OUR LADY & ST BENEDICT'S

Fourth Sunday of Advent. Fr Peter Hunter reminds us that saints do more than follow the rules.

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I occasionally meet people who have, for one reason or another, drifted away from the Church. And one thing they quite commonly say to me, as a priest, is ‘Don’t worry. I still live a moral life.’ I think they say it to me to cheer me up, but it doesn’t, because it makes me think of what a bad job we, the Church, have done at presenting Christianity to people if they end up thinking that the centre of the Gospel, its most important aspect, is a morality.

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Don’t get me wrong. Christians should strive to live good lives, and Jesus, and the Jewish tradition before him, certainly had a beautiful account of the moral life, but our Gospel is about the fact that God loves us even when we live bad lives, and enables us to find forgiveness and happiness. At Christmas, we particularly focus on the way in which God went so far in bringing us that forgiveness that he chose to share our human life.

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Even more than this, if we think of morality as following the rules, and all too often that’s precisely what we make it sound like, then Christianity is about so much more than morality, because God invites us into a whole new way of living which is centred on God giving us a share in his very own life. That’s what we mean when we talk about the life of grace.

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We get a wonderful picture of that in the life of Joseph in today’s Gospel. We’re told that Joseph is a just man. He lives his life by the law of the Lord. It must have shocked and saddened him to find out that his betrothed was pregnant, and it is surely reasonable in the circumstances for him to think of calling off his wedding, and because he is a just man, as we have heard, he resolves to do it privately.

God, as we know, calls him beyond this reasonable, moral world. I don’t mean that God calls him to something contrary to morality. Not at all! It’s not that he is to abandon his obligations but that God calls him to an adventure which requires him to go further than any moral code. He comes to see his situation in a new way, and new options and opportunities open up.

Joseph gains a role and a dignity that he could never have expected. God calls him to a life which he can barely imagine, and which will involve challenges, like the flight into Egypt, or even the episode where the boy Jesus is left behind in Jerusalem, which would take him beyond everything he had known.

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What I’m talking about is that God will call Joseph from a life of being a just, law-abiding man, to being a great saint.

What most of us would rather avoid thinking about is that God is calling each of us to sanctity too. I think sometimes, rules, moral laws, are sort of comforting. Even if we struggle to keep them, we know where we are with them. But God calls us to something so much greater.

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Notice, we don’t say of the saints, ‘Oh, that Saint Catherine of Siena, she was great at following the rules!’ What is remarkable in reading the life of a great saint, like St Catherine, or St Joseph, is that we see possibilities for humanity we hadn’t even considered. We hadn’t realised human life could be lived quite like that. There’s a depth and a breadth to the lives of saints beyond anything we could expect even from a thorough knowledge of human nature.

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It is so good for us, then, in this moment, as we wait for Christmas in a few days, to remember that when God breaks into our world, all bets are off. There is so much more to Christian life than any account of moral rules. Our lives, lived under grace, that is to say, lived by our own share in the Holy Spirit, will surprise everyone, and perhaps ourselves most of all.

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-14 | Romans 1:1-7 | Matthew 1:18-24