|
In the Gospel passage, like many of the Gospel writers, Mark gathers
together the sayings of Jesus and it is almost as if one saying reminds
him of another and he puts them all together. The first saying is about
John, and remember John was the beloved disciple and I think there is
a lot of the love of our Lord in the way he talks to John. John is almost
indignant at the abuse of miraculous power, and gently I think of our
Lord saying to him "John - I am the creator of the world, my power
is not contained here just simply here and now in Galilee in this particular
spot at this particular time", and he opens John's eyes to a realisation
of His Godliness. Then Jesus points out that anyone who is hospitable
(who doesn't have to sign up on the dotted line as a Catholic), but anyone
who welcomes you is hospitable to you - an act of kindness, that is the
work of God. Mark is reminding us about the opposite too, that our actions
can offend people, can be stumbling blocks in a way.
So today's Mass is about people speaking of God and in the first reading
the gift of the Holy Spirit makes people prophets. They weren't people
who foretold the future so much as people who spoke of God and perhaps
interpreted the world through God's eyes. That is what prophets were sent
for. And we know that in our Baptism you and I have been anointed as prophets.
We have been given the gift of prophecy and we see that gift emerge in
people who live out that prophecy. I'm thinking of how in this century
Pope John Paul II has probably canonised more people than any previous
Pope for a long time. And maybe he is saying to us that these are the
people, the true followers of Christ, who are the true prophets. People
like Edith Stein. The characteristic of a prophet is to hear and recognise
the word of God and to interpret that in their lives; to speak that in
their lives. Edith Stein, a Jewess, she was a philosopher pursuing truth,
and suddenly she heard the voice of truth in the life of Teresa of Avilla.
She responded and recognised that voice of truth, became a Catholic, became
a Carmelite nun, died in Auschwitz. So she heard the word of God and spoke
it out in her life.
Oscar Romero, the Bishop of Nicaragua was a very ordinary man, like all
Bishops are, and in some ways a time server, a stop gap, someone who wouldn't
rock the boat too much, until he heard the voice of God speaking to him
so powerfully in his friend who was murdered. His friend was a priest
of his diocese who was murdered by the military (supported of course by
the US and the United Kingdom); he heard that voice, the voice of God
and he became the voice of the poor so each day he broadcast. His broadcasts
were very simple and he named those who the military authorities had imprisoned
or killed that day. So he spoke out having heard the voice of God, he
spoke out and whilst speaking out he himself was murdered. Mother Teresa
who is a teacher, like so many members of the teaching orders in the church,
a great gift to the church. Nuns went out all over the world teaching.
She was a teacher and doing a very good job. Suddenly she heard the word
of God spoken to her: a man dying on the streets in Calcutta, and she
responded to that word and gave her life to the dying and attracted so
many others to follow her.
So the prophet is to hear the word of God and respond to it by their lives.
And we too are called to be prophets. And some of us do that very well.
One of our parishioners who I visited this week in hospital, Eddy Boardman,
spoke out very powerfully. His emaciated body and his face. He has cancer
of the face and it is very distorted. I was chatting to him and he was
talking about whether he would be ready for the photo call for the male
model of the year and he showed great joy and laughter, as we were chatting
and he had heard the word of God because of his devotion to our Lord in
communion in the Mass. He could speak about his circumstances peacefully
because he was at peace with the Lord. Then in the summer I was at Faith
and Light on a pilgrimage in Loughborough and two people who spoke very
powerfully, were very prophetic to me. One was called Daniel who is about
18 or 19 and he is in a wheelchair because he can't walk. He is a mess
really. He can't talk; he can't do anything for himself, and Avril and
Tom who fostered him from his early years were talking about how to get
him to live independently because he is becoming a man now and deserves
to have independent living. He now has a little sister who they are fostering
called Amelia. Amelia is 3 or 4 and like all little girls is a sheer delight,
a beauty. The strange thing about Amelia is she is all there physically;
she has no deformed limbs or anything like that; she can see; she has
got ears and can hear. She cannot talk because there is something wrong.
There is no connection between her body, her muscles and her nervous system
or there is a connection missing there so that her muscles move but she
has no control over them. So she cannot talk, she cannot walk, she cannot
do anything really and in the beautiful summer that God gave us Daniel
and Amelia were taken out of their chairs and put on the grass on a rug
and they soon crawled off that. We were at the big playing fields at Radcliff
College. To see the two of them just wriggling around and delighting in
the green of the grass and the warmth of the sunshine, the gentleness
of the breeze, and the complete harmony they had with each other and with
creation as they lived out the praise of God. They were hearing the word
of God revealed in the beauty, in the simple beauty, around them and they
were proclaiming that word. They were prophesying that word in a way that
will stick with me as the summer of 2003, as a picture of that summer
of the amazing beauty of creation, of the sunshine, and of the summer
breeze.
So we too have that same gift. We too are anointed as prophets. We are
called to recognise wherever the spirit blows, to recognise the Holy Spirit
of God blowing through our lives and then we are called to speak out that
good news of the Spirit - not so much by word but by the way we live.
|
