Diocesan Gathering

Dundrum House

23 November 2006

Rev 5: 1-10; Lk 19: 41-44

The contrast between the two readings is startling. Heaven rejoices that the sacrificed Lamb is the one who can open the scroll and reveal the mysterious truth of God. They sang a new hymn to celebrate the Lamb who won us for God from every race and language and people and nation.

But in the Gospel the Lamb, going up to Jerusalem to be sacrificed, weeps over the holy city because it fails to recognise its opportunity when God offers it.

Perhaps the big difference is what Ronan Mullen talked about last night – the thirst for the truth. The people in the first reading, even the angels, were longing. They asked, “Is there anyone worthy to open the scroll, but there was no one”. The writer ‘wept bitterly’ because there was nobody to open the scroll.

The person who thirsts for the truth is one who knows that the truth is great and mysterious. Only the Anointed Lamb is able to reveal it to us. Some of the Jews at the time of Jesus had reduced and packaged the truth and sought to make it manageable: “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all I possess. Thanks be to God I am not like the others”. Of course such an attitude did not die out with the Pharisees. We will all find it alive and well in ourselves if we look hard enough!

The opportunity that Jerusalem was failing to recognise was not some neat package or some abstract truth or some new insight. It was a Person, Jesus himself, the Lamb who was about to be sacrificed for them.

Pope Benedict said that Christianity is not an idea or a doctrine, “but the encounter with an event, a person” ( Deus Caritas Est , 1 ). Knowing and loving a person is something that can never be packaged and completed. The thirst for truth is the thirst to know Jesus. It is the thirst to allow our relationship with him to be the meaning of our lives. It means going beyond the words to the reality.

To love the Lord our God, and his Incarnate Son, the Lamb, with our whole heart and whole soul and whole might – that is our thirst. If it involves our whole heart and soul and might, that means that it should fill our lives.

Saint Columban, whose feast we celebrate today, put it like this:

“The Lord himself, our God, Jesus Christ, is the fountain of life and so he calls us to himself, the fountain, that we may drink of him… Though we eat and drink of him, yet let us ever hunger and thirst, since our food and drink can never be consumed and drained entire. The… thirsty… never have enough of drinking, but the more they drink, so much the more they thirst.”

We come to this Eucharist to eat and drink the food which is already the beginning of the eternal banquet. The thirst that it awakens and intensifies in us is the energy of the Holy Spirit. That energy is unquenchable because it is the call of God in our deepest reality.

The words of Jesus over Jerusalem are words of sadness not of anger. The people are failing to recognise the truth that their hearts long for. That thirst which they, and we, often suppress is the presence of the Spirit who prays within us with sighs too deep for words. It is the presence of the Spirit who is the pledge of the full flowering of the life that has already begun in us.

This Eucharist is both a challenge and a reassurance. We know that our opportunity is constantly offered. Each Eucharist renews the offer. That is our strength; that is the truth that remains through all the generations, all the triumphs and disasters in the life of the Church. All of this is part of the plan by which God gathers us into a line of kings and priests to serve our God.