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

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.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, on Thursday last I referred to the rare but significant occurrence of repeated calling of names in the Old Testament. It was the reading of Moses’s encounter with God in the Burning Bush which was the occasion for this reflection. There God spoke to Moses directly for the first of many times in the Book of Exodus: ‘Moses, Moses!’ and Moses replied, ‘Here I am’. The same thing happens in the Book of Samuel when the boy Samuel, - who is to be the man chosen by God to anoint the first two kings of Israel, Saul and David, - hears the voice of God calling to him in the nighttime in the Temple: ‘Samuel, Samuel!’ to which Samuel replies, as instructed by his master Eli the priest, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ The same thing occurs in the lives of the great patriarchs Abraham and Jacob; they too are addressed by God in this significant way. Each time, it is the prelude not just to an important message, but to something even more: a life-changing encounter with God in person.

Nor is this only something which happens in the Old Testament. For we have just heard one of the few, but for that reason very significant, occurrences of this double call of someone’s name by our Lord in person. As it happens, all of them are told by St Luke, either in the Gospels or in the Acts of the Apostles. This is the first in order of time, to Martha of Bethany, of which more in a moment. But also we should bear in mind that our Lord would later on also address Peter in the same way at the Last Supper: ‘Simon, Simon.’ We heard this last Palm Sunday in the Passion according to St Luke. It is a vitally important moment both of reassurance and of apostolic commission when Jesus says to Peter: ‘Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.’ You see how important this is? It is a prophecy both of Peter’s fall by the threefold denial of Christ, and of his role beyond that fall when he will recover, repent and then become the one who will confirm the faith of the other apostles as their leader on earth after Christ has ascended into heaven.

The third and final such double naming is of Saul, at the very moment when he will cease to be Saul and will instead become Paul, which takes place in the Acts of the Apostles. As Saul is about to enter Damascus with a warrant from the Chief Priests in Jerusalem, for the arrest and return for trial in Jerusalem of every Christian taking refuge there, he is blinded by a sudden brilliant light the force of which throws him to the ground. He hears a voice calling him: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ This event is so central not just to Saul’s life but to the entire narrative of the Acts, that it is recounted not just once but three times in different places in the Acts, twice being narrated by Paul in person, each time including the double call: ‘Saul, Saul!’ It was the one and only meeting we know of between Jesus, now risen and ascended and sitting at God’s right hand, and Saul the former Pharisee. From that one meeting would come Saul’s conversion from persecutor to believer and Apostle, and all his wonderful preaching, his letters and his joyful offering of his life in martyrdom in Rome which we celebrated just two weeks ago.

This brings us back, then, to Bethany. We know from St John’s Gospel that Jesus is a frequent guest at the house of Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Yet Luke narrates today’s Gospel story to us as though this was almost the first time that Jesus ever stayed there: ‘Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house.’ It is not impossible that this was indeed one of the earlier times when Jesus stayed at Bethany. If that is so, then it would certainly go some way to explain how it came to be that Jesus would from this time on become a firm friend of not only Mary but Martha too. Still, it seems that they already knew each other. Martha would hardly be likely to address Jesus in the way she does if she hardly knew Him at all.

We know this little story so well because it is quite contrary to everything we would expect. It is nothing like what we should consider ‘fair’. Surely Mary is right out of order! She has left all the preparation for the meal to Martha while she sits quietly at our Lord’s feet and enjoys listening to His words! So it is quite shocking when Martha appeals for Jesus’s assistance in getting her back into the kitchen where she should be sharing the hard work with her sister, and instead hears these words: ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken from her.’

What is our Lord saying here? There are two important points. First, he addresses Martha’s own state of mind: ‘you are anxious and troubled about many things.’ The ‘many things’ represent a dissipation of her powers of concentration and of her judgement of what is really important. She is being driven from one thing to another and cannot stop to consider what truly matters. Consider the words that the priest prays at Mass immediately after the Our Father that: ‘by the help of your mercy, we may be safe from all distress…’ Anxiety, trouble and distress are not states of mind that God wants us to fall into. Martha is distressed and troubled. This is not what God wants. What God wants is what Jesus calls ‘the one thing necessary’. What is that?

Sometimes people report Jesus as going on to say: ‘Mary has chosen the better part’, but no. Jesus actually say that Mary has ‘chosen the good portion’. What is this good portion? It is a scriptural phrase, found in, among other places, the psalms. Do you remember the line: ‘the Lord is my portion and cup’ from psalm 15? The word ‘portion’ can also be translated ‘inheritance’. This portion is one which is inherited. It is what someone can gain for themselves when they reject all other options for life. In this way a person can attain for him or herself a certain inheritance from God that would otherwise not come to them automatically. So the psalmist says in ps 15 that ‘the Lord is my chosen portion and my cup. You hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.’ What are these ‘lines’? They are the length of cord which were used in biblical times to mark out the boundaries of a piece of land, an inheritance.

This is what Mary has chosen. To sit at the Lord’s feet and listen to Him is to be granted a portion of the Lord Himself. But of course, this will not be the end. For Mary will be put to the test when she must act on what she has heard. However far she may have the good portion, this does not remove from her the responsibility of putting into effect out Lord’s teaching.

And Martha, too, will benefit from this exchange in a truly wonderful way when, some time later, he brother Lazarus dies. It will once again be Martha who calls to the Lord: ‘if you had been here my brother would not have died, yet even now I know that God will grant you whatever you ask of Him.’ And when Jesus promises that Lazarus will rise again, she replies that she knows that he will rise again on the last day. Then when Jesus goes on to declare: ‘I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in me will never die…do you believe this?’, she makes a wonderful declaration of faith: ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, the One who was to come into this world.’ This proves that Martha’s faith was at least equal to Mary’s. She had in the end found her own ‘good portion’. That portion is offered to all who will sit at Christ’s feet and who will put His teaching into action, having faith in Him. May our lot, our inheritance, be with Mary and Martha and the saints in heaven. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, recently I heard someone surmise that the date of Easter was chosen by the pope wearing a blindfold drawing a random date from a tombola like a raffle ticket. Well, after all, the date of Easter over the last few years has swung back and forth from April 12th to April 4th to April 17th to April 9th to March 31st to April 20th. In 2008 Easter was as early as 23rd March, and in 2011 it was as late as 24th April. Whereas Christmas is as regular as clockwork, always falling on December 25th, Easter is to many people bewilderingly and seemingly unpredictable. Why should this be so? Furthermore, this wild variation of the date of Easter is especially odd when we remember that it is Easter, and not Christmas, that is the most important feast of the Church year; and not only that, but from it almost a third of the year’s other important feast days are determined. So, for example, the date of Ash Wednesday is precisely forty-six days before Easter, and the dates of Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart are all calculated to follow precisely the date of Easter in the current year. That is why, given that Easter was as late as April 20th this year, Pentecost fell as late as June 8th and the Sacred Heart was only a fortnight ago.

It is perhaps not surprising that some people, exasperated by this wide variability, want to fix Easter to the first or second weekend in April, and so to make easier things like planning for holidays (not to mention Mothering Sunday, or our Mothers’ Day, which is always three Sundays before Easter, the fourth Sunday of Lent – and I won’t explain why that is right now!)

Last week I mentioned that the Council of Nicaea, the 1700th anniversary of which falls this year, had tackled this problem from the point of view of Christians celebrating Easter on different days. The Roman Emperor Constantine, who had given freedom to Christians after three centuries of persecution, and would himself eventually be baptized, was troubled to realize that some Catholics were feasting and celebrating the resurrection at Easter, while others in the same street were still fasting in Lent. Could not all Christians at least be brought to celebrate Easter on the same day? That was one of the tasks that he asked the bishops assembled at the Council of Nicaea to resolve.

But that only raises the deeper question: why were different families of Catholics, all believing alike in the resurrection of Christ, nonetheless celebrating it on different days? This is actually a very interesting question and not merely of historical importance, as it has a direct bearing on the date of Easter in any year. So, first of all, what is the origin of the celebration of Easter? Yes, it is the day of the resurrection of Christ, but when was that in the year? What significance did that day have in the life of the Apostles and the earliest generation of Christians? The answer is clear from the four gospels: it was at the time of the greatest Jewish religious celebration of the year: the Passover. This feast commemorated the Exodus from Egypt and the entry into the Promised Land of the Hebrew people some 1500 years before the time of our Lord. Think of it – the Exodus was almost as remote in the past to our Lord as the Council of Nicaea is to us! The Jews celebrated the anniversary of this event annually at Spring time. How was the date of the festival determined? Well, it depended on two calendars: the solar and the lunar. This means that the date of the Passover was to be calculated from the date when daylight exactly equalled night, which we call the equinox, but also from the phases of the moon. Specifically, the moon had to be full for the Passover to begin. But of course, the date of the equinox and the date of the full moon don’t often coincide exactly. So what determined the date of the Passover? In a way it was relatively straightforward; it was the day of the first full moon following the spring equinox. Now whilst this naturally meant that the date of the Passover was always different from year to year in relation to the date of the equinox, we need to realize that the months always began with the new moon.

Now you know how the moon waxes and wanes over the course of a month, passing through the phases from new to half to full to half and back to new. This process takes pretty well twenty eight days, or four weeks. Well, this was exactly what a Jewish month was. The first day of the month was the new moon. The month lasted twenty eight days, no more or less, and therefore the middle day of the month, the fourteenth day, was the time of the full moon. Of course, twelve such months don’t add up to the 365 days of the solar calendar year we are used to, and for that reason the Jews had to invent various ways of filling up the gaps to harmonize the lunar and solar calendars. Although our months and named from the moon (the words month/moon are related), they do not often closely relate to the phases of the moon as in the Jewish month. Anyway, all this is to explain why the Jewish Passover was at the first full moon of Spring, and therefore on the fourteenth day of the month, which was always the date of the full moon.

So our Lord’s final Passover, including His Last Supper, death and resurrection, all take place around the fourteenth day of the month called by the Jews ‘Nisan’. This is why thereafter, at the same time of the year, the Apostles and the early Christians always celebrated the death and resurrection of the Lord at the time of the Jewish Passover, and to an extent that is still roughly what we do, but with a very important difference which I am going to explain in a moment.

Some Christians followed exactly the timetable of the 14th day of Nisan for the date of Easter, keeping to the Jewish way of calculating time. But this had an important consequence. For it meant that Easter, whenever the 14th of Nisan fell, was not on the same weekday each year. For the Jewish feast that didn’t matter. But for the Christians there was a massively important consideration. All the Gospels tell us that in the year of our Lord’s Passover from death to life, the full moon, the date of the Passover, fell on a Sabbath day, or Saturday. Our Lord died on the day of preparation for the Sabbath, which that year coincided with the Passover. The Gospels also tell us unanimously that it was on the first day of the following week that the resurrection took place, and that the risen Lord appeared to His Apostles for the first time. For this reason, the first day of the week, or Sunday as we call it, immediately took on a huge significance for the Christians, who began straightaway to call Sunday ‘the Lord’s Day’, and to make it the principal day of the week for their celebration of what we call the Mass.

And so from the very outset of Christian celebration of Easter, there was a tension between those who wished to remain absolutely faithful to the Jewish date of 14th Nisan, whatever day of the week that might be, and those who held that Easter must be kept on the nearest Sunday to 14th Nisan, even though that would not be the same date as the Jewish Passover every year. This led to discussions between some bishops in the early Church. St Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of St John the beloved Apostle, kept Easter on 14th Nisan. He went to Rome in the middle of the 2nd century to discuss the proper date for keeping Easter with the Pope who kept the tradition of St Peter and St Paul, of celebrating Easter on the Sunday nearest to the 14th Nisan. They could not agree, since both claimed apostolic authority for their own custom.

So how could such a dilemma be resolved? Well, it would not be for nearly another two hundred years after the time of Polycarp. Constantine and Bishop Hosius decided to make this matter one of the issues to be addressed at the forthcoming Council of Nicaea in 325. It was important both to get all Christians to agree on a common date for Easter, but also to agree on the principles underlying the celebration of Easter. What is central to Easter? It is the Christian Passover, the Lord’s own Passover. Its culmination is the resurrection and that took place on the first day of the week, and St John tells us that it was primarily on that day that the Lord appeared solemnly to his Apostles in the Upper Room on two consecutive first days of the week.

This is why, from the outset of the Christian era, the Apostles effectively replaced the old Jewish sabbath day at the end of the week with the new Christian ‘Lord’s Day’ at the beginning of the week and this they did every week, because it was on this day that the Lord came to meet them. Sunday is the original weekly celebration of the Lord’s resurrection and an anticipation of our future resurrection on the Last Day when the eternal banquet of heaven will begin in earnest.

For this reason, therefore, not only was Sunday the original Christian holy day of the week, but the greatest of all days of the year, which every Sunday commemorates, the day of the resurrection, had to be on a Sunday. So the bishops at the Council of Nicaea were agreed on this: that Easter could not be on the same calendar date every year, like Christmas, because it would then be on different weekdays each year. No. It must always be a Sunday. But which Sunday?

Remembering that Easter is the celebration of the Lord’s Passover, it has to be at Passover time, in the early Spring. For this reason is must, like the Jewish Passover, be celebrated after the Spring equinox, that is, after March 20th/21st. But the entire Jewish tradition of calculating festivals also involved not just the solar calendar which gives us the equinox, but the lunar calendar, because the festival of the Passover must be at the time of the full moon. As we have observed, the lunar calendar does not coincide with the solar. For after the equinox, we must then wait for the next full moon, which can be a few days away or even a month away. But of course the full moon itself doesn’t necessarily fall on a Sunday, so we have to wait for the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the equinox. This is the reason why Easter can fall any time between March 22nd and April 25th. This is how the Bishops at Nicaea worked out the way of calculating Easter each year and this is what Christians thereafter have done. Of course, there are some Christians who observe Easter on a different date from us, notably the Orthodox, but that is for a different reason which I won’t bother you with now.

Next year at the time of the Spring equinox, look up at the moon if the skies are clear, and see what phase it is at: new, crescent, half, gibbous or full. When it is full, then you know that Easter will be on the Sunday following the full moon. In this way we keep to the ancient way of calculating when Passover time comes, but always bearing in mind that Easter must always be on the Lord’s Day, the day of the resurrection.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, on Trinity Sunday three weeks ago we looked at the teaching of the First Council of Nicaea which was held exactly 1700 years ago in 325 A.D. to resolve disputes among the bishops of the Church principally concerning the relation between Christ and His Father. A priest called Arius had been teaching that Christ was not God, but was a creature, albeit the greatest of all God’s creatures and most like Him. This was not, of course, what the Church had always taught. But many of the bishops, especially in the Christian east, were beginning to doubt what they had learned to believe in their youth.

A little background will help. Only a little more than ten years earlier than 325, a new Emperor named Constantine had arisen. He was, like so many Roman Emperors before him, a military leader, and was acclaimed Emperor by his troops (incidentally this acclamation took place in Eboracum – or as we call it today, York, in 306 A.D.) but at first he had to defeat several rivals and it was not until the year 324 that he finally became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Just before one of the most important battles he fought for supremacy over Rome itself in 312 A.D., he had a vision, often described as a cross in the sky, together with the words ‘in this sign you shall conquer’. The image was not what we usually think of as a cross, but rather a Chi-Rho, being the first two Greek letters of the word Christos. They look to us like the capital letters X and P joined together. Constantine ordered this to be put on all his army’s banners. Anyway, the vision proved true. Constantine was victorious and although he did not yet become a Christian, he at least gave freedom to Christians from all persecution henceforth. Eventually, too, he would actually become a Christian by accepting baptism shortly before his death some 25 years later in 337.

But just as Christianity was freed by Constantine from the most bitter of all the persecutions that had taken place in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, a bitter internal dispute rose about the person and nature of Jesus in relation to God the Father. Now the Church believes in One God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. If, then, the Father is the One God, how can Jesus, who is the Son of God, be God as well? Surely, some said, Jesus cannot be another God, but nor can He be the same God as His Father, so He cannot be God at all. This is where Arius came in, arguing that Jesus simply cannot be God, because only the Father could be the one God. Arius therefore proposed that Jesus was created as God’s first and greatest creature. In this way, however great and powerful and holy He undoubtedly was, Jesus was most definitely not God at all.

And then there were some others who had proposed another way of holding that the Father and Jesus were both really and truly God, and both uncreated. A priest called Sabellius suggested that the Father and Jesus were really just different names of one and the same person seen at different times or in different ways. He suggested that the One God presented Himself to mankind as the Father in the Old Testament; as the Son in Jesus; and as the Spirit from Pentecost onwards – but all three were not only one God, but actually one person.

But of course, this idea, ingenious though it seemed to some, was impossible too. For one thing was certain: in the Gospels, Jesus spoke to His Father as to another person. Whatever else, Jesus and the Father could not be the same person because that would make nonsense of the entire Gospel, not to mention the rest of the New Testament, including the teachings of St Paul, St John and St Peter. This was where the relation of Jesus to the Father was crucial. Jesus spoke about Himself as the Son; and He called God ‘Father’ in a way that was unique. When Jesus called God His ‘Father’, and especially using the intimate and familiar form of address ‘Abba’, which no human person would ever dare to use towards God, then He was clearly speaking from an intensely close personal relationship unlike that which any human person had with God.

So how could Jesus be truly God while not being the Father? Could it be true that the One God could be Father and Son and Spirit united as One God, yet in some way distinct from each other? - without meaning that there were three gods? - without meaning that these ‘persons’ were really one and the same person seen in different disguises at different times?

The Emperor Constantine, although not yet baptized himself, didn’t understand all this. But he was concerned that the Christian Church was not sufficiently clear and united in its faith. There was something else too. Not only were bishops arguing about God the Father and the Son and their relation to each other, but Constantine also found that Christians didn’t all agree on the right day to celebrate the most important feast of the year, Easter. This meant that while some people were feasting at Easter, at the very same time, and sometimes in the same place, others were still fasting during Lent. Couldn’t something be done to bring unity to the celebration of the most important Christian feast? Constantine sought advice from a bishop whom he knew and admired, Bishop Hosius of Cordoba in Spain. Hosius suggested that it would be a good idea that as many bishops of the Catholic world should be brought together in one place and there discuss and resolve solutions to these questions that all the Church should then accept as authoritative.

Between them, Constantine and Bishop Hosius effectively invented the idea of the Ecumenical Council: a meeting of bishops from all over the inhabited world (which is what ‘ecumenical’ means) to resolve certain matters of great importance to the faith and practice of the universal Church. So it was far more than a merely local or even a national council. It would be a meeting of as many of the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, so that with their united apostolic authority they could make decisions concerning what the Church believed in disputed matters.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 was the first of twenty such councils so far – the latest being the Second Vatican Council. The bishops there assembled came to several important conclusions which still stand at the heart of our faith and practice today. These are the words of the creed they solemnly declared: ‘We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (i.e. of one substance) with the Father, through Whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down, and became incarnate and became man, and suffered, and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and dead, And in the Holy Spirit. But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance, or created, or is subject to alteration or change – these the Catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.’

Now these are not exactly the words we are used to saying in the Creed at Mass. That is because the creed of Nicaea was adapted nearly sixty years later at another Ecumenical Council in Constantinople to include much more about the divinity of the Holy Spirit: ‘the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and Son is adored and glorified.’ This is why the Creed we are about to profess is properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the full statement of our faith in One God, in whom are three co-equal divine Persons each of whom possesses fully the One, divine nature, and to whom be all glory and worship for ever and ever.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, each year after Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate a sequence of feast days in which we give thanks to God for some of the most wonderful mysteries of our faith: first of these was last Sunday’s solemnity of the Holy Trinity, of God as He has revealed Himself to us in His own inner life in order to invite us to share in that divine life. Next Friday we will celebrate the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the mystery of the heart whereby God-made-man loves us to the end: which is His total self-giving for us on the cross. Today we celebrate a feast which comes between the Trinity and the Sacred Heart, the solemnity of the Most holy Body and Blood of our Lord, commonly known as ‘Corpus Christi’ which is not only a mystery in heaven, like the Trinity and the Sacred Heart, but is fully present and alive to us here and now on the earth.

In the second reading we heard St Paul’s account of the Last Supper, at which our Lord took bread and gave thanks to God and gave it to His disciples as He solemnly announced to them that ‘This is my Body’. Sometime before this Last Supper Our Lord had taught that He was the living bread, and that unless we eat Him we cannot have life in Him. At the Last Supper He was fulfilling that promise and added to it this command: ‘Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body.’

Nor was this His only gift at the table that holy night, for at the end of the supper He took the chalice and said: ‘this is the chalice of my Blood’. The feast which we are celebrating today is that of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord, ‘Corpus et Sanguis Christi.’ You see how His Body and Blood are consecrated separately at Mass, first the bread and then the wine, recalling how they were separated when every last drop of His Blood was shed on Calvary. Then, just before Communion, you see that a fragment of the broken Body of Christ is dropped into the chalice to signify that the Body and Blood are reunited at the resurrection, and that they will remain united for all eternity in heaven, and that it is the Body and Blood together that we receive in Holy Communion.

But let me go back to those first words St Paul tells us that our Lord said at the Last Supper: ‘this is my Body.’ The words tell us what that bread in His hands has now become, its new reality. It is no longer bread, then, but the Body of Christ. So, just why did He turn bread into His Body? It was so that we might eat his flesh. Think now about these words: ‘This is my Body’. Do we not hear them spoken often today by people who mean the exact opposite of what Christ means? See what happens if we change the emphasis from our Lord’s words: ‘This is my Body’ to ‘this is my body’. Don’t we hear these words from people today who want to claim absolute rights over their own bodies? Isn’t this what we get in a society where women now have the right to destroy their babies in the womb for no other reason than that they are ‘in my body’? This is what the decriminalization of abortion which was voted in last week in Parliament has led us to. What does it take for a mother to want to kill the child in her womb? It is the sense that that child is somehow opposing and denying the freedom and personal autonomy of the mother. ‘This is my body’ becomes the justification for making the free choice to destroy that other person that child, it’s ‘my body, my choice’.

Moreover, isn’t this idea of my body, my choice, what lies behind the new law also passed in Parliament last week, that allows people to kill themselves, and to force others to assist them to do so? It’s my body, it’s my life, or rather: it’s my body, it’s my death if I want it so. And so what Pope John Paul II called the ‘Culture of death’ has spread like a cancer and has poisoned our laws and the minds of so many people, so that out of the murder of the unborn child comes the death-wish of assisted suicide – It is not just that this law permits those who want to end their own lives for whatever reason with a doctor’s help, but more sinister still, this new law does not prevent those who want to free themselves of the burden and expense in of elderly relatives in need of loving care and of help in their final years, from pressurizing them to seek assisted suicide. So inevitably we will move from the apparent but illusory mercy of assisted suicide to the deliberate, legalized murder of the helpless aged and infirm.

How different this is from our Lord, who, according to St Paul, after saying ‘This is my Body’, goes on to say, not, ‘which is for what I want to do with it’, but rather, ‘which is for you’. With those words, above all, our Lord is saying the exact opposite of what the modern mantra ‘this is my body’ is saying. Our Lord is saying to us that His Body is not for His own private ends, much less kept back from suffering for His own selfish purposes, but rather ‘this is my body which I offer up both here and now for you to eat, and also will offer up tomorrow on the cross to take away your sin and reconcile you to the Father so that you may live for ever in heaven.’ And this is the beauty of what our Lord does: He gives us His Body to eat so that we may be nourished by Him. He gives us His body on the cross so that we may be saved by Him.

When we eat food, we eat something that is dead. But when we eat the Body of Christ we eat that which is alive. Yes, it is in the form or appearance of bread, since that is what it was before our Lord changed it, but it is no longer bread, because now it has been changed into His Body. Because our Lord’s flesh is alive, it has the life of Christ’s soul in it. It is not dead flesh but living. And the flesh of Christ, His sacred Body on the Altar, is living not for Himself but for us. ‘This is my Body which is for you.’ He gave up His life for us, He surrendered His Body for us, so that we might be nourished and fed from Him. Do we not often say, ‘you are what you eat’? If that is true from eating food that is essentially dead, what far greater results come to us from eating that which is truly alive and life-giving? What is dead we can change into ourselves. But the Body of Christ which is alive changes us into Himself, transforms us into His likeness, preparing us for the resurrection.

Very soon I will once more pronounce those sacred words of our Lord: ‘This is my Body, which is given up for you,’ and the commandment which accompanies it: ‘do this in remembrance of me’. Remembrance here is not simply a casting back of the mind to a past and finished event. When we ‘do this in remembrance of Him’ we are not simply play-acting something that is over and done with. We are doing that which makes real the very thing we commemorate. Jesus gave His Body to His apostles the night before He gave it up on the cross. The sacrifice of Calvary was already present in the act of handing over His Body at the Supper. For us, the sacrifice of Calvary is still present whenever we celebrate the Mass. For the Mass is not a mere commemoration, it is the re-presentation, here and now, of all that Jesus did both at the Last Supper and on the cross. This is why we call the Mass a Sacrifice, and why our Lord’s words: ‘this is my Body’ were not meant as a mere symbol of His Body, but as the real, literal truth. The miracle of the Body and Blood of Christ is not only meant to make us wonder with amazement at such a miracle, that Jesus should turn bread and wine into His flesh and Blood, but also to be conscious and aware that we are being nourished and transformed into the likeness of the One who feeds us in this wonderful way.

As a reminder of what it is that we celebrate at every Mass, and in order to emphasise the meaning of the great feast we are celebrating particularly today, when you come to receive Holy Communion I will show you the Sacred Host as usual but using the Latin words which are the popular name of this day: ‘Corpus Christi’; to which, as usual, you reply ‘Amen’ before you receive with all due reverence and devotion the Body and Blood of Christ.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren in Christ, exactly seventeen hundred years ago and just over two thousand miles away there took place a meeting of over two hundred bishops that, despite distance of time and space, still has enormous significance for us today. For it was in June and July of the year 325 A.D. that those bishops met to discuss the faith of the Catholic Church which we hold firmly. In only a few minutes’ time we will proclaim our faith using, at least in good part, the same words that were discussed and then approved at that meeting which we call the ‘Council of Nicea’, and it was the very first of the ecumenical councils, of which there have been twenty one in all, the latest being the Second Vatican Council which met in Rome between 1963 and 1965. These twenty-one Councils are all known as ‘ecumenical’, from a Greek word meaning ‘the whole inhabited world’. Hence, an ecumenical Council is one in which bishops from all over the Catholic Church take part, and it has significance for the entire Catholic world. Such is the first Council of Nicaea whose anniversary we are now celebrating.

That council, important as it was, lasted only two months, yet it discussed and decided upon many important issues, some of which I will speak about in the coming weeks, because they still have a bearing on our life and our faith. But the most important fruit of that first Council of Nicaea of the year 325 was the promulgation or declaration of the Creed, that is the statement of belief, concerning above all the Church’s faith in Jesus as the only-begotten Son of God. Now the Creed which we will proclaim soon is, as I said, partly the same as that which the Council Fathers decreed at Nicaea, and partly as it was further developed at the next Church Council of Constantinople in 381 A.D. Now the Council of Nicaea was concerned mainly with the divine state of Jesus as the Son of God, while the first Council of Constantinople over fifty years later not only restated the faith of the Nicene Creed, but added to it an important declaration of faith in the divinity of the Holy Spirit. That Creed, the one taught by the Council of Constantinople and based on the Creed of the Council of Nicaea, is the very one in which we will proclaim our faith in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a few minutes’ time. Hence it is properly called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed.

Why was it necessary for so many bishops to be summoned to Nicaea in 325 to discuss the Catholic faith? It was because the Christian faith in God had been questioned in a most serious way by a theologian called Arius. He thought that since there is only one God, then God can only be one person – and that person is the One whom we call ‘The Father’. For Arius, then, the Son, whom we know as Jesus, was not and could not be God. Only the Father could be truly God. So what was Jesus? Was He anything more than just a man – the son of Mary? Arius thought that Jesus was indeed more than just a man, because the Church had always taught that Jesus was more than a man: He was described in the Gospels and in the New Testament as ‘Lord’, as the ‘Word of God’, and as the ‘Son of God’. But what exactly did these titles mean? All right, Jesus is of a far higher status than any man, but how high exactly? Arius had an idea. Jesus is the ‘Wisdom of God’ as we heard in today’s first reading. This Wisdom is a special person below God. Now God has no beginning. He is eternal and without change. But what happens when creation takes place? Doesn’t God change when He created the world? At the beginning of the first reading we heard something which Arius took to mean that Jesus Himself was the Wisdom of God, and that He came into existence when God the Father ‘made’ Him. So the reading said: The Lord (that is God) possessed me (that is, Wisdom) at the beginning of his work (that is, creation)…Ages ago I was set up, the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth…’ Now, if Wisdom, who later became Mary’s Son whom we call Jesus, was a creature, then He could not be God like the Father. He could only be at the best the greatest of all creatures – but not true God. It was this that Catholics could not accept. Our Lord’s own words showed that He was ‘one with the Father.’

Just to take an example from today’s Gospel reading from St John, where our Lord told the Apostles: ‘all that the Father has is mine.’ What He meant by these words was made clearer in the words He spoke about the Holy Spirit: [the Spirit] ‘will glorify me, for He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that He will take what is mine and declare it to you.’ In these and other words spoken by our Lord in the Gospels, we understand that Jesus Himself knew that He was one being with the Father by nature, and also that the Holy Spirit was the divine Spirit of God who shared in the being of God and of the knowledge of God with the Father and Jesus.

Now this understanding of Jesus’s words was not new. The Apostles had taught that Jesus was the Son of God, the Word of God, that is the expression of everything that God the Father is. They had also taught that, as we heard St Paul say in the second reading this morning: ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’ This is what we celebrated a week ago on Pentecost Sunday, and which fulfilled our Lord’s promise in the Gospel: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and he will declare it to you.’

So when the Bishops met at Nicaea they discussed Arius’s theory that Jesus was not God, but only the greatest of all creatures, and that only the Father was God. They knew that this was not what Jesus had taught the Apostles, and not what the Apostles had written about Jesus. Nor was this only in the readings we have heard today. Our Lord had told the Apostles at His Ascension: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…’ So it was that from the very beginning of the era of the Church after Pentecost Sunday, the Apostles obeyed the Lord’s command to preach and baptize in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit who are One God. It is that faith which the Fathers of Nicaea professeed when they proclaimed that Jesus is ‘the only begotten Son of God’ not born in time, but eternally, for there never was any moment before He existed, but He always has been, as we say: ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God;’ then we acknowledge that although He is Son, this does not mean that He comes into being after His Father, as a human son does, but that the Father is never without His only-begotten Son. Then, contrary to Arius, we state that when we call Jesus ‘only-begotten Son’ we mean that He is not made, He is not created. There was no time when He did not already exist totally as God. Again, against Arius, who said that Jesus was a creature and made out of some substance other than the Father’s, the Council Fathers proclaimed that Jesus as God is of the same substance as the Father, which is in Latin ‘consubstantial’ with the Father.

But of course, the Church did not believe that only the Father and the Son shared the same substance, the same divine nature, but so does the Holy Spirit, which is why we say that the Spirit is adored and glorified with the Father and the Son. It would after all be idolatry to worship as God any being that is not God. So, for instance, we honour Mary with unequalled honour among all the angels and saints, but we do not worship her as God. However, this we most certainly do regarding the Holy Spirit. He is ‘the Lord and giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, meaning that He exists in the identical divine nature as the Father and the Son. And so it is that we believe, not in three gods, but in One God, and that this One God has made Himself known to us both in one infinite divine nature or substance, and in three co-equal persons sharing this divine nature – none of them being any more divine than the others.

From this faith, the faith of the Fathers of Nicea and Constantinople, we have a wonderful statement in the Mass of Trinity Sunday, in the Preface which we will hear shortly: ‘It is truly right and just…always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For with your only Begotten Son and the Holy Spirit you are one God, one Lord: not in the unity of a single person, but in a Trinity of one substance. For what you have revealed to us of your glory we believe equally of your Son and of the Holy Spirit, so that, in the confessing of the true and eternal Godhead, , you might be adored in what is proper to each Person, their unity in substance, and their equality in majesty.’

This is the wonderful and adorable mystery of faith which we both proclaim and worship on this joyful feast. We rejoice that God has so loved us as to share with us the inner mystery of his love and of His essence. May He grant that we all come to know, love and rejoice in this glorious mystery together with our Lady and all the angels and saints for all eternity to come. Amen.

Dear Sisters, throughout the liturgical year, when we celebrate Feasts of the Lord from His Incarnation and Birth to His Resurrection and Ascension, we call to mind those events which annually we commemorate so as to bring them alive once more within the Church, the living Body of Christ on earth which celebrates them. By ‘bringing them alive’, I do mean something far more than making them strike us through, and in, our powers of imagination.

When, for instance, we celebrate Christmas, our aim in doing so is more than merely to recall a beautiful moment in the distant past and a remote village in Palestine. It is to make present here and now the Christ child as the invisible God made visible among us, so that we may be seized, rapt, by love of the immensity who has made Himself one of us.

And when we celebrate the Mass of the Last Supper, it is not simply to commemorate the anniversary of that time of the year when, two thousand years ago, our Saviour hosted the Last Supper before He would depart from His apostles to go to the Father after His death, but it is to receive once more here and now His Body and Blood just as He gave it to His Disciples to offer to the Father, and to eat and drink for their bodily and spiritual nourishment.

And when we celebrate the Resurrection and Ascension, we do so not merely to call to mind the glorious event of the rising from the dead and the entry into heavenly glory of the Son of God and of Mary, but we do so in order to prepare ourselves, as members of His body here and now, for the vital truth that He has gone before us only in order to prepare a way for us to join Him in His risen glory in the eternal presence of the Trinity in heaven.

All this is made possible because of the event which we celebrate this day. For although we are commemorating an event that took place very shortly after those others we have just recounted, this one is different in a very important way. For in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as the Son had promised He would send from the Father, we do not consider only an event that took place on that day, but one which began that day and has never ceased to continue happening ever since.

Last night we listened to the account in Genesis of the confused ‘tower of babble’ which was the consequence and punishment of human rebellion against the Creator. As we did so, we recalled in that very account that the Holy Spirit Himself was preparing the ground for the antidote to babble and confusion: the restoration of the one language and the gift of understanding, poured out on those who profess their faith in God at their baptism. It is about this antidote that we have heard in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Nor is it merely the wonder that men of so many diverse languages and tongues suddenly found that they were all equally able to understand what they heard, but that what was being proclaimed to them were what scripture calls the ‘mirabilia Dei’ - the ‘marvels of God’.

For all that God had done in the incarnation and paschal mystery of His Son, all that was now being proclaimed in a new way – these events in Christ’s life and death are all ‘marvellous deeds of God’, a way leading to faith and to new understanding of God and His designs for us. No longer was there to be the babble of human confusion and the competition of many voices in declaring what we are, and how we have no hope beyond our death. For all those different ‘ways’ of claiming to know God were not only in competition with each other, but ultimately gave no understanding that endured the test of the great problem that faced everyone who came into the world: death.

The central importance of the message of Pentecost is that we have been given - not only the gift of life by the one who hovered over chaos at the beginning of creation and brought it all into order and beauty, but that He, the Spirit of God, continues to make all good, and to give the gift of understanding to those who are confused and bewildered by our very existence, and who see no hope in the end beyond the horrid barrier of our death approaching sooner or later.

The Spirit not only shows us that Christ is alive and assists us in preaching this truth, but He gives even to us the reality of this same life, through the power of the sacraments, and above all through the central act of our faith: Holy Mass. Pentecost is the one moment of the work of our redemption that continues unabated throughout history. It is the same Holy Spirit who came down on our Lady and the Apostles at that first Pentecost that still comes down now upon us and upon the gifts we offer on the altar so that they may become the Body and Blood of Christ. This present Pentecost is not merely a recalling of the first Pentecost, but is in fact its continuation.

The Holy Spirit no longer comes down in tongues of fire and in the sound of a rushing wind, simply because on that first day of Pentecost those were signs of a new reality which the Apostles needed in order to begin to understand what was happening. For every subsequent generation of new Christians the signs are no longer necessary because we know from the Apostles what the meaning of those signs is. We know by faith that the Holy Spirit who came down on them on that first Christian Pentecost is the same Holy Spirit who is coming down today upon us and upon the bread and wine that they may become our Eucharistic offering and nourishment. It is this same Spirit who, as St Paul teaches us, comes into our hearts and makes us cry out ‘Abba! Father!’ Our Lord has taught us to call God ‘our Father’, but it is the Holy Spirit who actually enables us to do so, by making us children of God in baptism, and coheirs with Christ of His glory in heaven.

Whatever the world’s babble does to attempt to bring back chaos, whatever it does to try and strike fear in us and threaten us with all kinds of mockery and doubt, and even despite the suffering it imposes on believers on account of the name of Christ which we bear, it is the Holy Spirit who can, and does, drive out all fear from us. This He does in the same way in which He first did it for the Apostles. When we recollect that they were poor, confused and demoralised by the death of Christ, and still could not quite take in what had happened to Him so much that they went back to former ways of life as fishermen in Galilee even after seeing Him in Jerusalem; and though they remained in the Upper Room after the Ascension, still doubtless out of fear of what the authorities might do to them, this was not where they would stay for long.

For it was on this day that the great inward change was brought about in them. The tongues of fire separated in order to rest on each of them and make them one. He gave them the gift of tongues so that they might be the better able to preach the truth about Christ’s resurrection and about our redemption in Him through forgiveness of our sins.

For the Holy Spirit is our teacher, as our Lord promised, bringing us the gift of understanding all that our Lord made known. He is our sanctifier, making us holy through the gifts which He gives us in the Sacraments, and there is no gift more holy, nor more giving of strength, joy and communion with God than the Eucharist which we share. For we remember that this gift, given by the Son and Spirit to the Church, will not only remain with us throughout this life until the moment we leave it to enter His presence, but it will be at the heart of our future life with the Trinity, the communion in us of Father, Son and Spirit which will make us His home, and of our dwelling in the Trinity, to make Him our everlasting home. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ; once again we are in the Novena for Pentecost, and in particular the Sunday within the Novena. For that reason, the Church presents to us each year on this Sunday a different excerpt from chapter 17 of St John’s Gospel which has been rightly called our Lord’s ‘Priestly Prayer’. It is truly right and just that on the Lord’s Day we should listen to our Lord’s own Prayer of Consecration at the Last Supper. One of the first things we note is that each time we read an extract from this long chapter, we repeat at the beginning the same words which open that chapter, ‘raising His eyes to heaven, Jesus said, “Father…”’.

The whole of the mystery of Christ’s work on earth can be summed up in this prayer of consecration, uttered by our Lord alone after all else has fallen silent, uttered as He offers Himself to the Father in anticipation of the offering He will accomplish on the morrow. He is the priest, indeed the only priest of the new and eternal covenant. When we pray the Mass, the central point is the Eucharistic Prayer, the Great Prayer as it is called in the Christian East, which is modelled on this prayer of Christ the High Priest. Like our Lord Himself, in the Canon of the Mass the priest who stands in persona Christi, at the beginning of the narration of the Last Supper consecration of the bread and the wine, raises his eyes to heaven in imitation of our Lord, before he goes on to speak those wonderful and extraordinary words: ‘take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body which will be given up for you,’ and ‘take this, all of you, and drink of it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins; do this in memory of me.’

The Body which will be given up, that is, handed over; and the Blood which will be poured out, as into a vessel for us to drink from; these together are our Paschal Lamb of sacrifice. It is at this wonderful time of the year that we celebrate the Pasch of Christ, which so far surpasses the Pasch of the Old Testament, as His priesthood surpasses that of Aaron and Levi and their successors.

In the passage of chapter 17 which we read today, the final section of the chapter, the prayer comes to a climax. Jesus prays to His ‘righteous Father’, not only for those who hear these words for the first time, but for all those who, through hearing their preaching of His word, will come to faith in Him. How wonderful it is to know that He is not only present to us when His word is solemnly read at Mass, but that He already had us in mind, us who are here today, when He uttered that prayer the first time. He had us in His heart even before we were made. He longed for our time to come so that He might bring us to Himself, unite us to Himself, fill us with His joy and with His Holy Spirit.

How wonderful it is to realise that these words: ‘Righteous Father,…I have made your name known to these and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and so that I may be in them’, these words, I say, are spoken for us to hear. We are those to whom our Lord makes His Father’s name known. He not only makes it known once, but, as He says, He continues to do so. He does this ‘so that the love with which you loved me may be in them’. This love with which the Father loves the Son, and with which the Son loves His Father in perfect return, is the love which is God Himself, the Holy Spirit of God, the bond of love. Our Lord, then, is praying the Father that the self-same love which they share, which is the Holy Spirit in person, may be in us, too. Our Lord’s prayer is that out of this love which they share, they may actually come to dwell in us, and that the Spirit may make both the Son and the Father known to us.

How wonderful, too, it is to realise that the Son of God is praying that by means of the Holy Spirit entering into us, He too may enter into us and so therefore the Holy Trinity may make His dwelling in us and share His life, His knowledge, and His love with us!

Whilst we can only stop in awe at the very thought of this, we must also remember that this is only the beginning. The prayer our Lord offers is not only for us, His followers, here and now, but looking beyond the end of this life towards eternal beatitude. It is the thought of this love that can have only one end: the desire for it to be increased. For there is always more of what God is and what He offers us.

This leads to the point that St John wrote not only the fourth Gospel but also three epistles which we are reading at this time in the Office of Readings, and the Apocalypse, from the end of which our second reading comes this morning. This passage relays the words which our Lord addresses to John at the conclusion of the long series of visions of the future, as He proclaims: ‘Behold, I am coming soon, my reward is with me to repay according to every man’s work.’ The Lord whom the Apostles saw visibly taken from them at the Ascension, is the One who, the angels told them, ‘will return as you have seen Him go,’ not to offer Himself as Priest and victim, but to judge in righteousness. This righteousness is the Father’s infinite holiness and justice without attaining which no one will enter the kingdom of heaven. This is why our Lord addresses His Father as ‘righteous One’ in today’s passage from the Priestly Prayer. He also makes manifest to John His own status upon entering into heavenly glory as man: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ We heard those words as the Paschal Candle was blessed and signed with its defining marks at the opening of the Easter Vigil. We also remember that when He comes again it will be as Judge to reward each one according to his deeds in the life, and that He will come as the bright morning star. Now that star is the sun, which rises in the East, just as we hear in the Benedictus canticle, ‘by the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will bless us.’ Jesus is the morning star, the rising sun, the living Paschal Candle that enlightens us all.

Yet as we long for His coming again, and as we pray to be ready to greet Him then, we draw strength from the fact that He has given us His Spirit in order to enable us to make this simple yet profound prayer: ‘Come!’ For when we know not how to pray, the Spirit Himself prays on our behalf and within our hearts, in words too deep for us to grasp fully, but meaning just this: ‘Come!’ This is the meaning of those repeated words at the final verses of the Apocalypse, showing the final glimpse of Him who is to come: ‘The Spirit and the Bride, that is the Church, together say to the Lord, ‘Come!’ Let everyone who hears these words answer (as though to intensify the call): ‘Come!’ Let all who thirst for righteousness come and drink the water that is the Holy Spirit poured out on those who thirst. The one who testifies to these words is Christ. He witnesses to their truthfulness, because He is Truth in person. He answers the prayer of the Spirit and the Bride, replying to them, ‘Indeed, I come quickly.’ As we await the renewal of the gift of the Spirit and the deepening of His life of prayer in us, we pray with longing to our Lord in the language of the earliest Christians, ‘Amen. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!’

On Maundy Thursday, when we celebrated the Mass commemorating that night on which our Lord made His great prayer of consecration to the Father, we sang the hymn Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est, which concludes with this prayer which we may well make our own at this time, too:

‘So may we be gathered once again, beholding

Glorified the glory, Christ, of Thy unveiling;

There, where never-ending joys, and never failing

Age succeeds to age eternally unfolding.’ Amen.