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

Let me begin by asking you a question: Where is the oldest English institution anywhere in the world outside England itself? Before I tell you what it is, let me tell you something about it. It is six hundred and sixty-two years old, and although its exact purpose has changed several times since its foundation in 1362 during the reign of the great King Edward III, it is still in the same location and even partly in the same original buildings.

Well, in case you haven’t already guessed, I will tell you: it is now known as the Venerable English College and it is in the heart of ancient Rome. It was founded as a hostel for English pilgrims to the eternal City and subsequently became also the home of the ambassadors of the Kings of England to the Pope. In 1579, after the steady flow of English pilgrims to Rome had dried up because of the so-called Reformation, Cardinal William Allen petitioned the Pope to refound the hostel in its original buildings as a new college for the training of priests who would return to England to keep alive the Catholic faith in the face of persecution and even probable death. This College still exists to this day, and it is where I myself trained for the priesthood in the 1970’s and 80’s. It bears witness to the continuity of English Catholic life from before the Reformation to the present day in a way that hardly any other institutions can do, because it is both completely English and has never been under Protestant rule.

Why am I talking about this great College, this historic English institution abroad? It is because it is dedicated to arguably the greatest English Saint of the Middle Ages, St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and martyr. St Thomas was famous in his lifetime and even more famous after his violent death at the hands of four of King Henry II’s knights. In the High Middle Ages, Thomas was one of the best known of saints not only in England but abroad. Many churches were dedicated to him, and the name ‘Thomas’ became one of the most popular in England because of him. Think of Thomas More, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell in the reign of Henry VIII just for starters. Pilgrimages to his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral were hugely popular, so much that one of the greatest early works of English literature was based on the tradition of pilgrims travelling in groups from London to Canterbury – the ‘Canterbury Tales’ by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is fascinating to think that Chaucer wrote this now very old seeming poetry some decades after the foundation of the English Hostel in Rome, and that the hostel is still there in the same place!

So why was Thomas Becket, St Thomas of Canterbury, so very famous and so very popular? Why are we celebrating his feast day here today? It is because what he stands for is so very important, and the way in which he stood firm in the face of great peril shows such bravery and conviction, that we remember him today and, here in Tettenhall especially, because he is the patron saint of this church and parish.

St Thomas was born in London in 1119 or 20, the son of wealthy Norman parents. Also. Because this was only about 50 years after the Norman conquest, he would have spoken Norman French rather than English. After being educated in Paris, which was then the most important intellectual centre of Western Europe, he returned to England where he became a clerk in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, who was, of course, a Norman like all the leading churchmen and landowners in England at that time. Thomas was not a priest, it must be said, and seems to have had no intention of ever becoming one. He was, in effect, a highly efficient and competent civil servant, a man of affairs and capable of handling complex issues to do with money, property and law. His great abilities brought him to the attention of the twenty-two-year-old king, Henry II, who ascended the throne in 1154, when Thomas was himself about 30 years of age.

Thomas and Henry became firm friends and the king appointed Thomas his Chancellor, the head of the government. Thomas had power over many aspects of church and state, controlling taxation and spending. It is curious to recognise the parallels between this King Henry and the later King Henry VIII, who also became a good friend of the slightly older Thomas More, whom he would make his Chancellor nearly four centuries later, and with whom he, too, would fall out to the point of having him killed.

But Henry II went one step further than Henry VIII would go with Thomas More; for when Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury died in 1162, Henry II decided to have Thomas Becket, his friend and Chancellor, appointed Theobald’s successor. Thomas resisted for as long as he could. He was unhappy at the prospect of becoming the Archbishop. This was not only because he was not even a priest, but because he knew something that the King didn‘t understand: namely that if he were ever to be given the great responsibility before Almighty God of being the most important bishop in all England, then he would have to behave towards the king his friend in a far different way. No longer would Thomas put the king’s interests and wishes first, but rather God’s.

Now Thomas, although until now a layman, had always been pious and dutiful, but nobody would have expected what happened next. Thomas began to insist on doing his duties as a bishop and on being treated as God’s representative and as protector of the Church. Where the king wanted to exploit the Church’s wealth for his own purposes, Thomas resisted. But Thomas was not merely a stout defender of the Church against the King, he was also a man dedicated to the Gospel. He regularly gave alms to the poor, often washing their feet himself and wearing penitential garb in place of the splendid robes of such a great churchman. His firmness in face of the King may seem somewhat excessive to us now and it would be unhelpful to go through all the details of the back and forth between Henry and Thomas. But one thing is worth stressing: such was the falling out between the two men that Thomas was forced to flee the country and live in exile in a French monastery for no less than six years. Only after that was the King prevailed upon to allow the Archbishop back to his own country and his see of Canterbury. But after only a short time the King once again tried to bring the Church under his control and Thomas once again resisted firmly. It was then that, just after Christmas Day in 1170, the King flew into a rage and said something which he came to regret. There are different accounts of the exact words but it matter little, because the result was that four of the King’s knights set off immediately to Canterbury to sort the Archbishop out for good and all.

Once they arrived, they sought out Thomas. The Archbishop’s attendants saw how furious the knights were and begged Thomas to hide away and if possible to flee once more. But Thomas was adamant. He would neither hide nor flee. He stood his ground before the armed men inside the Cathedral while the Office of Vespers was being sung in the choir. In a rage they all struck him with their swords and slew him, even slicing off the top of his skull with the force of their blows.

When the news of this got back to the King, he was appalled and tried to blame his men for misunderstanding his words, but the whole country and indeed the whole of Europe knew of the quarrel that had raged between the two men and King Henry was excommunicated by the Pope. He sought forgiveness and was obliged to humiliate himself by being stripped and flogged outside the Cathedral where Thomas had been murdered before being readmitted to Communion.

Meanwhile the Pope canonised Saint Thomas only three years after his death, one of the fastest canonisations in history. This was not just a political act on the part of the Church and the Pope, not merely a way of saying ‘Thomas has won’, but a recognition of Thomas’s true sanctity. People from all over England were already flocking to his tomb and there were wonderful miracles reported there as evidence of his holiness. That is why his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral became so important and his name was so popular in England, and why the English Hospice in Rome was named after him.

So, when a later King Henry, the eighth of that name, was enraged at the thought of an archbishop resisting one of his own predecessors, he not only had St Thomas’s shrine destroyed but tried utterly to obliterate his memory. His feast day was abolished and any reference to St Thomas was brutally eliminated from all religious books. For instance, back in the English College archive there is a late mediaeval Altar Missal from England which still bears the scars of this purge. The Mass for St Thomas of Canterbury on December 29^th has been brutally scored out and defaced. Fortunately, of course, Henry VIII did not win. The Venerable English College was never under the direct jurisdiction of Henry VIII’s tyranny and continued to celebrate St Thomas’s Day today as its patronal feast on this day. So, I am glad to say, do you here in Tettenhall, for both this church and the college church in Rome are dedicated to the one whom Geoffrey Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales called ‘the Holy blissful Martyr’. And St Thomas’s Day is still commemorated in the Universal Calendar of the Catholic Church. St Thomas of Canterbury, patron of the English clergy, pray for England and pray for us. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, for many years this solemnity of Christ the King has been regarded by many people as something of an embarrassment. Isn’t it rather old-fashioned to be thinking of Christ as a King? Surely we have outgrown that kind of thing. What is a king, after all? He is a ruler, one with authority to govern and to command respect and obedience. He is not elected and does not have to give an account of himself to anyone living. This kind of ruler was all very well in the ancient world, with such figures as the Pharaohs of Egypt, or Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, or Darius the Great of Persia. And even in the time of our Lord, the ruler of the whole Roman Empire was not a king, but an Imperator, the Latin word for ‘commander’ which really means the ruler of the army – even though the word Imperator gives us the word ‘Emperor’, which might seem to be more than a king, because from Imperator comes the word Empire.

And of course, in the Middle Ages all the nations of Europe were ruled by kings. Curiously enough, the first country to get rid of a king as its ruler was England, when Oliver Cromwell brought about the execution of King Charles I and made himself ‘Protector of the Realm’, most definitely not king. Even after Cromwell’s death, when Charles II returned from exile to take up the throne as king, his sovereign power, his ability to rule as he wished, was somewhat limited by Parliament, and so, over the course of three centuries, we come to King Charles III, whose role is defined not by election but by descent from his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth. The name of the country in which we live is the United Kingdom; it is not a republic. But of course, the king is not the absolute ruler of this kingdom. He is the Head of State, but not the Head of Government. He is what we call a ‘constitutional monarch’. So his kingship, his authority, is very much less even than that of the Prime Minister who heads the government. And the Prime Minister does not enjoy uncontrolled authority either. He (or she) must submit to the process of public election every four or five years. He or she can be dis-elected, so to speak. A king, however, cannot be deselected, because he was not elected in the first place. He inherited his throne, his crown, his kingly status.

But just because we do have a king doesn’t make this feast of Christ the King any easier to understand. I think it is at least as difficult for us to understand what it means to call Christ a king, indeed our king, as it is for, say, the Americans, whose republic was founded on the principle of rejecting royal power and privilege. Americans think that kingship is something from their past, from the time when they were colonials, subjects of the King of Great Britain. This makes the idea of Christ the King difficult for them to understand in yet another way from us.

Now Christ is altogether a different kind of king from this. In the Gospel we have heard, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus if He is a king? Why? Because this is an accusation that has been brought against Jesus. It is not a title of dignity in the thought of the Jewish people and the chief priests. For them, Christ is an upstart who has falsely claimed to be king. And, furthermore, as our Lord says, if He were a king in the usual sense of the word, would not He have soldiers under His command who would defend Him against His enemies? Yet here Christ is, standing before the Roman Governor, a representative of the Roman Emperor, about to be condemned to death. What kind of king is He really? Listen as He tells us precisely what kind of King he is: ‘Yes, I am a king. I was born for this. I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth.’ This is indeed not like any other kingship. Where others have rule over kingdoms and command armies and raise tribute to fund their lifestyles, Jesus is utterly different. He has come to bear witness to the truth.

We need to ponder this idea of kingship in order to understand it. What is truth? This is, in fact, they very question that Pilate goes on to ask immediately after the end of this passage. Was he serious? Did he not know what truth is? I think Pilate was a good example of a man who had got where he was by lots of compromises. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He had had to please the right people, marry the right wife, get himself seen and promoted by those who had influence and who had the ear of the Emperor. If you are going to get on, then you have to cut corners where truth is concerned. You can’t be too highly principled. You can’t be too picky about how people are treated.

This is where truth is so demanding. Truth is the absolute ruler of conscience. It is not elected, it is not chosen. It is given. Truth comes not from us but from Him who made us. There is no my truth opposed to your truth, This is what Jesus our King embodies. It is what He lived for and what He died for. But His death was not the end. As the Second reading from the Apocalypse put it: Jesus is the ‘first born from the dead, the Ruler of the kings of the earth.’ So He, who was put to death by Pilate at the insistence of the Jewish people and chief priests, has been raised to life, to a life that can never end. Although His kingdom is not of this world, it will come upon the world one day with complete, undeniable, authority. But it cannot be an oppressive authority. It cannot be authoritarian. It is the authority which was foretold in the first reading by the great prophet Daniel, who foresaw ‘one like a son of man…He came into the presence of the one of great age, (that is, God the Father). On Him was conferred sovereignty, glory and kingship.’ These are the qualities of kingship. Of that sovereignty Daniel goes on to speak further, saying: ‘His sovereignty is an eternal sovereignty, which shall never pass away.’ Christ has kingship conferred upon Him, not by election, but by appointment. It is God’s doing. But we must understand that this sovereignty is not oppression. His rule is not to subject us to tyranny, but to set us free. In His rule is the true freedom of those who are His subjects by choice, that is by faith.

We are subject in this life to many forms of tyranny, mostly of our own making; the tyranny of sin and temptation which we find so difficult to escape from; the tyranny of rule by lies and untruth – such as that which is perpetuated by the media which misrepresents the truth about God and about our relation to Him and to each other. The lie that is summed up in the culture of death, which sees the power to kill children In the womb and suicide as the highest forms of freedom, when they are really slavery and despair. Christ, on the other hand, has made us free by His death, so that we can be liberated from sin and untruth of all kinds. It is truth that sets us free, not lies. Truth shows us the real value of death and its relation to life, not just this life, but eternal life. If we acknowledge Christ as our King, then we will be made into a kingdom of priests to serve our God and Father. If we are on the side of truth, then we will listen to Christ’s voice. We will know how to reject the subtlety of lies and half-truths.

Then we will be among those who see Him coming on the last day in glory, along with all those who pierced Him and killed Him. For ‘His sovereignty is an eternal sovereignty which shall never pass away; nor will His empire be destroyed.’

This is the meaning of Christ’s eternal kingship. He already has it, but it will only be fully revealed when He comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The difference is this: that those who have lived this life in denial of Him and of the Truth will see Him coming and will wail and howl at the sight. But those who have lived by faith in Him and have been prepared to face persecution and rejection on account of witnessing to the Truth, will welcome His coming with unbounded joy. Because when He comes as King, to those who love Him now He is now oppressor but a liberator. We ourselves will become not slaves and subjects, but kings, for to serve Him is not only to be free, but it is to reign. That is what heaven will be for those who wait longingly for Christ to reveal His Kingship in all its glory and majesty.

There is a lot about coins in the Gospels. They frequently appear in our Lord’s parables. The coins with which the Good Samaritan pays for the welfare of the man who fell among thieves; The talents, of which the servant who received only one hid it in the ground and gave it back to his master without any interest, for which he was roundly condemned. Then in actual events they figure more often than we might realise. Yesterday on the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran, we heard how our Lord overthrew the money-changers’ tables in the Temple and scattered their coins around. On another occasion our Lord told Peter to pay the temple tax with a coin which he would find inside the mouth of a fish which he was going to catch in the Lake of Galilee. Then our Lord wonderfully confounds His foes when they ask Him about the legitimacy of paying taxes to Caesar by asking them whose image is stamped on the coinage they pay the tax with. Most dreadful of all are the thirty silver pieces. I need say no more about them.

The widow of today’s Gospel gave from out of her poverty, from all she had to live on, as our Lord observes. What she gave is sometimes called ‘the widow’s mite’, but St Mark tells us that she gave two coins, which he calls ‘lepta’, the smallest denomination of currency available.

I recall an occasion when I was the junior curate in a parish where we were three priests (yes, there used to be such days of clerical abundance!) It was Christmas Day in the Presbytery. The PP used to insist that because the Christmas Collection was for the clergy, then the clergy should count it and share it out. Well, as we waded through paper money and lots of odd coins, I came across three small envelopes, all in good condition, so not reused, carefully sealed from end to end and, when I opened them I found in each one a single penny. Well, it was obvious that they had been deliberately given in that way to attract our attention, and the donor clearly succeeded as here I am telling you about this some forty years later. To this day I don’t know whether that was a reflection of what the donor thought of the priestly ministry he or she was receiving from us, or if it was a real case of the widow’s mite, or three mites on that occasion. But even pennies, forty years ago, though not very valuable, were still not the smallest denomination. There used to be in those days still the halfpenny, a word I suspect some of you may not even have heard before, much less actually had in your pocket or used to pay towards anything.

Coinage, or money in general, represents value – something we put a price on and we give either in order to gain something else in return, or just to discharge a duty like paying taxes. But in the case of the widow’s lepta they are hardly able to buy anything. So the value they represented to the Temple Treasury is virtually infinitesimal. On the other hand, the large sums of money Our Lord sees put in by the rich could have contributed substantially to the daily expenditure of Temple outlay: the equivalent of their Hayes and Finch weekly bill for candles, or for vestments, or perhaps to pay for cleaning, or even the occasional sacrificial animal, maybe.

Nonetheless, Our Lord points out to His disciples the true value of anything given is to be identified not with what you can buy with it, but with what it costs the giver, and also something else – what it means to whoever receives it. And if what is given and received is, as in this case, not something given under compulsion, but freely, then the value is quite different from that of the price of something bought or sold. So, in this case, the widow’s two tiny lepta are very precious indeed.

First, she gave freely. This was not compelled, like the Temple Tax or any other tax for that matter. Secondly, she gave from her great need, not from wealth. This represented a far greater value both to the woman and also to God to whom it was given. Thirdly, she gave both her lepta, when she could reasonably have given just one and kept the other for her needs. After all, as a widow, she has very limited income. A wife or mother relies on her husband or children to supply her needs. Without a man in the home, where is the money going to come from? If the widow today gives away the only two coins she possesses, where is she going to get what she needs for a small meal?

This is what Elijah’s example teaches us. He meets the widow of Sidon, (and note she was not a Jew), and asks her for a drink of water and a mere scrap of bread. Not much to ask for. She replies, ‘as the Lord your God lives,’ - and this is how we know she is not a Jew, because she refers to Elijah’s God as your God – ‘I have no bread but only a little flour and oil. I am at this very moment gathering a couple of sticks to make a small fire to cook this tiny amount, and after that is eaten my son and I shall die because we have nothing else to eat.’ Elijah’s next word is very important: ‘Fear not!’ - for she is obviously resigned to death by starvation very soon, - ‘trust me because I speak now the Lord God’s word to you.’ And so, trusting his word, the widow does as he has asked her and she receives her reward. She does not receive a whole barnful of flour nor a tankerload of oil, but just enough to get by each day until the end of the drought.

She has put her trust in God’s messenger, and she is saved. Her generosity and her trust together are a very valuable offering in the sight not just of Elijah but also in the sight of God. This is how our Lord sees the widow’s offering. It is given as the offering of a free and willing heart and is given with complete trust in God. We can be sure that she is among the great saints in heaven even if she didn’t ever meet our Lord in this life and find out how much He knew about her. She certainly knows now!

And we know about her because our Lord told His disciples about the real value of what she had given. We, too, can be absolutely sure that He knows everything we give to Him and in what spirit of generosity and trust. We can offer not just money (or the lack of it), but the coinage of our entire lives to the service of His Temple, of His holy Sanctuary, in the priesthood. God receives with great joy what we offer Him with a generous spirit, when we put our trust in His goodness to us. He will most certainly honour and reward whatever we offer Him. Poor as we are in our own estimation, weak as we may be in so many ways, God doesn’t look at the value of what we give as being no more to Him that two tiny lepta, but rather as the offering of our hearts in love and gratitude to Him, and for that love and gratitude He will reward us, and when He rewards us, then like the widow herself, we will know then, too!

Last Thursday was the anniversary of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther technically launched the Protestant revolt against the Church. He opposed, among other things, the Church’s practice and teaching concerning Purgatory and those who go there, and what we can do to help those souls. Luther objected to the whole idea of Purgatory, both because he said that, since it is not mentioned in Scripture it can’t be true, and also because he thought it wasn’t necessary anyway. When we die, if we die in God’s favour, whether we are sinners or not, so long as we are forgiven we go straight to heaven. No Purgatory. No nasty punishment for sins. No fearsome fires.

But it is very timely to remind ourselves on this first Sunday of November what the Church actually does teach about Purgatory. The first point is that we must always make amends for our misdeeds. Not just a matter of forgiveness by those whom we harm or offend, but of satisfaction. e.g. When someone commits a crime in this life and are taken to court, then, whether they are sorry or not, whether they are forgiven or not, they have to make amends. They are fined or sent to prison. In the same way after this life is over there is a need of Purgatory.

The second point is that we cannot see God in heaven until we are fully holy, therefore, if we are not already perfectly holy at the time of our death, we need to be made perfect before we can enter heaven. Therefore, after this life there is the need for Purgatory.

The third point is that all humanity is somehow joined together. When I say ‘all’, I am including those who are dead. Sin is something we all share in, as a result of Adam, who is the cause of original sin. St Paul says: ‘when one [part of the body] is hurt, all parts are hurt with it’. We are all affected by the sins of others. But so too, thank God, we are affected by the goodness of others, and share in that too, for again Paul says: ‘If one part [of the body] is given special honour, all parts [of the body] enjoy it.’ (1Cor 12:26). Now the entire human race consists of those who are alive now and those who are dead. And the Church, too, consists of those who live now and those who are dead. As St Paul says, ‘if we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ, who is the head by whom the whole body is fitted and joined together.

The fourth point is that however much sin there is in the whole human race and in all history, the grace of Christ is greater than all sin. So, in the end, goodness will always triumph even in us poor sinners, but only when we have been changed inwardly by it. This is what makes the saints what they are. They are those who were once in the world like us and had to overcome sin in order to become what they now are in heaven. But the saints are still joined to us by descent from Adam, and by union in Christ, whom St Paul calls the ‘new Adam’, for just as Adam, who sinned, is the father of the entire human race, so Christ is the author of the human race renewed and saved by His grace. So St Paul says: ‘however great the number of sins committed, grace was even greater; and so, just as sin reigned wherever there was death, so grace will reign to bring eternal life, thanks to the righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ (Rom 5:20-21)

But our being in this altogether, the living and the dead, the sinners, those needing purification, those who have been made perfect, means that we all have a part to play in helping each other. We ask the saints to pray for us, because they are one with us in Christ. So too, we can pray for the souls who are being purified, and who are paying their debt of sin, including those sins already forgiven by God. Those souls want to be purged, they want to become fully holy once they have glimpsed the Face of God after death.

They know they are not yet able to stand the gaze of that loving Face, but they long to be able to do so. That is why Purgatory is, rather paradoxically, described in Catholic tradition as both painful and joyful at the same time.

But this is the crunch for us here and now in November, in the month of prayers for those souls who long for the completion of what they need in order to be able freely and joyfully to enter and stay in God’s presence: our loving assistance. Love is the key to all this. God’s love is so great that when we realise it for the first time on leaving this world, it utterly overwhelms us. In the Dream of Gerontius, Saint John Henry, Cardinal Newman pictured the soul of Gerontius going into the presence of God, seeing His loving Creator and Redeemer face to face, and recognising for the first time the infinite greatness of that love, and the amazing fact that such love brought God to become a son of Adam, and take Adam’s sin upon Himself on the cross so as to free us from sin’s consequences: which are everlasting death and damnation. In the sight of that beautiful face, Gerontius can only say: ‘take me away!’ for all he wants at this moment of understanding is to be cleansed of all his imperfections, which make him unworthy of that loving God, and to make amends for absolutely everything that he has ever done wrong.

So we come to the fifth point: the idea of Purgatory does not deny the loving mercy of God, but builds on it. Without God’s mercy there would be no opportunity to make amends after this life is over. It would be: ‘you’ve had your chance, you’ve completely messed up, and now you have deserved hell for ever.’ But thank God for His mercy which says to the deceased soul, ‘now on glimpsing my face you have seen the meaning of all that life was really about, and how you failed to love me properly, whether in your practice of the faith, or keeping free of sin, or in your lack of care for your neighbour, now you can make amends, now you can become truly holy and prepare to enter into the everlasting joy of your Lord with our Lady and all the saints.’

That is where we come in. For again as St Paul says, ‘It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that still has to be undergone by Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church.’ (Col.1:24). It is this which is at the heart of the practice of indulgences obtained for the souls in Purgatory, for by our loving sacrifices we can accelerate the change which they must undergo, we can alleviate the suffering which they endure simply from knowing how much they need that purification, how much they need and want to make amends. Our love can help them. That is what Christ asks of us, as a sign of solidarity with the Church in Purgatory.

But what exactly are indulgences? What are we doing when we say some prayers, and do so specifically for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory? How does that help them? Well, this is because of the union we have with Christ. He is the one who has perfectly fulfilled all that is necessary for our salvation, but he asks us to share, with Him, the work of purification, both our own and others’. We are members of His Body and so we share in His sufferings and His triumph. But just as we still have to grow in holiness ourselves, so too do the souls of the dead who are not yet perfect on leaving this world. As we are helped by the saints, and as we help our brothers and sisters in Christ around us who are in need, so too we can help those who are also in need, but not any longer in this world and life, to make that final preparation for complete union with Christ and God.

So, please, during this month of November, remember to pray for those souls undergoing this state of preparation for heaven, so that our sacrifices, in union with Christ’s saving death and resurrection, may be of service to them.

And here’s something else: when we do this, we not only help the souls in purgatory, but we actually grow in holiness ourselves. For there is nothing mechanical about this. We have to put our whole selves into it; hence the central importance of being in a state of grace – That is why the Church insists that in order to gain an indulgence (either for ourselves or for the Holy Souls) we must have confessed our sins recently enough still to be in a state of grace, and we must go to Holy Communion on the very day we try to gain the indulgence, for only then are we in that state of holiness which can make our offering profitable both to ourselves and to others.

So, finally, to fulfil the conditions of a plenary or full indulgence to help the souls in purgatory, go to confession (unless you have been very recently and are still in a state of grace), go to Holy Communion, and then visit a cemetery any day between now and November 8th praying an Our Father and a Creed (I believe in God). Over the next couple of weeks I will announce the dates and times of the blessing of the graves in all the major cemeteries of the town, so that you may join the priests and people of the town in prayer for the souls of the faithful departed in general, or of those in particular whom you wish to pray for. You can do this also on your own throughout the rest of November too, and it will also help the souls by means of a partial indulgence. God alone decides exactly how much what we do for them can help them to become holy enough to enter heaven sooner.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, once again St Mark has given us a very vivid account of an event such as only an eye-witness is likely to have been able to tell us; now whether that witness is Mark or not we cannot be sure, but in any case the account is at least likely to have been St Peter’s own recollection of this very dramatic healing witnessed by such a large crowd, as Mark tells us. After all, we do know that Mark wrote his Gospel from St Peter’s recollections and to assist S Peter in his preaching.

What do we learn from this healing of the blind man? First, this is not the same man as the man born blind of whom we hear in St John’s equally dramatic account in his Gospel. The man in today’s account, named Bartimaeus, or ‘Son of Timaeus’, was not born blind, since he asks for his sight to be restored to him, which is how we know he once was able to see, quite unlike the man born blind in St John.

This took place as Jesus was leaving Jericho, one of the most ancient and important cities of Judea, which lies about 25 miles east of Jerusalem. The road from Jericho to Jerusalem is bleak and dangerous on account of the many robbers that infested it and attacked lonely travellers between the cities. That is why our Lord set the parable of the Good Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and it would be along that road which Our Lord Himself wold pass after this event of which we have just heard, making His way to Jerusalem and to death and resurrection.

But to return to today’s Gospel; Our Lord was leaving the city accompanied by a large crowd. He was by now famous as a travelling preacher and teacher, and doubtless His reputation was enhanced by His many wonderful miracles over the course of His public ministry which had lasted about three years by now. We do not know how far these people wold be going with Him. Some surely would be staying behind, while a few apart from the Apostles, disciples and the holy women who cared for Him would be travelling with Him wherever He went.

Now a blind beggar enters the scene; he is even given a name, Bar-Timaeus, i.e. Son of Timaeus. This is probably significant. Why would St Mark tell us his name? Well, there are other cases where he does just that. For instance, he alone of the evangelists tells us that Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus to carry His cross, was the father of Alexander and Rufus. This can only mean that the people to whom Mark addressed his gospel must have known exactly who Alexander and Rufus were, otherwise there would be no point in telling their names. This would strongly indicate that Simon of Cyrene and his entire family must have become followers of Jesus directly as a result of the carrying of the cross. Mark indirectly tells us this simply by telling us about Alexander and Rufus. So what of Bar-Timaeus? There is a strong indication that exactly the same is true of him, i.e. that he became a disciple of Jesus, too. The strength of this suggestions lies in the very final words of today’s Gospel reading: ‘and he followed Him on the way.’ This surely doesn’t mean merely that he was one of the large crowd that walked through the streets of Jericho until Jesus left the city and then went back home. No. Being a ‘follower along the way’ is much more significant than that. It means that he became a disciple and accompanied Jesus thereafter, doubtless becoming a well-known early Christian among those who formed the early Church in Jerusalem after Pentecost.

Now to return to the narrative.

He shouts and the words he shouts are ‘Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!’ This is a prayer, addressed to Jesus as the Messiah, for the Son of David was a recognised title of the One who was to come, the great king who would liberate Israel. But we note that Bartimaeus is shouting out to Jesus as one who could have pity or mercy on him.

Even when those around try to silence him, he will not be stopped. He doubles down, as we say, crying out all the louder: ‘Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me.’

Then our Lord stops in His tracks and tells those around Him to call the blind man to Him. They now change their tune, far from trying to silence him, they now see that Jesus Himself is asking to meet him. Note how he threw off his cloak and jumped up. Such eagerness!

Then Jesus spoke. Such important words. Jesus has waited till now. ‘What do you want of me?’ ‘Lord, my Master, give me back my sight.’ Rabbuni is a special title. Mary Magdalene uses it in the Garden on the Tomb when she recognises the risen Lord. Bartimaeus is not simply regarding Jesus as a miracle-worker but as Son of David and Teacher, indeed as his teacher. Jesus tells him to go as his faith has saved him and his sight is restored at that moment.

But he does not go. He could have done, but instead he chooses to follow Jesus on the road. And as I said before, this is the road to Jerusalem, a hard and dangerous road leading to suffering and the humiliation of the cross unto death. Yet Bartimaeus follows Jesus gratefully and faithfully. He believes.

Note that Bartimaeus is not half-hearted in his request, and he gets the full response. His sight is restored fully, not in part. Padre Pio’s blind man’s prayer…

Bartimaeus gets more than even his sight back; he is given the gift of spiritual sight and understanding. Jesus is His Lord, even to death and beyond.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Assisted Dying, what is it? Assisted Suicide is the proper description. AD=Usurpation of a term.

Dignity, what is it? An organisation which assists people to commit suicide and campaigns for it to be made legal. ‘Dignitas’ = Usurpation of a word for tendentious purposes.

Easy to make out a case on compassionate grounds for putting to death someone suffering and destined to die soon. Why? Compassion sounds good, and the case for assisted suicide sounds perfectly compassionate. Surely safeguards can be put in place? What safeguards can be certain to last? But how does anyone know when someone will die? In my experience many expected to die soon last a long time, while the opposite also is true. Even doctors have only a informed power of guessing.

Every few years someone attempts to change the current and very well-established law which proclaims that to assist another person to commit suicide is a crime. Yet so often in the past it has failed. The last time was when a former MP in this constituency introduced such a bill.

Think of abortion: in 1967 this was lade legal and we were told it would only be safe and rare and in exceptional circumstances of danger to a mother’s life. Yet for years it has been virtually ‘on demand’. I remember the first time I heard the name ‘Keir Starmer’. It was when he was DPP and refused to prosecute certain doctors who were blatantly breaking the law by signing certificates permitting abortion on women on the grounds of mental health when they had never even seen the women concerned – just because certain persons wanted abortion for convenience.

So in the case of euthaniasia/assisted suicide. It may begin with safeguards, with clear limits in law, but what about pressure put on a dying person to stop using up resources uselessly? What about pressure from relations who want to get hold of an elderly relative’s property?

There is another such assisted suicide bill about to be introduced into Parliament. and there is a greater chance that it will be passed this time, given the range of views among the MPs elected to the Commons last July. The most atheistic and anti-life parliament ever in our history.

Now although it is the case that whenever such a change in the law has been rejected in the past, as was the case with Marris’s Bill in 2016, this never stops the proposers of euthanasia from continuing to keep up the pressure. And they are well supported by the supposedly neutral BBC.

Yet even though the proposers of assisted suicide continue to present bill after bill in Parliamnet until such time as the law finally is changed, will a bill opposing suicide ever be allowed afterwards? Think again about abortion.

The pro-suicide lobby insist that their proposals are measured and limited and appeal to compassion t justify their planned change to the law. But in reality all such protections are gradually removed. Remember conscience clauses or doctors and nurses opposed to abortion? Where are they now? Now you can’t even publicly opposed abortion without the serious risk of being sent to jail, and even without saying a single word! Yes, Isabel Vaughan Spruce, the fearless campaigner against abortion was compensated after two wrongful arrests, but think of Adam Smith Connor. He has not only been arrested for the same alleged ‘crime’, but sent to prison.

If the assisted suicide bill is passed, then the same will happen to anyone who opposes euthanasia some time in the future, and I predict it won’t be very long. Just as being anti-abortion has now become seen as fanatical and socially unacceptable, so too will being anti-assisted suicide in the future.

In fact, it is already happening on the quiet in hospitals. People who are seriously ill and in a coma which won’t permit them to speak, are being starved to death. This was the Liverpool pathway of a few years ago. But although there was an outcry against it and it was stopped, it just went underground and changed its name. Hospitals are still killing patients who are deemed unworthy of living any longer.

So it will be very easy to argue that people who are ill, whether dying or not, but are using up the valuable costly resources of the NHS, people who are depressed or feel guilty that they are a burden on their families, all these should accept the inevitable and allow themselves to be euthanised.

Our saint, whose feast we celebrate today, lived a famously long life full of many twists and turns and dramatic vicissitudes. He endured many painful personal difficulties as a result of them. Many of these were bereavements he suffered frequently through life; the sudden, early death of his dearest sister Mary, for instance, was to remain within him as a deep sorrow until the end of his own very long life over fifty years later. He could not even think of her in his old age without shedding tears. But there were other kinds of personal losses which he endured frequently, and these were also very painful, such as the loss of friends through their estrangement from him, or through betrayal of his friendship, but it is a fact that many of these came about as a result of his own actions and choices. What lay behind those choices is what we are celebrating today.

This feast falls on the anniversary of the single most catastrophic upheaval in his life (and I use the word catastrophic advisedly). Whereas on most saints’ days we celebrate their birthday into eternal life, that is not what St John Henry Newman’s feast day recalls. Instead, it was an event which took place when he was already halfway through his life: it was his becoming a Catholic at Littlemore on October 9th, 1845, an event which he described on that night in several letters to close relatives and friends, as his ‘being received into the one fold of the Redeemer.’ It was this step, he knew only too well, that would bring about a decisive breach with so many of his friends and colleagues in the Oxford Movement of the Church of England, a movement that he had started over a decade earlier with Keble, Pusey and others. He would also break off all contact not just with his university, which had been his home and workplace for well over a quarter of a century, but also with his remaining family, especially his remaining living sisters Jemima and Harriett, to whom he had always been close.

If the loss of so many dear and beloved persons was a sorrowful end to the entire first part of his life, it was more than made up for by something that was of inestimable value and joy: for on entering into this one fold of the Redeemer, the Catholic Church, Newman was filled with unquenchable joy and gratitude to God. On that fateful day he went into his library, on whose shelves stood the volumes of the Church Fathers he had been studying assiduously for years, and taking them down he joyfully kissed each of them, exclaiming, ‘now at last I belong to you!’

Belonging to the Church of the Fathers was far more than merely arriving at a common mind with historical figures from a remote past. As he wrote in the Essay on Development, the work in which articulated his reasons for seeking admission to the Catholic Church, Newman was truly entering a body, a vast entity with an organic unity in time and throughout the world. It was a body which was poor and despised in England generally and in Oxford especially at that time, socially and educationally inferior, barely emerging from centuries of persecution and the contempt of the powerful, yet Newman realised that these rather secretive, poor and despised people were essentially much more than they outwardly seemed. They were in truth members of one and the same as the communion that had contained and nourished the great fathers of the Christian faith: Athanasius, Ambrose, Cyril, Augustine and Leo. Belonging to them meant that he was now part of the same body, the body of Christ no less, sharing in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, as St Paul had described the essence of the Church of Christ to the Ephesians.

This is the true significance of the words spoken by our Lord at the Last Supper and which we have just heard in the Gospel: ‘I am the vine’. All his life, Newman was utterly consistent about one thing in particular: his search for, and dedication to, truth. It was this that had inspired his great attempt to recover the apostolical character of the Church of England, which fuelled the vigorous expenditure of time and energy which he devoted to the Tracts that he not only largely composed, but personally distributed to clergy far and wide around Oxfordshire in order to reawaken the sense that the Anglican Church was not an instrument of the state or government of England, but was truly a branch of the apostolic Church of Christ. Truth always came first in Newman’s life; and obedience to wherever truth led him. That night in October, 1845 was a new stage in the long search for truth, and one that was destined to bring him not only to the unity of the faith, but also to mature manhood in Christ.

The kindly light had been leading him since his earliest years into the fullness of the life of the vine, the true vine. For he had come to see that the Church is the vine of Christ, and that he must enter into the life of that vine if he were to have any life within him. For, cut off from that vine he could do nothing. It was a step bought at a heavy price, but one that he knew was even worth such a cost. A month after his reception into the Church and his first Communion, he wrote a letter of farewell to one of his oldest remaining friends and comrade-at-arms, John Keble, thanking him for all that his friendship had brought him. Yet Newman wrote aware that they would be sundered from now on, since Keble would remain in that communion in which they had both been brought up. Knowing this, Newman wrote these words: ‘Let it be your comfort [my dear Keble] when you are troubled, to think that there is one who feels that he owes all to you, and who, though, alas, now cut off from you, is a faithful assiduous friend unseen.’

The pain of being cut off from Keble, as also the pain of being cut off from his sisters and many others besides, he could yet endure because he firmly believed and truly, that he was now most certainly not cut off from the true vine. He had laboured for many years within another communion, believing that he was part of the true vine, yet coming to realise that it was an illusion. The truth was more difficult to discern than simply viewing the surface. The splendour of the church and university to which he belonged, which had nurtured him, was not anything to set alongside the true vine of the apostolic and catholic Church which was not only the one fold of the Redeemer, but was His living body on earth.

Newman was now not only grafted onto the true vine, but was now subject to all that the Lord said at the Last Supper must happen to any branch that lived in Him: in order to bear much fruit, every branch in Him must be pruned or, as the original Greek word puts it, ‘made pure’, cleansed of all that would keep the branch less than fully fruitful as the Lord willed it to be. So it would prove many times throughout the forty five years that still lay ahead of him in this world. Newman would undertake many great works for the love of God and so many of them would seem to fail. This was undoubtedly a great part of Newman’s share in the cross which was the pruning or purification of his soul and will. Although he was not to enjoy the fruits of his labours and sacrifices in this life, they would grow to maturity in another age. It was only after over a hundred years had passed since his departure out of shadows and images into the reality of eternity that his holiness would at last be acknowledged by the universal Church at his canonisation, and even now more fruit is promised as the Church discerns his extraordinary gifts as a teacher of the faith, considering whether to make him a Doctor of the Church in our troubled times.

And there is one particular sign of Newman’s continuing influence in our times that I want to end with. It was by God’s providence that in 1847, when Newman was seeking how best to use his gifts within the Catholic Church, he was guided to the figure of St Philip Neri, the 16th century founder of the Oratory in Rome. The Oratory was to prove to be Newman’s new home in the Church, which was to make up for, and more than compensate for, the loss of his first home and of his family and friends.

Yet in setting up the Oratory in England Newman was constantly beset by many problems and insecurities. For instance, his deeply held hopes of founding an Oratory here in Oxford were frustrated in his lifetime and were only to be fulfilled exactly a century after his death. In such trials as this he made his own the prayer of the Oratorian Church historian, Cardinal Baronius, who prayed to St Philip imploring him to ‘visit this vine which thy right hand planted with so much labour, anxiety and peril.’ May the English Oratory, this humble branch of the true vine, flourish and produce its fruit through the intercession and example of saints Philip and John Henry. May Christ the Redeemer prune and purify us, so that we may use the grace given to each of us for the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to maturity, to what St Paul calls ‘the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ’, in the glory of the saints in heaven. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, you may not have noticed, but this is the third week running that children have played a significant part in the Gospel. The first time, three weeks ago, our Lord took a little child and said to His Apostles, ‘anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me.’ Then last week, His words were dark and alarming, warning that ‘anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great millstone round his neck.’ And finally, today, He shows His indignation, even anger against those of His disciples who were trying to keep parents from bringing their children to be blessed by Him, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ Mark then tells us that He put His arms round them and laid His hands on them, and blessed them.

These three sayings of our Lord manifest His love for children and His appreciation of their special closeness to the kingdom of God, which comes from their innocence and openness. It is the corrosive power of sin that blights this. Our Lord refers to those who effectively spoil the innocence of children in His warning that those who corrupt the young deserve to be drowned. Adult life, He suggests, needs to recover this simple trust. It is not easy, but it is necessary in order to be able to enter heaven.

But there is another aspect to today’s particular Gospel that is of great importance. The Gospel began with the Pharisees putting a question to our Lord concerning the permanence and indissolubility of marriage. They are testing Him to see what He will say. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses had permitted divorce, but it was seen to be shameful, so the Pharisees asked our Lord in what circumstances was divorce permissible? Our Lord’s reply was uncompromising. This permission was only a toleration granted because the people were ungovernable, and not because God approved it in any way. On the contrary, God had made marriage indissoluble from the beginning of the human race, as we heard in the first reading from the Book of Genesis, and so it was not just for the Jews, nor for religious reasons alone that marriage is declared indissoluble, says the Lord, but because it is written into human nature that way.

This is what many inevitably see as a hard saying, but this is nothing new. The Apostles were amazed, as we can read between the lines, and asked Jesus to explain His meaning further. Does He really mean what He seems to have said to the Pharisees? Yes. But why? Why does the merciful Lord, the great forgiver of sins, the friend of sinners and tax-collectors, say something that He knows full well will be a bombshell to many who hear Him say it.

This is very serious indeed. Only a few days ago in Rome at the Synod, there was a penitential service at which forgiveness was asked for those who, and I quote, ‘use doctrine as a stone to hurl at others.’ You may wonder what this really means; I do. For instance, is it wrong, sinful even, to teach what our Lord taught, even when this is painful to hear and difficult to put into practice? If so, then this accusation of using doctrine as stones to hurl at people must be directed even at our Lord Himself. That surely cannot be right!

So much is at stake. Marriage is not just about good feelings, or about romantic love. Our Lord talks about a man and a woman becoming one flesh, not just setting up a partnership. Incidentally, what a terrible word ‘partner’ is, when it is used as a deliberate replacement for ‘spouse’. Partners, in the way we use the English language, means persons with whom we either do business, or play games. What a terrible model for a spousal relationship that is! A spouse is someone to whom one person has given him or herself. It is a gift of one’s entire life to another, a gift of mutual trust, and a means of creating a unique bond of unity which cannot be broken in this life. The word ‘partner’ can hardly be fitting for such a crucial relationship as that between a man and a woman for life!

The reason why our Lord lays such great emphasis on the unbreakable bond of those who become one flesh is itself of huge significance to our times. In 1967 Pope St Paul VI published one of the most important letters not only of his reign, but of our age. Like our Lord’s saying in today’s Gospel, it was shocking in its unswerving directness and clarity. In that letter, called Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul against all expectations taught that artificial contraception is always wrong, even in marriage, even when circumstances are profoundly difficult for a husband and wife. It is essential to human life that a married couple, made one flesh by God, in all their acts of loving marital union, should be open to the gift of life, that is, of children. Once you separate out the bringing of children into the world from the act of intercourse, you change radically what intercourse is. It can become a game, a partnership, and no longer a sharing in God’s creative love. Anyone can play that game if the responsibility of having children can be eliminated. Humanae Vitae teaches that the real fruit of Christian marriage is children, should God so decide. But if sexual acts become divorced from the begetting of children, then a lot of distortions follow. For instance, children are no longer seen as the fruit of the union of man and wife, and so it is no accident that less than ten years after contraception had become generally accepted, IVF was invented, in which babies were conceived in the laboratory rather than in the womb, a process in which many human embryos, when surplus to requirement, are simply wantonly destroyed. And once you take apart the idea of man and woman as one flesh giving life to children in the family, then you begin to conceive of all sorts of other distortions of marriage itself, such as so-called ‘same-sex marriage’, in which it is impossible for the two partners to become one, life-giving union. Whatever such unions are, they are not ‘marriage’ as human nature has been designed by God, nor in the sense that it is taught here by our Lord.

And so it is that our Lord, as well as firmly rejecting the whole practice of divorce as accepted by the Pharisees, also points to children as being the crown of this union for life of a man and a woman. It is because this teaching of our Lord’s has been rejected in our society that divorce is now so freely available, and is so very common in practice and, unsurprisingly, cohabitation has now become more common even than marriage itself. But what does marriage really mean if it is not permanent, - if it is not a lifelong union made to express love and mutual trust in the bringing up of children that a couple have together conceived and brought into the world?

Nearly 60 years on from Humanae Vitae we can see all too easily how the breakdown of the real meaning and purpose of human sexuality in marriage has led the world down a terrible cul-de-sac of broken relationships, loneliness, abuse and perversions of many kinds. Only a return to the clear teaching our Lord gives in the Gospel can bring society back to health and provide the loving conditions for children to grow in trust and confidence, and so to be better fitted to make good, stable, loving unions themselves once they reach adult life. It’s what the grace of the sacrament of marriage is given for; to strengthen married couples in all ways. By abandoning Christ’s teaching, the world has plunged into a downward spiral of sexual chaos and misery. Our Lord was not afraid to teach a hard saying when He knew how much was at stake. But He never used truth as a stone to cast at sinners. Neither does His Church cast stones at anyone when she teaches what Christ taught, precisely because the entire future happiness of the human race depends on that doctrine.

St Mark is the most compressed of all the Evangelists. What a lot he packs into today’s Gospel! It began with Our Lord’s question ‘who do men say that I am?’ and continued with a prediction of the Passion, together with Peter’s remonstration against this and our Lord’s rebuke to Peter, and concluded with the universal call to discipleship in the carrying of the cross.

Now we need to know a very important thing: that St Mark’s entire Gospel was written effectively as an introduction to its most important and truly climactic part – the account of the Passion and Resurrection. That also helps us to make sense of the passage we have just heard, which looks forward to the cross and resurrection.

So back to that first question which our Lord puts to His disciples: ‘who do men say I am?’ They, meaning some or all of them, but no one of them in particular, tell Him that there is a great breadth of opinion about Him; He is reckoned to be John the Baptist or Elijah or another one of the Prophets. This tells us that people had a good opinion of Him, they rated Him well, He was popular. But this was clearly not the full picture. It was moreover not what our Lord expected His own disciples to believe about Him. That is why He goes on to ask them, ‘but who do you say I am?’ He is implying that however good an opinion the general public have of Him, it is not the same as He expects His disciples to have; otherwise, He wouldn’t have asked them the same question. He clearly expects a different answer. It is an important moment. He has never asked them this question before.

So it is that Peter speaks up first, as so often in the Gospels. He seems to be the one to put into words the thoughts of others, to be their spokesman, the one who sees beyond the surface of things to the inner heart. So it is that he proclaims confidently and boldly, ‘You are the Christ!’ But Christ’s response to this, in this Gospel at least, is strangely muted. Not in this Gospel do we hear our Lord’s answering words we know from St Matthew, ‘Blessed are you Peter’ and ‘I say to you that you are the rock etc.’ but instead two unexpected and disconcerting things: first, He issued a command to them to keep this secret, and secondly, He gave them a teaching, but in mysterious terms of Himself as ‘the Son of Man’, a figure taken from prophecy, especially the prophet Daniel, connected with God’s majesty and His will to save mankind, and the prophet Ezechiel, who uses the title ‘Son of Man’ when he was called by God to be His messenger. This mysterious and solemn prophetic teaching is that Christ will suffer grievously, be rejected by the authorities of their own religion and people, that He would even be put to death by them, but also that He would rise to life on the third day after He had been killed.

Peter speaks up again, but now He takes our Lord aside to speak privately to Him, saying that this must not happen – the Christ must not suffer. We can imagine that this is issued more as a rebuke to Jesus than as a pious wish it may not come to pass. It is as though Peter is saying to Jesus: we are investing a great deal in you. We recognise your unique status as the Messiah, and therefore you have a role to fulfil. You must be our leader, the king promised from ages past by God to set His people free from foreign domination. You must certainly not talk in this alarming way about terrible suffering and death. Then comes our Lord’s bombshell, as if the foretelling of suffering and death were not already enough to cause despondency and alarm; for whereas Peter has spoken privately to rebuke our Lord, the Lord for His part openly furiously berates Peter, saying ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ Strong words!

What does our Lord mean by this? Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation, or Triumph, of the Holy Cross. It is a feast of some grandeur, in which we recall the victory won by our Lord over our sin and death by His own death on the Cross. But we should never ponder that victory without recognising the tremendous cost at which it came. In a church in this diocese which I know, built in the 1960’s, the then Parish Priest did not instal a crucifix over the altar but an image of the risen Christ instead. After all, he explained, Christ is not dead now, He is risen! Of course, this is true. But when we behold the cross, as we do particularly on Good Friday, but also throughout the year, we are not acting as though Christ Himself is still on the cross, but rather we are recalling its power, its stupendous cost to Christ for us, a cost which remains always present and relevant. So, just as we cannot have Easter Day without Good Friday, neither is there a resurrection from the dead unless Christ had first died, and the way in which He died was appallingly painful and humiliating: a death reserved to the lowest stratum in Roman society. It is hardly surprising, therefore, given the horror of crucifixion that Peter should have reacted so strongly and negatively to Christ’s prediction here,. However, it certainly is surprising that Our Lord responded so strongly and negatively to Peter, even calling him ‘Satan’.

It must come as a surprise to many to hear our Lord speak like that to Peter. Peter was the first leader of the Apostles, the first Pope, as we should say. But this should help us to learn something very important: that even being the first apostle, even being the first Pope, doesn’t mean Peter always gets things right. And if he didn’t get everything right, then neither does Peter’s successor as pope necessarily get everything right. Christ’s rebuke to Peter in this Gospel could apply to any of Peter’s successors who stray from the truth about our Lord. There have been such popes throughout history: e.g. Pope Liberius in the fourth century and Pope Honorius in the seventh century taught serious errors about Christ. They were subsequently condemned and corrected by the Church in General Councils. Of course, the same thing could happen again. So, if ever a pope should say something which goes against Christ’s teaching such as what we heard just now in the Gospel Acclamation: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one can come to the Father but through me’, and instead should say that e.g. Christ is not the only way to the Father; that all religions are just as valid ways of reaching God as the Catholic one; that while there is one God, the many different religions are like different languages expressing what we humans believe about Him; then such a pope would indeed be worthy of rebuke by the Lord Himself and the Church would have to be wary of him and in due course correct him. Peter cannot change what Christ has taught, neither can his successors. So, just as Peter cannot take away the cross from Christ, neither can he rightly deny what Christ teaches. But it is only the Lord who can rebuke Peter in person. While the rest of the Church may recognise that something may be wrong in what a particular pope says, it is only for that pope’s successor or for the whole Church in Council to correct him.

Our Lord’s next words are central to what we should always remember about His death on the cross: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ This is why we keep the cross ever before our eyes. By ‘renouncing oneself’, Our Lord means, of course, that we must deny any inclination to live life solely for our own enjoyment. But He also means that we must not abandon the faith He has taught us just because it seems difficult, nor fail to defend any of those truths which we proclaim in the Creed which the rest of the world rejects. For, as our Lord says: ‘anyone who wants to save his life will lose it’, meaning that anyone who chooses to follow the way of the world instead of the way of Christ will not inherit eternal life. It is only if we are prepared to lose our life, that is, to stand out against the mind of the world where this differs from or rejects Christ’s teaching, only if we are prepared not only to stand in witness to Christ the person, but to defend His Gospel which He has taught us and remain faithful to it despite all errors that the world prefers, then indeed we will be saved as Christ has promised.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, if you are looking for a picture of hell, you might go to the weird and disturbing images of the Flemish 16th century painter Hieronymus Bosch, who portrays humans being tortured in nightmarish ways by strange and horrible beings. But there is another way of envisaging damnation, less visually arresting, but no less frightening than that of torture; it is the idea of complete isolation. To be cut off from all contact outside oneself – unable to hear anything, unable to speak; how long could anyone endure such a self-enclosed state? How soon would such claustrophobia descend into madness? Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people”; but we might well correct this and suggest instead that hell is oneself, utterly alone for ever.

It is for this reason that Our Lord’s miracle in the Gospel we have just heard is so powerful a symbol of salvation. It is the opening up of a human person closed off from all contact with others by his inability to hear and speak clearly. We were made to communicate, and to be communicated with. Human beings are, by nature, social beings. To be deprived of the sense of hearing and the power of speech is to be seriously diminished as humans.

But what we also notice about Our Lord’s healing of this poor deaf-mute is the manner in which He does it. Already known to have powers of healing far beyond anything ever heard before, Our Lord is urged to lay His hands upon the man, to heal him. Yet this is not exactly what He does. He takes the man aside privately, puts His fingers into the man’s ears, touches the man’s tongue with His own spittle, looks up to heaven and sighs, before uttering a single word of command: “Be opened!” The drama of this scene is captured for us by the recollection of the very word that Our Lord used in Aramaic: “Ephphetha!”

But what does all this action and drama mean? Our Lord could, as on other occasions, have healed this man simply by laying His hands upon Him, or as with the lepers by a mere word of command; or, as with the Centurion’s servant and the Synagogue official’s son, even will their healing from a distance. Yet here Our Lord could not be more physical, more bodily, let us say even more ritualistic, in His actions. If we have ever wondered why God became man, as so many great thinkers and men and women of faith have done for centuries; if we have wondered, not in a sense of puzzlement, but in a sense of awe – we should look at this healing. For God did not need to become man in order to forgive man’s sins. God could heal our illnesses by a simple act of His almighty will. Yet He does not do so in that way, for it would leave something out of the picture that God wants us to know and understand. God became man in order to share Himself with us, and in order to allow us to share in the experience of His presence. God became man in order to overcome the isolation that sin had brought to man. Sin had alienated us from God. Recall how Adam and Eve, after sinning in the Garden, hid themselves from God out of fear. It was to overcome that fear and the isolation from God that sin had brought upon us, that God became man.

In His humanity, Jesus the Son of God is fully present to us. Our Lord’s human nature is not just a kind of packaging, by which we might gain access to something otherwise inaccessible. Our Lord’s human nature really belongs to Him, and in it His divine Person shines through and acts upon us. So in this miracle, God the Son Himself takes away the isolation of the deaf-mute by His own humanity – His fingers, His sigh, His spittle, His command.

This is the way of the Incarnation, of the Son of God made man. It is the way in which God has chosen to make us whole – to heal us of sin, and of the isolation and selfishness that sin both causes and symbolises. Moreover, this is the way Our Lord continues His healing work in the Sacraments of His Church. For when we are baptised, it is Christ Himself who baptises, who in His humanity gives us new life by water which symbolises both death of sin and selfishness, and the new life of communion in the Holy Spirit. When our conscience convicts us of our sins, it is to Christ that we turn, and Himself whom we meet in confession. We confess our sins in the Sacrament of Penance, not in order to tell Our Lord what He already knows, but to allow Him to touch us with His healing grace, and to speak His powerful word of command: “be absolved”, that is “be free” of your sin, of the impediment to your true freedom with which sin has weighed you down. It is Christ Himself who feeds our whole human nature, our bodies and souls, with His own self: Body, Blood, soul and divinity, when He gives Himself to us as the living bread in Holy Communion.

But having said all this, what, in the end, is more powerful than death? Death carries all human beings away. Whatever success or failure our lives may have to show, in the end we are doomed to the darkness of the grave. Yet even here Christ’s humanity brings us out. It was to the entombed Lazarus that Our Lord gave His powerful word of command: “Come forth!” and to those around that He said “unbind him; let him go free!” These words symbolise the power of the Son of God made man over death, and the ultimate isolation of the grave. Yet His power over death would not have been complete had He not shared death with us. And had He remained dead, then death would have conquered Him. All His wonderful miracles would, at the best, have been only a cruel sign of unfulfilled hope for doomed mankind. But Christ the Son of God made man is alive in glory. He has overcome the darkness and isolation of death for us men and for our salvation. In the Sacraments of the Church, it is the risen Christ Himself who continues to touch us, to anoint us, to speak His word of command: “Be unbound, go free!”

This is what our faith teaches us, that in Christ we are made fully human. Christ alone can touch us, can speak to us, with power to overcome our isolation, our death and our hell. In the Sacraments, He comes to meet us and heal us; and at Holy Mass, in the greatest and most wonderful Sacrament of all He gives us communion with himself. Neither in this life, nor in the next, is there anything better or more wonderful than that! The more we recognise this truth, and the better we prepare ourselves to meet Christ in His Sacraments, the more powerful His effect upon us, and we will find our true freedom and fulfilment, as He has always intended for us, in union with Him.