Godzdogz

Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, who from 1992-2001 served as the 84th Successor of St Dominic as Master of the Order, continues the series of talks given by Oxford-based Dominicans by reflecting on the Catholic vision for human sexuality:

A few weeks ago some of the brothers here at Blackfriars gathered around the coffee machine and got chatting about our lives before we joined the Order. We shared stories about the people and events that led us to follow Christ by - to our own astonishment - asking to be clothed in the White Habit of Our Holy Father. The stories were delightfully and refreshingly different - some told of rebellion against God until finally relenting, others told of a quiet fidelity that led to the (no less alarming) realisation that Christ was calling.

In the context of today’s parable of the Prodigal Son, you might say that some of us were ‘younger sons’ who went wandering before coming to Christ (not before wallowing with the pigs), and some of us were ‘older sons’ who stayed faithfully in the Church. Ultimately, we all came to realise our need for mercy, seeking - as we express liturgically at the moments of our clothing and profession - God’s mercy and that of our brothers.

In presenting the parable to us (vv. 11-32) the Church gives us a line of introduction (vv. 1-3) telling us to whom Christ is speaking: “the tax collectors” and the “Pharisees and scribes” who seek to exclude them. To the first hearers of Jesus’ words, then, it would have been obvious that the tax collectors’ notorious sin reflected the younger son’s futile rebellion, whilst the Pharisees' resentment at the gratuitous forgiveness being offered to the tax collectors reflected the cold-heartedness of the elder sibling.

 In essence, however, the Pharisaic sin and the notorious defection of the tax collectors is one and the same: it is fundamentally a withdrawal from communion, either by ignoring the living Father as centre of unity for the human family, or by refusing to accept the Father’s reintegration of another sibling. In withdrawing our communion from our brothers or sisters in Christ, we withdraw our communion from the Lord, so much so that the early Church Fathers closely associated the unity of the Church with its holiness. Lent is an invitation to face up, not only to our inner tax collector, but also to our inner Pharisee. As the Church prepares for a new Bishop of Rome, we need - now more than ever - to be together, to be “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic”, to show forth to the world (as the final Tweet of the Emeritus Roman Pontiff has it) “the joy of putting Christ at the centre of our lives”.

What’s the Transfiguration doing here in Lent? In today’s Gospel we read of that mysterious event when Peter, James, and John witnessed the revelation of Jesus’ divine glory as the Father’s beloved Son, but Lent might not seem, on first appearances, to be the most obvious time to commemorate that particular event in the life of Christ. After all, we usually think of Lent as rather an austere time – wouldn’t the brightness of the divine glory fit rather better with the white vestments of Eastertide than Lent’s sombre purple?

And when you think about it, the question actually goes rather deeper than that; because at a very basic level, the explanation for why we read about the Transfiguration in Lent is that, at least in St Matthew’s account, it’s clear that it happened not long before Christ’s Passion, but that draws our attention to the trickier question of what the Transfiguration itself is all about.

And actually, the timing of the Transfiguration can help us understand this, I think. If it came not long before the terrible events of Christ’s Passion, then we can see it as a glimpse of the glory that would be definitively revealed in Christ’s Resurrection, a “preview”, if you like, to strengthen the disciples and give them hope during the coming troubles: no matter how bad things were going to get, they had seen Jesus arrayed in heavenly brightness talking to Moses and Elijah, and heard as a voice from heaven identifying him as the beloved Son.

And in a sense, hearing the Gospel account of the Transfiguration today has something of a similar role in the course of our Lenten journey. It reminds us of the coming celebration of the Resurrection: if Lent is a time when we remember Christ’s suffering in solidarity with us in our humanity, we know that we will nevertheless celebrate his triumph over death by his divine power at Easter. Likewise, if Lent is a time when we remember our sinfulness, and through our penance recognise our need for God’s mercy, we do so not despairing of our salvation, but always aware of the triumph over sin and death which Christ’s Resurrection reveals.

And that, I think, actually brings out another aspect of what this Lenten season is about. We do, of course, need to focus on different stages of Christ’s life at different times – that’s just how our minds work – we need to spend some time thinking about Christ’s sufferings in order better to celebrate his Resurrection and so on; but Lent is also a time of preparation for Easter in the sense that we remind ourselves what it means to live in the light of the Resurrection.

As St Paul said to the Philippians in today’s second reading, “For us, our homeland is in heaven.” Just as the Transfiguration revealed the truth that, already before the Resurrection, he was truly God as well as truly man – God dwelling on earth among human beings – so we are called to remember at this time that in a certain sense already here and now we share through our Baptism in the Resurrection life, the life with God in heaven which Jesus has made possible for us.

And if we think about the traditional elements of Lenten penance – prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – we can see how this pans out. In encouraging us to pray, the Church is helping us to grow in our awareness of the presence of God in our lives; in prayer, we hold our whole lives – our activities and our desires – in His presence. In fasting – restraining in some way our material consumption – we express our recognition that all the good gifts God gives us are nothing compared to the greatest gift of himself, which he has given us in Christ. In almsgiving, we learn to see Christ in those in need, and also to imitate, in our own small and insignificant ways, that love for mankind which he has shown us.

So, then, the Transfiguration belongs in Lent not only as a reminder of our goal – of the divine glory revealed in the Resurrection – though it does that too. But it also reminds us, helped by our Lenten penance, to see the presence of God in every moment of our lives.

One common reading of Christ’s relationship to the Pharisees runs like this: the Pharisees were legalistic, bound to the recitation of inert laws and the practice of a moribund religion characterised by an ever growing battery of precepts and injunctions; Christ came to liberate us from such things, freeing us to the new life of grace, marked by the glorious freedom of the Children of God.

In fact, such a reading risks maligning the Pharisees. It is difficult to square the Jewish faith we see Christ practising - with all its festivals, feasts, communal gatherings and religious diversity - with a simple image of a dead religion chained to an inert set of laws. For all that Christ does indeed take aim at Pharisaic legalism and hypocrisy, both he and they share a desire to renew the covenant people in faith and morals, and when Christ deals with the specifics of Pharisaic teaching - as he does today in one of his ‘you have heard it said…. but I now say to you…’ phrases - he makes the law more burdensome, not less so. Whereas the Pharisees saw the obligation to love neighbour in terms of loving those within the community of Israel (mediating the wrath of God to the nations through their hatred), Christ stresses the obligation to love even those who oppose us. Why? Because we are to be holy like our heavenly Father, bestowing gratuitous love on those who oppose us, just as he lavishes grace upon the world that rebels against him.


In the light of our sinfulness, this all sounds rather hopeless and discouraging. How can we mere mortals ever hope to reach such divine levels of holiness? Our hope is secure, however, because those levels of human holiness have been reached in Christ’s perfect life of self-donation, which He now offers to us. It is this very holiness of Christ that is offered to us through the Sacraments, that has been stamped onto our souls by the Holy Baptism through which we have been engrafted into Christ, and which is revived in us through the Sacrament of Penance. These Sacraments lead towards the Eucharist, the source and summit of our faith, in which we receive Christ Himself, the living presence of the living God, whose communion prevents our piety devolving into the type of legalism of which we are quick to accuse the Pharisees.