HOLY WEEK 1998 - LOVE SO AMAZING
Preacher: Father James Murray SSC
EASTER DAY - LOW MASS What Jesus Asks of Us.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only son." John iii.16.
This is a classical statement of our faith. It is also a definition of love, of the wonderful surprising reassuring love of God.
It simply tells us what we need to know about God, that he loved the world so much that he gave what was most precious to him, his unique son.
And, when we have come to understand, also precious to us, his only son, the dear Jesus himself.
Think how impoverished our lives would be without Jesus. Think of how little we could bear pain or interpret suffering or tolerate the world the way it is without the dear Jesus - a Jesus-less world! We would be lost.
So we naturally rejoice that God did not despair of the world the way we sometimes do.
Of course we often feel justified in feeling there is no hope for the world. The appalling things that happen in it are enough to make us despair; the cruelties and the conflicts seem never-ending and insoluble.
I have recently been reading the diaries kept by Mrs Ella Bickersteth during the Great War. And many of us will probably remember that it was still being said after that terrible war that it was "the war to end all war". But it is no longer called the Great War simply because another war as dreadful succeeded it only twenty-one years later.
Ella Bickersteth, who wrote the diaries, had six sons, four of whom went to fight in that First World War. One son was killed in the first year, and two of the other sons wrote copiously to their mother about what they were experiencing. They kept their mother informed of everything that was happening. And, like our dear Lady, she literally kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.
The priest son, Julian, wrote of the consummate beauty of his sixth and evening Mass on Easter day in 1916 as he looked from his improvised altar down a long avenue of trees into the golden twilight, and of how hundreds of men had come to make their Easter communion.
He had ridden back towards the officers' mess on his bicycle, rejoicing in the starry firmament above him and the extraordinary sense of peace, even though in the distance could be heard the rumble of great guns.
But, two years later, he would write home on Easter Tuesday about a terrifying battle with wave after wave of Germans walking into the British machine-gun fire, and men in agony everywhere.
This time it had not been possible to have any celebration of Easter, no communions for men about to die, just horror on every side. Yet the words we are contemplating were in the poor chaplain's heart, that "God so loved the world that he gave".
If you recall Abraham taking his son Isaac out into the country, and finding a place suitable for sacrifice, and being ready even to offer up to God his little son, Isaac, you will have a picture of God himself contemplating the same loving action but not holding back.
Of course, we know how God intervened when he saw the faithfulness of Abraham, but there was no intervention when the dear Jesus was about to be sacrificed for us, because God so loved the world and us that he gave his only son, so that we should not perish but have eternal life. That is love, isn't it? The love which can never hold back.
And sometimes we may even see the sick for whom we pray with so much zeal not getting visibly better, even fading away at times, but themselves somehow very mysteriously and also very wonderfully becoming loving sacrifices to God.
Of course that does not mean that God wants any of us to suffer, any more than it gave him any joy to see his son in agony for us.
And the thought comes to us sometimes, "Why this particular person who has never done anything wrong?" "Why this loving friend who has been notably good to everyone?" "Why this fever and restlessness imposed on someone we know who has already had their fill of suffering?" It seems unfair. It does not make sense.
Yet pain seems to be part of the wonder and the mystery of love.
So here we are on Easter Day. It is not a day for pretences, and some of us may even bring sorrows with us, memories of Easters past, of those whom we love but see no longer.
But the festival also touches us with a sense of well-being, in keeping with the spring of the world, the resurrection of the dear Jesus. Yet, when the priests of this church go to the sick in the coming days of Easter, they will be going to the hidden martyrs, whose sufferings and patience are beautiful evidence of faith and the love of God.
I went to a young man once who was close to death, and, as I went in, his sister who was sitting there said, "Oh, you've got an important visitor." "Yes," he said, "and he's bringing the very important visitor with him." For I had the Blessed Sacrament with me so that he might make his Easter Communion. There were tears and trembling. I trembled myself and was close to tears, for I had heard his catalogue of suffering on many other days, and what he was going through. Yet, in a strange and wonderful way, the tears were tears of joy. And I thought of the words of the apostle Paul, that it was "for the joy that was set before him that the dear Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of God."
You see, it is our experience in the Church that no one who comes for healing blames God for their suffering, and almost never does one of the sick cry out that what is happening to them is somehow unfair. None of them demands a miracle, though they know that God is the God of miracles, but they simply ask in their own faithful way for the love of God and for the gift of the very important person, the Lord Jesus Christ. They know, these little martyrs of the way of suffering, their need of the love of God. And they know, and I hope we also know, that God always does something.
He is not the God of ultimate indifference, but the God of intimate love. God so loved the world that he gave, and he keeps on giving without stint, that we might have eternal life.
Father Maynard, who was once rector of this church, had a holy habit of saying that, when he thought about "eternal life", it seemed to him that it might be unutterably boring. But he put his trust in what we say in the creed, that not only do we believe in the resurrection of the body, of the whole person, but also in "the life of the world to come".
If you read the accounts of our dear Lord's Resurrection, one thing will strike you, that, sometimes when he appeared, the disciples and his other friends were uncertain about who he was.
I suppose it is natural enough to feel uneasy if you actually see someone after you have watched them die, and, in his case, so terribly on the cross, that you could not possibly expect to see them face-to-face again.
No wonder doubting Thomas wanted proof of identity, wounds in hands and feet, and spear-thrust in his side. And, even in Galilee when our Lord was on the shore and the disciples were fishing, they seemed uncertain about who he was.
They could not quite take in "the life of the world to come". They were wanting to believe it with all their hearts but they were human like us, and hesitated, even though they had received the promise.
And they felt guilty. They were guilty. They had all run away. It would have been easier not to be confronted by a Jesus already living the life of the world to come. I think we are very much the same martyrs to our ills and pains, captives to our fears and anxieties, and sometimes doing a fair amount of complaining. Then, we meet the dear Jesus who had never done anything wrong, so that his cruel death was so terribly unfair, and who was goodness itself, bringing immediate relief to other sufferers, and yet had to suffer himself, for the most extraordinary reason : that God loved the world so much that he gave Jesus over to this supreme sacrifice.
Do you see what he is asking of us? It is a very wonderful request from God that we should be his martyrs, his witnesses to this great truth : that if you really love, you give yourself.
So, you and I come on this Easter Day to give our love to God and to bring some hidden sacrifices, something very special to us, even to offer him the treasure-trove of our prayers, some for ourselves and some for others, knowing that he will take whatever we have to offer, and join it to his own superb sacrifice, the gift of his dear Son, and to assure us through that Son's Resurrection that we will inherit eternal life, the life of the world to come.
