“‘I have bestowed My love upon you, just as My Father has bestowed His love upon Me; live on, then, in My love. You will live on in My love, if you keep My commandments, just as it is by keeping My Father’s commandments that I live on in His love. All this I have told you, so that My joy may be yours, and the measure of your joy may be filled up.'”
Gospel of S. John, 15: 9-11 [link]
This weekend, after we have spent two Sundays talking about basic virtue – humility, integrity, honesty – this weekend, let us talk about perseverance. This is very, very important in our day, because we live in a moment in history when we know how difficult it is to make any type of commitment. It’s the reason why we have so few marriages now, and fewer still of them in churches. Why, in the Church of Christ, we have so few vocations to the monasteries and convents anymore, or even to the seminaries. When a couple comes up to me and says, Father, we are celebrating thirty years of marriage… Or forty, or – bless us all – fifty years… then, I want to throw a party to celebrate. Because these anniversaries demonstrate to us that such commitments are possible, when our present society and culture seems to tell us they are more idealistic.
Many years ago, I made a promise too, to be faithful, to serve in a particular way, and to do that until the end. None of the priests stand before a bishop for ordination expecting that one day they will leave, just as couples don’t stand up for marriage thinking that one day they may separate. We don’t really want to think about difficult times when our resolve is pushed to the breaking point. But these times do come, don’t they? Many of us know it, I know it. Perseverance. We must hold on to what is precious, even when we fear to lose it (perhaps). We must lock on to it, establish a covenant, sign documents in blood. Well, not blood really, but you know what I mean… we priests put our hands on a book of Gospels and say, So help me God and these Gospels which I touch with my hand.
Our readings at Mass this weekend are about keeping the law of God, certainly. But as that quote above from Christ’s Last Supper discourses in S. John’s gospel demonstrates, God connects observance of His commandments with love for Him, and this is true both of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And now the issue of fidelity and perseverance applies generally to all Christians. Whether we marry or not, whether we serve the Church in Holy Orders or not, God calls every one of us to return to a time when our race was in its beginning, when humanity was united to Him. Sin stabbed us in the side and dragged us from Him, bringing us death. God will not drag us back by force, He will not drag us kicking and screaming into heaven. He wishes rather that we establish that desire for Him ourselves, that we sign our lives over to Him therefore, and that we persevere in His love until the end.
That is the story of the Bible and the history of the Church. It is a love story, insofar as God as a lover makes a proposal to every human soul and invites her to make a response to Him. We shall find these themes throughout Holy Scripture and this weekend in our readings, such as with the words of Moses echoing through the book of Ecclesiasticus, which we now call Sirach: obey the commandments and choose life, disobey the commandments and choose death…
“When men first came to be, it was God made them, and, making them, left them to the arbitrament of their own wills; yet giving them commandments to be their rule. Those commandments if thou wilt observe, they in their turn shall preserve thee, and give thee warrant of His favour. It is as though He offered thee fire and water, bidding thee take which thou wouldst; life and death, blessing and curse, man finds set before him, and the gift given thee shall be the choice thou makest; so wise God is, so constraining His power, so incessant the watch He keeps over mankind. The Lord’s eye is watching over the men who fear Him, no act of ours passes unobserved; upon none does He enjoin disobedience, none has leave from Him to commit sin.”
Book of Ecclesiasticus (aka. Sirach), 15: 14-21 [link]
If you wish, says the sage, you can keep these many, difficult commandments of God and so have life. You choose to have life. God wants you to have it, but you must want it. There are elements in our society today who despise law of any sort, and rail against police forces, want to destroy order so that anarchy can be established. This is of course on a political level, but the tendency we can note on the spiritual level also. Men and women grimace at the Creator God, cursing His order within the Creation, telling him (if they talk to Him at all) that man is more important, that man’s desires must stand over God’s, that it is man who is to be the master over Creation. We see this attitude and its consequences on enormous scales these days, and all around us. This is what sin is – fighting against God’s order, pushing for disorder and anarchy.
And the prophet, be he Jewish or Christian, stands up and says (the response to our psalm this weekend), Blessed the person who follows the Law of God, the order established by the Holy One. The great English author C. S. Lewis called this order established by God the ‘deeper magic.’ Our Lord Jesus Christ called it love, charity – the desire for the good of others. Nor our own selfish good, but the good of the people whom we somehow have a care for.
What the Apostle S. Paul says to us in our second reading we could read out to the post-Christian society that we live in.
“There is, to be sure, a wisdom which we make known among those who are fully grounded; but it is not the wisdom of this world, or of this world’s rulers, whose power is to be abrogated. What we make known is the wisdom of God, His secret, kept hidden till now; so, before the ages, God had decreed, reserving glory for us. (None of the rulers of this world could read His secret, or they would not have crucified Him to Whom all glory belongs.) So we read of, Things no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart conceived, the welcome God has prepared for those who love Him. To us, then, God has made a revelation of it through His Spirit; there is no depth in God’s nature so deep that the Spirit cannot find it out.”
First letter of S. Paul to the Corinthians, 2: 6-10 [link]
The Church has a wisdom to offer a world and it is a wisdom that is not of this world. It is a wisdom that the selfish or the worldly may not want to hear, because they may have to give up too much to follow it. They may have to give up their very lives for it.
We Christianss certainly have to live this wisdom, this charity, this love. We should live as if God were everything, and as if the people He loves mean the world to us also. As the Lord says in the Gospel reading, our virtue is fruitless if it goes no deeper than that of the scribes and pharisees, who (as we know) were too often obeying precepts of the law without love for the people they were supposed to serve. The famous ‘sermon on the mount’ of our Lord, between chapters five and seven of the gospel of S. Matthew, may be summarised like this: you have heard it said in the Law of Moses that you should not do such and such a thing and please don’t do it, but here I am, Holy God in your midst, and I say to you that if you do not avoid that sin for love of the person who may be hurt by it, out of love for that person, then you have not followed the Law at all. And so we can see why He sharpens the requirement. If we truly love somebody, we shall both not wish to kill them and not to insult them grievously. If we truly love our spouses, we shall never entertain divorce. If we truly respect the integrity of other people, we shall not only avoid the evil of adultery with them but also avoid lustful desires about them. If we truly honour God and the holy places, we shall never foolishly swear by Him or by them oaths that we are likely to break.
“‘Do not think that I have come to set aside the law and the prophets; I have not come to set them aside, but to bring them to perfection. Believe Me, heaven and earth must disappear sooner than one jot, one flourish should disappear from the law; it must all be accomplished. Whoever, then, sets aside one of these commandments, though it were the least, and teaches men to do the like, will be of least account in the kingdom of heaven; but the man who keeps them and teaches others to keep them will be accounted in the kingdom of heaven as the greatest. And I tell you that if your justice does not give fuller measure than the justice of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Gospel of S. Matthew, 5: 17-37 [link]
‘You have heard that it was said to the men of old, Thou shalt do no murder; if a man commits murder, he must answer for it before the court of justice. But I tell you that any man who is angry with his brother must answer for it before the court of justice, and any man who says Raca to his brother must answer for it before the Council; and any man who says to his brother, Thou fool, must answer for it in hell fire. If thou art bringing thy gift, then, before the altar, and rememberest there that thy brother has some ground of complaint against thee, leave thy gift lying there before the altar, and go home; be reconciled with thy brother first, and then come back to offer thy gift. If any man has a claim against thee, come to terms there and then, while thou art walking in the road with him; or else it may be that the claimant will hand thee over to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and so thou wilt be cast into prison. Believe Me, thou shalt not be set at liberty until thou hast paid the last farthing.
‘You have heard that it was said, Thou shalt not commit adultery. But I tell you that he who casts his eyes on a woman so as to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If thy right eye is the occasion of thy falling into sin, pluck it out and cast it away from thee; better to lose one part of thy body than to have the whole cast into hell. And if thy right hand is an occasion of falling, cut it off and cast it away from thee; better to lose one of thy limbs than to have thy whole body cast into hell.
‘It was said, too, Whoever will put away his wife must first give her a writ of separation. But I tell you that the man who puts away his wife (setting aside the matter of unfaithfulness) makes an adulteress of her, and whoever marries her after she has been put away, commits adultery.
‘Again, you have heard that it was said to the men of old, Thou shalt not perjure thyself; thou shalt perform what thou hast sworn in the sight of the Lord. But I tell you that you should not bind yourselves by any oath at all: not by heaven, for heaven is God’s throne; nor by earth, for earth is the footstool under His feet; nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And thou shalt not swear by thy own head, for thou hast no power to turn a single hair of it white or black. Let your word be Yes for Yes, and No for No; whatever goes beyond this, comes of evil.'”
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 