Caption This Mass was celebrated at 10.30am today, in Saint Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin (photo credit, John McElroy)
- Homily of Archbishop Dermot Farrell for Chrism Mass
Our Wellspring of Hope – Christ, the One High Priest
Holy Thursday is the Feast of Communion, it is the Feast of One-ness, of Unity. It is a feast in two parts: the second part is this evening when we remember the Lord’s Supper, and how we are made one: “this is my body given for you … this is my blood poured out for you.” (Luke 22:19–20)
The first part is this morning – this Chrism Mass, in which we remember the mission of Christ, what he is truly about, and to what all of us who minister in his name are called. And to each one of you – priests, deacons, lay faithful I extend a warm welcome.
The readings we have just heard are deeply rooted in two things: in service and in the future. Our familiarity with them in the context of Jesus’ fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy may dull our sense of the service that Jesus embraces, while hiding from us the radical future character of that call: “He has sent me to give, to proclaim, to announce …. to give the oil of gladness …” During this Jubilee of Hope, is it with this future dimension that I’d like spend some time.
The mission of Jesus is radically future-oriented. He has a profound clarity – one could call it a confidence – about why he has been sent. He comes as God’s compassion and hope for his sisters and brothers who are ‘poor, blind, oppressed, those worn down by the daily grind of trying to make ends meet.’
Jesus’ compassion, is born of God’s compassion. His compassion is born of his relationship with his Father. Like us all, Jesus takes time to come to know his Father. It is in this relationship with his Father that he discovers his own identity: “You are my Son the beloved …” and this discovery, like our own, is ongoing, full of ups and downs—“I bless you, Father because you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and have revealed them to mere infants.” (Matt 11:25) but also “Father let his cup pass from me…” (Luke 22:42)
Here we come to see something profound about the nature of hope: the hope that Jesus has, and the hope on which he puts flesh is born of his relationship with his Father: the hope he expresses in his “neither do I condemn you” to the woman caught in adultery (as we saw two weeks ago—see John 8:11), the hope which empowers him to give of himself – the “take, this is my Body” of the Last Supper – is brought to life and kept alive, nourished by his relationship with his Father.
Fifty years ago – in 1975 – Donal Murray could say, faith, hope and charity “are essentially one. They are our readiness to allow the implications of Christ’s glorification [i.e., his resurrection] to be worked out in our lives.” (Jesus is Lord [Veritas, 1975], 40; emphasis mine).
“They are the implication of Christ’s [resurrection] worked out in our lives.” With his characteristic clarity Murray would name what was at stake: “if faith is our welcoming of God’s activity, hope is our reliance on God.” (ibid.) “Hope is our reliance on God.” Hope is the working out of our reliance on God in our lives. Without God, we have nothing in the end. Without God we are nothing in the end. This we see in Jesus. This we learn from Jesus.
If there is one thing I’d like you take away with you today, it is the profound difference between hope and optimism. The word hope fills the language of our lives: “we hope to be able to return to work after an illness,” “we hope to be able to make that meeting,” “we are hopeful of a positive outcome of this or that negotiation.” This is the way we speak. “The doctors are hopeful …”- words we all want to hear. This is the way we speak.
Our faith uses the very same language, but it is saying more. In our day-to-day speech, when we speak of hope, we are really talking of a prognosis, a calculation that we make. We look at the weather and make a calculation: sailors and fishers have to become very good a reading the sky, the wind, and the sea. Hill-walkers, too, have to learn to read the weather, to know when something will pass, and when it is prudent to turn back. It is a calculation, based on knowledge and experience. Our doctors have to be able to be able to read and interpret our test results, something that is not always easy.
However, when our faith speaks of hope, we are saying more. “Our own hope had been…,” (Luke 24:21) say the two disciples to the risen Lord on the road to Emmaus, and the Lord brings them on a journey that refocuses their hope. As they walk with him, and listen to him, the horizon of their hope shifts; they are moved from concern with their own loss, to concern for this stranger. In sitting at table with the one whom they invited in, “their eyes are opened and they come to recognise him.” (Luke 24:31, cf. 24:29)
We are like those two disciples, especially those of us in priesthood: “our own hope had been.” In many ways, the crisis that we are living through in our Church is a crisis of hope. Jürgen Moltmann, the great theologian of hope who died last year, captured it well: “without hope, faith falls to pieces, becomes a fainthearted and ultimately a dead faith. It is through faith we find the path of true life, but only hope keeps us on that path.” (Theology of Hope [1964], 20)
We see a faith falling to pieces. We have allowed optimism to slide into the place of hope, and allowed prognosis to replace relationship. Life-giving hope cannot be delivered by human effort alone; it is more than calculation and strategy; life-giving hope is rooted in our relationship with Christ, someone whose story was that of failure (see Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 31).
Tonight, after the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, all of us, will accompany the Blessed Sacrament to an “Altar of Repose.” Then, following the Lord’s command, we will watch with Jesus. We will watch with him who prayed, “Father, let this cup pass from me, but not my will but thine be done.” (Luke 22:42) Here we see the hope of Jesus! Here we see Jesus working out “his reliance on” his Father, to use Donal Murray’s helpful phrase. He is anchored in someone beyond himself. This is more than optimism. Christ, anchored in his Father, is our hope, and our school of hope.(i)
Like the Emmaus disciples, our hope comes to life when we are attentive to the needs of others: concern and compassion are “the path that leads to hope. Hope is not a self-comforting expectation of better days. It’s even less about awaiting what’s going to happen. Hope does not mean looking to a hypothetical future. It is knowing how to recognise the invisible at the heart of the visible, the indescribable at the heart of the audible.” (see Cardinal José Mendonça, The Mysticism of the Present Moment, 23).
The witness of the saints, from Paul to the martyrs of our own days – I think especially of the monks of Tibhirine, the martyrs of Atlas – points to the transforming hope that is born of closeness to God in Christ, and nourished, day-in-day out, in searching for him, listening for him, bringing our cares and concerns to him.
But there is another martyrdom: the dying to self in the ordinary life of our parishes, much less dramatic, but no less draining, and no less real. It is there that we give witness, in lives dealing with the ordinary work of accompanying the sick and dying, of disputes between people who should know better, the failure of marriages, the young person who has done something really foolish, the celebration of a life of someone we may not particularly like, questions of whether you still need another” evening Mass … for whatever “special occasion.”
Without hope, priesthood “loses its taste” (see Matt 5:13), it won’t even “see us out,” as some say. Without true hope, in Moltmann’s phrase, “it will fall to pieces.” And where will we find hope? Surely by practicing hope, by “calling to him while he is still near” (see Isaiah 55:6), by giving him time, by allowing his light to shine, by discovering – and tasting – his weakness in our own (see 1Cor 1:25, cf. 2Cor 12:10), by letting the Spirit come upon us also, bringing God’s good news to us who are poor (see Luke 4:18, cf. Isa 61:1).
As we renew our promises, may Christ the High Priest sanctify us, and guide us along his way.
+ Dermot Farrell
ENDS
- Archbishop Dermot Farrell is Archbishop of Dublin. This homily was delivered today at the annual Chrism Mass at 10.30am, in Saint Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin.
Footnote
I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prisons) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and it anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
I think the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above the water, and the only true source of the breath-taking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace (Vintage, 1991), 181.
