Advent Mass

There is a deep irony in the words of Isaiah, son of Amos, as he prophesies what may happen in the long future of Jerusalem.  Part of his prophecy rings true even for us today as we see many pilgrims of the three Abrahamic faiths congregating in the various holy sites contained within the city walls, and this much is true:   

“All nations shall stream toward it;
many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us climb the LORD’s mountain”(Is 2:3)

But as for “following the instructions of the Lord, that we may walk in his paths”, that I suggest is something only partially achieved. It is a truth that people of good will have to accept, particularly as we, trustees, colleagues, friends – all part of the family at FACE – struggle with the enormities of the problems of not only Eastern Christians, but also all the innocent people caught up in the conflict in Gaza and other problems in the Holy Land, the Middle East and elsewhere in our world.

Yet though we must pay attention and act, we should not become too caught up in the relentless negativity of the news cycle, for whatever may be happening, there is something all of us can do to help make real that second part of Isaiah’s vision.  And that is by keeping alive the light of Christ’s hope and love in whatever ways we can.  We are greatly helped by part of the admonition and encouragement of the Second Letter of Timothy we have just heard: to truly hold dear the faith and love of Christ given us by grace. In a very real sense, part of our essential vocation as Christians and Catholics is to ‘Guard this rich trust with the help of the Holy Spirit that dwells within us’.( 2 Timothy 1:13-14)

This brings me to look at two further elements of our celebration this evening, which I feel underline this basic task.  We remember John of Damascus, a saint venerated in Eastern and Western Christianity, and we have a gospel that suggests something about choice. Yet here I urge a word of caution and would like to suggest that part of the problem we face in dealing with understanding our scriptures – and, in another kind of manner, the political and religious conflicts of our contemporary world, often lies in our inability to see the whole issue. We are good at reading into something, but not often at stepping back to listen to the layers of voices in the story and hear another story.

What does John give to us? Like the Gospel he challenges us.  He was born c 675 in Damascus, received a classical and theological education, and followed his father in a government position under the Arabs. After a few years, he resigned and went to the Monastery of Saint Sabas near Jerusalem where he lived until he died on this day 4 December 4, 749. He was a monk, a theologian, and venerated in both the Greek and Latin Churches.

But it is in three distinct areas that he is famous :

Firstly, he is known for his theological writings against the iconoclasts, who opposed the veneration of images. One of the paradoxes in his story is that it was the Eastern Christian emperor Leo who outlawed the devotion to images, and curiously, and again this needs to be noted, it was because John lived in Muslim territory that his enemies could not silence him. His clarity of exposition is second to his deep theology, such as exemplified in his work, ‘Fount of Wisdom’ : “But since some find fault with us for worshipping and honouring the image of our Saviour and that of our Lady, and those, too, of the rest of the saints and servants of Christ, let them remember that in the beginning God created man after His own image. On what grounds, then, do we show reverence to each other unless because we are made after God’s image? For as Basil (the Great, c. 330-379), that much-versed expounder of divine things, says, the honour given to the image passes over to the prototype”. We may shorten this to his precise comment: “ ‘Because of the Incarnation, I salute all remaining matter with reverence’. In these days when ecology, climate and environment are highly important for our survival, in fact for the prospect of that peace of a future heavenly Jerusalem prophesied by Isaiah, this basic truth, that all is touched by the sacred, and all are in fact icons of the holy, rings true.  And about this we need greater awareness.

Secondly, John is famous for his treatise, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, a summary of the Greek Fathers, of which he became the last. This book is for Eastern schools what the Summa of Aquinas became for the Western Church.

Thirdly, he is known as a poet, one of the two greatest of the Eastern Church, alongside Romanus the Melodist. Many of the texts he wrote are still used in the Eastern liturgy today, but there are also hymns of his which we are familiar with in the West.  But he was also a great devotee  of  the Blessed Mother  of Christ, Saint Mary,  and his sermons on her feasts are well known.

But what is he for us? I think John hints at the jewel contained in our Gospel today, a reminder that not all is what it seems, and that the Lord who is coming is also the God of surprises  and humility.

I shall try to make the connection for us. As John is a paradox, able to defend the incarnation and the sacredness of earth because he lived outside the Christian mainstream in a land under Islamic rule away from the constant controversies of Christian doctrine on the nature of Christ and of God, so too this gospel takes us to a very strange place where we have to see things differently.  In one sense it seems obvious: two servants who do well for the absent Master, and a third who fails miserably and is punished. Too often I have heard this gospel preached as something to do with our personal talents, but this take on the story misses the point if we do not start by recognising several things.

Firstly, we cannot metaphorically identify this Master as being in any way an image of Jesus. He is rapacious, someone who reaps where he does not sow, and gathers where he has not scattered seed. He is aggressive in seeking to build up his estate, doing whatever he can to make a profit. The reprimand he gives to the third servant for failing to invest the money with the bankers, so that he might have gained interest, is actually a false statement, for in fact this is a practice forbidden in scripture (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:35-38).

Secondly, if we mistakenly identify Jesus as the Master, the return, the second coming of the master, is not at all like our own expectation of Christ, because there is none of the eschatological expectancy of waiting for a coming that is not known but hoped for, and which requires of each servant a definite faith and a readiness to live each day with that hope. And that sheds light, not on the two servants who do not have that faith, but on the third, the misunderstood one, who has faith.

Whilst we might from our own perceptions and from our own culture, commend the actions of these first two as faithful, wise and judicious actions for the good of the Master’s wealth, hearers at the time of Jesus would have perceived it differently, in the sense that these servants’ understanding of ‘faithfulness’ was not to God or the Torah, but to a greedy master who did not want to get accused of profiting at someone else’s expense, and which in religious circles and in good society was considered shameful behaviour.

In order to get round this, these sort of corrupt persons would often delegate their business to slaves, ‘pass the buck’ so to speak, as slaves were held to a different standard. Richard Rohrbaugh, a commentator in the Biblical Archaeology Review, explains the ancients’ reasoning: “Shameful, even greedy, behaviour could be condoned in slaves because slaves had no honour nor any expectation of it.” So we have to ask ourselves: Is their behaviour an example of the type of ‘faithfulness’ we ought to emulate?

To confound our expectations we can begin to see that in fact it was the third servant who was being faithful, not to the greed and sin of the Master, but to God; he was  being obedient to the demands of God’s Law, whilst the other two servants connived in the masters greed and did what was forbidden. The story should make us uneasy, for Jesus himself says that we should lend ‘expecting nothing in return’ (Luke 6:35).

Thirdly: the tale is absurd: Why?

This master, a devious character, is willing to gain money at other people’s expense. His character challenges any interpretation of the parable that would directly correlate him with Jesus, who does none of these things. But there is also the sheer ridiculousness of the story, we might read five talents as a small sum, whereas in actual fact the true value of a talent was astronomical. Five talents being perhaps the equivalent of 20 years’ wages for the servant. The story would not have been perceived as a success for the Master or the two servants, because as Rohrbaugh points out ;… “honourable people did not try to get more, and those who did were automatically considered thieves”. To have gained, to have accumulated more than one started with, is to have taken the share of someone else. As the early Christian theologian Jerome would later write: “Every rich person is either a thief or the heir of a thief” (In Hieremiam II.V.2; CCL LXXIV 61). And as Sirach puts it, “A merchant can hardly keep from wrongdoing, and a tradesman will not be declared innocent of sin” (26:29). In other words the whole idea of riches, monetary gain and wealth is challenged at its roots!

So what do we make of it all?

I think the answer is simple and also profound, it calls us tboth know our Scriptures much better and also to refrain from using them to justify our own cultural assumptions. It calls us to take the equitable distribution of goods and wealth as something inherent in the Christian message. It challenges us to turn the world upside down and look beyond the immediate, to find, as John of Damascus discovered in his understanding of the Incarnation of Christ, that Christ is everywhere, even where we might assume God is not, and at all times the Holy One can use and change us. In the words of the Jesuit poet G M Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”. The nuances of the gospel tale and the story of John of Damascus highlight the gentle perceptive humour at the heart of our understanding of Jesus, who shows us up for what and who we are, holds up a mirror for us to see ourselves, not as the two servants, not as the master, but far more like the third servant, whose sense of honour and faith was deep, and whose basic observance of life was for the good of others, and not to serve the greed of another.

Isn’t that what Jesus means? Isn’t this what Isaiah hints at, isn’t this what the life of John of Damascus and our other Palestinians and Eastern Saints point us towards, a recognition that to follow Christ is to march to a different drumbeat?  It is only when this deep conversion of heart, when our openness to a different love of God takes place, that Isaiah’s prophetic words will be fully realised!

For from Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and impose terms on many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
One nation shall not raise the sword against another,
nor shall they train for war again.

Maranatha: Come Lord Jesus, come!