Crowds and sandwiches

In the Gospel of Mark we are treated to a rather brilliant example of the Markan sandwich - two inter-related stories that provide flavour, texture and context to each other to highlight the power of the kingdom of God that breaks into our existence through the ministry of Jesus. The woman suffering with the hemorrhage for twelve years and the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus are both fearful, suffering, in need of healing and salvation, and both are supported by faith in the midst of a crowd that has other ideas and does not share in the same faith.

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Recorded at St Paul's, 10am (11'22")
Sunday 13B

Seated at the right hand of the Father

The Feast of the Ascension can strike us a quite bizarre affair - especially to one who grew up on a diet of science-fiction and imagined that Jesus somehow managed to add flying and living outside of the atmosphere to his walking-on-water and multiplying food - as well as raising the dead and getting through locked doors (after being resurrected from the dead). So today I want to allow St Paul's powerful prayer in Ephesians to inspire us to look deeper into the truth behind the feast, and particularly to consider what it meant for Jesus to be seated at the right hand of God. We begin with the description of the burnt offering in Leviticus 1.

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Recorded at St Paul's, 5.30pm (12'29")

Prepared for heaven

Bastien Joseph Isaiah Madrill, 18 April 1996 - 26 April 2012

It is always with a certain hesitation that I attend to a call like I received last Thursday evening, to visit a family's home after the death of a loved one. Although you have been invited, you are never quite sure what will await you when you arrive, and I am keenly aware of the sense of barging in and intruding on what has to be one of the most intimate and sublime experiences that any family will journey through. As the priest, you are not sure what level of faith will await you, or what level of antagonism or anxiety or anger concerning the church. When I was led into Bastien's bedroom and saw Joe and Claire and Michaela and Alexis gathered around his bed, it didn't take long for me to realise that I had been invited into a most sacred encounter.

The first thing that struck me that night was the extraordinary love that emanated from each member of this most incredible family. But as we began to pray and I offered the prayers after death, then it became clear that the evident affection and devotion that each and every person there had for Bas was founded in a deep faith and trust in the God of life.
After I had finished the prayers assigned to me, and we had prayed together for a few minutes, I tried to move into the background, and practice the very ancient tradition of the simple prayer of presence.
I hoped to allow each member of the family to continue to say goodbye, as I silently prayed as a member of St Paul's Parish in this sanctuary of the domestic church.

I prayed in silence and commended Bas into the merciful arms of our dear Lord Jesus; meanwhile the family prayed in a similar way, asking his guardian angel to escort him along this part of his journey.
Later that night, and then especially the next day, I began to get an insight into the enormous impact of the life of this young man - through the flood of tributes on facebook and then the silence and respect - along with the tears and the weeping of hundreds of students at Magdalene last Friday.
I have no easy answer to the question that has been asked so often since Bas was first diagnosed with cancer on 21 October, and especially since his death - why? As one girl asked me after Mass on Sunday - if God loves us so much, then why does he kill people? Why does he allow such suffering?

Of course, I do not believe that God is vindictive, or that God does kill people. I believe that God has created us in love as part of his natural order, but it is an order that is tainted by the wounds of sin and death. So yes, we experience the horrors of diseases such as cancer in this present world - but we are never meant to suffer them alone. We are always in the presence of a God who does love us unconditionally and who continues to lavish his love upon us.

When we suffer, Jesus is there suffering along with us. He did announce his name was Emmanuel - God-with-us. Not only that, but the place where the church should be most evident is when one member of the body suffers. It is then that the love of God's family should be most clearly experienced through the physical presence of the hugs and kisses, the touch and embrace, the love and grace of the body of Christ on earth. This is something that Bas so clearly received both implicitly and explicitly through the obvious love, faith and grace of his immediate and extended family.

Undoubtedly the reason that he touched so many peole with his love, was because he learnt a lesson that so many others can take decades to learn - if at all - the lesson of the gift. The lesson of grace.
Perhaps the reason that so many people were so deeply touched by the life of Bastien Joseph Isaiah Madrill, was because somehow he allowed himself to be touched deeply by God's love, and in so doing, he became a very sign and presence of the kingdom of God, here on earth. Somehow he discovered the secret of being a citizen of heaven much more quickly and with greater ease then so many thousands of others.

So why did Bas die so young? Because he could. Because he was ready for heaven and eternity in the new creation. Let us pray that we can learn to be citizens of heaven and allow the gift of love to mark our lives as well.
Bastien - rest in peace.

Play MP3 - Homily

Recorded at the Funeral Mass for Bastien. (5'36")

• Tribute - written by Joe and Claire Madrill for their son Bastien, which I read out during the funeral liturgy (20'48"):
• Play MP3 - Tribute letter

The Hunger Games and Sacrifice

Last weekend I joined the throngs - not in welcoming the Messiah to Jerusalem - but in watching the new hit movie, The Hunger Games - based on the first part of the popular trilogy written by Suzanne Collins. The action takes place in a future post-apocalyptic north America, where all that is left after the unnamed devastation are the capital (somewhere deep in the Rockies) and twelve districts. The heroes come from District 12, where the main industry is coal-mining. We discover that to 'celebrate' the quashing of the uprising that had happened 74 years earlier, when there was a 13th district that led the rebellion [apparently no longer in existence] a contest is held to choose two delegates from each of the districts - one boy and one girl aged between 12 and 18 to compete in the so-called Hunger Games. The object of the games is to fight to the death so that of the 24 competitors that enter the arena, only one is allowed to survive - and all of this is captured by hundreds of cameras and broadcast as compulsory viewing to the whole nation. Charming!
As I watched the movie (and then read the book this week), I was struck by how often stories and movies set in some distant future are so dark - the world and its peoples are scratching to survive in an environment marked by violence, warfare and hatred. Dozens of examples come to mind. So this scenario - as horrible as it is - only joins a very long list from human history or societies and cultures that have demanded no less than mortal combat and human sacrifice either as entertainment or as an attempt to deal with the angst that we have felt and continue to experience. The Capital here needs a scapegoat to remind the citizens in these far-flung districts that it is in charge.
When we gather today to remember the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, welcomed by hundreds of pilgrims from equally far-flung regions of the Jewish diaspora - perhaps many of them from Galilee and other northern districts, it seems that the liturgy barely allows us to catch our breath before the action moves to the final anointing of Jesus, the last supper, the garden, betrayal and arrest, trial and then the crucifixion. The need for a scapegoat - seemingly so strong in the human psyche - is answered in Judaism by the annual remembrance of the Day of Atonement, where a goat is brought through the crowd of pilgrims and then banished as a way of acknowledging the seriousness of our sin and dysfunction. But the goat is not enough. To only allow another to take on our sins is not enough if we know that we have to turn around and repeat all this again next year. The difference that Jesus brings to this reality is that he is not only a scapegoat - he becomes something unique in human history, because he is able to make this offering once and for all. He is not only one like us, but he is also God. So when he offers himself for our sins in our place, this sacrifice radically subverts the standard model because he freely offers himself in our place. He is not the scapegoat for he offers himself - not as something that has to be repeated each year - but as the once and only sacrifice that we have the wondrous privilege of remembering so powerfully each year.

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Recorded at St Paul's, 10am (4'45")
L6B; Palm/Passion Sunday, Year B.

Annunciation - dreaming big and saying yes

The readings in the liturgy today provides a contrast between two figures - the great and mighty King Ahaz, and the young maiden Jew Mary. When the Lord, through the prophet Isaiah, appears before the king, and directs him to ask for a sign, he is given permission to dream big. "Ask the Lord your God for a sign for yourself coming either from the depths of Sheol or from the heights above." So he is given permission to ask for anything; the boundaries that he is set could not - in the Jewish understanding of cosmology - be any bigger. In response, the foolish and rather pathetic Ahaz is only able to respond with false piety - "no, I will not put the Lord to the test." It is hardly a test when you have specifically been given permission by the Lord to ask for something!

As we fast forward through 700 years of turbulent Jewish history, we arrive in Luke's telling in the village of Nazareth - an area that like all of the holy land is under occupation by the might of the Roman army. It was a dangerous time to be alive.
Even the simplest of what we now understand as ordinary activities and events could involve mortal peril. Indeed, sociologists tell us that childbirth and infancy were so risky, with such a high death rate, that just to keep the population of the Roman Empire stable (that is with a zero population growth), every woman of child-bearing age (which in those times was 14 years old - and it was a feat to survive even to that age) had to undergo five pregnancies - because so many mothers died in child-birth and so many infants died. So when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary on this day, and reveals such a confusing and utterly dramatic message, it is even more remarkable that the young Mary is able to respond so readily with the words that we know so well: 'I am the handmaid of the Lord; let what you have said be done to me.'

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Annunciation of the Lord.
Recorded at St Paul's, 9am. (06'08")

Sacrifice, obedience and the lamb

Our first reading from Genesis 22 contains what is often regarded as one of the finest examples of a short story in all or Western literature. In 19 short verses, the reader is taken on a terrible and shocking journey along with Abraham and Isaac - your only son, the son that you love - for three days until they reach the mountain of Moriah (which 2 Chronicles tells us would become the temple mount in Jerusalem). Although the reader knows that this is a test for Abraham, he is not in on that little secret; so we can only wonder how he endured these three days while he would have been beside himself in grief as he walked along with Isaac, prepared camps, ate meals together and shared stories around a camp-fire - and yet pretended that nothing was amiss in this horrible pilgrimage.

The lectionary reading skips over some of the details, so it well worth reading the full passage to see all the details - and especially the poignant exchange between Isaac - now carrying the wood that would be used to burn the sacrifice and his father, as in innocence Isaac looks up at his father and asks the powerful question: 'here is the flint/fire and the wood - but where is the lamb of sacrifice?' With the faith and obedient trust that has become Abraham's greatest mark and honour, he answers with powerful prophetic insight: 'The Lord himself, will provide the lamb - my son.' We are left to wonder whether 'the son' is meant to be ironic - a hint from Abraham to Isaac of the darker purposes that he is being forced to embark upon. When they reach the summit of the mountain, there Abraham binds his son - an act that provides the title for this sacrifice - the Akedah of Isaac (or in Hebrew, Akeidat Yitzchak). We are not told how old Isaac is at this point - at the end of Genesis 21 we are simply told that 'a long time passed' so Isaac could be a young boy (yet old enough to carry a pile of branches), or a young man. Whatever his age, it seems that Isaac, who now knows that he is to be the lamb of sacrifice, allows himself to be bound and so offered to the Lord.

It is only after Isaac, now bound, and placed upon the newly constructed altar, and as Abraham - presumably racked in grief and tears - reaches out with the knife to lunge it into the neck of his beloved son. As he begins to bring the knife down, it is then that the angel of the Lord intervenes to prevent this heinous crime of human sacrifice from taking place. Then we are informed that a short distance away, a ram is caught up in the bushes, and so is available to take the place of Isaac and be sacrificed. Note it is a ram - not the lamb that Abraham prophesied. After this passage, any careful reader of scripture should be looking for this lamb - when will God come through and answer this promise? When will God finally provide the lamb of sacrifice?

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Recorded at St Paul's 10am - with the assistance of Lachlan, Matthew and Ben, and a whole lot of rope from Bunnings and a huge knife from the presbytery kitchen.
The recording from the 8am Mass is also available: http://www.fecitmihimagna.com/

The empty God

To make sense of the gospel today, you need to see what has been happening earlier in chapter 25 of Matthew's gospel. At the beginning of the chapter Jesus and his disciples have made their triumphant entry into Jerusalem on the day that we now call Palm Sunday. He then proceeded to cleanse the temple, driving out the money changers and sellers. It is at this point that he is confronted by the scribes and chief priests who ask by whose authority this country-bumpkin from Galilee is acting like this? Jesus, as the good unoffical Rabbi, responds by putting a question to them about John the baptist's authority - from God or man? When they refuse to answer he then tells the story that is the Gospel today. Closely related to this passage is the utterly sublime hymn that forms the major part of our second reading today, taken from the letter of St Paul to the church in Philippi. The hymn called the Carmen Christi, is usually considered to pre-date the letter and thus is the earliest declaration of the church to this question of the authority of Jesus to act like this - 'his state was divine.'

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Recorded at SJV, 8.30am (9'23")

At the end of Mass, it was announced that Bishop Peter has appointed me as assistant priest to the parish of St Paul's Camden (Fr Michael Williams is the parish priest). Camden is the largest parish in NSW and the Diocese, and is growing rapidly with many young families. I will live in the presbytery in Camden; Fr Michael lives in Narellan. The appointment will take effect on 6 October 2011. At this stage there is no priest available to take my place here in the Lumen Christi Pastoral Region.

Betrayal, lies and grace

The Palm Sunday liturgy crams an amazing array of emotions into an hour - from the jubilation of the triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the heartbreak and desolation of betrayal, sleep, violence, cowardice, lies, false witness, racial abuse, denial, pride, anger - the reality of so much human sin on display. It is precisely into all of this sin that the person of Jesus enters and journeys - until he can take it all on board in the violence of the cross and allow love to win the final victory.

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Recorded at Mater Dolorosa, 10am (5'35")
Palm Sunday. Matthew 26-27.

Roll the stone away from the stink

This most powerful healing story - perhaps the ultimate miracle with the raising of a man four-days dead - begins so simply with a description of the fact that a man called Lazarus was ill. Most of our English biblical names have come to us via the Latin Vulgate translation. In the original Hebrew, Lararus would have been called El'Azar - which means God helps and he lived with his two sisters Miryam and Marta in Bethany (or Biet'Anyah, which means 'house of the afflicted') - an appropriate place for someone who was ill. El'Azar then becomes a sign for anyone who is afflicted in anyway, and who needs the help of God. So why does Yeshua (Jesus) wait two days to visit his beloved friends?

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Recorded at St Francis Xavier Cathedral, 9.00am (12'06")
Lent Sunday 5A. John 11:1-45

Life, death, hands, feet, bodies and couches

Now that our journey with Jesus to Jerusalem has finally reached its climax in the triumphant entry into the city, the tension only continues to increase. Likewise, as the liturgical year rapidly draws to a close, the church this week offers readings that invite us to reflect on what happens to us - and very specifically what happens to our bodies after we die. So why do our bodies matter? Shouldn't we only worry about our souls? Or is it okay to buy a new couch? Listen in for all this and more!

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Recorded at SJV 6pm

Death and new life in Luke (Easter Vigil)

Luke 24:1-12

Hey! I’ll let you in on a little secret. Are you ready? (whispering) Dead people – well, they usually stay dead. We didn’t need the insights and advances of medical science in the past couple hundred years for humans to know that.

The scriptures make it clear that no one who was following Jesus – his disciples or the many women who were travelling with him and stayed with him right through those terrible last hours of the passion, death and burial of Jesus – none of them expected to find anything other than a dead body in the tomb when they went back there early on the first day of the week – Sunday. And Jesus was certainly dead. It was not his disciples, friends or the women who certified that – it was the Roman soldiers who declared him to be dead. And let’s face it – they were the experts in killing people. That was their business and trade.


Hans Holbein – painting of “The body of the dead Christ in the tomb”, 1522 (Kunstmuseum, Basel). Fyodor Dostoyevsky fell into a feint when he saw this painting. This Jesus is so dead - humanly and in every other sense - how could he ever rise again? That is what the women were prepared to see when they went to the tomb that first day of the week.

But Luke wants us to know something else. Indeed a whole lot of other things as we are given in our reading from chapter 24 – the first movement in his magnificent three-part symphony of the story of the resurrection. He first wants to address a number of clues that he gave us last Sunday (Palm Sunday), when we read his passion story – and particularly the final section from chapter 23.

There the centurion who was overseeing the crucifixion declares that Jesus was innocent (he was a victim, not a villain and didn’t deserve to die). The crowds return home after his death shocked and sad. Those who knew Jesus watched from a distance, including the women who had followed him from Galilee.

When his body was taken down from the cross, Joseph of Arimathea came and took the body, wrapped it in a shroud, and placed the body in a new tomb – ‘where no one had been laid.’ The women – who are finally named in the Gospel today – go with Joseph and see the tomb and how the body was laid. All of these details are carefully spelled out, just as Luke promised in the prologue to his Gospel.

Burial practices in the ANE varied widely. Here, the burial was to be in two stages. First the body would be laid on the ledge in a cave (natural or constructed); it would be wrapped up with spices and ointments to cover the smell of the decomposing flesh. Although this was expensive, it was necessary because a given tomb would be used many times, and in the coming months other bodies would more than likely be laid to rest on other shelves in the same tomb. (But again Luke makes clear this one was new – and hadn’t been used before – so there was no risk that the women had mistaken which shelf the body of Jesus was on – it was the only one in the tomb.) When all the flesh had rotted away, the remaining bones would then be reverently collected and transferred into a small bone-box, called an ossuary. The initial burial was always temporary and only the first stage in saying goodbye to a beloved friend or relative (unlike our practice where the burial is the end of the road). So it was always crucial that people knew where the person had been laid; they would not make a mistake about that.

So when the women went to the tomb, very early on the first day of the week (Sunday), they were going to finalise the preparation of the body, to place more spices around the body to mask and cover the smell when the body decomposed. So they knew which tomb to go for, and also knew that the body of Jesus was the only one there. All they had to worry about was that the stone would not be too heavy to roll away from the entrance. When they arrived and the stone had been rolled away and there was no body inside – what were they to think? The only conclusion is that someone had stolen the body. The possibility of resurrection is so removed from their understanding: yes, they knew that it would happen someday – but it was for all the righteous, all together – not for one person ahead of all the rest. No one had even dreamed that this was a possibility. So yes they are utterly surprised, shocked and shaken.

The women, and perhaps even more so, the disciples are full of surprise, shock, astonishment, fear and confusion. But the saving grace of the women is they remembered the words of Jesus and they shared them with the eleven (Judas is now gone) but they don’t get it and dismiss the words of the women as stupid idle talk. At least Peter cares enough to go and have a look for himself – he stoops down and sees the grave clothes (signs that the body at least had not been stolen – why would anyone unwrap a dead body?) – but the best he can come up with is amazement and to be perplexed. Clearly this was well short of the growing faith of the women.
So what about us? What will we make of all this? The evidence is rather clear: that has been demonstrated again and again over the centuries. “Why look for the living among the dead?”

How will we respond?

Do we join the thousands of voices today that dismiss all of this talk about miracles and the resurrection of Jesus as first-century ‘stupid idle talk’? Do we stay perplexed and amazed? Or do we accept the evidence and remember the words of Jesus – and then come to believe and be transformed by the power of the risen Lord, ‘from glory into glory’?

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Recorded at St Michael's, 7pm (8'52")

The end of the world - of death

Week 33 - Season of the Year B
Mark 13:24-32

Often when we are presented with a passage like the Gospel that we have just read, we are left scratching our heads and wondering what on earth (or heaven) is going on. Of course there is a fascination in our world (like theirs) about the end of the world. Movies like 2012 - released this week - or other Hollywood blockbusters like Knowing, Independence Day, the Day After Tomorrow all attest to our interest and fascination with the subject, as do bookshelves full of prophecies from Nostradamus or the Mayan empire - or indeed of course from our own Scriptures.

So yes, we have a range of passages and whole books in the Bible that are samples of what we call 'Apocalyptic'. The first reading today was from the Prophet Daniel, and the final book in the Bible is the Book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse. And they are notoriously difficult to interpret. Especially if we imagine that they are to be taken literally, or that they are meant to be read as precise predictions of how the world will end. Which they are not.

First the title gives us a hint - it is called apocalyptic, which comes from a Greek word 'apokalypso' meaning 'disclosure', 'unveiling' or 'revelation'. Sometimes this refers to an unveiling of the future, but usually it means a revelation about what is happening all around us - which is the case in today's Gospel. Secondly, this kind of literature is usually written during times of persecution. So Daniel comes from the period of the Jewish exile in Babylon, when the people were suffering great persecution; similarly the book of Revelation was written at the end of the first century, during a period of deep persecution of the Christian Church by the Roman Empire.

Turning to the Gospel itself, this chapter 13 begins with Jesus and his disciples sitting in the temple forecourt. Now, especially for country bumpkins like this lot, coming from Galilee the Temple was an amazingly impressive building. As a country kid myself, I remember vividly the first time that I went overseas. As a good Catholic boy, my first stop was Rome and we went straight by train from the plane to St Peter's. Man, that place is just amazing. The building is simply massive and so beautiful. It is 220m long and seats 60,000 people. But the temple of King Herod was just as impressive - or even more so. The whole complex was nearly half a kilometre long - 485m along the Western wall. At the south-eastern corner the wall is 130m about the valley - that's like a 40-story building. And it was all decked out in white limestone, marble and stacks of gold. So it would take your breath away! And Archeologists have discovered that some of the foundation stones would have weighed around 4000 tonnes - so it was certainly enough to blow away these country kids. And Jesus simply says that not one of these massive and beautiful stones will be left standing on another. And to declare that he really didn't even need to be a great prophet. He knew how central the Temple was to the whole scheme of things - how it lay not just at the centre of Jewish religious life but also their whole cultural, political and national identity. He also knew how much the tension was building between the Jewish zealots who were pushing for a national uprising and the Roman Empire. This all came to a head in the last 60s, leading to the complete destruction of the Temple in 70CE.

So Jesus is alluding to this - and to some extent he is also alluding to the eventual end of the world. But he talks about all of this coming about during the current generation - that the disciples would all witness it. If we take all this literally, we are left wondering if Jesus got the details all wrong. So what was he talking about when he mentions the sun and moon being darkened and the stars falling?
First we need to remember the centrality of these 'heavenly bodies' in everyday life. Now, if I want to know what the time is, I just look at my watch. If I am wondering around and want to know where I am I pull out my mobile phone and turn on the GPS. The same in my car. If it is getting a bit dark, I flick the switch and turn on the lights. In those days the sun and moon provided their main sources of light. You used them to know what the time was. You used them and the stars to navigate and to know what season it was and what the weather was going to be like. (Hence the example of the fig tree.) So the sun and moon and stars represented what the whole world was like. The symbolised the existing structure of the world. So when Jesus says that all of that is changing - all of that is coming to an end in this generation - he is talking about events that are much closer at hand. Remember all this happens in Jerusalem during what we now call 'Holy Week'. The great events of Jesus' death and resurrection are only a day or two away. Jesus wants his disciples to know that what is about to happen will not just effect him - but it will change their whole world (represented by the sun, moon and stars). Why will everything change? Because until that time the whole world has revolved around death. Death (like taxes) is the one thing that every empire has always held over its citizens and subjects. Fear of death has remained a constant across human history. In one way we can understand that all of our sin and dysfunction is linked to this fear of death and our feeble attempts to overcome it - whether that is by pursuing health, wealth, beauty, power, sex or simply distracting ourselves with new toys or experiences. But all of that world came to end - or began to end - the moment that Jesus took all of our sin and dysfunction on-board when he stretched out his arms on that Roman cross.

The old world did in fact end on that glorious Easter Sunday morning. All of our fears and failures were caught up and redeemed by the work of God in the person of Jesus. The world that the disciples knew did end that day.

But the end was also a beginning. Because realities are of little use unless we know about them. Unless we live in their truth. So while death no longer has a hold over us, we need - as a Christian people - to live in this truth. And we need to take our place in proclaiming and living as an Easter people.

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Recorded at St Michael's Nowra, 9.30am (12'51")

The Good Life

Fr Richard John Neuhaus, the publisher and editor of the iconic journal 'First Things' died last night in New York from cancer.

This is a reflection that he wrote on death back in 2000:
We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word “good” should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Read more here

We also heard at the end of last year of the passing of Cardinal Avery Dulles. This is a reflection that he wrote:

The behavior of living organisms cannot be explained without taking into account their striving for life and growth. Plants, by reaching out for sunlight and nourishment, betray an intrinsic aspiration to live and grow. This internal finality makes them capable of success and failure in ways that stones and minerals are not. Because of the ontological gap that separates the living from the nonliving, the emergence of life cannot be accounted for on the basis of purely mechanical principles. In tune with this school of thought, the English mathematical physicist John Polkinghorne holds that Darwinism is incapable of explaining why multicellular plants and animals arise when single-cellular organisms seem to cope with the environment quite successfully. There must be in the universe a thrust toward higher and more-complex forms.
...Materialistic Darwinism is incapable of explaining why the universe gives rise to subjectivity, feeling, and striving.