(12^th March): Deuteronomy 26.16-19; Psalm 118; Matthew 5.43-48

Throughout this week our readings at mass have encouraged us to think carefully about vocation. ‘You must be holy’ we heard on Monday; today we hear Jesus’ intensification of this demand. ‘You must be perfect.’

Each of us knows painfully the pathetic meagreness of our own spiritual lives. But God responds to our needs irrespective of our worthiness. And as we begin to apply that principle to our own dealings with other inadequate human beings we grow into the life for which we were made; we become not just in virtue but in fact the children of God, the heirs of his kingdom, the bearers of the Light from his face shining onto the bleak darkness of a world separated from him. [Philippians 2.14-16]

(11^th March): Ezekiel 18.21-28; Psalm 129; Matthew 5.20-26

Matthew’s Gospel seems deliberately to have been cast into five sections (plus a prologue and an epilogue), analogous to the five books of Moses, the first five books of the Old Testament. The first of these sections (Chapters 3-7) has the Sermon on the Mount as its centrepiece, in which Jesus asserts that the Law (Torah) given to the chosen people of God has continuing significance in the nascent Christian community.

Today’s reading is Jesus’ elaboration of the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The law’s purpose is not to make some people feel self-righteous while others feel themselves hopelessly condemned. Jesus goes to the depth of the law, and defines ‘killing’ as including a panorama of anger, contempt and character assassination. ‘You think you deserve God’s commendation because you’ve never killed anyone’, he seems to say. ‘Well, how about these kinds of killing? Which of you is innocent of all of these?’

If the Law is insufficient to make any of us righteous [Galatians 2.16] what hope does any of us have? St Paul says that our hope arises from the ‘faithfulness of Jesus’. His perfect (complete) obedience to the vocation of God for him reveals the inadequacy of our own response to God’s call. But at the same time Jesus’ faithful obedience makes up for the failures of humankind. What we do kills. What he does brings life.

The book of Esther arises in the situation of Israel returned to its homeland, after the long exile in Babylon. Nevertheless Israel is a colony of the Persian empire and Israel’s monarchy is defunct. The Persian King Ahasuerus rather extraordinarily chooses Esther to become his Queen, and in that position she finds the opportunity to foil the plot of one of the king’s ministers to destroy the Jews. Contemporary Judaism continues to celebrate this deliverance in the annual feast of Purim.

Lengthy sections of Chapters 4 and 5 (including our reading for today), as well as sections of Chapters 8 and 10, are not present in the Hebrew text of Esther but are found only in Greek translation; accordingly they are not included in Jewish or in Protestant Bibles. Esther’s moving prayer, our reading today, asks God’s protection as she prepares to approach the King on behalf of her people. She engages in this dangerous enterprise because she has become convinced that she had come into Ahasuerus’ court by divine Providence ‘for just such a time as this.’ [4.14] With that conviction that she is not following caprice but the perfect will of God Esther finds courage to fulfil God’s vocation for her.

(9^th March): Jonah 3.1-10; Psalm 50; Luke 11.29-32

The book of Jonah, with its four short chapters, offers an excellent vehicle for meditation during Lent. In the first chapter, God’s call comes to Jonah’s ear, but Jonah finds its demands inconvenient, and so he goes as far as he can in the opposite direction. That doesn’t work out too well for Jonah, and in Chapter 2 he finds himself in the worst predicament imaginable. Now he turns towards God and prays with a newly-awakened piety, promising God that ‘the vow I have made I will fulfil.’ So Chapter 3 finds Jonah obeying the Lord’s call, going to do the work God had asked of him. He goes to Nineveh, one of the largest cities of the ancient world, and standing not far from its edge, he preached and called for repentance. All at once the whole city clothed itself in the sackcloth of fasting. Even the animals fasted.

And Jonah foamed with anger. God’s call had interrupted his life, inconvenienced him. But far from being something that only Jonah could do, the work had turned out to be inordinately easy. So the 4^th Chapter of Jonah opens with Jonah enraged at God. Like many of us in times of emotional and spiritual distress, Jonah became irrational and petulant. He sat down in the burning heat of the sun and urged God to kill him.

Instead, God made a plant grow up to shade him and restore him to spiritual health. The things God calls us to do aren’t work that God himself hasn’t been able to get around to. Vocation creates us, makes us who we are meant to be. As we offer ourselves to God, God transforms us and gives us his own peace.

(8^th March): Isaiah 55.10-11; Psalm 33; Matthew 6.7-15

We are, most of the time at least, very poor diagnosticians of our needs. When we are children we ask for chocolate, but a wise and provident mother provides us with some carrot sticks instead. Our prayers should not be consumed with naming the things we think God may have overlooked, something like placing a grocery order and awaiting its delivery. Rather, our prayer time should be a time of bringing our demands and desires into harmony with God’s perfect will for us. Like any good conversation, our prayer should contain less talking and more listening. God wills to do for us and through us more and better things than we can ask for or imagine [Ephesians 3.20]; in our prayers we ask that his imagination should replace our own, that his vision of what we may become will not meet resistance from us but calm and trustful acceptance that he knows both our needs and our ignorance in asking. In his perfect purpose we shall find peace and daily satisfaction.

(7^th March): Leviticus 19. 1-2,11-18; Psalm 18; Matthew 25.31-46

Holiness is the defining characteristic of God. Essentially the word suggests otherness, difference. Human beings can be, to varying degrees, strong, prescient, even benevolent. But only God can be holy.

Thus the vocation (call) to the people of God, ‘Be holy, for I, the lord your God, am holy’, is less demand than promise. It is as if a generous man encounters an urchin and declares, ‘You must have a new coat’—and then sets out to provide for the need he has identified. When God calls us to holiness, he calls us to become God-like, and he sets out to endue us with his own character. The Torah (the Hebrew word means ‘teaching’ or instruction) is God’s way of informing his people of the way they are to live, the way of God’s own life.

In the end, though, instruction isn’t adequate. God teaches us how to become Godlike by himself becoming human. In Jesus, he lives human life, with all of life’s complexities and paradoxes, and dies human death, with all of death’s terror and pain. Returned to heaven, Jesus bestows on us his Holy Spirit, who fills us and endows us with his own holiness.

Saturday 5 March 2022: Isaiah 58:9-14; Psalm 85(86):1-6; Luke 5:27-32

Jesus calls a tax collector - not a reputable, synagogue accepted, holy man, but a collaborator with an occupying army, to follow him. In Luke called Levi - elsewhere called Matthew, and at Jerhico, the fallen man Zachaus is called. Yet we are starting that time of disciplined observance, Lent. Another apparent contradiction at the very start of Lent?

Jesus responds to this apparent contradiction with two of his own, neatly explaining why. He came to call sinners, not the perfect, and to call the sick, not the healthy. Jesus is saying that it is not the details of the law that are important, but the purpose of the law. All that the law is meant to do is to bring people to God, to show us the way and guide us home. Recent synod discussions in our Parish, in the catholic press and elsewhere indicate that there is some tension to be found between the rules of the church, and the pastoral work of the church. The rules - for example, about family life and contraception - show us the way to a full life in God's love, but are not there to block or bar us from entering into that journey. Their purpose is clear, but our pastoral responsibility to each other is to encourage and accept all who seek Him.