Thought for the week - 16 March 2025

So many things are done to us to make us think one way or another way. Headlines in newspapers, particularly online, often bear little relation to the content of the article. Photos of world events can be very misleading, the internet, and specifically social media, is a battleground of differing opinions and outright lies which are so confusing that some people just believe them all or at least apply a sceptical mindset only to the ones which contradict the earlier opinion they were given. News agencies, politicians and preachers constantly contradict each other and there is a general lack of faith in the skills of experts, even to the point of some groups of people believing that every politician, doctor, nurse and so on is in some kind of cahoots, to which we offer the obvious analysis that trying to get ten people to agree to something is impossible, let alone five percent of the world. It’s a wonder that anyone listens to anyone at all. And nor do we, every day at Mass I hear the Word of the Lord addressed to me, and reply ‘Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ’, but how often do I really attend to it? This may be partially distractedness but surely there is also an element of resistance. If I were to listen, my life would be turned upside down, or maybe I would not know what to believe after that. Where, like everything else, would it end? The disciples accompanying Jesus on the way to Jerusalem also do not want to hear his words. He has told them that he is on his way to suffer, die and rise again, but they simply don’t want to know. So the Lord dramatically challenges them to open their ears. He is transfigured in their sight and a voice from heaven cries out, ‘Listen to him.’ It’s a revelation that the blind man, and the paralytic and the demoniacs and the lepers do not need, for they know Him anyway, it’s a sign to the terminally confused, his disciples, and to us.

God promises to us more than we could ever imagine, an infinity of joy and utter freedom. Abraham in the first reading is promised descendants as many as the stars of heaven. But God’s promises leave no one unchanged. Abraham is enveloped in darkness and his life is bound by covenant to God, the Creator of those very stars, and he loses tight control of his life. He loses his home, and his security, if indeed we find this world to be home, or security.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem to make his ‘exodus’ into a freedom which infinitely transcends that given to Israel when she left the bondage of Egypt. He invites the disciples to accompany him freely on this journey out of the bondage of sin and death. But, like the rest of us, they are afraid. For I may long for that infinity of love which is God’s own life, but also fear its fire; I thirst for God’s unbounded freedom but freedom is frightening. Fyodor Dostoevsky tells the story of the Grand Inquisitor, who asserts that ‘nothing has ever been more insufferable for humanity and society than freedom. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us; “Better that you enslave us, but feed us.”’- and that could be a motto for social media couldn’t it? Tell us lies, but give us something to hate. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

The contemporary American author Annie Dillard claimed that listening to the gospel is the most risky thing one can do: ‘The Churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life jackets and signal flares.’ And she is entirely right, if Jesus is how He is shown to us in the Gospels and if His disciples are like they are shown to us as well, then we should be like them and that is profoundly dangerous, and our life jackets will not work and, perversely, we should hope that they would not, because it is not this world which can harm us.

The final words of this gospel are almost chilling: ‘When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.’ Jesus, who had been seen conversing with Moses and Elijah and whose Father cried out from heaven, is again found alone. We listen to the words as a community, in shared attention (or distraction). But we also hear them alone, as words addressed to each of us alone, invited on a journey into personal freedom that no one else can take for us. Listening to the Word, each of us is ‘alone with the alone.’ Like the disciples, we need silence to digest their import and space this Lent to be alone and see the path ahead.

Yet they do not travel to Jerusalem alone. They walk with the Lord and each other. Our journey is also towards the shared freedom and joy of the Kingdom, for which we struggle now. Embracing freedom is costly and we must not submit to the tyranny of lies, judgementalism, and the devil. Our freedom is ultimately inseparable from that of the world. If we support the cause of freedom, even though it is but a tiny foretaste of what is promised, it will be costly for us too. Let us weigh the cost and set out, for it is the devil that we fight, and God is on our side.