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Commentary on Ezekiel 17:22-24, 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, Mark 4:26-34

Today’s Mass readings are about how God works – with us and without us.  In a sense, we could say they remind us that God’s work will be carried out whether we cooperate or not.  If we choose not to cooperate, God’s plans will not be frustrated, but we ourselves will be the losers.

The Gospel consists of two parables which are quite different in meaning but which have a common theme in being connected with the growth of plants.

What is the Kingdom?
In the first parable Jesus tells us what the Kingdom of God is like. To begin with, perhaps a few words about the ‘Kingdom’ are in order because it is a term which frequently appears in the Gospel.  What is this ‘Kingdom’?  First of all, it is not a place.  The Greek word used in the Gospel is basileia, and is an abstract word which means ‘kingship’ or ‘reign’ rather than ‘kingdom’, which in English suggests a territory or place.  ‘Kingship’ or ‘reign’, on the contrary, suggest power.

To belong to the Kingdom or kingship of God, then, is to put oneself fully, consciously and deliberately under the power of God, to experience that power and be empowered by it.  That power is above all the power of love.  It is a creating, enfolding or embracing power, an encouraging power, a power that lifts up and enables us to be what we are called to be.  It is not a coercive power which achieves its ends by threats, still less by violence.

Lord’s Prayer
When we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your Kingdom come”, we are praying that people everywhere put themselves under this loving power of God. And our first call as Christians is to belong to, that is, to enter that Kingdom, and not just to be a member of the Church.  The Church is, in so far as it is faithful to the call of Christ, part of the Kingdom, but the Kingdom extends far beyond the membership of the Church.  The Church is, when it is being what it should be, the Sacrament or visible sign of the Kingdom.

As well, perhaps we can think of numerous modern examples of non-Christians who are very much full of the spirit of the Kingdom (using the definition above) – some, even more so than many who are baptised.

God works when we don’t
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is giving an image of that kingship or power of God at work.  He compares it to the situation of a farmer planting seed on his land:

The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.

And Jesus continues:

The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come.

The picture is clear – the building of the kingdom is God’s work.  It goes on whether we are working with it or not; whether we are aware of it or not.  It will not be frustrated by any opposition or passivity on our part.

Failure to crush
We can see evidence of that in the way that the Christian faith has survived over the past 2,000 years.  Some people, some governments and other powerful agencies have done their utmost to obliterate Christianity from the area under their control – and they have utterly failed.

The reason is that the values the Kingdom stands for (which are also the same values the Church stands for) are so totally in harmony with the nature of things and the deepest aspirations of the human person that no intervening force can neutralise them for any length of time.  And this nature and these aspirations come, of course, from their origin and Creator – God.

So, while the outcome of the kingdom is inevitable, it is important that each one of us identify fully with it.  It is possible for the Kingdom to be realised and for us to have chosen to stay outside, to adopt an anti-Kingdom position.  This is basically to take both an anti-God and, which is ultimately the same thing, an anti-human position.

Tiny beginnings – big future
Jesus gives another image of the Kingdom.  This time he compares it to a mustard seed.  Here the focus is not on the inevitability of growth, but on how the Kingdom emerges from tiny beginnings.  The tiny mustard seed grows into a very large shrub, so big that it can provide shelter for birds in its branches.

This is clearly a parable of encouragement.  We need to remember that when these words were written, the Church was still relatively small.  It consisted of tiny communities scattered in cities, towns and villages all over the Mediterranean area.  Without the communications media which we take for granted today, they were to a large extent cut off from each other much of the time.

Persecution
In addition to that, the church communities, were often subject to savage persecution.  It would be perfectly natural for them to wonder if they could survive into the future.  They were like the tiny mustard seed.  Yet, given time, this tiny seed will grow into a large plant.  That vision, given the adverse circumstances in which the Gospel was written, was an enormous vote of confidence in the Church and the future of the Kingdom. A similar image in the First Reading speaks of the seed growing into “a noble cedar”.

Today’s parable assures the readers of the Gospel that, like the mustard seed, they can grow.  How surprised those early Christians would be to see the Church today!  How the mustard seed has grown!  Christians number well over a billion people today, a number not even conceivable in olden times.  The Gospel’s confidence was not misplaced.

Apprehensiveness about the future
It is important for us to remember all this when we feel somewhat apprehensive or pessimistic about the future of Christianity in various parts of the world.  We need to remember that the Church thrives on persecution and that the Church will never embrace the whole world – it is not the Kingdom, but only a sign of the Kingdom.

So let us concentrate on cultivating our own little field and watch the mustard grow there…God will take care of the rest.

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Commentary on Genesis 3:9-15; 2 Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1; Mark 3:20-35

In today’s Gospel, we see a good example of ‘inclusion’, where one story is contained inside another and both are complementary. The ‘outer’ story is about the contrast between people who are ‘inside’ and those who are ‘outside’. The ‘inner’ story is about what puts people ‘outside’ – their refusal to listen to Jesus. The passage tells of two very different reactions to Jesus, one negative and the other positive.

The Gospel opens by telling us that Jesus had gone “home” with his disciples. What does ‘home’ mean here? After all, we know that Jesus, after leaving Nazareth, did not have a home – he did not have his own place to lay his head. Nevertheless, he was in a house – a house, perhaps belonging to one of his disciples, in which he felt perfectly at home.

He would tell his disciples later that all who left home to follow him would have an abundance of homes in this life; the home of every Christian would be a place of welcome to other Christians and, in fact, to all strangers genuinely in need of shelter. Again, any place where Jesus and his disciples are gathered together is home. And we will see that illustrated further on in the story.

As soon as people knew that Jesus had arrived, they piled into the house with him – so many that Jesus and his disciples could not even eat. When Jesus’ family heard what he was doing and saying, they went to take him out of there, convinced he was quite out of his mind:

He has gone out of his mind.

Here we have the first negative element in the story. His own family and relatives reject what he is and what he is saying and doing. They can only see that he is making a laughing stock of the family with all this ‘guru’ business. He has apparently been driving out evil spirits that have been heard shrieking and making their victims behave in bizarre ways. Worse still, he is behaving in very unorthodox ways and his remarks are upsetting the religious leadership – that also could mean trouble for them.

Indeed the religious leadership was after him. They had come up to Galilee all the way from Jerusalem and were accusing Jesus of being under the power of the devil:

He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.

Self-contradictory charges
Jesus points out the obvious contradictions in their accusations. What sense does it make for Satan to be casting out his minions who were doing his work for him? A kingdom divided by civil war is going to fall:

…if Satan has risen up against himself [what a strange idea…] and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.

Jesus goes further. He says:

…no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

Jesus, of course, is the strong man who has broken into Satan’s house, tied him up, and released those who were being held there. This is the only reasonable explanation for what Jesus has been doing. That statement of the religious leadership (the scribes) makes no sense whatever. It is the interpretation of poisoned minds.

The only unforgivable sin
And Jesus goes on to say something which sometimes puzzles people:

Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin…

And Mark makes it clear in what context these words were said:

…for they [the scribes] had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

How are we to explain these strange words of Jesus? Does it mean that all sins can be forgiven except one? Why just one exception? And why the sin against the Holy Spirit? What is so sensitive about a sin against the Holy Spirit? What about a sin against the Father or the Son? Aren’t things like murder and rape much worse sins?

To answer the question we have to ask another: What is a sin against the Holy Spirit? It is through the Holy Spirit that God teaches us and guides us into a right way of living, which is to become more and more united with him. To sin against the Holy Spirit is to turn our backs on God by rejecting that teaching and guidance. This is precisely what is happening with the members of Jesus’ family and the scribes in today’s Gospel.

Instead of seeing the love, power and the action of God so clearly present in Jesus, they blindly assert that he is mad and possessed by an evil spirit. If they had opened themselves to the guidance of the Spirit, they would have been able to see what indeed many others were able to see – as when the crowds exclaimed on one occasion about Jesus:

…God has visited his people! (Luke 7:16)

Whenever we turn our backs and refuse to open ourselves to the gentle hand of God leading us towards him, by whatever means that may happen (and the Spirit can use all kinds of instruments – people, things and happenings), we are guilty of sinning against the Holy Spirit.

Closed hearts
Why cannot there be forgiveness for such a sin without our own repentance? For the simple reason that we have closed our hearts and put ourselves beyond God’s reach. God never forces his way into our hearts. Our Lord says:

I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me. (Rev 3:20)

But he will never force down the door. I have to open it from the inside.

And, if God is prevented from reaching us, how can he extend his forgiveness to us? That is why it can be an “eternal sin”; it will remain that way as long as we are closed to his entering. Other sins, however serious, can be forgiven, including murder and rape and genocide – as long as we repent and seek reconciliation. But as long as we refuse to repent, to change, to convert and change our ways, we have entered into sin against the Holy Spirit and have effectively tied God’s hands. God’s forgiveness is not a unilateral, judicial act; it always requires the turning back of the prodigal so that the Father can embrace us once more.

Outsiders and insiders
Now we come to the final part of our Gospel passage. We were told at the beginning that Jesus’ family wanted to take him in charge because they thought he was mad and an embarrassment to them. They came to the house where Jesus was with his disciples and a large crowd of people sitting around listening to him.

Jesus is told that his mother, brothers and sisters are outside looking for him. The key word in this sentence is “outside”:

…his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside…

Jesus responds by asking:

Who are my mother and my brothers?

Then, looking at all those sitting around him and listening to him, namely, those who are ‘inside’, with him, he says:

Here are my mother and my brothers!

And why are they called that? Because:

Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

Huge implications
There are huge implications from this apparently simple saying. Jesus is, in fact, inaugurating a new way for people to relate to each other; he is inaugurating a new family. In this family we are brothers and sisters to each other, not on the basis of blood, or culture, or race, or nationality, or any other conventional group, but solely on our acknowledging him as our Lord and Brother and God as our Father.

These are the people on the inside. Those who still cling to the more conventional divisions (and very divisive they often are) are on the outside. They are symbolised in the First Reading where we have our first parents refusing to listen to the word of God and eating the forbidden fruit. This results in their being expelled from the garden. They are now on the outside, and subject to all kinds of distress and suffering. They are left, by their own choice, on their own. Their nakedness, originally something totally natural, becomes a matter of shame and a symbol of the emptiness of their inner selves after turning away from God.

Similarly, Jesus’ family and the scribes are on the outside because they do not listen to Jesus’ call to treat all equally as brothers and sisters. Down the ages many who have tried to break down the barriers between people have been also called mad and sometimes even evil.

The most tragic of all perhaps are those, who, in the name of Jesus and claiming to belong to his family, foster murderous divisions between people who should be one in faith. Here there are surely some who are seriously guilty of the sin against the Holy Spirit.

What about us?
However, it is not for us to sit in judgement on others but to look at our own selves. Are we on the outside or the inside? To what extent do we listen to, accept and fully assimilate Jesus’ call to belong to his family? To what extent do we reach out beyond the divisions of race, colour, gender, religion, class, education… to embrace others as truly our brothers and sisters?

Like St Paul in today’s Second Reading we are indeed aware of our gradual decline as we grow older, and, like him, we can be weighed down by many troubles, but we are filled with hope. As long as we keep listening to Jesus’ word coming to us at all times, our:

…our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

With the faith and confidence of Paul, let us say with him:

…we know that, if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

Let that house, where God speaks and we listen, be our only home.

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Commentary on Matthew 5:27-32

In today’s reading from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes two more texts from the Old Testament to continue illustrating his attitude to the Law and its meaning.

One of the Ten Commandments says: “You shall not commit adultery”. Adultery is here understood as a sexual relationship between two people, at least one of whom is already married to someone else. But, for Jesus, for a man even to look at another woman with lust (he does not say whether either of them is married) is already to have violated the spirit of the commandment and the kind of relationship that he expects between people. We would need to distinguish here between a man finding a woman particularly beautiful or attractive and, on the other hand, looking on her as an object for sexual gratification. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with the former. We might also add that what is said here of men applies equally to women. If women are not mentioned it is because in ancient society the initiative for sexual activity seldom was available to the woman.

This commandment, in fact, is not primarily about sexual acts; it is about the inviolable dignity of each person. It is about the deep respect that people ought to have for their own bodies and the bodies of others. Other people cannot be used simply for one’s personal pleasure or to satisfy one’s sexual appetites—not even in the secret recesses of one’s mind and heart.

Jesus puts the situation rather graphically. He says it would be better to go physically maimed through life rather than allow oneself be led into a situation where another person could be so dishonoured. In human beings, our sexual powers have a double purpose: to express a deep and genuine love between two people, and for the procreation of new life.

Related to this, Jesus quotes from Deuteronomy (24:1): “Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a writ.” The original text reads as follows:

Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife.

The text goes on to say that if:

…the second man dislikes her, writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies): her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled, for that would be abhorrent to the Lord… (Deut 24:14)

Two things seem clear in Jesus’ time: it was men who could initiate divorce and on the flimsiest of pretexts; it was the woman who was considered guilty of adultery by marrying another man, which is why she could not be received back by her first husband.

Jesus strongly challenges both of these traditions. The Jews accepted divorce, but Jesus is ruling it out. The only exception for a marriage to be dissolved is on the basis of “sexual immorality” (Greek, porneia). There is much discussion on the meaning of this term, but it seems that it refers to a special situation in Matthew’s community. Certain types of marriage between Jews were regarded as incestuous, but were allowed in the case of a Jew marrying a Gentile. But Matthew is saying that in the case of a Gentile becoming a Christian (and marrying a Jewish convert), such exceptions would not be allowed and divorce should not take place. Jesus says further that a man who marries a woman who has been divorced commits adultery.

It is important to note that Jesus is first of all putting men and women morally on an absolutely equal level. He is making the marriage contract something to be taken very seriously with grave responsibilities on both sides. This issue will come up again later (in Matthew, chapter 19) and cause some dismay among Jesus’ disciples.

In our day, the whole question of marriage and the family is fraught with serious problems. Among them are divorce and adultery, although the problems here are somewhat different from that of Jesus’ time. The kind of divorce that Jesus speaks about is of a unilateral decision by a husband who wants to be rid of his wife, often for trivial reasons. In modern society, it is more often the result of the painful breakdown of a marriage relationship. While emphasising that nowadays each case must be treated with great pastoral sensitivity, we do need to remind ourselves of the fundamental values and attitudes that Jesus is underlining in this passage.

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Commentary on Matthew 5:20-26

In today’s reading continuing the Sermon on the Mount, what Jesus means by saying that he has not come to abolish the old Law but to transcend it is made clear by Jesus’ giving six examples of how a number of Old Testament sayings are to be understood by his followers. In fact, he says that if we wish to be his followers and do his work, we must move forward to the deeper level of understanding he proposes:

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

It is clear from what we see of the scribes and Pharisees in the Gospels, that for them, religious virtue consisted in the most exact external observance of every detail of Jewish Law. The more perfect the observance of the letter of the Law, they argued, the closer one was to God. Jesus challenged that understanding and it led to serious confrontations with the religious leadership.

Of course, the way of the scribes and Pharisees has its attractions. It is a much easier way to measure one’s obedience to God. And one finds the same among other religions today. Among Christians (including Catholics), one finds that there are some people who are very anxious to know whether a certain action ‘is a sin’ or not. Such an approach leads in many cases to scrupulosity and fear, finding sin even in minutiae. God becomes a menacing shadow ready to strike at the smallest wrongdoing.

When speaking of the Jewish law, the first example Jesus gives is of the commandment:

You shall not murder [kill]. (Exodus 20:13)

Jesus’ understanding of this commandment goes far beyond the actual killing of another person. He extends it even to anger and abusive language. And anger can often be totally locked inside and invisible to an outsider. Jesus says:

But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

In other words, Jesus excludes any kind of violent behaviour towards a brother or sister, either in action, or word, or even thought.

He also links our interpersonal behaviour to our relationship to God. It is no good, then, piously bringing our offering to the altar in the Temple and presenting it to God while we are—through our own fault—in conflict with a brother or sister. We cannot separate our relationship with God and with that of a brother or sister. This will be spelt out in other parts of the Gospel. Before we make our offering, we must first be reconciled with our offended brother or sister and only then, after the injury has been healed, make our offering. Jesus also recommends early reconciliation if only to avoid greater troubles later on. It is not worth going to jail simply out of hatred or anger towards another.

All this is very relevant to us. Whenever we celebrate the Eucharist, we should recall what Jesus says in this text and put it into practice. Before we make our offering of the bread and wine, we are invited, at the beginning of the Eucharist, to confess our sins to God and to the gathered community:

I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned…

How often do we really think about what we are saying at this time?

Again, before sharing with others in the Body and Blood of the Lord, we pray:

…forgive us our sins as we forgive those who offend us…

And we are also invited to make a sign of peace with all those around us. For how can we share in the Body and Blood of the Lord if we are at enmity with a brother or sister who is a member of that same Body? But again, so often this is just an empty gesture, with very little real meaning and, for the most part, made to someone we do not even know. Let us work to put the meaning back into what can so easily degenerate into a meaningless ritual.

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Commentary on Matthew 5:17-19

We have said that Matthew’s Gospel is primarily directed at a readership with a Jewish background. It is clear that their Jewish background and traditions were things which were not easy for Christian converts to give up. Both Paul and Matthew go out of their way to assure Jewish converts that Christianity is not a rejection of Judaism, but its natural development. It is everything that Judaism is and more.

So, in today’s passage, which continues the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus solemnly assures his readers:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

Jesus has come not to terminate the Law, but to bring it to a higher level. In a very rough simile, it is like the upgrading of a computer by upgrading its operating system. It is still the same computer doing the same things, only better. The vision of Jesus helps us to see the Law in a new light.

So Jesus says that the Law is still to be observed. Of course, we will see very clearly in the following days exactly what Jesus means. He is not saying that every single injunction of the Law (some of which seem very strange to us) has to be literally observed, but rather that the spirit behind those injunctions is still in force. His words are meant to console, but they are also a challenge, as we shall see. The New Law does not mean simply the addition of new elements. There is what we would call now a ‘paradigm shift’ to a Way which goes beyond laws to the Law of Love.

In our Church, too, we need to be ready to move forward creatively to new ways of understanding our faith and living it out. The traditions of the past are still valid, but we must never get bogged down in them to the extent that we do not respond to the clear signs of the times.  Tradition can be understood in two ways: either as a fundamental belief that has existed from the very beginning, or simply a way of doing or understanding things which has been around for a long time.

“When will the Church stop changing?” we hear some people ask. The answer is, hopefully never. The day we close ourselves to change is the day we die, as Paul warns us in the Second Letter to the Corinthians. To quote Cardinal John Newman:

To live is to change; to be perfect is to have changed often.

Cardinal Newman knew about change. He made radical changes in his own understanding of the Christian faith, changes which he saw as unavoidable although they involved great sacrifices on his part, and led him from the Anglican to the Catholic Church.

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Commentary on Matthew 5:13-16

We may be totally filled with the spirit of the Beatitudes, but it will not do very much good unless their effects are clearly seen in our lives. To be a Christian, it is not enough to be good; we must be seen to be so. It is not enough to ‘have a spirituality’ that fills us with a feeling of peace and tranquillity. The spirituality of the gospel is outreaching. We have not only to be disciples of Christ but also need to proclaim him.

In today’s reading from the Sermon on the Mount immediately following the Beatitudes, Jesus presents us with a number of images expressing this. Jesus first says that his followers should be “the salt of the earth”. Salt is an essential ingredient in almost all cooked food (even sweet food) to provide taste. We all know what it is like to have soup that contains no salt; we know how much part salt plays in flavouring mass-produced fast foods.

We are to be like salt; we are to give taste and zest to our environment. We do that through the specific outlook on life which we have and which we invite others to share. At their best, Christians have been very effective in doing this, and have had a great impact on the values of many societies and in bringing about great changes.

To be tasteless salt is to be next to useless. Salt that has lost its taste is fit only to be thrown out. At the same time, in the West we sometimes, too, put some salt on the side of our plate. That salt, however tasty it may be, is still not doing any good unless it is put into the food. And this is an interesting feature of salt, namely, that it blends completely with food and disappears. It cannot be seen, but it can be tasted.

That reminds us that we as Christians, if we are to have the effect of giving taste, must be totally inserted in our societies. We have to resist any temptation, as Christians, to withdraw and separate ourselves from the world. It is a temptation we can easily fall into, and there are many places where the Church is absent nowadays. There is no salt there. For example, in our commercial districts, in our industrial areas, in our entertainment and media centres, where is the visible Christian presence?

Other images used by Jesus today include being the “light of the world” or being “a city built on a hill”. There is no way it can be hidden; it sticks out like a beacon. And what is the point of lighting a candle and then covering it over with a tub? You light a candle to give light so that people can see their way and will not fall. To be baptised and to go into virtual hiding is like lighting and then covering up a candle.

Finally, Jesus gives us the reason for making ourselves so visible—so that people may see our good works. Is it in order that we can bask in their admiration and wonder? No! Rather, it is so that people will be led through us to the God who made them, who loves them and wants to lead them to himself.

It is for us today to reflect on how visible our Christian faith is to others, as individuals, as families, as members of a Christian group, as parishioners and as a diocese. Are there people or places in our area where a Christian witness is for all intents and purposes absent? Can we do anything about that?

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Commentary on 2 Corinthians 3:15—4:1,3-6

We continue the point that Paul was making yesterday. We have a passage rich in meaning and full of allusions to the experience at Mount Sinai. He continues telling the Corinthians that observance of the Law by itself can only bring death, while the Spirit brings life.

…to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds…

Paul now switches from the time of the covenant at Mount Sinai to the present time. He is saying that the Israelites in the time of Moses typify the Jews of the present time, and he may also be referring to some Christians of Jewish origin, who still do not recognise the temporary nature of the glory that was seen in Moses. As a result, when the writings of Moses are read in the synagogue, a veil still prevents them recognising the temporary nature of Moses’ glory. There is, as it were, a veil preventing their full understanding.

When Moses read the Law to the people, he had to veil his face because the people could not stand its brightness. But now, Paul says, the veil is not on the face of Moses, but over the minds of the hearers who cannot see that the message of Moses has been overtaken by the Word of Christ. However, Paul says:

…when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.

In Exodus, Moses appeared before God without the veil and gazed on God’s face unprotected. Paul applies that passage to converts to Christianity: when they turn to the Lord fully and authentically, the impediment to their understanding is removed. They can look God in the face:

…the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

The “Lord” to whom the Christian turns is the Spirit of whom Paul has been speaking, the life-giving Spirit of the living God, the inaugurator of the new covenant and ministry. He is also the Spirit of the Christ. And the Spirit of Jesus is a spirit of real freedom, which enables one to follow God’s truth, to love creatively and to become more alive every day. This is in contrast to the smothering effect of the ‘ministry of death’ from the old Law which brought so much condemnation:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Here we have the veil image being used again. Christians (Israelites from whom the veil has been removed) are like Moses, standing in God’s presence, beholding and reflecting his glory. Through our ‘gazing’ at the Lord we become transformed, conformed more and more to the likeness of Jesus, who is himself the very Image of God. As Jesus said:

…whoever sees me sees him who sent me. (John 12:45)

The life-giving Spirit of God, who is also in Jesus, is already present in the community where the transformation is already taking place. The community is the Spirit-filled Body of Christ.

Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.

A ministry of this sort generates confidence and forthrightness, even when Paul—as at present—meets with criticism and opposition. He is confident that the Spirit of God is with him and the work he is doing for the gospel.

Paul now deals briefly with some of the criticism that is aimed at him:

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.

Here is the final application of the veil image. It seems Paul is being criticised either for obscurity in his preaching, or for the way in which he presents the Gospel (perhaps for his criticism of the Jewish tradition, which is particularly resented by some who see Paul himself as a once zealous Jew). He confidently asserts, however, that there is no veil over his Gospel. If some fail to perceive its light, that is because of their lack of belief. Paul says:

…the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

The veil lies over their own eyes, a blindness induced by Satan, “the god of this world”, and a sign that they are headed for destruction.

The criticism of Paul is misdirected:

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake.

The light that is revealed in Paul’s preaching comes, not from him, but from the glory of Christ of which he is the messenger. Far from preaching himself, the preacher should always be a transparent medium through whom Jesus is perceived. The preacher is a ‘slave’ of Jesus and not someone who just uses the name of Jesus to draw attention to himself. As John the Baptist said of Jesus:

He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:30)

Again from Paul:

For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Here Paul alludes to his own dramatic calling when the light shone from heaven on him as he went to Damascus to attack the Christians there. That was the beginning of Paul’s call to serve the gospel of Jesus. Perhaps the quotation is also an echo of the creation of light at the beginning of the Book of Genesis (1:3), and Paul is presenting his apostolic ministry as a new creation. There may also be an allusion to a passage from Isaiah:

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light… (Is 9:2)

Here Paul is suggesting his prophetic calling as servant of the Lord and a light to the nations. And the purpose of his mission is to reveal to others the glory of God visible on the face of Jesus Christ through his life, death and resurrection.

On the one hand, we too, like Moses and Paul, are called to reflect the brightness of God and, at the same time, we ourselves become brighter and brighter as we grow more and more into the image of God. And our light is not, as Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, meant to dazzle or turn people’s gaze away but rather to help them realise the brightness of God himself and lead them on to him:

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. (Matt 5:16)

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Commentary on 2 Corinthians 4:7-15

Having presented an impressive picture of the Christian as someone brighter than Moses’ reflecting the glory and beauty of God’s Word, Paul now goes on to the paradox which this situation raises.

He confronts the difficulty that his present existence does not appear glorious at all, that it is marked instead by suffering and death. He deals with this by developing a topic mentioned earlier, asserting his faith in the presence and ultimate triumph of life, both in his own and in every Christian existence, in spite of the experience of physical suffering and death.

Certainly, many of his critics would have called into question the image he himself offered to the world. And Paul is the first to make the admission:

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

The treasure is the glory that he proclaims and into which all those who hear and accept the message will be transformed. But the instruments carrying that treasure are very fragile, like the small terracotta bowls used for oil lamps.

He will make the same point later on in the letter in his famous passage about the mysterious “sting of the flesh” with which he was afflicted, saying:

…whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:10)

In doing the work of the gospel, Paul describes some of the troubles he has experienced, but their net outcome is that others have benefited:

We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed…

The picture is a negative one, but there is always an underlying experience of bringing help and salvation into people’s lives. As, of course, was the ultimate outcome of the appalling suffering and death of Jesus.

And so Paul concludes that we are:

…always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.

What a marvellous saying! Jesus is the paradigm. Paul’s sufferings are connected with Christ’s and his deliverance is a sign that he is to share in Jesus’ resurrection. Even when battered and bruised and rejected, he is reflecting the life-giving suffering and death of Jesus. This is a saying that could be applied to many who have suffered for the gospel.

He continues in the same vein:

For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us but life in you.

In other words, his experience of suffering does not end in himself, but affects others. The Christ-like suffering which Paul experiences brings life to those to whom he brings the gospel. Here is a living out of the eighth Beatitude:

Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
(Matt 5:10)

All of this is an important clarification of what he meant earlier by the dazzling brightness of the Christian disciple and apostle. The greatest brightness is seen in the one who is ready to undergo every suffering and every indignity for the sake of Jesus. It is the thinking behind John’s Gospel where the evangelist sees Jesus’ last agonising moments on the cross as his moment of glory. It was at that moment that the presence of God in Jesus shone brightest. It was the centurion, seeing the dying and battered body of Jesus, who said:

Truly this man was God’s Son! (Matt 27:54)

So Paul makes no apology for all that he has done in Corinth. Quoting from Psalm 116, he says:

I believed, and so I spoke…

For him, there was no alternative. Like the Psalmist, he clearly proclaims his faith, affirming life within himself despite death and the life-giving effect of his experience upon the church.

And Paul continues:

…we know that the one who raised Jesus will also raise us with Jesus and will present us with you in his presence.

Paul sees God presenting Paul and his companions together with the Corinthians to Jesus at the final parousia. We may note the strong expression of unity and reconciliation between Paul and the Corinthians in spite of the difficulties between them. As he says:

Indeed, everything is for your sake, so that grace, when it has extended to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

Whatever people might say or think of him, Paul had only one aim: the glory of God and that as many as possible should know and acknowledge Jesus as Saviour and Lord. Undoubtedly, Paul had his faults—glaring faults. And some of these faults must have rubbed some people the wrong way, but as he will say later, it is precisely because of these that God’s message shone out more clearly through him.

The same can be said of us. Let us learn to see our weaknesses not as obstacles but as opportunities.

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Commentary on 2 Corinthians 3:4-11

Today’s reading is part of Paul’s defence of his behaviour and of his credentials with the Christian community in Corinth. However, as often happens, it leads him into making statements which go far beyond his own personal interests and leave us with ideas providing much material for theological and spiritual reflection.

In the verses immediately preceding our reading, Paul has just said that one of his main credentials are the Christians of Corinth themselves.

You are our letter of commendation written on our hearts, known and read by all.

And ultimately he now says that all the credit for what has been achieved in Corinth comes not from Paul himself but from God.

He is the one who has give us the qualifications to be the administrators of this new covenant.

Paul has not appointed himself; it God in Jesus who has called him. And this “new covenant” is not of a written law, but of the Spirit. It is a covenant not confined to a legal document but is the living testimony of the Corinthians themselves.

And, perhaps in a remark aimed at some of his more legalistic critics, he affirms that:

…the written letters bring death, but the Spirit gives life.

It is a remark that should be engraved on all our hearts. Again and again, it has been the lists of laws and rules that has often been the kiss of death for Christian communities, and it is a problem which continues to bedevil us today. For Paul, to cling tenaciously to the letter of the Law is to die, to atrophy.

Paul’s confidence is grounded in his sense of a God-given mission. His qualifications come entirely from God’s calling. Paul is now living in a new covenant, characterised by the Spirit, which gives life. The term ‘new covenant’ comes from Jeremiah:

The days are coming says the Lord when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant and I had to show myself their master, says the Lord. This is the covenant I will make…after those days. I will place my law within them, and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jer 31:31-33)

And he goes on in words that must have been very provocative for some of his more conservative hearers:

…if there was so much brightness accompanying the giving of the Law on Mt Sinai, such that the people could not look directly at the shining face of Moses, what brightness must accompany the giving of the Spirit?

Paul’s words here seem directed against individuals who appeal to the glorious Moses and fail to perceive any comparable glory either in Paul’s life as an apostle, or in the Gospel he preaches. He asserts in response that Christians have a glory of their own that far surpasses that of Moses. Not so much because of who they are, but because of the message which inspires their lives.

He refers to the Old Law, carved on tablets of stone, as a “ministry of death”. He is speaking of the Mosaic law in its limitations. It leads to death rather than life, to condemnation rather than reconciliation. For its defendants, it was “glorious”, as indicated by the shining face of Moses. Paul does not deny that, but asserts that its glory was only temporary and fades in the face of Jesus’ ministry of life. The glory of the new reduces the former glory to no glory at all.

If there was any splendour in administering condemnation, there must be very much greater splendour in administering justification.

This is the difference between the law and the Spirit. The law tends to bring judgement on people, but the Spirit gives life and renewal. The law points out the limits for people’s behaviour – ‘Don’t do this’, ‘Don’t do that’. The Spirit calls forward to a much deeper level of living.

If the ministry of condemnation was glorious, the ministry of righteousness will abound much more in glory.

The Law was a complex of things that must be done, and even more things that must not be done. The “ministry of righteousness” we find in the teaching of Jesus is inspiration continually to reach beyond ourselves. It is the difference between the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. In the fact, the Law, which seemed such a great thing at the time, has now been surpassed by a far more inspirational vision.

Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfil it. In doing so, he simply left it behind.

For if what was going to fade was glorious, how much more will what endures be glorious.

It is that Spirit which Paul wants the Corinthians to experience rather than go back to the old days of blindly following a legalistic system, whose observance was often measured by what could be seen externally. The Law leads to rigidity and stagnation, the Spirit to spontaneity and creativity.

What Paul said then is equally true for us now. There is a certain tempting security in following a set of do’s and don’ts which some people are tempted to follow, but it leads ultimately to stagnation, and often to a not very attractive self-righteousness. It is the Spirit that gives life and brings people together in love, unity and harmony. That is the only way that the Kingdom can be built.

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Commentary on 2 Corinthians 1:18-22

It seems that Paul has incurred a certain amount of criticism from the Corinthians and is coming to his own defence. In the verses just preceding today’s reading, he admits that he had intended paying them a double visit. On his way to Macedonia, he intended passing through Corinth and then pass through Corinth again on his way back. He did not do this, and it seems he was accused of being two-faced, of being a ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ person at the same time. Feelings seem to have been so strong against Paul that he had to deal with the problem at a distance through letters and delegations (internal conflicts among Christians are nothing new!).

Unable to deny the change in plans, Paul nonetheless asserts the firmness of the original plan and claims that it does not indicate in any way a lack of constancy in his behaviour and work. He grounds his defence in God himself, who is utterly firm and reliable. So he claims that this quality can be expected to be found in varying degrees in all those who are associated with God. Christ, Paul and the Corinthians all participate in analogous ways in the constancy of God.

So he goes to his own defence and denies that he was in any way two-faced:

As surely as God is faithful, our word to you is not “Yes and No.”

Like Jesus, his Lord, he claims that he together with his missionary companions, Timothy and Silvanus, were never anything but ‘Yes’.

However many God’s promises are, they are always an unequivocal ‘Yes’—not ‘No’ or ‘Maybe’. Similarly, an ‘Amen’ (‘So be it’) from Paul and his helpers goes through Jesus to God for his glory. The real source of Paul’s security in the Corinthians and the one who anointed him and his companions for their work is the same God. Their guarantee of that is their total endorsement of Jesus.

In turn he says:

…it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, who has put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a down payment.

The Corinthians should be assured, then, that his failure to make the promised visit was not due to any insincerity on Paul’s part.

We might note that a number of the terms in the passage, which appear related only in concept in Paul’s Greek or an English translation, would be variations of the same root in a Semitic mind, such as Paul’s. These include the words ‘yes’, ‘faithful’, ‘amen’, ‘gives us security’, ‘faith’, and ‘stand firm’.

Integrity is an essential quality in our Christian life:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
(Matt 5:8)

People need to be confident that what they see in us and hear from us comes from deep within us. Paraphrasing the slogan, we should be able to say of ourselves, “What you see is what there is”. Falsehood or hypocrisy of any kind will seriously diminish the effectiveness of our Christian witness.

Parents and teachers and others responsible for the formation of the young have a special responsibility here. We are not to be like the Pharisees who teach one thing and do differently.