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

St John of the Cross wrote this Christmas Poem:

Now at last the destined ages

Their appointed course had run,

When rejoicing from His chamber

Issued forth the Bridegroom Son.

He embraced His bride, and held her

Lovingly upon His breast,

And the gracious Mother laid Him

In the manger down to rest.

There He lay, the dumb beasts by Him,

They were fitly stabled there,

While the shepherds and the angels

Filled with melody the air.

So the feast of their espousals

With solemnity was kept ;

But Almighty God, an Infant,

In the manger moaned and wept.

So the bride at her betrothal

Did the bridal gifts arrange ;

But the Mother looked in wonder

At the marvellous exchange.

Man gave forth a song of gladness,

God Himself a plaintive moan ;

Both possessing that which never

Had been hitherto their own.

I begin with the words of St John of the Cross, a Carmelite Saint, to highlight the truth that over these past 2000 years, many good and holy people, and very many ordinary people like us, have explored the Mystery of Christmas, the event which changed history, and which continues to change history, year by year.

It is always good for us to reflect on the fact that while the Christmas narrative does not change, the people and the hearts who experience the Christmas Mystery change, and so this Christmas will mean something different for us, depending on our experiences of the past 12 months.

For to us a child is born,

to us a son is given;

and the government shall be upon his shoulder,

and his name shall be called

Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

So proclaims the Prophet Isaiah.

And the world continues to ask, and even people of faith ask: where is this peace that the birth of the Saviour promised?

And the answer is given: human beings are given free will to make choices, and not controlled as robots.

Many people tend to think of the world as an unhappy place, a place lacking hope.

At such times, and turning aside from some of the undoubted clouds overhead and much publicised, events which point to the shadow side of humanity, the people we know: our families, our friends, our neighbours and so many of the ordinary people in our communities are good and honest people.

The birth of the Saviour who came to bring us peace is far more evident in life than we sometimes realise.

As an Advent people over recent weeks and, this night, as a joyful Christmas people, we are waiting for our blessed hope,

the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ,

who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness,

and to purify for himself a people for his own possession

who are zealous for good works.

This Christmas is poignant here at Carmel, following the death of two longstanding members of the Religious community very recently:

Sr Teresa Joseph and

Sr Mary Stella.

Both of whom, having dedicated their lives to the Lord in Religious, contemplative life are, for all of us, and especially for the Sisters: Pilgrims of Hope.

They remind us that the destination of our pilgrimage of Hope is Heaven.

As we pray for them and remember them this Christmas, we seek their prayers for this community of prayer.

I know well - and have benefitted for 30 years now as a priest - from the prayers of the Sisters for Priests.

For everybody gathered here this evening, the Sisters’ life of prayer is a deep consolation to all of us.

So many of us try each day to make time for prayer in busy lives.

The contemplative life is one that is centred around the Mass and the hours of prayer.

We might even describe is a busy life of prayer.

Perhaps the community here might desire that Sr Teresa Joseph and Sr Mary Stella share in something of what St Therese of Lisieux described as her Christmas miracle of 1886:

She wrote:

God would have to work a little miracle to make me grow up in an instant, and this miracle He performed on that unforgettable Christmas day. On that luminous night which sheds such light on the delights of the Holy Trinity, Jesus, the gentle, little Child of only one hour, changed the night of my soul into rays of light.

(SAINT THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX, MANUSCRIPT A, FOLIO 44 VERSO)

During the recent celebration in Rome of the Jubilee for Consecrated Life, Pope Leo the Fourteenth - himself a Religious - said this:

Dear Sisters, the Lord, to whom you have given everything, has rewarded you with such beauty and richness, and I would like to urge you to treasure and cultivate what you have received. Let us recall the words of Pope Saint Paul VI: “Keep,” he wrote to religious, “the simplicity of the ‘least ones’ of the Gospel. May you succeed in discovering this anew in an interior and closer relationship with Christ and in your direct contact with your [community]. You will then experience through the action of the Holy Spirit the joyful exultation of those who are introduced into the secrets of the kingdom. Do not seek to be numbered among the ‘learned and clever’... Such secrets are hidden from these. Be truly poor, meek, eager for holiness, merciful and pure of heart. Be among those who will bring to the world the peace of God”

On this most holy night where we celebrate and enter the Mystery of the Incarnation, in this Jubilee Year as Pilgrims of Hope, and most mindful of our closeness in prayer and love this night with our dear recently departed Sisters, may the simplicity of the Christ child, whose greatness in history is captured in the humility of Bethlehem be for all of us a profound encounter with the Prince of Peace and an invitation to life in all its fulness.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, Advent is a season in need of rescue. Its very name is now only familiar to many through the modern ‘Advent Calendar’ with its daily treats: for the children a chocolate or a toy; or for the grown ups cosmetics or perfume, jewellery, even a small bottle of something alcoholic. The time formerly occupied by Advent in the wider world has been taken over by fairy lights and decorations, and by secular songs celebrating eating, drinking and partying to excess.

But the real Advent is now only a rarity, an endangered species, a season on life support, something quite different in character from the Christmas it looks forward to. That is a shame, because without entering into Advent we cannot really understand Christmas and even less successfully celebrate it. We live in a society which expects instant gratification. We don’t as a whole like to be kept waiting for something once we have a clear idea of what we want. The aim of modern advertising is to fill our minds with images that not only arouse our appetites, but actually try to convince us that without this product, or that kind of excessive consumption, we will fail to make ourselves happy but also, perhaps more insidiously, to make those around us happy, too. If we don’t have far more than enough to eat, we will leave everyone round our table feeling miserable at Christmas. Do you want to do that?

Even in many churches it is now fashionable to put up decorations long before Christmas and I have heard that in some churches, cribs are already fully on display, including the Christ child,! But this is surely to miss the point of Advent! This is a time to look forward not with impatience, but with a quiet watchfulness of spirit. Let me explain what I mean.

Isaiah, the prophet whose voice is heard so much in church during Advent, begins today’s first reading with these words: ‘the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and bloom like the crocus…’ Why does he speak of a wilderness, a desert, a land stricken by drought? These are not comfortable places in which to rest and take our ease. Nor are they meant to be! So what is this wilderness or desert? It is the state in which we find ourselves when we do not have what we want. It is uncomfortable to be without something we are longing for. As children we must all have known that sense of anticipation of some joyful event coming up and crying out impetuously, ‘I can’t wait!’ Well, Advent is a time in which we are given the opportunity to learn to wait – patiently. We already know that the name of Advent means ‘Coming’, but we don’t reflect that the word means that whatever is coming is by definition not already here. In this case the celebration of our Saviour’s birth is the coming into the world of the One God who created it, not coming as God in all His glory, but rather in humility as a man, human like us in every way except sin.

Well, maybe that makes us think of something else: not only must we learn to wait and to wait patiently, but we must recognise what it means to wait for God made man to come into us at the feast of His birth. We are waiting not just for the date which celebrates the anniversary in the past of Christ’s birth at Bethlehem, but for the realisation in the present of God’s plan for us. When Isaiah speaks of the dry land being glad, and the desert blossoming abundantly, and of its rejoicing with joy and singing, he is actually speaking about us. He is speaking about our hearts, about all that is central to our lives and existence. Think about it in this way: what is it that makes us rejoice? What makes us sad? One of those which can make us sad, or even angry, is not only not getting what we want straightaway but having to accept something else imposed on us instead. The desert within us is the state of having to accept that things are not as we would want or choose them, and having to learn to accept that or wait until the proper time.

Apart from Isaiah there is another great Scriptural voice that speaks to us today about this need to learn patience and acceptance: the Apostle St James. He begins today’s second reading with these words: ‘be patient…until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it until it receives the early and late rains.’ We who are generally less familiar with the cultivation of the land than were many of the first Christians have to try and put ourselves into the mind of a farmer. The farmer has a lot of very hard work on his plate. He must till the land, which is heavy work guiding the plough, then he must sow the seed in the freshly tilled earth, having first made sure he has enough seed to sow. But after that it is largely a matter of waiting – of waiting for that over which he has no control: the rain. He has to hope that rain will fall both in sufficient quantities and at the proper time, which is, as James says, early enough to allow the seed to germinate, and late enough to bring the crop to ripeness and full yield.

Our Lord Himself often taught with images from farming and gardening and with the same intent: to teach us spiritual truths about ourselves that we might otherwise miss. Like the farmer in St James’s epistle, we need to see ourselves as being like soil which needs breaking up in order to receive water to make it fruitful. During a hot, dry summer, if rain falls on hard ground that is not broken up, it doesn’t soak into the ground at all, but simply runs off and causes flooding, and the ground remains dry and barren. So, like the farmer who must work hard to break up the ground to make it fruitful, we too must work hard to soften our inner selfishness so that we may receive the many graces that God wishes to pour out on us in such a way that they bear fruit in us.

This is what our Advent can be and must be. We must be like the farmer waiting patiently for the rain needed to make his hard work fruitful and bring his crops to full growth. But rather than the land, it is our souls that we must work on. We must break up the hardness of our selfishness and impatience. It is good for us to have to wait for gratification of our desires, to experience things that make us realise how impatient we can be, how determined we can be always to get our own way. Advent is a time to ask for patience in waiting, so that when He comes at Christmas, our Lord may find in us a spiritual soil made ready by our patient waiting during this precious Advent season to receive Him into ourselves far more fruitfully, far more joyfully, than if we have not made such preparations. It is a time to learn not to insist on having our own way, and even better still, to learn to rejoice when we don’t get our own way. That would indeed be a great victory!

Listen again to Isaiah: ‘Say to those who have an anxious heart, Be strong, fear not! And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Sion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads, they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.’ The sorrow and sighing are the uneasiness of impatience and self-will. Only when these are finally overcome can gladness and joy come in their place. That is what Christmas will bring to those who have first kept the self-discipline of Advent. In a similar way St James says: ‘Be patient until the coming of the Lord…establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another…’ He encourages us to avoid grumbling because this, together with self-assertion, brings only unhappiness and sorrow. Patience prepares us for true joy. And finally we can return to St Paul’s words which cry out in this Sunday’s entrance antiphon like a clarion call: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice! Indeed the Lord is near!’ This is the reason for our rejoicing: not that Christmas is already here, but that by our patience and forbearance we can prepare better for the One who is born at Christmas to be born in our hearts. We still await that birth, but we do so with joy. That is why we are not yet celebrating in white or gold vestments as we will do on Christmas Night, but today in Rose vestments because we are still in Advent, not quite in purple, but still waiting for the Lord’s birthday to come so that He may be born in our hearts made ready for Him.

I find that there is no time of the year when I am more aware of how time both moves onwards and yet also comes round full circle than strikes me at this time of Advent. The new liturgical year began last Sunday. We began, as always, looking forward to the end times, when Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead - as we say in the Nicene Creed whose 17th centenary we have been celebrating this year – yet this announcement seems only to repeat what we experienced this time last year. Still we are waiting, and still Christ has not yet returned. How are we to understand this, without cynically concluding that the Second Coming is not really going to happen, or if it does, it is still a long way off? We must listen anew to that old voice: the voice of one crying in the wilderness: John the Baptist.

But why does John appear at all? Could Our Lord not have begun His work without John going before Him as His herald? Of course He could have done had He chosen to do so. But the coming of a great prophet as the Precursor of the Messiah (i.e. “Anointed One”) was foretold in Scripture. It was generally held by the Jews in Our Lord’s time, that the Prophet Elijah would return to the earth shortly before the Messiah appeared, in order to prepare the way for Him. So when John burst onto the scene, people not only took notice of what he had to say, but also of what it might mean. Was the coming of the promised Messiah imminent?

We learn more about John’s impact on the religious society of his day in next Sunday’s Gospel. But for the present we can think about the implications of “a voice crying in the wilderness”. How often do we use that phrase to mean a lonely voice, a person isolated and without supporters or believers? John’s message is uncomfortable, as is his appearance and the environment in which he operates. He is not a city man. Those who wish to hear his message must leave the city and come out into the wilderness to hear him. Of course, many do just that, as we will hear in detail next Sunday. But the importance of John is not only in the content of his message, but in its timing. He comes to reawaken the sense of longing for God that the Jewish people had lost. Nor is this something that happens only to the Jews. It can happen to all “religious” people. We can all fall into the trap of finding a comfortable routine that suits our life well. We can so easily think that we know exactly what God wants of us—just so much and no more. But God is always far beyond the limits of our imagination and dealings. John comes to remind us of this basic fact. God is infinite and cannot be confined within our images of Him.

And so as another Advent steals upon us, are we simply just listening all over again to the same message as last year and the year before? Or is there in reality something different? Well, the message may not seem to have changed much since we last heard it, but the difference lies in the fact that we have. We are not the same people that we were last year, or three years ago when we last heard these same readings we have just listened to. John the Baptist comes to say to each of us: Of course you have changed since last year, that is not at issue, what is at issue is this question: how have you changed since I last cried out to you, ‘prepare the way of the Lord’? For in truth we do all change willy nilly. But what is open to question is: have we changed for the better – or for the worse? I don’t know how you all read your consciences, but I know I recognise that I have not changed for the better in all the ways I know I should have done. But then again, how can that be done? How can any of us change for the better, and do so consistently and permanently?

The answer lies in realising that we cannot improve ourselves. We need someone who can do that for us, not without our co-operation but still in a way that transcends our own power to change ourselves for the better – to overcome our faults and failings and to keep God at the centre of all that we do. In other words, we need one whom John has come to prepare us to receive. We need the Saviour who alone can change us into His own image and likeness.

Now John is a mortal man like us, though one who is empowered in an extraordinary way by the Holy Spirit to be His prophet, the Spirit’s spokesman to the people of John’s own time and to us. But the Saviour whom God will send to us is no ordinary mortal but His own Son made man. Again we recall the words of the Nicene Creed: this Saviour whom John announces and for whom he prepares the way within us is ‘the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.’ John comes to make His paths straight. But what are those paths? The valleys, mountains, winding ways and rough roads are within us as well as in society. Just as soon as we think we have done everything He wanted us to do or be, God makes greater demands of us. That does not mean that God is a hard taskmaster, but that He knows what will best weed out our faults and weaknesses, and develop our qualities.

Not only is God far beyond the limits we put on Him, but so also is His plan for us. John comes as a stern messenger with a strict message. In a way, John is the ideal of the Prophet, God’s mouthpiece who brings word from God, but can bring no more. The One whose coming he prepares us for is quite different. The Son of God is more than a prophet, He is God. Everything that God is, so is He. That means that the Son of God will bring more than a message from God, however sublime—He brings God’s mercy and love. John binds up the sinners in chains of guilt. He convicts us of our sins. Our Lord goes further– He brings forgiveness for our sins and healing for our spiritual wounds. He awakens in us the love of God and the presence of His mercy. It is Our Lord who will reveal to us that God is not only the Almighty, but is the Father, who in His infinite love has sent us His Son as our brother and Saviour, and still sends us His Holy Spirit to make us holy in Him and bring us to know Him even in this life, as a preparation for the eternal life with which He will reward all those who have waited patiently for His coming and have striven to do His will in their lives on earth.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, before I begin, please could I ask you to join me in praying for the soul of our dear Sister Mary Stella who died here last night. She was a member of this community for over sixty years and had lived as a Carmelite for over seventy.

Today is the Solemnity of Christ the King, and the last Sunday of the year, the Church year that is. So it is that on this last Sunday we look forward to the last times when our Lord will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, as we proclaim every Sunday in the Creed. It will be then, when He appears in majesty, that all will acknowledge His kingship, though now it is frequently hidden, just as it was in the Gospel we have heard read to us. There Jesus was on the cross, mocked by the Rulers of His people and mocked by the soldiers who were pagans, very far from any majesty, glory or signs of kingship as we understand them.

But before I say more about that, I should also say that because this is the last Sunday of the year, it is also the last Sunday on which we shall hear St Luke’s Gospel read for another two years, because next Sunday, the first of Advent, sees the beginning of the year in which we will predominantly listen to readings from St Matthew’s Gospel. Now each of the Evangelists has a distinctive approach to the life, death and resurrection of our Lord. St John is the most distinctive of all, but although the other three have much in common that sets them apart from St John, they also have their distinctive features.

So, for instance, St Luke tells us at the beginning of his Gospel, addressed to a certain man called Theophilus, that he has gone into all the records and accounts of our Lord’s life as carefully as he possibly can so as to be able to write an orderly account for his friend. Part of this account includes things not known from the other evangelists. For instance, in a month’s time, when we draw close to Christmas, we will hear St Luke’s unique account of the preparations for the coming into the world of the Saviour. It is Luke alone who tells us about the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Shepherds and the angels on Christmas night, the Presentation in the Temple with Simeon and Anna, and the mysterious disappearance of the young boy Jesus and His discovery after three days discoursing with the elders in the Temple in Jerusalem. Where did Luke learn about these important events in our Lord’s early life? By the time he wrote his Gospel all those who were involved in those far distant events were dead, except only for one: our blessed Lady. Only she could have been the original source for most of these accounts, and the Church has long held it probable that Luke, being the meticulous historian he was, made sure to learn directly from our Lady what had happened at the very beginning of her Son’s earthly life.

But Luke is also the unique source for certain events at the end of our Lord’s life too. It is Luke alone who tells us of our Lord’s merciful prayer to the Father as He was being nailed to the cross: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ And whereas both Matthew and Marl tell us of the two criminals crucified with Jesus who also railed against Him, only Luke tells us of the one who rebuked his companion for mocking Jesus: ‘have you no fear of God? …we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then this criminal goes on to do something most unusual: he addresses the man dying next to him by name: ‘Jesus’, he says, which is a mode of address not used by anyone else, for it is usually ‘Lord’, ‘Rabbi’, or ‘Master’, and he continues: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power’. These words of great humility and supplication win a wonderful reply from the dying Jesus: ‘Truly I say to you, this day you will be with me in Paradise’.

We do not hear of this exchange from any other evangelist. We do not hear that one of the two criminals spoke in this way, nor that Jesus replied so reassuringly. Who, then, was the source of these words? It must have been someone who was there. We know from St John that he stood by the cross together with the blessed Mother of Jesus, our Lady. Since she was the source of so much concerning our Lord’s earliest days, then very possibly she may have been the principal source of things from these last days, too. She stood by the cross throughout the entire time Jesus was crucified and shared in all the pain and the opprobrium of the mockery of the chief priests and the soldiers. It was she who from the beginning pondered her Son’s words in her heart. Those words of mercy and of hope must have resounded in her ears and heart too, though hers would be a longer wait to be in paradise with her Son than would this repentant criminal’s.

May our Lord grant each of us the grace to see Him as King on the cross, and to accept our cross for love of Him and in thankfulness for what that cross brings us. May we say with the good thief, whom we know by the name Dismas: “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingly power”. May He say to us: “Amen I say to you, you will be with me in paradise”.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, the contrast between the two main characters, the Rich Man and Lazarus the poor man, is very great, and terrifying in its finality. As so often when our Lord tells a parable, He is inviting His audience to identify themselves with the characters. Who am I? The rich man or the poor man? Well, we need to examine closely what is meant by rich and poor in our Lord’s own telling of this story.

Shortly before this parable begins, we hear that the Pharisees were laughing at some of our Lord’s teaching regarding the danger of excessive wealth. It was part of the customary belief of that time that to be rich was a sign of God’s blessing, and to be poor was a sign of a curse or of some kind of punishment for sin – and indeed the sin might not be one’s own but a parent’s. Do you remember the Man born blind in St John’s gospel? The Apostles ask Jesus in all seriousness, ‘Lord, who sinned? This man or his fathers, that he should be born blind?’ Jesus replied, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned.’ Yet this was a common assumption. If you were unfortunate enough to be poor, or sick, or blind - then you must have committed a sin yourself, or were taking punishment from God for your parents’ sin. It seems strange to us, and it is thanks to our Lord teaching both in the healing of the Blind Man and in the telling of this parable of the rich man and the poor man after death, that our understanding of the true meaning of riches and poverty has been given to us.

Now something else should be said which seems obvious but is not really so when we bear in mind all that we have heard about beliefs in our Lord’s time concerning riches and poverty. In the story, the one who was rich and thought to be blessed in life is now in hell. The one who was poor, neglected and despised on earth is now in heaven. But Our Lord is not saying that the rich man is condemned for being rich, nor that the poor man is in heaven simply because he was poor in life; rather, their states in life are surprisingly and shockingly reversed in the afterlife. Why?

Our Lord teaches in many places in the Gospel that riches are no guarantee of a place in heaven. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven’. Remember how shocked the Apostles were to hear that. ‘In that case, who can be saved?’ they honestly thought that being rich made it easier to get into heaven than being poor, and here was the Master telling them most emphatically the opposite, And He had also told a parable about a rich man who had more than enough to keep in his stores, who decided to build bigger stores and take it easy from now on: ‘eat, drink and be merry!’ . But our Lord then bursts the bubble of expectation of an easy life: ‘Fool’ He exclaims, ‘Your soul is to be demanded of you this very night.’ In other words, the rich man must not only leave behind all the riches he thought he was going to enjoy for years to come, but must also face judgement before God.

Now back to this story and its particular lesson. The rich man lives an easy life, of material comfort, a life with no demands on him to do anything. He has plenty to eat drink – the best money can buy. But he totally ignores the poor man who is so near, yet so far. The poor man is not actually part of the rich man’s life. He is outside the gate that keeps riff-raff away, that stops the rich man from being bothered by the inconvenient needs of the poor man. And so, when he dies, he is clearly judged by God on that. Now the poor man apparently makes no particular demands on the rich man. He is not knocking on the door. In a sense, he is not even making things difficult for the rich man, as he might do if he made his presence felt. But just because the poor man is easy to ignore doesn’t let the rich man off the hook. The poor man has to put up with terrible degradation due to the neglect of his rich neighbour.

So now, they are both dead and the rich man goes to hell – Hades being the name for the place or condition of torment. But Lazarus goes to what is called ‘the bosom of Abraham’, a figure of speech meaning the place of the blessed. The rich man is in torment which he never expected, never gave a second thought to while he was enjoying himself. What can he do? Ah! There is Lazarus, and the rich man remembers him now. Surely Lazarus will help him and bring him a bit of comfort, just a little drop of water! But he can’t address Lazarus directly, only Abraham, who answers with the terrible truth that, even if Lazarus wanted to help only a little bit, he can’t make the crossing from heaven to hell. It’s an utterly impassable gulf. The rich man’s next effort is to get Lazarus to go back to earth and warn his rich brothers to avoid what he is now irrevocably stuck with. This is where our Lord makes the first of two great statements: Abraham replied to the rich man: ‘they have the Law and the Prophets, let them take heed of them!’ In other words, all this is not something I am revealing for the first time: this terrible gulf between heaven and hell; this terrible punishment for neglecting the needy – it’s all in what we call the Old Testament! Far from it being the case that being rich gets you automatically into heaven, our Lord is warning His hearers that all this He is telling them is in Scripture, which they can and should read and study every day!

It is time we noticed something else that we haven’t mentioned so far, but it is very significant. The rich man is never named. Sometimes in some retellings of this story, such as a famous English folk song, he is called ‘Dives’, but then we remember that this isn’t a name at all, it is simply the Latin word for ‘a rich person’! He has no name. In his life, we must assume that he was well known, respected, a citizen looked up to and often referred to by name. But not now. Now he is in hell he is just a nameless soul in torment. On the other hand, the poor man, although despised in life and taken no notice of, is now enjoying heaven and his name is known to us: Lazarus. This is the Greek form of the Hebrew name ‘Eleazer’, meaning ‘God has helped’. It is a name full of meaning which we can understand when we see what has happened to Lazarus after the misery of his earthly life. Moreover, it is a name which is known in heaven. Remember how our Lord said to the Apostles on one occasion: ‘Do not rejoice that the devils submit to you, rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven’. Lazarus’s name is written in heaven, but not the rich man’s.

And so we come to the final point that our Lord makes, and it is a very significant one indeed. When the rich man replied to Abraham, after hearing that his brothers must take notice of the teaching of Scripture if they wish to avoid joining him in hell, he says to Abraham, ‘but they will believe if someone comes to them from the dead’, meaning Lazarus coming back from the grave as a solemn warning. But Abraham refuses this, too, saying: if they will not believe Moses and the Prophets, then they will not believe even if someone should rise from the dead.’ Well, the rich man had not said anything about rising from the dead, just returning, presumably as a vision, or as a ghost. But our Lord has put into Abraham’s mouth something very important. How often do we wonder at the Resurrection of our Lord, how after His very public death, His resurrection was witnessed by only a few. Is that not strange? Would it not have been better for Him to have been seen at least by those who had killed Him, so that they would be converted? Well, no! Our Lord says here quite clearly that there are people who would deny even that evidence, because they absolutely would not be prepared to accept the consequences of believing in the risen Jesus. They would have to change their lives, they would have to be like the rich man ought to have been; they would have to be just in their judgements; they would have to love their enemies. All this would be too much and they would simply find ways of not accepting the plain evidence before them. Instead, our Lord knows that we must come to faith in Him and act on it, and on that faith and on our acting on it we will be judged. May we live according to the faith we have been given by God, and act according to His teaching, so that we may be given a merciful judgement and live for ever with God and all His angels and saints.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, my paternal grandfather had a well-developed Black countryman’s typically dark sense of humour. One of his sayings passed down in the family was: ‘The one who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be humbled even more.’ Had you known him you would have understood that there was no irreverence meant by this. Instead, what he meant was that there is no justice in this world, and that it is vain to expect it. Those who lust after the admiration and envy of others will, sooner or later be utterly humiliated, since as the Book of Proverbs tells us: ‘pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ And as a former MP of this constituency once famously wrote: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs..’ Indeed. That is the nature of human affairs. History generally shows this to be true. Think of some of those leaders of nations who have come near to achieving world domination, only to fall into disaster or oblivion. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte – at one time each seemed to be on the verge of controlling the known world, but not only did they all fail, but failed in a devastatingly humiliating way: Alexander conquered more of the ancient world than anyone before or since, yet died broken by disease while still only 32 years of age; Caesar succeeded in gaining sole control of the Roman Republic only to be assassinated by his former friends; Napoleon stormed through all Europe easily overthrowing kings and armies until defeated first by the terrible Russian winter and finally by Wellington at Waterloo. Of course there are others who may have managed to die while enjoying some success, but even many of those will have feared for their successors or for their own reputation in history.

And from a merely human point of view, self-abasement will never win any approval from others, but only contempt. So, for instance, if you do not seek to defend your own rights, be certain that nobody else will do so unbidden on your behalf. And there is a remarkable witness to this in the form of one of our Lord’s parables: the importunate widow and the unjust judge. The widow wears down the judge’s apathy by constantly demanding that he give her justice against her enemy. He admits that he couldn’t care less about the woman, or even about justice, but resolves to give her what she repeatedly demands of him simply to get her off his back. The widow understands that if she doesn’t keep on at the judge, she will never get what she wants. If she were simply to retire quietly and wait for justice, it would clearly never arrive.

But in all this we are looking at human life and human nature in its brokenness, without God. That is where we should never make the mistake of expecting success without some effort, and even then success is hardly guaranteed. As in many recent passages we have heard in the Sunday Gospel readings, what our Lord has to say in today’s Gospel is quite different from anything human experience could show. We should not only not look for worldly success and admiration, but actively despise it; not in a way that suggests contempt for human relations, but rather in a way that seeks to find the place our Lord wants us to choose. Why does He tell us to go to the lowest place? Well, He says it is so that we can be moved to a higher place and so be exalted in the eyes of our fellow guests. Were it simply as a way of seeking human respect, then that would surely miss the entire point. So that cannot be our Lord’s true meaning. Think of it in this way: our Lord frequently used imagery in his parables drawn from banquets and wedding feasts. This is what He is doing here. He is thinking of the banquet as a symbol of the eternal wedding feast of heaven. In heaven God will honour those who have humbled themselves for love of Him here on earth, and honour them in a way which will win the righteous admiration of the saints in heaven, not the empty admiration of people on earth.

Of course, Our Lord said this in the context of an actual historical meal at which he was a guest along with many others, and so He used this context to explain what He meant by humility leading to honour in God’s sight. At that meal were many of our Lord’s critics, men who sought honour among themselves and vied with each other for top place, thereby also seeking to prove themselves of higher status than their neighbours. They were watching Him, says St Luke, clearly because they saw Him as an outsider who said and did uncomfortable things. Indeed on this very occasion, just before the words we have heard were spoken, our Lord had healed a sick man in the midst of these guests, and as it was a Sabbath Day, this was a dangerous thing for Him to have done. The other guests would all have been highly critical of our Lord for healing on the Sabbath, since that counted as ‘work’, the doing of which was forbidden by the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day.

So it is that although He is a guest at this house and at this meal, our Lord is, from the very outset, seen as an outsider and indeed almost as an outlaw, accused of breaking the fourth commandment as though He were superior to it. Of course, we know that He is not superior to God’s commandments, for He is their embodiment as well as their interpreter. He understands them in a different way from us, and wants us to understand them in the same way as He does. In particular, He wants us to understand that the Sabbath is a time for God’s restorative power to be poured out on our sinful, sick natures to make them whole and holy. We come to Him on this day, the Lord’s day, in all humility, so that we may beg for His mercy, knowing ourselves to be unworthy of it. In this way we humble ourselves, for if we thought we were indeed deserving of God’s grace we should altogether fall short of ever getting it. Our Lord reminds us of this danger in yet another parable, that of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in the Temple. And indeed, at the end of that parable He quotes the same conclusion that we have just heard: ‘the one who exalts himself will be humbled and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.’ So it is easy to see how important this lesson is for us to grasp since our Lord lays so much emphasis on it.

In urging His audience to take the lowest place, Our Lord wants them to be like Himself, the embodiment of humility. Then He goes one step further by telling His host and His fellow guests not to invite to their banquets those who can repay their generosity in this life. What gain would there be in that when our lives are finally ended? When we stand before God, will it be of any use that during our lives we have given banquets to those who have invited us back? Surely it is better for us to invite those who cannot repay our generosity! Why? Because it will not be for them to repay us anyway, but the only One who can truly repay with justice and who can truly outdo us in generosity: God Himself. Our Lord is not telling us never to entertain our friends and relations. He is rather telling us that it is by our generosity to the needy that we make ourselves ready to receive a place in His presence with all the saints at the eternal banquet of heaven. There all the chosen will be God’s guests. We will be the ones, all unworthy as we are, the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind, made rich by grace, healed from our sins that cripple us, given sight that takes away the blindness of pride and stubbornness, that will be welcomed by God the Father and by His Son into the company of all the angels and saints.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, the Gospel passage we have just listened to began with an interesting question, ‘Lord, will those who are saved be few?’ But what does the question actually mean? For a start, what does the questioner mean by the word ‘saved’? Saved from what? Saved for what? It is not clear. There are many contexts in which such a word might be used. For instance, in a time such as that when Our Lord was on the earth, rumours of war were never far away. There was a constant swell of excitement among many Jewish people that the kingdom of David and Solomon, the glory days, were about to be brought back by a glorious revolution in which someone would emerge as a leader who would gather the people, arm the men and drive out the Roman occupiers from Jerusalem and Judea and, hopefully, all Israel. In such a case, would many men fall in the coming war? Would many women and children be made widowed, orphaned, even homeless? We really need to remember that there were many people who thought that our Lord was just that sort of emerging leader. The word ‘Messiah’, which we know belongs to our Lord, was a word often taken to mean a king. This is because the word ‘Messiah’ means ‘the Anointed One’, which is a description of someone who is anointed with holy oil to be a sacred leader of his people. Anointing was the rite, for instance, in which kings were consecrated for their duty as divinely appointed leaders of their people, especially in war. Even now in our own land, a king or queen is anointed as part of the coronation ceremony at the beginning of their reign, a rite taken from the Old Testament kings of Israel.

But of course you know that in our Lord’s day there was no king in Israel. There had been no king for centuries. Israel had been conquered by a series of foreign pagan powers, and the most recent of those was the Romans. Throughout the years of our Lord’s ministry in Israel, many people looked to Him as a possible charismatic leader who would lead a rebellion and set up the kingship once more. Don’t forget, too, that when our Lord was eventually brought to His execution on Calvary, the accusation over His head was: ‘this is Jesus, the King of the Jews’. Because that was how His enemies wanted the Romans to see Him, as a failed Messiah, a failed revolutionary leader against Roman rule. Another reason why this interpretation is possible is the fact which St Luke tells us that Jesus was gradually making His way to Jerusalem. He was making a name for Himself. He was gathering followers and admirers. Might He not be preparing to make a bid for the kingship? It is possible that the questioner who was asking ‘Lord, will those who are saved be few?’ was trying to assess if a very bloody war of independence was coming. Perhaps many men would be killed.

Of course, we know that this was not our Lord’s true calling. On trial before the Roman governor, who actually asked Him if He was a king, Jesus replied, ‘I am a king. For this I was born…but my kingship is not of this world. If my kingship were of this world my servants would be fighting now to prevent me from being handed over to you, but this is not the kind of kingship I hold.’

Or again, it may be that the questioner had another idea in mind. Jesus was known as a teacher as well as a man of great power shown by His wonderful miracles of healing and raising the dead. Yet He seemed not to be remotely interested in leading a rebellion, but rather in renewing the religious life of the Jewish people along the lines of the teaching of the prophets of old. Perhaps the questioner was thinking of the religious life of his fellow-Jews at that time. Could many of them be saved from God’s anger on account of their constant unfaithfulness? If so, how would they know whether they were safe from God’s judgement and condemnation?

Well, our Lord’s reply seems to us at first to avoid directly answering the question. He doesn’t say yes or no, nor does He do what He often does elsewhere - put a question back to His questioner. Instead He does something else: He gives an unexpected instruction to the questioner: ‘Strive to enter through the narrow door.’ What does our Lord mean by this command? It is obvious that this is something difficult, because one does not need to strive to do something easy or straightforward. It also turns the question back to the questioner because it is designed to make him think, ‘what do I need to do myself in order to be saved?’ Whatever his idea of being saved is, it is something that he must strive to achieve, and not simply wait to see if it will happen by divine providence. So what does Jesus mean by the ‘narrow door’? Well, a narrow door is not a grand entrance. It is not a triumphant way. It denotes humility. It draws no attention to itself or to those who use it. But a door also allows you to pass from one place to another, or from one state to another. In this case, the narrow, unfavoured, humble door allows you to enter into a state you desire and long for, but not one that you can expect to enter without striving to do so.

We need to reflect on this saying of our Lord’s with care. If we reflect that ‘being saved’ means more than anything else ‘entering into heavenly joy’, then we must be careful not to assume that we can enter into heaven without striving to do so.

We all know that at the end of life we must die. We do not always reflect that what happens to us after death is not so certain as death itself. How many people naturally assume that after death comes heaven? That we can just walk in by the open door? That is not what Jesus wants us to make the mistake of thinking. The idea of the narrow door is the life of grace. This means a life which is made possible and is shaped by God’s grace, His power and love in the sacraments, but which must be made fruitful by the way we use that grace. It is like this: God wants us to be craftsmen using our own lives like raw material. In order to be craftsmen we need certain tools. A carpenter without tools could do nothing to shape wood. God wants us to be like carpenters, and our own lives are the wood, the raw material out of which we shape our lives to His will and our best form. He therefore gives us the tools without which we could not be such craftsmen. Those tools are His graces, especially the graces of the Sacraments which we can use to shape our lives, our hearts and minds according to His will and His plan for us. If we do not use those graces, those sacraments, then we will be entirely unable to shape our lives as God wills and so we will be unable to enter the narrow door which leads us to heaven.

The danger which Jesus warns us to avoid is to assume that we can do all this by ourselves. That we can ‘do it my way’, to quote a famous song. No. We cannot get into heaven by doing anything ‘our’ way, only by doing it God’s way. That is because we cannot shape ourselves properly except by God’s help. So Jesus warns against thinking we can just turn up at the door of heaven and get in by saying to Him, ‘Hello Lord! Here I am!’ to which He may well reply, ‘I do not know where you come from’. We sometimes say of people that we do or don’t know ‘where they are coming from’, meaning what motivates them, what empowers them, what gives their actions and words purpose. Jesus is saying today to the questioner asking Him if many will be saved: ‘don’t ask that question, instead ask yourself this question: how will I be saved?’ That is the one question that truly matters. In order to be saved, we must not make the mistake of relying on ourselves, on assuming that, because we think ourselves good, therefore God will also think us good enough to enter the narrow door into heaven.

So, pray always for what we call ‘final perseverance’, the gift of God to remain faithful to His grace until the end of this life. Pray also for those who have given up trying to follow God’s way and to use the tools of His grace. May they return to the way that leads to the narrow door. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, all our Scripture readings today have been unusually long, and require a lot of concentration. For that reason, I hope to be as concise as possible in contrast to the readings, and for what I say to be concentrated so as not to require you to concentrate too much after all you have already listened to.

Therefore, rather than try to tease out all the details one by one, which would take a very long time indeed, I want to try and bring everything to a head, in order to show you the common strand running through everything in the readings.

In many ways, it is the collect prayer which excellently does this for us. That prayer I will repeat for you now in full: ‘Almighty ever-living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised.’

This prayer is a summary of the spiritual life of faith, its journey and its fulfilment. Note how it begins: ‘Almighty God, whom… we dare to call our Father’; this recalls for us the words with which the celebrant at Mass invites all the faithful who are present to pray the Lord’s Prayer, beginning ‘Our Father…’ But the collect has also reminded us of another very important thing that we often overlook: that we make this prayer not only because the Saviour has taught us how to pray, but in particular because the Holy Spirit has taught us that we can pray. St Paul reminds us that the Holy Spirit helps us to pray when we do not know how to. He puts our petitions into words that far surpass our poor human language and narrow ideas of what we need. He takes our prayers and perfects them, as a craftsman might take a lump of wood or stone which we might give to him, and from it produces a magnificent piece of art. The Holy Spirit works on us and on our poor words in just such a way, presenting us to God the Father as the children whom He has not only created, but even more than that, has made His sons and daughters, co-heirs with His Only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

We make all our prayers, as we say at Mass, through Jesus Christ our Lord. This means that we know we cannot ourselves make prayers worthy to be presented to God, unaided. The Holy Spirit inspires and helps us, while it is the Son who has become one with us by becoming Mary’s son, and joining our frail human nature to His all-powerful divine nature as God. Through Christ our Lord, not through our own merits or power, that is how we pray to God. This should encourage us to have faith in Him, because God will hardly wish to ignore or refuse the prayers of His own Son and Holy Spirit when they pray for our needs.

Christ became man so that we might become like God Himself in goodness and glory. God the Father does this by adopting us as His sons and daughters. It is difficult for us to realise this, but God actually longs to see us as though we were actually His own sons and daughters by nature, so to speak, to see in all of us an ever stronger resemblance to Christ. We love to see resemblances among family members. Such likenesses tend to make those who bear them even more dear to us for the sake of those whom we love that they look like, or speak like, or walk like. So it is with our God. He asked His Son to come into the world ‘as one like us in all things, sin only excepted’, so that He might see and love in us what He sees and loves in His Son made man. And just as God the Father asked this of His Son, so His Son answered, ‘Behold, I am coming at your will,’ meaning that He accepted His Father’s request to become man in order to make all of us sharers in His nature.

Again, there is a prayer we use at Mass which beautifully expresses this: ‘may we come to share in the divinity of Him who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.’ This, then, is our faith. We do not fully see it yet. This life is still beset with darkness and difficulty. We cannot see God as He is, nor can we see what, as He desires, we shall one day be. For this reason we pray to ‘our Father’ that He will show Himself to us constantly as a Father. We ask Him in the Holy Spirit to increase our faith – our firm conviction that He will fulfil in us what He has promised through the outpouring of the gifts of grace which come from the Holy Spirit.

God wants in this way to build up in us a sense of longing for our true homeland and destiny in heaven. It is this of which the second reading spoke at some length. Here we are strangers and nomads, in the sense that our minds and appetites are unsettled; they wander about looking for an answer to satisfy our longings but cannot find them in anything this world has to offer. The truth is that only God can satisfy our longing for fulfilment. Our faith really consists in this sense that we cannot be who we are really called to be except in union with Him, that is with the Father who has made us for Himself, with the Son who has shared our human nature, and with the Spirit who shows us the direction in which we should shape our lives and understand our longings.

Our Lord in the Gospel tells us that we have no need to fear, because ‘it has pleased the Father to give you the kingdom’, that is, His own realm. So when He goes on to tell us to sell our possessions and to be dressed for action with lamps lit, He means not for us to deprive ourselves of anything important, but the opposite, to discover the real treasure of faith in Him, the promise of being waited on by Him in person. It is in this way that we hope to merit to enter into the inheritance which God the Father has promised, as the collect put it. Faith is the key that unlocks our relationship of complete trust in God, and of our growing in likeness to Him. When our Lord speaks in the Gospel of ‘staying awake’, He means not growing lazy and worldly, as it would be so easy to do if we did not remain faithful to our life of faith in the Mass and the sacraments, especially confession, which is the sacrament by which God shapes our growth and prunes away all that makes us unlike Christ and unworthy to share His inheritance.

All the severity of our Lord’s final words in the Gospel need to be heard and understood in the light of our being formed to share in this inheritance. God is not severe like a cruel step-father in a fairy story, but as a truly loving Father, ‘our Father’, who gives us the Holy Spirit to shape us into the likeness of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. For unless we become like Him, we can never enter into our heavenly inheritance, our true, heavenly homeland, which He has promised us and which, by faith, we learn here to long for.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, If only it were yesterday! Now I am not evoking a spirit of nostalgia, though it can be easy enough to do just that, at least for some of us, but rather I am speaking literally: if only it were yesterday because the day of the month and the first Mass reading were perfectly devised for what I want to say today.

Beginning then from the first reading from the Book of Leviticus; this book, the third of the Old Testament, is a handbook for ritual and worship. Yesterday we heard the description of the celebration of the Jubilee year: its calculation and the duties the people had to fulfil during it. In the first place, as I said once before when speaking about our own Jubilee, this took place every fiftieth year, being seven times seven years, or forty nine, plus one extra for superabundance. It is the same way in which we calculate Eastertide, only we do so in weeks rather than years, but the numbers are the same: seven times seven weeks gives forty-nine days, then one extra for superabundance is the fiftieth, for which the Greek word is Pentecost. Hence the importance of Pentecost in the scheme of Eastertide, a kind of jubilee at the end of the Easter season.

And the fiftieth year of which Leviticus spoke, the jubilee, was indeed a special and great event. It was treated like the sabbath day: a day free from all worldly tasks – so, too, the jubilee year was declared sacred and dedicated to God and to justice. It was a time to celebrate the dignity God had given the children of Israel. It was, in other words, a ‘great reset’, a new beginning.

In the year 1300 A.D., Pope Boniface VIII celebrated the first Christian jubilee, also dedicated to God in a special way. It was at first intended, like the Jewish jubilee, to take place every fifty years, and to be an occasion of graces given more abundantly than at other times; especially the graces of remission of sins and of all debt owed for sins committed.

In order to gain the graces of extra remission of past sins, the Christian people were instructed to make a pilgrimage to Rome, so as to obtain there in great basilicas the graces poured out more abundantly than at any other time. Such was the enthusiasm with which the faithful took advantage of this great offer of mercy, that the Popes decided the jubilees should not be so far apart as fifty years, to allow more people to take part. So they decided to celebrate a jubilee halfway between every fifty years, that is, every twenty five years.

That is why the Church is celebrating a jubilee year this year. The last one was the one called by Pope John Paul II, the ‘Great Jubilee of the 3rd Millennium’, celebrated in the year 2000 and so we are now celebrating another jubilee halfway towards 2050. We may well not have been around in 2000, and we may well not be around in 2050, so we have been given this opportunity to take advantage of the graces offered not just for the remission of our sins, but also for the remission of all we have to undergo for all our sins, even those already forgiven in the sacrament of Penance and reconciliation. This means that whatever remission we receive during this year of grace is so much less that we will have to undergo in purification at the end of our earthly lives in Purgatory.

So much then for the Holy Year, now for yesterday. Yesterday was August 2nd, and the occasion of the Indulgence granted by the Pope to St Francis of Assisi in 1216, many years before the establishment of the Jubilee in 1300. But the idea is the same as the jubilee, and as any indulgence. It is a form of prayer made in faith according to the mind and ruling of the Church which in return rewards the faithful person with the gifts of grace from the merits of Christ and the saints.

The St Francis indulgence was from the outset associated with the date of August 2nd because this was the dedication day of the beautiful tiny chapel dedicated to our Lady of the Angels, and known to him and his followers as their ‘little portion’, or in Italian ‘Porziuncola’, because it had been granted to him for his own use. It was there that he eventually chose to die in 1226.

The pope, at Francis’s request, gave an indulgence, like that for the jubilee we have just been thinking about, to all who visited the Porziuncola chapel on the dedication day each year. But then, in the same way that the jubilee was extended from every 50 to every 25 years to make it easier for people to avail themselves of it, so too the terms of gaining the Porziuncola indulgence were gradually extended. First, the indulgence could be gained in any Franciscan church, then in any cathedral, and finally in any parish church as is still the case today. But it is still firmly restricted to the 2nd August.

However, even if you missed that one yesterday, don’t forget that you can still gain the holy Year indulgence for the remainder of this Holy Year, and whereas this was originally only granted to those who visited Rome, now it is possible to gain it in other places nominated by the local bishop of each diocese. Here in Wolverhampton we are highly blessed, for the Archbishop has nominated St Michael’s church on Coalway Road as the local shrine church for the gaining of the indulgence, on account of the forthcoming canonization of the parish patron, Bl Carlo Acutis.

The conditions for gaining the indulgence are clearly laid out on a sheet prepared by Fr Mark, the Parish Priest. They are available in the foyer. So I won’t go through them all in detail. But I do urge you to take advantage. Think of this: our distant ancestors would have had to make a long and perilous journey to Rome to gain what we only have to go a few hundred yards to obtain.

Is it worth it? Aren’t indulgences a thing of the past? Weren’t they proved false by Luther? Well, first up: it most certainly is worth it. The Apostles were given the power to loose and bind on earth and in heaven by none other than Christ Himself. Indulgences are one of the ways in which the Pope and bishops fulfil that role and responsibility on our behalf to this day. Luther thought that there was no such thing as purgatory because he couldn’t find it in the Bible. But he thought it was only about forgiveness of sins. It’s not. Forgiveness is given in the sacraments, but purgatory is about restitution and restoration. We have to make restitution for all the sins we have committed, even those that have been forgiven. That is true in everyday life as well. If anyone steals something, they need not only to be forgiven but to give back what was stolen. For some sins, like deeds, words or thoughts that cannot be undone, restitution will be something else that compensates for the sin, an act of penance. If we don’t make such acts of restitution in this life, we must do so in the next. Indulgences enable us to make restitution for past sins. But indulgences have yet another vital effect; they also help us to grow in holiness. It is never just about paying a debt, like e.g. going to prison; indulgences comprise our prayers and our receiving the sacraments of the Church in a way that opens us up to their power in a wholly special way. By confessing our sins and receiving Holy Communion whilst fulfilling the terms of an indulgence, the power of God’s grace is multiplied in us, so that His holiness may be strengthened in us even more than usually.

That is what we can gain in a Holy Year indulgence, more even than in any other year. The next opportunity may be 25 years away, so we should take this opportunity. So much depends on it. You will be profoundly grateful when you discover at the end of your life that by getting the grace of the indulgences offered by the Church in this life, you have escaped a long and harrowing time in Purgatory, making amends for what you did not make amends for on earth.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, Prayer is one of the great puzzles of the Christian life. It is something that should be so easy and straightforward, yet it is rarely so. Our Lord does not pretend that it is. According to our Lord, prayer is something that is not easy, though it is simple. How can it be simple? Because it is a matter of trust, of childlike trust in God as ‘our Father’. We don’t need to learn to breathe, as it comes naturally to us at birth. We don’t need to learn to eat for the same reason. We learn language as infants, but we do so without being fully conscious of the task.

Yet the apostles had to ask our Lord to teach them how to pray. What triggered this question was their seeing Him praying. Now prayer is something that our Lord certainly did not have any difficulty with. For Him it was certainly like breathing for us: something that came naturally. So when His disciples saw Him pray, they wanted to learn how to do the same.

The prayer He teaches them in answer to their request is the one we call the Lord’s Prayer, which we know in two versions: St Matthew’s which is far more familiar and used, and St Luke’s. St Luke’s shorter version has our Lord tell us to address God simply as ‘Father’, not even as our Father. Nor does Luke mention ‘who art in heaven’ as a description of God. This is ‘Abba’, the God who is in Christ, and Christ is in Him. The kingdom of heaven is among you, as our Lord says on other occasions. Nor does Luke include the prayer for the Father’s will to be done on earth as in heaven.

Instead, our Lord tells His disciples to pray for our daily bread to be given, not just this day, but every day. Yet we can tell that this prayer is, like St Matthew’s version, one given by our Lord rather than prayed by Him, because of the petition in both prayers that God forgive our sins, because we ourselves forgive each one who is in debt to us, as we learn in the parables.

But what are we to make of the final petition? Where Matthew has ‘do not lead us into temptation but deliver us from evil’, Luke merely has ‘and do not put us to the test’. What does this mean? The two versions are not that different, it must be said. The ‘test’ of which our Lord speaks is the same word in both versions, meaning a trial, a great tribulation. This can be personal or communal. But it involves human wilfulness and culpability. The scriptures speak in many places of a great trial, and this can come at the end of an individual’s own life; the final test to which we are put by Satan before he finally either defeats us or loses us to God.

But how can God be responsible for this? If it comes from Satan, how can God be part of it? Can God ‘lead us into temptation’? There are different ways of looking at this. Of course God does not will evil upon us. He does not wilfully or uncaringly push us into temptation, into trials which may defeat us. But nonetheless He can allow this to happen.

Think, first of all of Christ Himself. It is absolutely clear from sacred Scripture that Christ was led into temptation in the wilderness ‘by the Spirit’. At the beginning of His public ministry, when our Lord went into the desert ‘to be tempted by the devil’, it is stated that this was God’s own will, not just His permissive will, but something that God willed to happen, so that Christ would be strengthened in some way by this encounter with Satan. And so it was. We remember from the accounts we hear each year on the first Sunday of Lent, that Satan subjected our Lord to three temptations, but that this did not happen merely because Satan willed it, but because God willed it. God foresaw that Christ would be strengthened by the experience, and would learn important truths about His mission, about human nature, and about Satan’s deceptive power to make evil appear good.

All right, so this was a special case in which there was a clear good purpose in God leading Christ into temptation. But this is not always the case. It is not always the case that a trial of temptation must lead to a good end. Take another case: In psalm 80 it says that ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.’ This instruction is for the people to recognise their Lord and God, and to be fed by Him, in other words – ‘give us each day our daily bread.’ But then the psalm continues: ‘But my people did not heed my voice, and Israel would not obey me. So I left them in their stubbornness of heart, to follow their own designs.’ In other words, God can allow those who reject or neglect Him to die in their sins. He can give them up if they persistently turn their backs on Him. This is what it means to be led into the great trial, the final trial when it is too late to come back to God, indeed the whole point of this idea is that the one who abandons God and shuts his ears to God’s voice will eventually have nothing left in him with which to resist the devil’s final burst of power.

That this is so we can also learn from St Paul, who in the Letter to the Romans says: The anger of God is being revealed from heaven against all the impiety and depravity of men who keep truth imprisoned in their wickedness…That is why such people are without excuse; they knew God and yet refused to honour Him as God or to thank Him; instead they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened. The more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew, until they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for a worthless imitation…That is why God left them to their filthy enjoyments and the practices with which they dishonour their own bodies, since they have given up divine truth for a lie and have worshipped and served creatures instead of the Creator.

So here St Paul shows us how God can indeed put men to the test, can lead them into temptation, not by any malice on His part, but because men have refused the light of truth. So, Paul goes on, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behaviour. And so they are steeped in all sorts of depravity, rottenness, greed and malice, and addicted to envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite.

St Paul paints a picture uncomfortably like so much of the modern world we live in, and indeed not unlike the world of Sodom and Gomorrah in the first reading. How grievous is their sin! Cries God to Abraham, and announces His intention of destroying them and their cities. It is Abraham’s prayer that holds back God’s hand from this act, this putting the men of Sodom and Gomorrah to the final test which they must fail on account of their wilful wickedness.

I wonder how many times God has held back from plunging the modern world into that last fatal test, so disturbingly like that of which St Paul spoke in the Letter to the Romans, all because of some modern-day Abraham interceding for the world? Did not God inspire Abraham to pray in this way so as to show him the power of prayer? Does not God do the same then for us? Does He not show us the power of prayer to hold back the world from being plunged into a test it has recklessly deserved? And this is because there are holy men and women who pray for us all ‘not to be put to the test’? Give thanks to God for the Carmelite sisters who, I believe, will be seen on the last day to have helped save so may souls from being put, all through their own stubbornness and wickedness, to the final dreadful test. May God indeed not put us to the test, but rather keeping us from being deaf to Him by not constantly, daily, putting into effect His teaching on prayer. Father, we pray you, do not put us to the test, but send us your Spirit to keep us faithful to daily prayer so as to grow in love and faithfulness each day until our lives shall end in you alone.