Homily given at the opening of the Holy Door of Mercy at St Anselm and St Cecilia, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 20 December 2015.
So you have a Holy Door. It’s good to reflect a little on what it’s for. It reminds us, above all, that we’re on a journey – a journey from this life into the next.
Jesus said, ‘I am the door’; and we long to be united with him in the next life. But he did warn us that the door he stands at is a narrow door. We need to use this life to make sure we can fit!
I found myself reflecting on all of this when I recently visited the Holy Land. It was my first ever visit. I found it incredibly moving to approach Bethlehem. I couldn’t believe I was really there.
Those words we hear in today’s first reading kept coming back to me: ‘Bethlehem Ephrathah, out of you will be born the one who is to rule over Israel.’
To enter the place of his birth, you have to enter a very low door. It’s called the eye of a needle, which explains what Jesus meant when he said, ‘It’s harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to enter the eye of a needle.’
At Jesus’s tomb, too, you have to stoop very low to enter. The doorway is tiny. You feel as if you’ve entered with him; and you can just imagine the guards sealing the entrance.
To enter the place of his birth and of his death brings home to you just how incarnational our faith is: I mean how concrete, how physical, how real. ‘Here,’ you say to yourself, ‘Mary actually brought forth his body into the world.’
‘There Mary and Joseph of Arimathea laid that same body to rest.’
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews emphasises the point, when he has Jesus say in the passage we’re given today, ‘You prepared a body for me.’
It was incredibly moving to be taken as well to the very place where Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth as God prepared in her womb the body of Our Saviour. Getting there is quite demanding because, as Luke tells us in today’s Gospel, it was in the hill country – very beautiful hill country as it happens. But the coach can only take you so far; then you have to make a long walk uphill.
Visiting these places is quite physically demanding. They remind you not only of Jesus’s corporal reality but of your own too. It reminds you that Jesus and each of us makes a physical as well as a spiritual journey through life.
Going through a Holy Door is designed to do the same. Body and soul, we each cross the threshold, praying God that he will one day take us – our whole self, soul and body – to himself. We do so with a mixture of feelings: sorrow, of course, for our sins but trust, also, because we know this Holy Door is given to us as a place of Mercy.
Opening this door on this day reminds us that Mercy was Jesus’s very mission. He himself is peace, as Micah reminded us. It was out of God’s Mercy that the Word was made flesh; he lived among us; he offered himself up for us – all so that we might be saved. He invites us now to drink deeply of that Mercy.
It’s helpful to hear Pope Francis say that, in initiating this Year of Mercy, he wants us to understand that God waits for us like the Father waited for his Prodigal Son. He waits to show us his Mercy. The Father didn’t close the door behind his boy; nor did he just leave it open; no: he waited at the door. The same Father waits for us at each and every Holy Door.
Mercy, Pope Francis wants us to be clear, is not so much a noun as a verb. That’s to say, it’s not just a thing; it’s an action: it’s something God does in us. Above all it’s an invitation. Just as the Father waited for the Prodigal Son to return, God waits for us to turn back to him.
I do think one of the best images of this is to be found in London itself. I mean that wonderful painting called The Light of the World. It hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral. Christ is depicted as a man holding a lamp: he is the Light of the World.
He stands by a door, obviously waiting to be allowed in. As you look at it, you notice something very important: the door has no handle on his side. The message hits you. This door is the door to my heart. The choice is mine whether or not I let Jesus in.
All of us are bound to experience this same dilemma as we stand on the threshold of this Holy Door: to let Jesus in or not to let him in. Pope Francis wants to encourage us. Pope Francis is like a kind shepherd: with his words and encouragement, he urges us to enter into God’s Mercy. If we’re hesitant, he urges us to remember just one more story – a story which we also find in the Gospel of Luke.
It is the story of Simon the Pharisee who gave a meal for Jesus and his friends. A woman came in who had a bad name in the town. She showed repentance for her sins by washing Jesus’s feet with her tears, wiping them with her hair, then anointing them with a most precious ointment.
Simon, who had shown generosity by inviting people into his house, couldn’t accept that Jesus would allow her to touch him in this way. He couldn’t accept that Jesus forgave her. Pope Francis says Simon limits himself to inviting Jesus to lunch but doesn’t truly welcome him. He can’t bring himself to take the next step towards Jesus, of repenting of his own sins and allowing Jesus to forgive hers.
Francis, shepherd that he is, urges us not to hold back from taking that next step. See the invitation which is being held out to you. Accept the invitation to embrace and be embraced by Mercy; to confess your sins and make a new start. He suggests simply but gravely, in the silence of your heart, that you ask yourself: ‘How long is it since I last went to confession? Two days, two weeks, two years, 20 years, 40 years, more?’
Ask yourself; then, however, long ago it was, walk through this Holy Door and go! Because the person who waits to meet you in confession is not the priest but Jesus himself!
