Baptism of the Lord

Written by Isaac Fernandes Wednesday, 16 January 2013 07:15

Baptism of the Lord

13 January 2013

Inauguration

President Obama will be inaugurated for the second time next week and he will spend the next four years trying to push through various policies he believes will benefit his country and the world beyond. His programmes will be practical and backed up by the force of law. If they succeed they will affect the circumstances of people’s lives but he would never claim that he can legislate into being a better person. 

In the ancient Jewish world the Messiah was eagerly longed for in the hope that he would bring about a new society freed from the oppression of Greeks and Romans. He would usher in an ideal state such as people thought existed under King David. (No one seriously thinks it did but at least Israel was free from external enemies).

As we look at our society today the Messiah no longer has a capital M but he is there all the while in the advertisements that tell us how to create the ideal world for ourselves by satisfying our desires. So many of the things that attract us do excite us for a while, but we also discover which are of lasting value and which are not.

Christmas time ends with the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan and the gospel writers tell us that the event was accompanied by ‘a voice from heaven’. The voice is inaugurating the kingdom, or better the reign, of God through a person. The Jews were disappointed. Where were the signs they had long expected would be associated with the coming of the Messiah? Their current oppressors, the Romans, were firmly in charge and Jesus showed no interest in removing them.

Instead he spoke of seeds growing in the fields and leaven fermenting the dough. He laid down only one law and that was unenforceable.  His teaching ‘made a deep impression’ because he went to the heart of every person and called on them to change their way of thinking. He wanted a new world but he wanted it through the conversion of hearts which flow into the conversion of structures. There was no way this newly inaugurated leader could legislate or enforce his programme.  He appealed to the noblest that is in every human being and said to them: ‘Come. Do not be afraid!’ ‘They did not know that I was the one caring for them … with leading strings of love’ (Hos 11:3). 

Fr David Harold-Barry SJ 

Epiphany: Curiosity is a virtue

Written by Administrator Sunday, 06 January 2013 14:14

The Epiphany

6 January 2013

Curiosity is a virtue

Twice, in the space of a few lines, we are told that John the Baptist ‘did not know him’ (John 1: 31& 33). The ‘him’ refers to Jesus and John the Baptist, according to Luke (1:36) was his cousin. So how come he did not know him?

The time after Christmas – before we get sucked back into ‘ordinary’ days – is a time of ‘showing.’ Jesus is shown to the shepherds, then to the wise men from the east and finally at the baptism in the Jordan. When there is a new baby in the family we are happy to ‘show’ the child to relatives and neighbours. They are curious to meet and to know the new child and curiosity was held, by Augustine, to be a great virtue. Curiosity has got us to Mars and the i Pad though it has not yet got us to peace in Syria and the Great Lakes.

Showing and curiosity are two sides of the same coin. I can show you something beautiful but if you are not interested I am wasting my time. John the Baptist was curious. He ‘knew’ Jesus on one level. Maybe they played together as kids and did together all the things children do. 

But at a deeper level John did not know him until he was ‘shown’ him by the Spirit (John 1:33). Then he really knew him and he searched for images that would express the distance he now felt between himself and Jesus, ‘I am not fit to undo the strap of his sandal’ (v. 27).  

Even Joseph and Mary did not know him at first. That incident in the temple when Jesus was 12 years old is revealing. Surely we remember when we were teenagers how we longed to ‘be myself.’ There are all these adults around telling me what to do. Can’t they give me some space to discover myself? That is what Jesus did. And the beautiful thing is his parents didn’t interfere. They did not understand but they said nothing.

Getting to know Jesus takes time and these days after Christmas are all about that. It is not something we can do in these few days but at least we can remind ourselves that that is what it is all about. That is our agenda for this year and every year. ‘One day, we will see him (and know him) as he is’ (I John 3:2). But for now we have to be content to ‘see as in a glass, darkly’ (I Cor. 13:12). But whether we see clearly or darkly we are called to be curious about Jesus and that means about all his brothers and sisters whom we see, because we don’t see him – yet.

Fr David Harold- Barry SJ

Feast of the Holy Family

Written by Administrator Tuesday, 01 January 2013 13:19

Feast of the Holy Family

30 December 2012 

I can do no other

It is a paradox, a kind of contradiction, that we are most free when we choose to do what we ‘have’ to do. We grow up with all sorts of ‘have tos’. We have to live in obedience to our parents when we are small, we have to go to school, we have to train in order to perfect some skill, we have to make sacrifices in order to love authentically. We know that freedom does not mean just doing what I like when I like without any regard for consequences. We have to, as it were, train our freedom so that we can sometimes choose to do something that is really difficult but which we know is in harmony with our fundamental choices. 

In a few years (2017) we will celebrate the 500^th centenary of Martin Luther’s decisive action that launched the Reformation. He had no intention of dividing the Church but the opposition he met with led him to harden his position and at the moment of his trial he simply said, ‘here I stand, I can do no other.’ In other words he chose to take the only stand he felt he could take. ‘He chose’ but in a sense he did not choose. ‘He had no choice,’ as we often say.

Priests and ministers of the Christian faith often notice that they are welcomed to conduct services for those who die. But the time comes when they are thanked and politely told they have done their job. Everyone knows that other ceremonies then take place that people feel they ‘have to’ perform even if these ceremonies are in conflict with what the priest or pastor has just done.

What is this connection between freedom and ‘have to’? Which sort of ‘have tos’ are expressions of freedom and which are not?

When Jesus was ‘lost’ in the temple at the age of 12 (Luke 2:41) he answered his parents anxious questions by saying, ‘I had to be about my Father’s business’. We are told they did not understand but, reflecting back, we can at least say that Jesus was absorbed by the will of his Father (John 4:34). While he was the most free human being that ever lived he was also the most ‘bound’. He told the two on the way to Emmaus, ‘ought not’ the Christ suffer (Luke 24:25).

Yes, we ‘are driven’ to act in certain ways and we often say ‘I have to do this.’ But Jesus is inviting us to look at what fundamentally drives us. Is all this compulsive activity we go in for really an expression of freedom? He calls us to look at what we do spontaneously: is it good?  

Fr David Harold-Barry SJ

Christmas Journey

Written by Administrator Wednesday, 26 December 2012 06:40

25 December 2012

Christmas Journey

Bus journeys, car journeys, air journeys – people like to travel at Christmas. Families gather. Generations meet. It is a time of coming together and celebrating relationships and enjoying being with family and friends. Those who stop and ponder the original Christmas recall that it too was marked by journeys. Mary and Joseph set out for Bethlehem; the shepherds journey to the manger; the wise men come from the east and the holy family flee to Egypt.

All this movement can stand as a symbol of the restless energy we are conscious of every day as our world struggles towards its goal of perfect justice and peace for everyone. Fifty years ago the greatest meeting the planet has ever witnessed gathered in Rome. More than two thousand people met for four years to write documents in which they struggled to explain in contemporary words their age old message. ‘The fundamental purpose,’ they wrote, ‘of (economic activity) must not be the multiplication of products. It must not be profit or domination. Rather it must be the service of the person, and indeed of the whole person, viewed in terms of their material needs and the demands of their intellectual, moral, spiritual and religious life. And when we say person we mean every person whatsoever and every group of people, of whatever race and from whatever part of the world.’ (Vatican Council II, The Church today, # 64, December 7, 1965).  

The council expressed again and again in its sixteen documents its belief that human kind is on a journey. It is a journey that began long ago in the evolution of the planet and of our species. Scientists have calculated the immense age of the universe and of our earth and finally the length of time we, humans, have been around. But in the ‘short’ time we have lived we have developed the world at an ever increasing speed. What is the goal of this journey? For the council, and for all those for whom the council spoke, there is only one answer; we are on a journey towards achieving perfect peace and justice for every person, the City of God.

The greatest boost we received on this journey was when God himself came to walk with us, he became one of us and shouldered the burdens of the journey with us. He carried our cross of inequality where the rich have more than they need while the poor suffer in destitution. He carried our cross of injustice where human rights are acknowledged in constitutions but ignored in practice. He carried our cross of division where people are discriminated against because of the group to which they belong or their party or their faith. And he carried all the other crosses that men and women and children carry sorrowfully along the way. He is the Simon of Cyrene who helps to carry the cross of his suffering brothers and sisters. He walks with us now and assures us of victory. We will get there. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But we will get there. This is the hope and the joy of Christmas.   

Fr David Harold-Barry SJ