the Blood of the covenant which is to be poured out for many.’

As I said a moment ago, we receive the Blood of Christ whenever we receive His Body, because they cannot be separated in Him alive as He now is. It as only in death that they were separated. He gave two forms not as two different sacraments, but as two different outward signs of the one sacred reality. It is that which we receive and adore and honour. Let us always do so with great reverence, reflecting carefully on who it is that comes to us in such great humility now under such humble appearances.

In honour of this day, and as a reminder of what it is that we celebrate, at Communion today I will offer you the Sacred Host with the words: ‘Corpus Christi’, to which, as usual, you reply ‘Amen’.

Last Sunday, Pentecost or Whit Sunday, we celebrated the coming to the Church of the Holy Spirit, an event which came about in answer to our Lord’s prayer to His heavenly Father after the Ascension. We have just heard about that great and wonderful event in the Gospel, as our Lord left his final instructions to his Apostles. Pentecost was the final event in the Paschal mystery, that is, the entire work of our salvation, which began as far back as the Fall of our first parents, which brought about God’s first promise to send us a Saviour. In yet another sense we can say that the entire work of Salvation, God’s work, began not with the Fall as such, but even earlier still with the creation itself. As the psalmist put it in today’s Responsorial psalm: ‘By his word the heavens were made, by the breath of his mouth all the stars.’ As with all such passages from the psalms, the Holy Spirit himself guided the human author to reveal a hidden truth in those apparently simple words: for the ‘word’ of God by which the heavens were made, is none other than the Word who eventually became flesh and dwelt among us; whilst the ‘breath of his mouth’ is the Holy Spirit of God, for God’s own breath is life itself, symbolised by the spirit hovering over the creation in the Book of Genesis, and the mighty wind heard by the Apostles on that first Pentecost Sunday.

How fitting it is, then, today to look back over the last few months’ celebrations of the coming of our Saviour at Christmas, of His saving death and resurrection, His ascension and the sending of the Spirit, and to consider the underlying meaning of everything that we have celebrated together from Advent to last Sunday. For today we celebrate the greatest of all mysteries of the faith, and one which is given to us so that it may fill us with light and joy: the mystery of the Blessed and undivided Trinity, one God.

I say that this is a mystery. But don’t think God is a puzzle. By ‘mystery’ the Church quite simply means that although we will never succeed in completely understanding who God is, we will never cease to know and understood more and more of Him throughout eternity. This, incidentally, is why eternity cannot be in any way monotonous. It is precisely because we will always be discovering ever deeper and deeper aspects of the truth about God, who the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are, and how we are able to relate to this wonderful God of ours, that eternity can never be anything less than a continuously unfolding miracle of wonder for each of us.

But to go back to the beginning. It is God who alone exists of Himself, unlike absolutely everything else which He has made; all things invisible, like the angels, and all things visible, from the entire vastness of the universe, to the tiniest living microscopic creature, all comes not from any necessity, but solely from the will of God. It is God alone who exists simply because He is, and there has never been a moment when He has not existed.

God is not part of the universe, or else he would be one ‘thing’, so to speak, among many. But His being is something quite different from any other kind of being, known or as yet unknown to us. This is usually why some people don’t ‘get’ the idea of God, they think that because there seems to be no room inside the universe for him, that therefore he is a figment of human imagination. Yet God is not something mankind has invented to fill up the gaps about what we don’t know. God is above all the One who reveals Himself to us. He began to reveal Himself in the Old Testament. We heard in the first reading how Moses taught the people to reflect on God’s revelation. ‘Understand this today, and take it to heart,’ he says, ‘Has any god ventured to take to himself one nation from the midst of another by ordeals, signs, wonders, war with mighty hand and outstretched arm, by fearsome terrors – all this that the Lord your God did for you before your eyes in Egypt?’ To put it another way, the God who saved them from slavery and brought them to the Promised Land was the same God who gave them the commandments, not as a curse, as a new form of slavery, but on the contrary, so that by keeping his laws and commandments, they and their children might prosper and live long in the land that God gave them.

But God had not finished revealing Himself. He was preparing them to receive an even greater revelation: the gift of His Son, who though He is God just like himself in every way, would come among us as a man like us in every way, except sin. The Word through whom all things were made, the perfect copy of the Father, showed us that God is indeed a Father, first of all to His beloved Son Jesus, and then through Him to all mankind. Jesus taught His disciples about the Father, teaching them to call Him ‘our Father’, thereby fulfilling what Moses had done in the Old Testament. ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you.’ But He also had prepared them for yet another gift from God after He was to be taken from them: ‘I will send you another advocate, the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father, who will lead you into the complete truth.’ It is this Holy Spirit whose coming at Pentecost we celebrated last Sunday, who finally made the fullness of the one God known to us, insofar as we can know it in our limited way in this life.

Yet why does the One God want to reveal Himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Doesn’t this complicate things for us? No. That is not God’s intention at all. It is because God, who is inifinitely good, wants only to share Himself fully with us just as He is. The Father has given us two immeasurably great gifts: His Son and His Spirit, thereby revealing to us that while He is three persons, He is absolutely one single undivided God. The Father shares His unique divine nature with His Son and the Spirit, which is what we mean by calling them ‘consubstantial’. This means that even before He created anything out of nothing, God was never ‘alone’, never lonely. He was always a communion of three persons. And this communion is the source of their love which they rejoice to share with each other. This love, this giving of Father, Son and Holy Spirit to each other, is the real reason why they willed to create the universe, so that they could share that love with their creatures, and so that creation might share in the glory that is His. This is why God has called us, too, whom He has made in His own image, to love one another as He has loved us, and in that way to come to the perfection that He intends we should enjoy for all eternity in heaven with Him. May His Will be done in us for ever!

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, today is one of the greatest solemnities of the year – the final climax and culmination of the entire Easter season. Today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles is the only place in Scripture where we hear of the wonderful and strange events that characterise this day and record for us the descent of the Holy Spirit. In reflecting on the liturgical anniversary today of that event, we also remember that the Holy Spirit is Himself Almighty God, co-equal with the Father and the Son, sharing the self-same nature of the one Godhead with them both.

Indeed, the strange phenomena of the Coming of the Spirit on that first Pentecost Sunday are difficult for us fully to understand. The sound of a mighty rushing wind, the appearance of something that could only be described as ‘like tongues of fire’ which separated as they came to rest on the head of each person present in that Upper Room – all this is very strange. These phenomena were not to be repeated in the same manner after this day, though the reality which they conveyed to the Apostles and the holy women has continued to take place in the life of the Church ever since. The event is the beginning of the life of the Church as the body of Christ united in Him by the one Holy Spirit shared by all who are baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is why we call today the ‘Birthday of the Church’.

A particular difficulty lies in the way that the individual images of the Holy Spirit as wind and fire reveal so little of Him as a person at all, let alone a divine Person. Indeed, I think we can say that the Holy Spirit is more truly concealed in wind and fire than that He is revealed by them. It is His presence that is revealed by the Pentecostal wind and fire, but not His Person; something of what His power is, but not who He is personally as God. Even after Pentecost, the Spirit remains an intense, yet joyful, mystery. Moreover, the Gospels tells us of other signs of the Spirit. First, He appears at our Lord’s Baptism in the form of a dove descending upon the Lord to anoint Him. Secondly, our Lord Himself speaks of the future coming of the Spirit upon the Church by means of the image of the Spirit as ‘water’ welling up to eternal life in the heart of those in whom the Spirit will come to dwell. So from these different scriptural sources we can grasp that the Spirit is seen in the powers of air, fire and water – the elements that move freely and beyond the control of human power. These may reveal his presence but they also conceal his person, which we must therefore look for in another way.

St John Henry, Cardinal Newman wrote about two contrasting ways in which we can grasp the truths of the faith: one he calls ‘notional’, the other ‘real’. A notional grasp or assent is purely in words we use. We can say the words ‘the Spirit is God’, and believe them, but without it really penetrating our understanding or warming our hearts and minds, that is, without giving us a strong sense of His real Personhood and His power and love. That kind of strong sense of the Spirit’s character and reality as a divine Person is what Newman calls a ‘real’ apprehension. How do we get from a notional acceptance of the Holy Spirit to a ‘real’ and living apprehension of His divine power and majesty? How can we begin to realise just how great a part He plays in the lives of those who pray for His gifts and who welcome them with great joy?

One of the most important ways in which we come to a ‘real’ apprehension of someone so otherwise elusive of our knowledge as the Spirit, is through the liturgy. Cardinal Newman explicitly mentions the power of the liturgy of Pentecost to do just that for us. But he was writing about this at a time when Pentecost was not a single day’s celebration, here today and then gone tomorrow, but rather it consisted of what he called ‘the grandest octave’; eight continuous days of celebrations and meditations on the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s coming. For it is especially by the sheer weight of eight days continuously devoted to this particular mystery that the full depth and riches of its meaning and of the real personhood of the Spirit can begin to be impressed upon us.

We can think of an octave as being like a festival. A festival consisting of only one day hardly makes a splash, let alone a deep impression, because it has passed away almost before it has got going. Yet a festival of eight days has a presence and a power that makes itself felt even if we are not directly part of it for every day. We celebrate Easter and Christmas with octaves which help both to prolong the celebration and to provide us with continual opportunities to rejoice in and reflect on their meaning and influence, to give weight to the importance of what we celebrate in them. Even if we go to Mass only on the feast and on the Sunday in the octave, we get a greater sense of the power and importance of what we are celebrating just from knowing that the Church’s liturgical celebration lasts for eight whole days. Until fairly recently, Pentecost too used to have just such an octave as Easter and Christmas do, and on reflection it seems to me that it is a great loss to our understanding of the Person, role and character of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church and in the working out of our salvation, that we no longer have a whole week to ponder on His wonderful divine reality and to celebrate His presence in the Church.

And there is more still to ponder and celebrate. When I was a Parish Priest at the Oratory, one of my preparatory sessions for the confirmation class was to teach the distinction between the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The gifts, I would explain, are given to us by the Spirit as He comes to dwell in us. But the fruits must come from us, by our cooperating with the gifts of the Spirit. And if learning about all this takes time, it takes even more to put it into practice. To learn the meaning of these gifts and fruits, and how we are the place in which the Spirit must find a home; to learn the meaning of the different images of the Spirit - the wind, the fire, the water and the dove, - and how none of these images on its own tells us precisely who the Spirit is, all requires time to unfold and develop. For it is only when we have had time to ponder all of them together that they reveal a rounded and varied image of the Spirit as God.

Week by week we state our faith in the Spirit as the Lord and giver of life, who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified. It is in order to be able to convert what is probably a ‘notional’ grasp of the Spirit in the Creed to a ‘real’ and joyful grasp of the Spirit’s divine essence and of His effect upon the life of the Church, that during this coming week here at Carmel we will be prolonging and continuing the celebration of Pentecost with Votive Masses of the Holy Spirit. In this way, we will continue to reflect on the various images of the Spirit in Scripture, the diverse characteristics of His person and of His power and influence, the better to come to know Him and to love Him who is Himself both the love of the Father and Son for each other, and the love of the One God for the whole of His creation.

This Sunday of Eastertide each year gives us an opportunity to hear part of the final chapter of St John’s account of the Last Supper, which is a wonderful prayer addressed by our Lord to His heavenly Father. Having come to the end of his long discourse to the Apostles, He is about to leave with them for Gethsemane. There He will pray with such pain and intensity that He will sweat blood. Here in the Upper Room He prepares Himself for all that lies ahead by this extraordinary prayer. Nothing else in the whole New Testament is like it, where we hear the Son of God addressing His Father with love as He prepares to offer Himself as a sacrifice. Here He shows Himself to the Apostles as a priest, about to offer the one perfect sacrifice which will consecrate us to God. Chapter 17 is entirely dedicated to Christ’s prayer to His heavenly Father at the end of the Last Supper in preparation for His imminent sacrifice, to be accomplished the very next day on the cross. It is also an extraordinary prayer, in that we are given an intimate experience of what it meant for the Son of God to pray to His Father; for the one who is ‘the Word who was with God in the beginning, and who was Himself God.’ We are privileged to hear, through the testimony of the Beloved Disciple who leant on God the Son’s breast at the Last Supper, the very words addressed by the Son of God to His Father on the eve of his leaving the world to return to the Father.

The Word, who was with God in the beginning, through whom all things were made, used human language to speak to His heavenly Father. This was so because the ‘Word was made flesh’, He took our human nature to Himself when He became Mary’s son, and therefore He is now able to speak, as man, to the Father whose Son and perfect image He has always been, and still is even as man. This is an amazing thought. Let us try and grasp it, however imperfectly, so as to gain even a tiny glimpse of the inner depths that this great prayer reveals. For those inner depths are of the life of God Himself, and of the one who is true God and true man.

First of all, the prayer opens with these significant words: ‘Jesus raised His eyes to heaven.’ This raising of the eyes towards the place where the Father dwells is the origin of what the priest does at Mass when he faithfully repeats the actions of our Lord at the Supper, thus: ‘He took bread in His holy and venerable hands, and with eyes raised to heaven to you, O God, His almighty Father...’ so begin the words of the central part of the Eucharistic prayer. So then let us think of what the whole of the Eucharistic prayer means. At the very beginning of that Prayer, sometimes also known as ‘the Great Prayer’ on account both of its length and its supreme importance in the heart of the Mass, there is a dialogue in which the priest calls on you, the faithful, to ‘lift up your hearts’, and to ‘give thanks to the Lord our God’. It is this ‘giving thanks’ which is at the very centre of the entire Mass, and the Greek word for ‘giving thanks’, ‘Eucharist’, is itself one of the names by which we know both the whole Mass and its principal fruit, the Blessed Sacrament.

After that dialogue between the priest and the congregation, he continues to pray alone, just as Christ prays alone in the Gospel reading. This is because the priest is acting ‘in persona Christi’, which means that by virtue of his ordination, he is made a sharer in the very priesthood of Christ Himself. First of all there is the Preface, which is a hymn of praise to God, often closely connected with the feast day or season we are celebrating. So today, for instance, the Preface is a hymn of praise to God for the Ascension of Christ His Son, which brings us hope of heaven. Then, at the end of this Preface we all sing the Sanctus, so as to join the angels worshipping God in heaven, just as the Prophet Isaiah heard them singing: ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory’. After this, once more the priest continues alone with the great prayer, addressing the Father in the same way that Christ prayed at the Last Supper. After praying for the Church, he prays that the bread and wine may be changed into Christ’s body and blood, and then does what our Lord did at the Last Supper, using the same words and actions, and as we say, consecrating the bread and wine to become our sacrifice to God, and the Blessed Sacrament for our Holy Communion. He then prays that God the Father will graciously accept this very sacrifice, as being Christ’s sacrifice and that of His whole Church. He prays that the Holy Spirit may consecrate those who will receive the Blessed Sacrament in Holy Communion, to keep in them in unity and make them holy. At the end of the great prayer, the priest raises aloft the sacrificial gifts in a gesture of offering and praises the Father through Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In all this, the priest is doing what Christ did; praying Christ’s own entire prayer of supplication on behalf of the whole Church; the prayer of thanksgiving, of blessing, of consecration and of self-sacrifice. Giving thanks and blessing are two ways of expressing the same action and prayer; so in the first and third Eucharistic prayers the priest says: ‘[Jesus] took bread, and...giving you thanks, he said the blessing...’ while in the second Eucharistic prayer the priest says: ‘He took bread, and giving thanks, broke it...’

This is why chapter 17 of St John’s Gospel is so significant, because it is Jesus’s own Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving, of blessing, and of consecration. Consecration is something that a priest alone can do. When we call Christ the one High Priest, it is because of this prayer which consecrates all He will do on the cross the next day. It is the prayer of the Son of God, of Jesus our priest, consecrating Himself to be the sacrifice offered the next day on the cross. This is why we say that every Mass is a re-presentation of the one single sacrifice; it was offered on Maundy Thursday in the signs of bread and wine and in the prayer of thanksgiving and consecration, and it was offered in blood and suffering on Good Friday – but they were one and the same sacrifice. So too, now, every Mass is one and the same sacrifice as that offered by Christ, and as He offered and consecrated Himself at the Last Supper, so too in every Mass Christ offers and consecrates Himself through the hands and words of the ordained priest to continue offering the same perfect sacrifice.

The Gospel we have just listened makes this point. In it we hear only our Lord’s words of prayer, nothing else. Throughout this chapter Jesus prays that those the Father has given Him, His Apostles, may be true to God’s name, and that they may all be one; then also because they do not belong to the world, that they may be protected from the evil one. Yet He prays not only for the Apostles, but for ‘those also who through their words will believe in [Him]’, that is all Catholics of every age. Then at the end of today’s Gospel reading, our Lord makes this prayer to His Father: ‘consecrate them in the truth….for their sake I consecrate myself so that they too may be consecrated in truth.’

This is the very heart of the prayer that the Son makes to His Father, which we enter into at every Mass. For while we can never repeat that sacrifice offered once for all on the cross, we can and indeed do relive it ourselves every time we do what He commanded us to do in memory of Him. And this was His command to the Church, to consecrate bread and wine into His own body and blood, so that He could thereby consecrate us, nourish us with His own body and blood, fill us with His Holy Spirit and make of us an eternal offering to the Father, so that we may obtain an inheritance with all the elect, the chosen saints in His kingdom, where we hope to enjoy for ever the fullness of His glory.

It is this one and the same Christ who so consecrated Himself at the Last Supper as to consecrate us, giving Himself to be our nourishment in the Blessed Sacrament and to be our sacrifice in the Mass; and it is through Him, with Him and in Him that we shall render all glory and honour to God the Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.

‘I shall not call you servants any more...I call you friends’. These wonderful words are a great consolation to us in this life, which can be so full of difficulties and discouragements. According to St John, at the Last Supper Our Lord spoke at great length, instructing the Apostles about the full depth of meaning of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood that He was giving them, and of the Sacrifice He was about to offer the very next day on the cross. Yet I think we can also see that St John also had in mind another body of instruction, that which St Luke refers to in the opening words of the Acts of the Apostles, which we will hear at Mass on Ascension Thursday this coming week. There Luke tells us that our Lord spent forty days from the day of His resurrection until His glorious return to the Father, continuing to appear to the Apostles and telling them about the kingdom of God.

These two instructions, the first at the Last Supper and the other during the Forty Days after the Resurrection really do belong together. Undoubtedly our Lord will have given the Apostles much of the same teaching both before His Passion, and after His resurrection. Both are the consummation of His entire life and ministry, and explain the gift of Himself to the Apostles. When you listen to our Lord’s teaching at the Last Supper, it may at first seem almost hypnotically repetitive. I mean that, so very often throughout the Last Supper, our Lord seems to be saying the same thing over again, sometimes with very slightly different words, as though He is looking at something from as many different angles as possible to give a full account of its riches.

It is in these chapters, for instance, that we learn most of the forthcoming gift and mission of the Holy Spirit, who has been mentioned from time to time during our Lord’s ministry, but never in such depth as now. It is from this teaching that we learn that the Holy Spirit is about to come down on the Apostles to form the living Body of Christ from a mere handful of individuals. It is then that the Spirit will become the source of our joy, and source of the power of the Church’s Sacraments which transform us into the likeness of Christ our Lord. In this way the Spirit will make Christ known to us by bringing Him to dwell within us, by filling us with the unquenchable joy of loving the God who has made known His love to us. That great gift we shall celebrate with great joy and solemnity in two weeks’ time at Pentecost, when the Easter season comes to its triumphant end.

That is why our Lord said that the Holy Spirit would remind the Apostles of all that He, the Christ, had taught them, and furthermore, lead them into all truth. We are the heirs of that gift of the Spirit. He is the One who inspires us with living knowledge of the love of God and fills us with joy. He is the One who brings about the unity of the Church – and I don’t mean some figurative, metaphorical unity, but the real living bond of love in the Body of Christ who, as St Paul found out, makes us cry out in joy: ‘Abba, Father!’ This is the joyous spring from which flowed our introit this morning: ‘Proclaim a joyful sound, and let it be heard! Proclaim [it] to the ends of the earth.’ The ends of the earth ring out to the same song of joy, because the ends of the earth are filled with those in whom one and the same Spirit makes His home and unites us in the one Body of Christ.

And what is the truth into which Christ says the Spirit will lead us? It is the knowledge that Christ no longer calls us servants but friends, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Up until the Holy Spirit’s coming upon them, the Apostles cannot have known the inner secrets of the Son of God. Nor can we, by human means alone. The Apostles and we have nevertheless been given this wonderful knowledge by the Holy Spirit. He is the one who makes known to us everything that the Father has taught His Son, and He does this by living in our hearts, and so making us sharers in God’s own friendship which is His inner life of love. Hence our Lord’s words: ‘I shall not call you servants any more, I call you friends.’

Now I just want to invite you to think for a moment how truly amazing it is that God the Holy Spirit dwells in us in order to make us God’s friends, and not merely His servants. We tend either to take it for granted or to treat it as something too obscure to understand. Yet once we begin to dwell on that striking fact, then our Lord’s command to love one another as He has loved us makes more sense. How can we possibly love anyone as God loves us? By unaided human nature this is impossible, but not with God living in us and sharing His inner love with us. This is what Christ has made possible by His death, resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit. This is why He freely laid down His life for us: ‘A man can have no greater love,’ He says, ‘than to lay down his life for His friends.’

As I say, so much of what Our Lord says at the Last Supper seems at first merely repetitive. Yet to stop at just thinking that would be to miss the real heart of what He is saying to us. At the opening of the Gospel we have just heard, He says ‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love.’ ‘Remain’, or to choose a similar word ‘abide’, are words describing a constant state of being, and means sharing life together. Our Lord uses this word constantly as He addresses the Apostles at the Last Supper: ‘if you remain in me, then I will remain in you’, and as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel: ‘As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself but must remain part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.’ And He puts this yet another way when He says: ‘make your home in me as I make mine in you’. It is when we do this, all through the indwelling, which is the remaining or abiding in us of the Holy Spirit, that we can do what Our Lord commands: ‘love one another, as I have loved you,’ and ‘I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last.’ We can express our Lord’s words in another way as: ‘go out and bear fruit, fruit that will remain.’

To love one another as Christ has loved us, that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s living in our hearts. He it is who enables us to make our home in Christ, and Christ to make His home in us. Now when we receive Christ into us bodily in Holy Communion, His sacramental presence remains for a short time only. That is why we can receive Communion every day if we so wish. But the Holy Spirit can make Christ’s remaining in us to be continuous, constant, when He brings the Father living in the Son and the Son living in the Father to dwell in our hearts. The Holy Spirit enables us to bear fruit, the fruit of loving one another as Christ loves us; such fruit will last into eternity. Now there’s something genuinely to make us cry out with joy, and proclaim a joyful sound to the ends of the earth, Alleluia!

‘O sing a new song to the Lord!’ the psalmist encourages us this morning. As Eastertide continues, its character changes from the recollection of the Resurrection and the appearances our Lord to His disciples, to a more profound dwelling on the joyous new life of the resurrection which we now share with the risen Lord through our baptism. It is the ‘here and now’ on which we are called to reflect, and there is no time of the year in which the ‘here and now’ is more redolent of joy than in this Easter time. And it is out of joy that the Church sings, over and over again, the Alleluia, of which we were deprived during the six long, dark weeks of Lent.

Also, throughout the Sundays of Easter, in the Liturgy of the Word at Mass we hear only readings from the New Testament. Whereas at all other times we hear a first reading from the Old Testament, such as the prophets, or the books of the Law, or of the history of God’s people before the coming of Christ, at this time we only hear the Acts of the Apostles. This is because the Acts describes not only events in the lives and missions of the Apostles, but also gives a picture of life in the earliest generation of the life of the Church. So it is that we hear, for instance, that whatever the trials of the early Church, the first Christians were united in heart and mind and in the prayers and the ‘breaking of the bread’, which is the name St Luke, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, gives to the Mass.

And in today’s reading, Luke tells us about Saul, who had now been converted from persecuting the Church to preaching the risen Christ, and would soon be known as Paul, how he was arousing the hatred of his erstwhile friends because he had now become a follower, indeed a powerful preacher, of the risen Christ. Yet even so, St Luke tells us that the church in Judaea, Galilee and Samaria were at peace, building themselves up, living in the fear of the Lord, and filled with the consolation of the Holy Spirit.

In this way, St Luke largely tells us about the way the Church coped with persecutions from without, whilst making references to the inner life which sustained the first Christians with a profound joy and confidence in Christ. The secret of this confidence and joy must surely have been the spiritual life generated and nourished by the Mass, for in the Mass Christ Himself, the risen Lord, continues to make Himself present to the Church, just as He had done to the disciples at Emmaus, or to the Apostles in the Upper Room.

This is the newness of life prophesied by the psalmist as we sang ourselves in the introit: ‘O sing a new song to the Lord’. The Church says to us: ‘rejoice, for the new life of Christ is living in you! Show this joy, give expression to it, by singing a new song.’ St Augustine speaks of this new song as well, when he comments on these words of the psalmist: ‘we are admonished,’ he says, ‘to sing a new song to the Lord. A new man,’ he goes on, ‘sings a new song. For singing is a sign of exhilaration, and, when we look even closer, a new song is a sign of love.’ He continues in this way: ‘the person who knows how to love the new life, knows the new song that is to be sung’, or to put it another way, ‘he knows how to sing that new song.’ For the new song belongs to the New Testament, and the New Testament in turn belongs to the person who is made new in the risen Christ.

Nobody expresses this better than St John, as we so often hear him both when the second reading is taken from one of his letters, and in the words of our Lord as John records them for us in His Gospel, as we have heard today. Love is the inspiration for our singing the new song of the resurrection, which fills the life of grace with joy. St John summed this up for us in the second reading this morning when he told us that our love must not be mere words, but something real and active, namely, that we believe in Christ as the risen Saviour, and that we love one another as He told us to do. This is not to be understood as some kind of moral code, like the Ten Commandments. This commandment to love one another is the foundation of all morality. When we are filled with the love of God and put it into practice, then we find that obeying the commandments is the expression of that love in us, and that love in us means God lives in us and we live in God, and that we know that this is so because the Holy Spirit is the divine Person who gives us knowledge of the Father and the Son within us.

This is how we can understand the idea that grace transforms us from within. Grace is not something that merely comes to us on particular occasions, nor is it only the power and goodness of God, but it is first and foremost the living presence of God in us, and we recognise it for what it is by the enlightenment of the Spirit who was first given to us at our baptism – the first Easter Sacrament, and the gateway to all the other Sacraments, especially Holy Communion.

This can help us to understand what our Lord is telling us in the Gospel, namely that He is the vine, and we are His branches. A branch of a vine can have no life in it if it is cut off from its roots, and that life in it is the sap, which eventually produces the fruit of the vine, the grape from which comes the wine that, as the psalmist says, ‘gladdens the heart of man.’ We, as the branches, can only produce the fruit if we live in the vine and the vine lives in us. His blood must course through our veins, and this can only happen if we receive Him in Holy Communion. Communion with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and in the Holy Mass are the means whereby He lives in us and we in Him, for cut off from Him we can do nothing. Hence, once again, the central importance of Sunday Mass in the life of the Catholic.

It is this life, the true life of the vine within us, that gives us our true spiritual identity, which cannot be something we construct for ourselves. Invented spirituality, though very popular these days, is dead if not rooted in Christ the vine. The only spirituality which gives life is the Holy Spirit we receive in the sacraments of the Church. This life is that which enables us to live as members of Christ, as His branches. This is the life about which we sing in Eastertide, the new life which inspires the new song. And this new song doesn’t mean something that was written yesterday or the day before, but something which has been given us to sing by the Holy Spirit, something which He first poured out on the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost, and has been pouring out on those who are baptised, and on those who receive Holy Communion, ever since that first Pentecost Sunday. For the Holy Spirit and the life which He gives never grows old. It is always fresh and new, and inspires new members of the body in every successive generation to sing His new song.

This new song, then, is the song of God’s love within us. It is the song of Christ the lover for us, His beloved. He has poured out His life for us on the cross, and now He pours that life into us in the Mass and in Holy Communion. That same love, that same blood, ever new, ever fresh, ever living, is what fills our heart when we sing the new song of Eastertide, expressed most perfectly in the Church’s own chant, which fills our liturgy with the equivalent of light in sound. For the chant is quite unlike any earthly song. It is quiet and gentle, and expresses not so much an exuberance as does much music we think of as ‘joyful’, but rather the vibrancy of still life which we sometimes see in pictures of natural beauty, such as is found in flowers. But the beauty which inspires the Church’s chant is no natural beauty, it is entirely supernatural, and it cannot be more exquisitely summed up than in the word ‘alleluia’, the song of the redeemed which, by God’s grace and our faithfulness to His love, we will sing ever new for all eternity in heaven.