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Commentary on 1 John 4:7-10

We move today into the third part of 1 John called ‘The Source of Love and Faith’. It is divided into two parts: the first deals at length with ‘love’ (4:7—5:4); the second is about ‘faith’ (5:5-13). Today John emphasises that the initiative for love comes from God and not from us. God does not love us because we love or obey him.

The word ‘love’ (Greek, agape) in its various forms occurs 43 times altogether in this letter. It is used no less than 32 times in the passages that begin today through verse 3 of chapter 5!

‘Love’ is one of the most used (and abused) words in our language. Our music lyrics use it all the time and there have likely been songs about love since the dawn of music. We use it in all kinds of other contexts too. People ‘love’ chocolate or they ‘love’ spending hours watching football on TV. People are ‘in love’ and they ‘make love’. And so on.

What, then, do we mean by love in our reading today? CS Lewis, the Christian writer, wrote a book called The Four Loves. There he describes four kinds, all of which should be part of Christian living. One of these is agape, the form of love that 1 John is talking about. A definition of agape that captures its essence is: “a passionate desire for the well-being of the other”.

This is the love that God unconditionally extends to all his creatures without exception. It is the love that each of us, too, is to extend to every one of our brothers and sisters—again, without a single exception. It is an outreaching love, an unconditional love. It does not depend on mood, liking or disliking. It is based purely and simply on the need and on the good of the other. It may or may not be expressed sexually, but it is definitely not the love (eros) that most of the pop songs are talking about.

No matter what we do, no matter how evil or vicious we are, God’s love for us remains unchanging and unchangeable. The old hymn (Love it was that Made Us) says it this way:

Love it was that made us and Love it was that saved us…

The reason is simple:

God is love.

Love enters into his very being. God cannot not love—if he did, he could not be God.

It is strange to say (and for some it may be shocking), but God loves the most depraved person we could imagine and Our Lady or one of the saints in exactly the same way. He cannot do otherwise. Is there no difference then?

The difference between Our Lady and the evil person is not in God’s love for them, but in their response to the love offered to them. One person has a closed heart, while Our Lady, from the moment of the Annunciation, gave an unconditional ‘Yes’ which she never withdrew.

All our loving, then, is simply an opening of our heart, a return of the love that God has first shown us. When we reveal ourselves as loving persons, it is because God’s love is working in us and through us. The sign that we are loving him is also that we are filled with love ourselves, love which originally came from him.

As someone once said, God’s love is like electricity. God’s love is only in us when it is passing through us. It can never stop with ourselves. If we keep that love to ourselves, it dies.

The question then is not: Does God love the drug pusher? (He does.) The question is: Does the drug pusher love his brother? (If he does, he is certainly going about it in a strange way.) Anyone who is a deeply loving person to those around him is already full of God’s love. God’s love never changes, but it can be blocked by a closed heart.

God’s love is available in abundance to anyone who opens his or het heart to him. May I be able to do that. But that love, too, must continue to flow out beyond me to everyone I meet. It is impossible to separate God’s love for me and my love for others. We cannot have one without the other.

Our Christian life, then, is about being loving persons, not primarily about orthodoxy or theological expertise, or conformity to rules, or making sacrifices, or carrying out “religious” duties. As St Paul says in his famous passage in the first letter to the Corinthians:

…if I…do not have love, I am nothing. (1 Cor 13:2)

Today’s reading says:

Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

If I am not a loving person, all the rest is a waste. If I am a truly loving person, everything else is taken care of. And what is the source of that love? It is not ourselves says John, rather:

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us…

The evidence is that God:

…sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Jesus hanging on the cross is the most dramatic sign of God’s love for us, a love that is totally gratuitous (so we call it ‘grace’) and never earned by any action of ours. Let me today look at Jesus on the Cross, say a big ‘Thank you’ to him and then go and pass on his love for me to everyone I meet.

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Commentary on Micah 7:14-15,18-20

Today’s Mass readings are about God’s great desire that the sinner repent and experience God’s love and tender mercy. The First Reading comes from the prophet Micah, a contemporary of both Hoseah and Isaiah.

The passage consists of a prayer which appears to be from the time after the return of the Jews from exile in Babylon (537 BC). At this time, the people were still few in number, possessed only a fragment of their former land, and were surrounded by hostile nations.

It is a plea for God to take care of his beleaguered people. But there is confidence because their God is quite unlike any other:

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
and passing over the transgression
of the remnant of his possession?

The passage reflects what Jesus tells us about God in today’s Gospel.

The people may at times deserve the anger of God, but it will never last, for God loves his people too much. In fact, it is difficult to conceive now of a God who responds in anger when his people sin. It is never he who distances himself from us; it is we who are unfaithful.

We can always be sure of his “faithfulness” and of his “steadfast love”, which he had promised so long ago and so many times. He had sworn to Abraham and Jacob that their descendants would be as numerous as the dust of the earth and the sand on the seashore, and he had promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. God will not go back on that promise.

And so, we too have confidence of complete forgiveness and reconciliation. This compassion of God for the sinner and his desire to take him back is graphically illustrated in the marvellous story of the Prodigal Son, the subject of today’s Gospel.

We too, whenever we are truly sorry and ready to change, can be absolutely sure of meeting the same compassion and forgiveness.

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Commentary on Luke 17:11-19

This story of Jesus’ compassion is unique to Luke. We are told that Jesus was travelling on the borders of Galilee, the northern province of Palestine, and Samaria, which lies between Galilee and the southern province of Judea. Jesus is making for the Jordan valley on his way south to Jericho, one of his last stops before reaching his final destination in Jerusalem.

Just as he entered a village he was met by ten lepers (it does not specify whether they were men or women). As lepers they were not allowed to come in close proximity with other people. This was because it was (rightly) known that the condition could be transmitted to others by physical contact—though we know now it needed to be fairly prolonged contact. (Remember how the famous Fr Damien, the Apostle to the Lepers, eventually contracted the disease through his ministering to a colony of lepers in Hawaii.)

Because of their dreaded disease, such people were outcasts, condemned to live their lives on the fringes of society. The tragedy is that, given the limited medical knowledge of the times, many such people were almost certainly not suffering from leprosy at all, but from some other non-contagious, perhaps chronic skin disease.

So, calling Jesus from a safe distance, they cried out:

Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!

Jesus simply told them to go and show themselves to the priests. And, while they were on their way, they were all cured. Presumably they continued on their way to see the priests who would give them an official declaration of being ‘clean’ so that they could once again legitimately return to life in society. A major element of their healing was their re-integration into society.

Just one of the cured lepers then came back to Jesus “praising God with a loud voice”, and in deep gratitude fell at the feet of Jesus:

And he was a Samaritan.

These words are loaded with meaning, for it is presumed that the rest were Jews. In the first place, Jews and Samaritans could not stand each other, and the Jews tended to look down on the Samaritans as ungodly and unclean. But in the misfortune of their leprosy, these Jews and Samaritans, rejected by both their own peoples, found common support in each other’s company.

But now that they are cured, only one of them comes to say thanks and he is still—in the eyes of the Jews—an outcast. Jesus, looking around at the Jews in his company, expresses surprise:

Were not ten made clean? So where are the other nine?

The only one to come back and give thanks was a despised foreigner.

This unexpected action is also reflected in another of Luke’s stories, which we reflected on earlier, that of the so-called ‘good Samaritan’. Today, in this Gospel reading is another good Samaritan. And, of course, there is a third—the Samaritan woman who is featured prominently in John’s Gospel (John 4:4-42).

To the man in today’s Gospel, Jesus says:

Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.

That “get up” or ‘rise up’, which Jesus often uses with those he heals, has echoes of resurrection and entry into new life—a life of wholeness brought about by the man’s trust in Jesus and his acknowledgment of the source of his healing.

In the context of Luke’s Gospel, the story prepares us for developments in the growth of the early Church, described in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. This is because, as the early Christians (all of them Jews) flee from persecution in Jerusalem, the people of Samaria are among the first to accept Jesus as Lord and to become followers of the Gospel. On the other hand, many of the Jews in Jerusalem remained closed to Jesus’ message and call.

We, too, must never give in to a temptation to exclude any people as possible followers of Christ. We must be ready to reach out to all, even the most unlikely. None must be treated as outsiders or untouchables, even those who show themselves extremely hostile to the Gospel.

And while there may not be any real lepers in our own society, today is an occasion for us to reflect on who could be regarded as lepers, outsiders, outcasts and untouchables among us at the present time. I might also consider whether I personally treat any person as an outsider in my home, in my work or in other places where I meet people. Such exclusion is totally contrary to what we celebrate in the Eucharist.

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Commentary on Matthew 20:17-28 Read Wednesday of Week 2 of Lent – Gospel »

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Commentary on Luke 21:5-11

The Temple at Jerusalem in Jesus’ time was a magnificent building and one of the wonders of the world. As the Gospel tells us, it had been more than 40 years in the building and was not yet completed. People were commenting to Jesus on the beautiful decorations of jewels and votive offerings. His hearers must have been shocked, if not utterly sceptical, when Jesus told them that, in time, the building would be utterly destroyed with “not one stone…left upon another”. In our not too distant past, who would ever have dreamt that the World Trade Center, that temple to capitalism, would be reduced to rubble in a just matter of minutes? And how much more the Temple of God?

They asked Jesus:

Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?

Jesus’ answer is directed more to the end of time than to the actual destruction of the Temple, which occurred about 40 years later in the year 70 AD. In fact, one event blends into the other. To many who were witnesses to its destruction, it must have seemed like the end of their world. What kind of life could they live without their Temple, without the dwelling place of their God? How could Yahweh allow such a thing to happen? It left a huge empty space in their lives which nothing else could fill.

Jesus’ warning is that his followers should not misread the signs or be too alarmed. It seems the early Christians were expecting Jesus to return for his Second Coming within their lifetime. This must have led to many false alarms—people claiming to be the returned Lord, or warning that the end of all things was close at hand. Even the destruction of the Temple (remember many of the Christians were converted Jews) must have looked like the beginning of the end. St Augustine had similar feelings as Rome, the heart of Christendom, fell in ruins to the ‘barbarians’ (the ancestors of many of us!). The end of Rome seemed to him like the end of the world.

Jesus tells his followers not to be too ready to believe what they hear people saying. Nor are they to be too alarmed when they hear of wars and social upheavals. There will be many natural disasters, widespread diseases and celestial phenomena. These do not necessarily spell the end. The message now being given is:

…the end will not follow immediately.

At every pivotal time in the history of our planet, there are people who claim to see the end in sight. The coming of the third millennium was no exception. So far they have all been wrong. The attitude of Christians is not to be one of fear and anxiety. It sees the new era as a time of challenge and opportunity, a time for new beginnings.

On a more personal and much more realistic level, we may be anxious about the signs of our own time of departure from this world. But again, it does not help to become fearful and anxious. Rather, we should work to live each day to the fullest and to make it productive for ourselves and others.

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Commentary on Luke 10:17-24

We saw at the beginning of chapter 10 how Jesus had sent his 72 disciples out to all the places where he himself would visit. Today we see them returning full of joy and satisfaction:

Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!

They discovered that, in his name, they were able to do the same things that Jesus did.

In reply, Jesus said to them:

I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.

The power of evil is being reversed and this was partly the doing of his disciples working in his name. And he further reassures them:

I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will hurt you.

‘Snakes and scorpions’ more likely represent evil powers and so the statement is not to be taken literally and still less to be tested (as some obscure sects have tried to do with predictably tragic consequences!). It is true that for the committed disciple nothing can really hurt them. Physically, maybe, but not their real selves. Nothing, as Paul says, can separate us from the love of God, that is, the love that God extends to us at every moment of every day.

Then Jesus tells his disciples the real reason why they should be happy. It is not because they have special powers over evil spirits but to:

…rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

In other words, their blessedness comes not from what they are able to do, but because they have been chosen as the instruments for God to do his work, to make the Kingdom a reality. That is the origin of our blessedness too.

Then follows a beautiful prayer of Jesus to the Father. He thanks the Father because all that is coming into the world through Jesus is being made known, not to the wise and great ones of this world, but to “the little ones”, the people who, in the eyes of the majority, are of no account:

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

And, since that day on the lake shore when Jesus called four fishermen to be his followers, he has been calling very ordinary people to know his identity, to hear his message and share his vision.

And so he can say truly to them:

Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see but did not see it and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.

All of this applies to so many of us too. We, for reasons only known to God himself, have been given knowledge of the Son. We too, by means of the Church, have been given a vision denied to so many—we have heard the Word which is the Way to truth and life.

Whatever problems we may be facing right now, let us on this day count our blessings and express our gratitude for them. And the only way to do that is to say ‘Yes’ to Jesus and his Gospel. Let us start doing that right now.

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Commentary on Luke 14:15-24

Today we have the last of four teachings of Jesus linked with meals. It was prompted by the remark of a guest at table who said:

Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!

It was very common to associate the future Messianic kingdom with a banquet. Jesus responds with a parable which is a warning to his complacent listeners, many of whom probably smugly presumed that they would be among the small minority chosen to eat in the Kingdom.

A man threw a large dinner party with many guests invited. But when the time came and the guests were reminded, one after another they gave excuses why they were not able to come. One had just bought a piece of land and had to inspect it; another had just bought some oxen and had to try them out; a third had just been married.

It seems that the original invitation had been accepted, but when the final invitation came, excuses were made. In fact, none of the excuses has much validity. One would not buy a field and only then look at it, nor would one buy oxen without having tried them out before the purchase.

On hearing this, the master got very angry and ordered his servants to:

Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.

After this, the servants reported that there was still room, so they were given orders to scour the roads and bring in as many as they could find. Said the host:

Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.

The parable is a clear message from Jesus to his Jewish listeners. Many of them, especially the religious leaders steeped in complacency and presumption, had rejected the invitation to follow Jesus and enter the Kingdom. Some of them would actually conspire to bring about his death. Their place would be given to those formerly seen as outcasts, both Jews and Gentiles, people aware of their needs, the “poor in spirit”. There would be a special place for the poor and the disabled, people often seen by traditional Jews as people abandoned by God and buried in sin.

To go back to the beginning of the passage, blessed indeed are those who eat together in the Kingdom, but it is clear that only those who respond to the invitation will enjoy the privilege.

We have no more right to presumption than those Jews who rejected Christ. We too are being invited to go into the Lord’s banquet hall, but it is important that we respond to the call. We do that by our totally accepting and living out the teaching of Jesus our Lord. And part of that teaching is that we, too, invite and welcome into our community those who are poor, crippled (in some way), the blind and the lame—taking these words in their broadest sense. No more than those fellow diners of Jesus, our presence at the Kingdom banquet is never to be taken for granted.

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Commentary on Galatians 4:22-24,26-27,31—5:1

Today’s passage actually begins with a verse not in our reading:

Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? (Gal 4:21)

By this Paul is invoking the witness of the Scriptures. To inherit the promise, it is not enough to be just a descendant of Abraham, as Ishmael (Abraham’s son by Hagar) was. It is necessary to be descended as the result of promise, like Isaac; it is necessary to be a spiritual descendant, not just a genealogical one. Hence for Paul, Isaac’s birth prefigures the rebirth of Christians.

Paul uses the examples of two of Abraham’s wives, Hagar and Sarah, to illustrate the difference between the Jews who were following the Law of Moses and Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, who follow the law of Christ.

Hagar was a slave woman while Sarah was a free woman and the wife of Abraham. In the beginning Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was barren, so he took the slave girl, Hagar, who gave him a son, Ishmael. It was only later, when she was already past child-bearing age that Sarah bore Isaac. The difference between them, according to Paul, is that Ishmael was born “according to the flesh”, that is, in the ordinary course of nature and without any special intervention on God’s part.

Sarah, however, had been barren into her old age, and the child she eventually bore was the result of a special promise that God had made to Abraham about his descendants. That promise only applied to Isaac and his descendants. (Hence, the significance of Abraham’s total trust in God when he was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, and was ready to do so.)

The point Paul is making is that it is not enough to be descended from Abraham, as Ishmael and many Jews could claim. He sees in the two mothers symbols of the two covenants:

One woman…is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery.

Paul refers to it as an “allegory”, not in the sense that it was not historical, but that Paul is using the story to illustrate the theological truth he is sharing with the Galatians.

The first covenant Paul identifies was that made on Mount Sinai between God and Moses. But, says Paul, its children (the “present Jerusalem”) are now to be regarded as slaves, slaves of a Law that cannot save them. This is in contrast with the messianic Jerusalem, to which, as Isaiah foretold, “all the nations shall stream…” (Is 2:2). This is the Jerusalem which the prophets proclaimed—a Jerusalem not of laws, rituals and holocausts, but a Jerusalem which created a society of truth and justice for all.

The second covenant, however, belongs to this second Jerusalem, what Paul calls the “Jerusalem above”. The rabbis taught that the “Jerusalem above” would come down during the time of the Messiah. It is, in Paul’s eyes, the place where Christ reigns as King and whose citizens are his followers, in contrast to the “present Jerusalem”. It is this “Jerusalem above” which is the “mother” of the Christians.

Paul quotes from Isaiah’s joyful promise to Jerusalem:

Rejoice, you childless one, you who bear no children…

Jerusalem “bears no children” because her children are in exile. Paul applies Isaiah’s joyful promise to exiled Jerusalem to the gathering of believers through the Gospel, by which ‘Jerusalem’s children’ have become many.

Paul tells the Galatian Christians—both Jews and Gentiles—that they are children not of the “enslaved woman” (of the Law), but of the “free woman” (the Spirit of Jesus). There is no need for them to continue following the old ways of the Law. To do so is to renounce the freedom which came to them in Christ.

The purpose of Christ’s liberating death was precisely to make us free. To go back under the Law would be to return to a way that is equivalent to a form of slavery. Human beings must choose either Christ or the Law as author of salvation. The freedom spoken of here is freedom from the yoke of the Law. The burden of the rigorous demands of the Law as the means of gaining God’s favour makes an intolerable burden for sinful man. As Peter said at the Council of Jerusalem when the acceptance of Gentiles into the Christian community was being debated:

…why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we [the Jews] will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” (Acts 15:10-11)

It is important for us Christians to be aware that following Christ and the Gospel is meant to bring real freedom into our lives. If we do not experience our being Christian as liberating, then there is something lacking in our understanding of what the Gospel is about. One gets the impression that many Catholics do not have any real sense of liberation, although their faith may give them a measure of security—at a price. They have replaced the Law of Sinai for another set of legalities (“If I do this, is it a sin?”). It has to be said, too, that some pastors have preached a gospel heavy with rules and regulations and threats of sin and damnation.

Some see being a Christian as a matter of having to observe all kinds of restrictions which ‘other people’ are not obliged to follow. Some have been heard to say things like, “Oh, I wish I had not been baptised!”

For this reason, some remain riddled with guilt because they consistently feel they are not living up to the requirements of their religion. Others rid themselves of this guilt by leaving the Church altogether, saying: “Now that I am not a Catholic, I am not bound by that nonsense any more; I don’t have to go to church on Sunday; I can have sex with anyone I like, whenever I like” and so forth.

Others see virtue in ‘denying themselves’ and ‘making sacrifices’, giving up the ‘freedom’ that other people seem to have in order ‘to save their souls and go to heaven’.

There is no question of doubting the sincerity of such people, but it is sad that somehow they have not learnt or been taught that the true Christian is a truly liberated and free person. To be free is not simply doing just what one feels like doing. Such an attitude inevitably leads to self-destruction and certainly not to happiness and fulfilment. To be free is to be effectively able to follow the good.

That good we believe is found in the vision of life that Jesus proposes and which he personally followed. It is not a way just for Christians; it is a way for people everywhere. It is the vision of the Kingdom—a world of truth and goodness and justice and mutual respect for all, without exception—a Way that leads to God. A world where God, people and the world are living in a beneficially harmonious relationship.

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Commentary on Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23 and Matthew 5:38-48 Read Sunday of Week 7 of Ordinary Time (Year A) »

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Commentary on Luke 9:7-9

Today we have a short interlude which is leading to some very special revelations. Herod the Tetrarch is hearing stories about what Jesus is doing. ‘Tetrarch’ means the ruler of one-fourth part of a kingdom. This one, Herod Antipas, was one of several sons of Herod the Great, whose the kingdom was divided among four of them. Herod Antipas ruled over Galilee and Perea from 4 BC to 39 AD. Although not strictly speaking a ‘king’ he is called that in Matthew and Mark following popular usage.

Herod is puzzled because he is being told that Jesus is John the Baptist risen from the dead. At the same time others are saying that Elijah, whose expected return would signal the arrival of the Messiah, or some of the former biblical prophets has reappeared. Herod has recently beheaded John the Baptist, and the superstitious king is filled with a mixture of fear and curiosity. He kept trying to ‘see’ Jesus.

Luke does not actually record the death of John and, in this short passage, he prepares the reader for the later meeting of Herod with Jesus (Luke 23:8-12). So Herod’s wish will be partially fulfilled at a later date, though under very unexpected circumstances, and in a way that Herod will find very unsatisfactory. He is hoping that Jesus, like some circus dog, will do some ‘tricks’ or ‘miracles’ for him.

Herod’s desire was almost entirely one of curiosity, it was the desire of the hedonist and the seeker of novelty. To ‘see’ Jesus in the full Gospel sense is something totally different. It can only happen to those who have the eyes of faith, and who can see in the person of Jesus the presence and power of God. We may recall the request of some ‘Greeks’ who told Philip they wanted to see Jesus and the reply that Jesus gave about the grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying (John 12:20-26). We have not seen Jesus if we do not know him in his suffering and dying as his way to new life.

Let us ask to see Jesus today, a seeing that leads to a total acceptance of his way of life and following him all the way, through the cross and beyond to a life that never ends.