Quite a few years ago, I was visiting the headmaster at our parish primary
school. I hadn’t been a naughty boy – I can’t remember the exact reason. The
deputy head then happened to bring along two boys that had been caught
fighting. The head questioned the first boy, and then got the second boy to tell
his side of the story. After that, he then gave them such a telling off that I
thought the two boys did well not to burst into tears.
Sometimes, our view of God the Father can be that of a strict headmaster,
someone that we avoid because we are scared of what He might have to say to
us. Sometimes, people use the phrase, don’t they, of “Oh, he’ll put the fear of
God into them”, and perhaps certain programmes we might have watched or
films we have seen might give us the idea of God being a God of thunder and
lightening.
When Christ is transfigured on the mountain, you can imagine this sort of thing
going through Peter’s mind. The Lord is radiant in glory, with Moses and
Elijah appearing at His side, and Peter makes his comment about putting up
tents. It says that Peter “did not know what to say; they were so frightened”.
Maybe James and John were too dumbfounded to speak.
The Old Testament speaks about “the fear of the Lord”, and in the psalms it
says that, “The fear of the Lord is the first stage of wisdom; all who do so
prove themselves wise” (Ps 110 (111):10). If I may sound a bit controversial,
the fear of the Lord is an important concept. In fact, when the new translation
of the Rite of Confirmation came out a few years ago, one of the changes was
that, whilst previously one of the prayers spoke about “awe and wonder in
God’s presence”, now it speaks of the “fear of the Lord”. So what is this fear
of God all about? You might think, well, Father, you’ve already preached
about hell once before, so is this where the conversation is going? On this
occasion, no. We need to understand what “the fear of the Lord” is, and what it
is not.
So if we see it as just being like a scared animal quivering in a corner, then that
is not a very good way to think of our relationship with God, including God the
Father, and that is not what “the fear of the Lord” is all about. Rather, it is
about having an appropriate respect for God. In the first reading, Abraham is
put to the test, and, once he has passed the test, it says that the angel of the Lord
said to him, “Do not raise your hand against the boy ... Do not harm him, for
now I know you fear God”. By that test, Abraham had showed that his fear of
God, his desire to do what God wants, was greater than even his innate fatherly
instinct to protect his son. We can unpack it a bit and show that it says that, for
Abraham, God is God – His ways comes first, regardless of what he was
planning. If God says so, then that’s what we’re doing, even if I don’t
understand why.
That then needs to be the underpinning of how we relate to God – appropriate
respect, avoiding the two extremes of either cowering in a corner, or, at the
other end of the spectrum, becoming over-confident and telling God what to do,
or arguing that our way is best. And when we look at the Our Father, the prayer
given us by Jesus Himself, the second line of the Our Father says “hallowed be
thy name”, which means we are praying for appropriate respect for God, for
His name, and of course for holy places and things. In this parish we are
privileged in that the church can be left open during the day for people to come
in and pray whenever they want to, whilst in other parts of the country,
churches have to be locked. In one of the parishes where I was on placement in
Birmingham, the Parish Priest said to me at the time that he never wanted to
have to lock the church, but on one occasion someone tried to set fire to it, so
after that it was locked and alarmed. But wouldn’t it be great if in society, it
was taken as the norm that churches are respected, that Christ is respected as
the One who guides everyone’s life and informs the laws of the country?
Around a hundred years ago, a convert son of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Robert Hugh Benson, wrote a novel called The Dawn of All – that’s “all” as in
“a” “double ll”, as in everything. It begins with a bad priest who is seriously
ill, and who suddenly gets transported to the 1970s, only to discover that
England, as well as the rest of the world, is in the process of rapidly becoming
Catholic again. All the old cathedrals are back in Catholic hands, the monks
have moved back into Westminster Abbey, and the government consults the
Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster on important matters of legislation. There
are still pockets of resistance, strong at times, but in many ways it is truly a
golden age. When we pray, “hallowed by thy name”, we pray not only for
God’s name to be held in appropriate honour and respect, but also for
everything that unfolds from that.
“The fear of the Lord is the first stage of wisdom; all who do so prove
themselves wise” (Ps 110 (111):10). Next week, we’ll explore another
dimension of the Our Father, and if you want to read The Dawn of All, it’s
available for free on the internet – all perfectly legal.
Curious about exploring things further? If you would like to ask further questions about the topics raised in these homilies (or maybe think it wasn’t explained too well!), please feel free to e-mail Fr Michael at stjoseph.thame@rcaob.org.uk