FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT YEAR C
February 21, 2010

FIRST SERIES  - JEWISH PASSOVER

Lent has its meaning as a preparation for the Christian feast of Passover.  Christians got this feast from the Jews.

  The Jewish feast of Passover is celebrated for eight days between the 15^th and the 22^nd of the Jewish month of Nisan. 

During the entire feast of Passover, the Jews are forbidden to eat or even keep in the house, any food made with yeast (such as, ‘leavened’ bread).  They no longer have to feed from the food of foreigners.  For the first two evenings of Passover, the Seder brings families together.  Things are done in the family, in a precise way.  There are prayers recited, blessings given, and various foods and drinks tasted.  There are cups of wine, pieces of unleavened bread, bitter herbs.  Each of them refers to an episode in the exodus from Egypt.  The main reference is of course to the roast lamb that had to be eaten in haste on the evening of their departure, with unleavened bread (matsoh) and bitter herbs.  The haggadah (a text intended to teach the meaning of the Passover) is read during the meal, and has the form of a dialogue between a child and his father.

Many Jews think it is not possible to invite a non-Jew to the Seder, because of the interdict (in the bible) on outsiders to consume the paschal lamb.  ‘No foreigner shall eat of it’.  At most, they could eat what they called the afikomen, a small piece of unleavened bread symbolizing the paschal lamb.   This practice has been discontinued since the destruction of the temple.  But the meaning of Passover, and the Freedom it symbolizes, is for everyone.  On the eve of Passover they said a blessing of all creation: ‘Blessed are you, the Eternal One, our God, King of the universe, who has created everything in the universe….’  This suggests that Passover is creation centered as well as liberation centered.  In fact the liberation of God’s people is part of God’s gift of creative freedom to the whole universe.

The light of freedom shines from Israel to the whole world on this feast.  A special blessing of the sun was part of the Passover Seder.  The ancient Jews naively thought the world had been created 5,769 years before their time.  They believed that God had placed two great lights in the sky (the sun and the moon) on the fourth day of creation.  They calculated the position of the sun at the end of its first cycle, and argued that the sun resumed that position every 28 years.   A special prayer called the Birkat Ha’Hamah (Blessing of the Sun) was recited at Passover.  The sun of freedom is always shining.

Christians, at Easter, use these themes and apply them to Jesus’ Passover from this world to the Father, giving freedom, on earth and in heaven, to all of us.

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SECOND SERIES:  TEMPTATIONS ABOUT THE CHURCH

Temptations.  The temptations of Jesus.  Our temptations?  Do we have them like we used to?  Good people who come to mass on the first Sunday of a new Lent – do they actually have temptations?  A temptation means you are ambivalent about something.  You could go two ways at once.  There’s conflict between what you’d like to do and what you ought to do.  Ok, you go along to church but you don’t go along with church.  Etc. 

Lent. Lent again.  I’m thinking of people, us ordinary people, who go to mass pretty regularly.  We do it quietly, without much fanfare.  This morning we came and found out it was Lent.  Lent again!   We forgot Ash Wednesday.  They tell us that wasn’t a sin, but it feels like one for us.  We are not too keen on Lent.  We’ll get told to give up something.  Give up sweets or beer for Lent.  Ok, make it sweets.  We feel like giving up church for Lent!  We are not too keen on public display, parades, processions, stuff like that – ‘religiosity’.  Most of us ‘do’ ‘God’ more quietly.  We know there are some basic ground rules, and are thankful for them.  We know there are principles higher than any rules.  They have to do with the way we relate to one another.  And relate to God.  We do go to church, most often anyway, and each time we go we admit – aloud – together – that we’ve failed again (act of contrition).  We also expect to fail again before we come next time (you need it to qualify for admission!).  But somehow, in it all, we try.  We end up trusting one another and being decent to one another much better than we might be if we didn’t come to church….  There’s something strange about church: pull the words apart and they don’t make a lot of sense, but underneath them there’s a counter-intuitive something, and as we get older we come to see that life depends on things like that.  It’s a case of trust, maybe like trusting someone enough to marry them!  You can’t get a feel for church as if it is was like learning arithmetic tables.  It’s not so sure, and lot more humble.  But – we’re there!

Underneath all the rituals and what not, the real question is: what’s it all mean for human living?  What’s human anyway? What’s it mean to have faith at all?  Or hope? Or to relate to someone with decency and yes, a bit of love?  Life is not one damn thing after another, and going to church isn’t just going to one damn ceremony after another.  Going to mass isn’t just a routine for people who never ask questions.  It’s a therapy for people who are afraid of themselves, and who can’t find a balance between running away from people (and things) and hanging on to them.  In church, without words, you just know that if there was a place for Peter after what he said about Jesus, there’s room for everybody.  After a while you get to feel – as you look around the congregation – that there are some damn good people here, and they are that good because they have been here for a good while, most of a lifetime really.

We start off in church, especially in Lent, saying we are all sinners.  No, I wouldn’t say, if I were allowed to pick the words, that we were a lot of sinners.  We aren’t ‘good guys’, but we aren’t really ‘bad guys’ either.  You get to feel that ‘sinner’ is an idea about us in someone else’s head… Someone isn’t really a sinner if they work in a dubious job, or have a certain ethnic background, or aren’t ‘religious’ or ‘devotional’ in the only way we are and think is right.  Calling people in general to be more humble, and repent, is okay, even a good idea, and is around in all religions.  Acknowledging that each person has a lot of positives in him or her, and has more capacity for good than a need to make up for what others call bad in their past, that’s a different feeling.  Rituals don’t make you good, but they make you grateful for the good in you (and others too).  This isn’t politics.  It’s reality.  This isn’t ideology.  It’s trust, received and given.  You could say we are all just ordinary people, but in truth we aren’t ordinary at all!  But I’d never admit that in public!

There are many people who grew up Catholic in the 40’s and 50’s.  They were Catholics then because of the faith of their family, particularly of their mother.  They liked mass and benediction, and novenas and the music of that popular piety.  It was a golden age of a certain kind of church.  The ‘world’ just seemed to be an extension of the church’s sacred space.  Church doors were never locked.  The real presence in them was as certain as the traffic going past.  It was a pervasively catholic culture.  The church was embedded in a world it could largely affirm, mostly because the church made it better.  Its story, its art, its music, its faith, it all went together well.  It was there in the catholic (primary) school.  It encouraged a very-sensuous and richly physical experience of ‘God’.  And, yes, it reminded its people to mistrust their untutored passions – they did come from Adam and Eve – and to prefer the church’s ordered moral world to any urge for wrongly expressive sex.  For many such people, that world broke up some time down the track.  That universe disappeared.  It often started for them with higher education.  Everything they learnt that was interesting, the church was forbidding under pain of ‘mortal’ sin.  They were straightforward un-ironic people, and they felt that if they couldn’t live the way the church wanted, they couldn’t stay in the church.  If they couldn’t be perfect in terms of the system, they had to leave the system.  After all, the church had brought them up to think of Absolutes.  They wanted integrity, they were perfectionists.  If they couldn’t be in the church, they couldn’t be with God either.  If they were at odds with God, they couldn’t talk to God or ‘pray’.  They didn’t want to be metaphorical Catholics.  They left the church, and the faith, and God and the whole spiritual business.  At least they did so in practice, but probably not deep in themselves.  Some of them said they were atheists, when they were really looking for a more real God.  I think we, now, would say they were sincere, and therefore morally blameless in giving it all away.  If it was a ‘sin’ (it wasn’t) it was a ‘sin’ of honesty.  They did have twinges of nostalgia.  Christmas time: they watched Scrooge on TV and liked the crib displays in the shops and in front gardens down the street.  They liked the music and the carols.  Lent: they got a twinge of conscience when Lent started each year.  Good Friday: a difficult day, but it came and went.  They turned up to an ecumenical stations of the cross where they wouldn’t be noticed.  It didn’t feel quite enough, somehow.

A few of these people say that over time, they have run into strange coincidences in their life. They awakened in them something of an old sense of ‘catholic’.  A few would say they had a feeling that the old faith was pursuing them, but they dismissed the thought. It was a ‘temptation’!  Some of them settled for interesting compromises.  Some of them went on ‘secular’ pilgrimages to holy places (Compostella, Gallipoli, Israel…).  Some of them gave a bit of financial support to some church projects (Bushfire appeals, post-tsunami aid, Caritas, Vinnies….).  Some of them actually bought rosary beads and hoped no one would see them. 

Slowly, over decades (let’s say) they learnt that their own intuitions were good, and they learnt to trust them.  They even started to trust the love for the church that had never died in them.  First loves are not all that wrong.  Maybe their criticisms of the church were appropriate, after all.

But they had two things to deal with.  Two voices.  One was the voice of an inner accuser.  It was a voice within the soul.  It was like a personalized dark search engine.  It dragged into consciousness all the dirty bits that were there, or that they would have liked to have been there.  The other voice was – Jesus.  Just a simple sense that if he knew everything, then they didn’t have to.  Just a simple sense that if he was looking after everything, nothing’s an accident.  People can be obsessed with both voices at the same time.  It takes a long while to develop selective listening.   Some have said they identified with the infant Christ in the arms of the Mother of Perpetual Help, tormented by imagined angels bearing the instruments of their passion.  Even that was going back to images of childhood.  Some have said they felt Jesus really was there, still, in the Blessed Sacrament, and they wanted to sit there and talk to him.. 

Meantime, there are questions.  Are any of the old (holy) stories true?  Are they all a pack of lies?  Can I live with the ‘feel’ of the church without agreeing with it all – with its position about women in or out of ministry, with its position about various moral and matrimonial matters, or with its politics.  If I don’t agree with it all, have I got any right to want the ‘feel’ of the church?  Or to be around the church?  And if I did come around to church, they’ve got some odd types in the parish now, and in the clergy too!

No, you don’t have to have a conversion to do so.  A born catholic can’t convert to the church.  You can’t become something you always were.  But you can …. revert.  You don’t have to be either an angel or a devil.  It’s not a case of absolute absolutes.  You can be, you are, human.  Humans deal with the middle ground.  It’s human to revert, a bit, as it feels right, as long as it does something wholesome for you now and doesn’t take you backwards.  But how far do you revert if you don’t feel right about going all the way (yet)?  I guess that’s up to you, isn’t it?  Converts go all the way (or do they?).  Reverts work it out their own way.  I’ve never met one who went back all the way.  And they, hopefully, know, that’s true. 

In fact, all of us, those who have never ‘left’ the church (but often wanted to) and those who have (and often wished they hadn’t), we all have a lot of temptations.  We are tempted to forget the whole business, the whole tradition, the church business all together.  We are tempted to go shopping and find a church we can be comfortable with.  We are tempted to stop thinking and settle for the church – however stupid – that is around.  The result, either way, is homelessness.  You’re on your own.  That doesn’t feel good.  You need some where, some ones to belong to.  That’s why you go to church.  Wait a minute.  If I take any real notice of this priest, I’ll get anxiety problems every time I have a drink.  It’ll cost me another few dollars on the next collection, for the ‘poor’.  I’m tempted to run for cover before it gets too much…

Can’t it wait till this Lent business is over?

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