“But who can endure the
day of his coming . . . ? he is like a refiner’s fire . . . and he will purify
the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.”[1]
A
|
re
there passages
from the Bible that frighten you, or at least make you think twice about
yourself and your behaviour? Thomas Merton—a well-known religious figure of a
generation ago—was made uneasy by Matthew 6.5: “Amen I say to you,
they have received their reward,” words used by Jesus to describe the
recognition the Pharisees received when they practised their piety publicly, in
order to excite admiration among the people. And that certainly is meagre
recompense compared to the glory that awaits the faithful servants of the Lord:
“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”[2] A text I
find unsettling is also found in Matthew: “The Queen of the South will arise at
the judgment with this generation and condemn it.”[3] Let me
explain why I find this verse a continual challenge.
In 1959, after my graduation, I left Saint Michael’s
College here in Toronto, returning to take up residence there after an absence
of more than fifty years, in 2012. Not surprisingly, when I first began moving
around the campus, images from the past crowded into my mind. In what is now a
meeting room under Saint Basil’s church, to take one instance, there had
earlier been a chapel frequented by the twenty-five seminarians who lived and
studied at the College in those days. I can picture it as it was, with the
altar against the front wall, flanked by statues of the Blessed Virgin and
Saint Joseph. As I recall, we were very devout, almost monastic, in the
simplicity and severity of our lives, and I sometimes wonder if the spectre of
my former self, when I was a young man, might not, like the Queen of the South,
arise at the judgment to rebuke my loss of fevour and religious observance. And
I also sometimes ask myself what Catholics of the Middle Ages would have to say
to us if they were somehow able to join us in the celebration of Candlemas,
today’s feast of the Purification of Mary. In mediæval times Candlemas was a major religious and social event,
marked by one of the most elaborate processions
of the liturgical year, when every parishioner was obliged to join in carrying
a blessed candle [which] afterwards would burn before Our Lady’s altar. . . .
The people took candles away from the ceremony, to be lit during thunderstorms
or during times of sickness, and to be placed in the hands of the dying. [The
use of candles] and the imagery of light in the ceremonies was derived from
Simeon’s song, in which the child Jesus is hailed as “a light to the gentiles”[4]
a phrase we have just
heard in today’s Gospel. That’s what it was like to live in a Catholic country,
where the liturgical seasons and the great feasts determined the rhythm of daily
life—in the home, in business, in courts and palaces.
Is
there is anything quite like that in our society? What about professional sports—Will
you be watching the super bowl this afternoon?—or the entertainment industry? Are
not, in fact, the Oscars an annual event that a lot of people mark on their
calendars? And are we not as keen to learn about the titillating goings-on of
athletes and actors as our ancestors in the faith were to hear about the
saints? In any case we decidedly do not live in a religious society, and as
religiously minded people we must at times feel the lack. Surely it would have
been easy to be devout long ago, when the rhythm of life was determined by the
Church’s calendar. The practices of devotion, such as processions and pilgrimages,
novenas, fasting and feasting—all these were woven into the fabric of everyday
life. How different it is today; they, unconsciously perhaps, functioned in a
Catholic culture, and we, equally unconsciously, function in ours. If we are
honest with ourselves, shall we not admit that our moral and cultural
convictions, for the most part, are indistinguishable from those of our
non-believing contemporaries? On the other hand, it requires more gumption to
practise our faith and to witness to it nowadays than in the past. They
were carried along by social custom, but we have to swim upstream,
against the current. This fact may be some response to the rebuke of those
ghosts from the Middle Ages who alongside the Queen of the South will arise at the judgment with this
generation and condemn it.
Whatever
the period, past or present, the essence of our faith remains constant, and, like
our mediaeval counterparts, we recognize Jesus as a “light for revelation to
the gentiles and the glory of his people Israel.” He still comes to his temple,
and he still expects us to incorporate the Gospel into our lives; the stakes
today are as high as they were seven hundred years ago. The prophet says as
much in the first reading: “But who can endure the day of his coming . . . ? he
is like a refiner’s fire . . . and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine
them like gold and silver.”[5]
There’s another fearsome verse to summon up that over-worked Queen of the
South, one echoed by Saint Peter when he wrote that our faith is to be tested
by the refiner’s fire,[6]
just as the ore is smelted until the slag rises to the surface to be skimmed
off, leaving the pure gold behind. Given this text—and there are many others
like it—“we have cause to be uneasy.”[7]
It follows that we have all the more reason to place all our hope in Jesus,
about whom the Letter to the Hebrews says: “he himself was tested by what he
suffered, [so that] he is able to help those who are being tested.”[8]a
[1]
Malachi 3.2-3.
[2]
Matt 25.34.
[3] Matt
12.42.
[4]
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992), pp. 16-18.
[5]
Malachi 3.2-3.
[6] 1
Pet 1.7.
[7]
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, book 1, chapter 5.
[8] Heb
2.18.
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