Faith & Duty

 Address given at St Mary's Nenagh on Sunday 16th October 2022, the 18th after Trinity

In today’s NT reading Luke (17:5-10) records two short sayings of Jesus.

They are memorable because Jesus - as he always does - paints vivid pictures in simple everyday language. But they are also paradoxical, because although they seem simple on the surface, it is only after pondering them for a while that we can begin to grasp their true implications.

In these two sayings, Jesus is giving his followers – then and now – two important rules for living as God’s beloved children: a rule of faith, and a rule of duty.

First, the rule of faith

The apostles said to Jesus, ‘Increase our faith’. Jesus replied, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.’

I wonder whether the apostles felt at first that Jesus was exasperated by their request. Was he criticising them for not having even the merest smidgeon of faith? Because of course they knew they couldn’t expect a tree to obey their command!

But once they thought about it they would realise that he was simply telling them the truth, in his typically vivid way.

Surely what Jesus really means is this. They mustn’t use the excuse of too little faith to avoid doing what God asks of them. If they have any faith at all, no matter how small, they must act on it. They must trust that God will work his purpose out through them - and get on with it. They will find that they can do things they never thought they could – miraculous things.

And I think, perhaps, that we have experienced the truth of this in our own parish. Recall that some years ago, when we discovered that St Mary’s needed a new roof which would cost hundreds of thousands of Euro, we didn’t at first believe that we could raise the money. But when we overcame our fears, when we trusted that God would not let us down, when we acted on our little faith, by God’s grace and with the help of our neighbours and the wider community, we discovered that we could perform a little miracle. We raised enough money to complete the roof in a little over a year. And later we went on to replace two more, build a hall for our parochial school, and bring the Rectory up to modern standards!

The rule of faith that Jesus gives us is this: do not fear that you have too little faith; instead trust in God and obey the promptings of his Spirit; you will discover that you have faith enough to do things that might seem impossible.

Second, there’s the rule of duty

Jesus asks his followers to imagine they are slave owners. A slave owner wouldn’t dream of thanking a slave for doing what he is ordered to do, he says – that’s just what a slave is meant to do! But then he asks them to imagine their role reversed, with them like slaves in relation to God. ‘So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have only done what we ought to have done!”’

Now, we’re not at all comfortable today with the idea of slavery – thank God! Slavery was abolished largely because Christian men and women came to realise that it contradicted the biblical conviction that every human being is created in the image of God - though shamefully not until nearly 2000 years after Jesus’s death. I doubt that many of Jesus’s disciples owned slaves themselves – they weren’t rich folk – but slavery then was part of everyone’s common experience – they would have understood what Jesus was talking about very well.

If Jesus were making the same point today, he might say something like this.

‘Imagine you’re a multi-billionaire, like Elon Musk perhaps, who employs many housekeepers or personal assistants. When they do their job, you don’t go out of your way to thank them, or give them a bonus, because you pay them well to work for you – doing their job is only what you expect of them.

Now, put yourself in God’s shoes. He employs you to serve him by doing good, doing his will. He has given you this wonderful world and all its resources to meet all your reasonable needs. Surely you don’t expect God to give you any special reward just because you have done what he asks of you, do you? You’ve only done your duty!’

The rule of duty that Jesus gives us is this: behave like servants of God; the Holy Spirit will tell you what God wants of you if you listen for it in prayer; your Christian duty is to do what he asks. But you should not expect to earn any special favour from God for doing it – it is no more than what God expects of you.

We have no right to expect good things in this life, nor a place in heaven, just because we have done a few good deeds – and inevitably failed in many others. Yet Jesus reveals to us a God who is like a loving Father. He assures us that God will forgive our failures if we ask him to, and he tells us he has prepared a place in his kingdom for his faithful servants. But it is a matter of God’s grace and not our own merit.

Let us then resolve to live our lives according to Jesus’s rules of faith and duty

Let us trust in God and believe that though our faith is little it will be enough to achieve God’s purposes.

Let us be servants of God, doing what is right and our duty, not because we expect to be rewarded for it, but just because it is right and it is our duty.

St. Ignatius Loyola captures this spirit beautifully in his prayer

Teach us, Good Lord, to serve you as you deserve:
To give, and not to count the cost;
to fight, and not to heed the wounds;
to toil and not to seek for rest;
to labour and not to ask for any reward,
save that of knowing that we do your will.
Through Jesus Christ Our Lord.
Amen

Finding life by losing it

‘Get behind me, Satan! Get thee behind me, Satan!’

What a shock it must have been for Peter to hear Jesus address him in these cutting words, recorded by Mark (8:31-38).

Peter had been the first to say, ‘You are the Messiah’, when Jesus had asked, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ But Jesus then ‘began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering … and be killed’. Peter knew Jesus was referring to himself, and he was shocked. Like most Jews of his day, he expected the promised Messiah to come as a great conqueror to destroy the gentiles – including the hated Romans - and to rule over a revived Kingdom of Israel. The Messiah would vanquish his foes, not be killed by them! So Peter remonstrates with Jesus: ‘Look here, Jesus, that can’t be right!’ he says - or words to that effect. It is then that Jesus turns on him and likens him to Satan – and he does so in front of all the others!

Why was Jesus so hard on Peter, his friend and disciple? Jesus knew that God’s way was not the way of violent earthly conquest, but the way of self-sacrificing love. I’m sure he didn’t want to die a painful death, but Jesus must have realised this was the inevitable outcome of what God called him to do. He was determined to face it bravely. But Peter tries to argue him out of it, in an echo of Satan’s tempting in the wilderness.

Isn’t this often the way it is? When we’ve made up our minds what the right thing is to do even at a personal cost, our friends and loved ones try to talk us out of it. The tempter can be the very person dearest to us! Yet we must not allow even the pleading voice of love to stop us from doing God’s will.

So Jesus seizes the moment to teach Peter and the disciples his way, the way of the cross, how to find life by losing it.

As usual, Mark compresses Jesus’s teaching to a very few words, but it goes to the very heart of our Christian faith. It is worth reflecting on it sentence by sentence.

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’

Jesus’s honesty is startling isn’t it? No one can ever say Jesus lured them to follow him on false pretences! He does not offer his disciples an easy life or a comfortable way to God. Like other great leaders, he calls us as Churchill did to ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. But he does not call us to do anything more than he is prepared to do himself.

First Jesus calls us to ‘deny ourselves’, to say no to our own selfish instincts. But more than simply practicing self-denial, Jesus tells us we must be prepared to take real risks – even to risk our very lives – if that is what God, through our conscience, tells us is right. We who follow Jesus must do God’s will in all things to the best of our ability.

‘For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’

Jesus grabs our attention with this great paradox: to save life is to lose it, and vice-versa.

The very essence of life is to risk it and spend it, not to save it and hoard it. If we live selfishly, always thinking first of our own profit, comfort and security, we lose life all the time. But if we spend life for others, if we follow Jesus’s way of loving self-sacrifice, we win life all the time.

The truth is that the only way we can find a life that matters is by losing it in the love of God and the love of our neighbours. That is the way of Jesus, that is the way of God, and that is the way of happiness too.

‘For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?’

I’m sure you, like me, can think of people who are outwardly hugely successful, but who in another sense are living a life that is not worth living. In business, they may have sacrificed honour for profit. In politics, they may have sacrificed principle for popularity. In their personal lives, they may have sacrificed their deepest relationships for their own ambitions or desires. Such people are seldom comfortable in their own skin and often live to regret their bad choices.

It is a matter of values really - Jesus asks us where our values lie. As he says elsewhere, we are to store up our treasures in heaven, not on earth, ‘for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’. Our values must be God’s values, not the false values of worldly success.

 ‘Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’

Many people did not like what Jesus said and did. He stood up for the poor, the despised, the rejected, and he was a friend of sinners. Scribes and Pharisees – the pious and respectable of his time – saw his behaviour as shameful. Knowing this, Jesus warns his disciples not to be ashamed to follow him publicly - for if they are, how can they expect to share in the glory of God’s kingdom?

These same words should be a warning for us. In Ireland - and in Europe generally - it has become deeply unfashionable for many people to own up to a Christian faith. Even if we believe in our heart of hearts, many of us find it easier not to speak openly about our faith for fear of being mocked or thought less of. In fact, we behave as if we are ashamed of our faith.

It is a simple truth: we cannot expect to share with Jesus the joy of shaping the world into the place God means it to be, if we do not stand up to be counted for Jesus and for his message of loving self-sacrifice.

So to sum up, when I reflect on these words recorded by Mark, I hear Jesus’s voice calling me, down through the ages:

1^st, Jesus calls me to be ready to risk everything to do God’s will, rather than my own;

2^nd, Jesus calls me to find true life and happiness by losing my life in the service of God and others;

3^rd, Jesus calls me to live my life by God’s values, not the false values of worldly success.

4^th, Jesus calls me to follow his path of loving self-sacrifice, joyfully, fearlessly and without shame.

Let us pray for the grace to respond to Jesus’s voice, in the words of St Ignatius of Loyola:

Teach us, Good Lord, to serve you as you deserve:

To give, and not to count the cost;

to fight, and not to heed the wounds;

to toil and not to seek for rest;

to labour and not to ask for any reward,

save that of knowing that we do your will.

Through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen

Jesus' Healing Ministry

Address given at Templederry & St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 1st July 2012, the 4th after Trinity.

Have you heard this one? - Sermons are like biscuits – they need shortening!

These words jumped out of the page at me, as I was sitting idly in a waiting room the other day, scanning the jokes page of an old copy of the Tipp Tattler. It seemed to be meant just for me – a message from on high! I wish I could preach a sermon like a wicked, buttery shortbread biscuit, but I fear it’s beyond my capability.

Three things strike me particularly as I read today’s NT reading (Mark 5:21-43).

First, notice how hectic Jesus’s healing ministry is.

·        Jesus has just returned from healing a mad-man on the other side of the lake, to find a crowd clamouring to see him. Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, begs him to come to heal his desperately ill daughter. Jesus immediately responds as he always does to people in need. But on the way, pressing through the crowd, he suddenly senses another person in need, a woman with a haemorrhage has touched his cloak. He turns aside with healing words for her too. When he finally reaches Jairus’s house, he heals the girl who everyone else believes is already dead.

·        Jesus is always on the go, he never stops. How tired he must be with all the crowds and all their demands – but he keeps at it, because he knows it is God’s work he is doing.

Second, notice how sensitive Jesus is to the needs of all he meets.

• He recognises Jairus’s agitation and goes with him straight away to see the girl – there are no waiting lists for Jesus, unlike our own health service.
• Despite the crowd pressing around him, Jesus senses the touch of the woman with a haemorrhage, and pauses to talk to her directly.
• When people come to tell Jairus his daughter is dead, Jesus reassures him. When he reaches the house, after sending away those in hysterics, he lovingly takes the girls hand, and gently says, ‘Little girl, get up!’ And he even makes sure that she gets something to eat when she comes to and can walk about.

Third, notice how important faith is to Jesus’s healing.

• “Daughter, your faith has made you well”, he says to the woman with a haemorrhage, “go in peace, and be healed of your disease”.
• “Do not fear, only believe”, he says to Jairus.
• Wise doctors, I think, have always appreciated that the faith and belief of patients in the treatment they receive is important for recovery. A consultant proposed injections of colloidal gold to treat my father’s rheumatoid arthritis. He replied, ‘I believe in gold injections about as much as I do in rhino horn’, and sought a second opinion. The gold I am quite sure would have done him no good, because he did not believe it would. But his faith in the second consultant’s treatment gave him several more years of good health.
• Mark also tells us, in the very next passage of his Gospel, that Jesus’s healing powers were almost completely ineffective in Nazareth. People who knew his family, people he had grown up with, just could not bring themselves to believe in his message of good news.

Mark records these healing miracles to demonstrate that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

But for me the real miracle is that Jesus continues his healing ministry even today, both in us and through us.

There are times when each and every one of us desperately needs healing. And Jesus, who told his disciples ‘Remember, I am with you always’, offers us his healing touch whenever we need it.

Jesus is never too busy to respond to us. With his great sensitivity he understands our needs beyond what we ask, and he will heal us in whatever way is best for us. If it is physical healing we seek, we may not always receive it – healing miracles are rare enough these days - but he will surely give us the spiritual healing we really need.

The only thing he needs from us is the faith and boldness to ask him in prayer.

But as well as healing us, Jesus also heals through us. Jesus calls us as Christians, corporate members of Christ’s body, his Church, to continue his ministry in his name.

St Teresa of Avila puts it beautifully, ‘Christ has no body now but ours. No hands, no feet on earth but ours. Ours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Christ has no body now on earth but ours.’

Today’s reading has something to teach us as we do our poor human best to live up to Jesus’s call. First, we must expect our lives to be hectic – there is so much that needs to be done. Second, in order to minister successfully to others we must cultivate in ourselves a Christ-like sensitivity to their needs. And third, our ministry will do little good unless we also foster faith in the good news Jesus preached, not just in those we meet on the way, but in ourselves.

I shall finish with St Ignatius Loyola’s beautiful prayer for Jesus to strengthen us in his service:

Teach us, Good Lord,

to serve you as you deserve:

to give, and not to count the cost;

to fight, and not to heed the wounds;

to toil and not to seek for rest;

to labour and not to ask for any reward,

save that of knowing that we do your will;

through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen