Climbing that mountain - reflections for All Saints

Reflections on the Solemnity of All Saints

Trying to live the Christian life is frequently likened to climbing a mountain. In the gospel for All Saints we hear our Lord delivering his main teaching about discipleship from a mountaintop. It is not easy being a Christian, and it is like climbing a mountain. But why?

A whitewashed tomb

As we listen to our Lord it becomes clear that Christ wanted disciples that were not just obedient to laws but who were virtuous. He did not want followers who just kept an outward observance of the Law of Moses. Our Lord was interested in the heart not just visible actions. He was therefore interested in what precedes our actions; He was interested in the source of our actions - the source of our thoughts or motivations. The Christian life is hard because we not only have to strive to do the right thing, but we must also strive to think the right thing and desire the right thing. Our Lord’s greatest criticism was not directed towards those publicly regarded as sinners, but to those whose sin was hidden by outward righteousness. He called them whitewashed sepulchres! Outwardly they seemed clean, but inwardly they were dead!

In the Sermon on the Mount He sets out His moral teaching (i.e. how we are to live) based not merely on outward adherence to God’s laws, but a much more demanding teaching based at the level of the heart. The heart, in the Christian sense is not the seat of our emotions, but it is the mysterious centre of our being where our will is located, and from our heart issues thoughts and desires. We could put it this way, healing our heart is central to becoming the disciple Christ wants us to be – it is central to becoming a saint!

Let us think about a moral command like: do not steal. When morality is brought to the level of the heart, then we are guilty of theft, not just when we perform the action of stealing something, but from the moment we consent to the thought of stealing something. Once we give our will to it in our heart, then we have broken the commandment and committed a sin and possibly a grave sin. We may not ever actually steal anything physically speaking, but by consenting to it in our hearts we have broken the commandment – and this is a very grave matter in most circumstances. The same principle applies to all the commandments. Remember what our Lord taught about adultery? Someone commits adultery by consenting to it in their hearts. Consent is the crucial thing. The moment we say ‘Yes’ to a sinful idea, a sinful thought, a sinful desire, then we have crossed the line. Of course, thoughts come to us, even our Lord was tempted, but the moment we consent in our hearts to that sinful thought we commit that sin, we break that commandment.

Today we remember the Saints in glory. The innumerable hosts of Saints in heaven whose names we do not know. And it can seem that their holiness is very far from us – it seems we are at the base of the mountain, and they are at the top. So it is important that you understand one very important thing: we cannot reach the top by our own effort! The reason our Lord makes such high demands on His disciples, on you and me, is that He provides us with something that is key to climbing the mountain. He provides us with one of two key things to healing our hearts: grace. The other thing is our repentance – we must decide to repent.

So let us climb that mountain towards the Saints with both feet: one repentance and the other grace. Amen.

Dispensing the blessings of the New Covenant

Easter Thursday - (Luke 24:35-48)

Even faced with the risen Lord the disciples are still struggling to believe what they can see, hear and touch. The hypothesis that somehow the disciples came up with the resurrection stories from their faith in the resurrection does not hold up – what is revealed here is that the disciples struggled to have faith; faith was born not from themselves but from encountering the risen Lord and grew by grace.

The risen Lord shows that He is the same person they knew by showing them His wounds. Here was the same body that had been crucified two days earlier. So not only was His body missing from the tomb, but now they can see the body with its wounds. So the evidence that He had risen is incontrovertible for the disciples.

Of course there is something altogether different about Him too! He is not a vision, nor a ghost. He is physically there. To demonstrate His physicality He asks for something to eat, and they offer Him broiled fish. Ghosts or visions do not eat.

So the picture is building of what the nature of the resurrection is. The resurrected Lord is physically present with the body that was crucified. The risen Lord talks and eats. Together with this is the fact that He can appear to various people in different places (outside the tomb, on the road to Emmaus, then in a locked room). He seems no longer subject to the limitations of time, space and the laws of nature. He reveals therefore what His glorified body is like, and thereby shows what our resurrected and glorified bodies will be like.

Just as He had done for the disciples on the road to Emmaus, so He does for the Apostles. He opens their minds to the meaning of Scripture. So also for us, if we are to understand the Scriptures we must allow Christ to teach us by the Holy Spirit through the Church’s teaching authority (we cannot hope that personal interpretation will allow us to understand the Scriptures rightly!).

Finally our Lord commissions the Apostles to go and preach repentance and salvation to all people and nations. The Church dispenses the blessings of the New Covenant through the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments (see Mt 28:19-20 ‘baptism’, Jn 20:23 ‘confession’).

The Lord wants the fruit of His passion, death and resurrection to be shared with all people that they may turn away from the fallen life and through the grace of Christ live the risen life in Him. The capacity to do that comes through baptism, and our repeated failures to rise to the new life are rectified through the Sacrament of Penance. Through the Eucharist (if we receive it in a state of grace) our lives are increasingly ordered to the risen life.

Fr Ian