What Thoughts Do We Have In Our Hearts?

On 22^nd of November 2006 my uncle, Fr. Manuel Merten OP, promoter for the nuns of the religious order of the Domenicans in the Vatican, received the "German Preaching Award" in the ancient Church of the Palace of Bonn, Germany, actually the Church of the University.

Annually, beginning in the year 2000, a very famous German publishing company offers this reward for "the best homily of the year". Any German-speaking Minister of whatever Christian denomination can take part in this contest by sending in one homily he or she preached on a certain day during a certain church service. Ministers of Non-Christian religions can also take part in this competition. On an ecumenical level the Jury is composed of professors of theology, publishers, pastors and representatives of the main Christian churches.

It is the second time that a Dominican was rewarded as the best preacher of the year. After Fr. Dr. Ulrich Engel OP in 2004 this year Fr. Manuel Merten OP received the bronze badge along with a valuable copy of the Bible. About 400 invited guests are normally invited for this outstanding event, among them a good number of friars, sisters and lay-people of the Order.

His homily was about the tolerance (and intolerance) of the different religious faiths in the world against the background of the recent attacks of islamic fanatics in different parts of the world.

I think,we desperately are in need of people, who raise their voice against intolerance and inhumanity and I'm proud, that one important voice of them comes directly out of my own family!

So here's the homily of Pater Manuel Merten:

What thoughts do you have in your hearts? Religions and the will of God for the good of mankind?

We are recording an incident from the 28thOctober 2001. On that particular Sunday, the sizeable Catholic community of Bahawalpur in Pakistan, that for decades has been entrusted to the Dominicans, changed their service times and for the first time fixed the principal worship at 10 o'clock, so as to make the church available beforehand for the small local evangelical community.

Forty-five evangelical Christians had gathered for the service, when suddenly the door was torn open and masked men armed with machine guns stormed in and opened fire indiscriminately. When they disappeared shortly thereafter, they left behind them 17 dead and a number of severely wounded, as well as severely shaken Catholic and evangelical communities. The following day, radical Islamic newspapers celebrated the incident, regretting however that the change of service time had not been known, otherwise the "triumph of the servants of Allah over the unbelievers would have been all the greater".

A week ago today, I celebrated mass in this very church - against the background of a newly tense situation, in which Christians feel insecure, in case protests over the appearance of caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in western newspapers degenerate into hostile action against them.

In connexion with the service, I am sitting together with the Dominican brothers and sisters of Bahawalpur. They are still marked by those earlier events and their emotion is unmistakeable when they recount how quickly it all happened, and how they witnessed the massacre from the window or the courtyard. But then they tell of impressive signs of support and solidarity from amongst the ranks of their Muslim neighbours. And naturally one event did not go unmentioned. One day, after the attack, on the evening of 29th October 2001, after a nine hour car journey, there was standing at the door, the old and seriously ill Maulana Mohammed Abdul Qadir Azad, former head imam of the second largest mosque in the world at Lahore, Pakistan, together with his son the present head imam of the mosque. They came to express their outrage. Abdul Qadir Azad apologised to the Christian communities in the name of right thinking Muslims and denounced the massacre as a "betrayal of the Prophet's message".

The head imam from Lahore did not stop at this solidarity visit. In January 2004 he invited a delegation of Christians, led by a Dominican, to a conference in his mosque. In front of more than three thousand faithful, and over one hundred Islamic scholars, the head imam set this invitation in the context of the permission Mohammed had given in the 7th century for Christians to conduct their prayers in the mosque of Medina. Then, on a Friday, their holy day, three thousand Muslims listened to one of our colleagues, James Channan, for over an hour. Since then there has been a considerable mutual esteem, not to say warm friendship, between him and the imam.

In the course of my stay in Pakistan, I also got to know Mohammed Abdul Qadir Azad personally. We spoke too about the caricatures and their dangerous impact especially in the Islamic world. Naturally the imam found these representations of the prophet hostile, but he could see no exact correlation between such caricatures and religious alienation between Christians and Islam. Whoever wishes to bring the caricatures to bear in a battle of cultures or even of religions has, according to the imam, a false perspective on things. Of such people one can only ask "Why do you have such thoughts in your heart?" And then Abdul Qadir Azad said something that deeply moved me; "Without the revelation of the message of love of the prophet Jesus and his unconditional desire for peace, Islam would not have reached its plenitude".

What thoughts do you have in your hearts? This is the very same question that Jesus in today's gospel, puts to "some scribes who were sitting there". They see the faith of the four men and the paralytic, they see the unusual amount of trouble they go to in order to bring their friend into Jesus' healing presence, they see the crowds of people gathered before the door, yearning for words that transform and bring peace, they themselves hear Jesus saying "Your sins are forgiven," but their religious preconceptions, or more exactly their "ideology" clouds their vision. Where something pleasing to God is being wrought, they see "blasphemy" at work.

This is a motif that is apparent in all the gospels: high priests, scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees who make up the religious elite, seem particularly at risk of confusing their own political or religious concepts - their ideologies even - with the will of God. Over and over again this danger is made evident, as in St Matthew's gospel, and with reference to the prophet Isaiah where it literally states: "You will listen and listen again, but not understand, see and see again, but not perceive. For the heart of this people has grown coarse, their ears are dull of hearing and they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart and be converted and be healed by me".

Religion, divine revelation - tragically - can be misunderstood, and it happens over and over again. When Pope Urban II proclaimed the first crusade on 27th November 1095 he ended his inflammatory speech with the words "It is the will of God" - and even today Muslims, when speaking of Christians, use the crusaders' concept of the "will of God", of which Christians too were convinced in the workings of the Inquisition and the burning of witches. With the conviction "It is the will of God" whole peoples and cultures have been exterminated, slavery and people trafficking justified, the rights of women suppressed, human rights abrogated and much more besides. In the firm conviction that it was "the will of God" George Bush defined in his state of the union speech of 29 January 2002 the "axis of evil", and later, on the side of the righteous, we hear of Guantanamo, prisoners being flown to prisons that practise torture, ever more pictures of Abu Grahib and other such places.

In the conviction that "Allah wills it" seventeen people were shot on the 28th October 2001, as they were gathered peacefully in prayer in the church. In the conviction that "Allah wishes the death of unbelievers", innocent people are hunted down in various Islamic countries.

We should listen to the words of Jesus in today's gospel: "What thoughts do you have in your hearts?" Let us ask ourselves the question: how can one avoid having a false perspective on things?

There is a place in the gospel of Luke that can help us find the right scale of values. Here is the text in abbreviated version: the rejection of Jesus in his own land.[2] "He came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did. He stood up to read, and they handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll he found the place where it is written: ‘The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free to proclaim the Lord's year of favour'. He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the assistant and sat down. And all eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today, even as you listen'."

Jesus' words met with approval, but then someone asked the question: "Isn't that the son of Joseph?" Then Jesus ventures to remark that the so called chosen people has paid scant attention to God, and how often instead people from foreign races, heathens and non believers have not only been more attentive to God's word, but above all, have followed it. The report concludes: "When they heard this the people in the synagogue were enraged. They sprang to their feet and hustled him out of the town; and they took him up to the brow of the hill their town was built on, intending to throw him down the cliff, but he slipped through the crowd and walked away".

It is obviously not religion in itself, nor piety, nor regular attendance at church that guarantee that our view of things is not obscured and the thoughts in our heart not perverted. The test questions for a true understanding of what God wants from us are these: do what you say and what you do bring hope to the poor, is it good news for them? Do your actions bring freedom to prisoners - and there are so many different kinds of them. Do you give new sight to the blind? Is there not someone close to you who needs raising up? Are you, like Christ, a sign that God is merciful, and bountiful towards mankind?

Let us in this service pray for peace in the world and the well being of all peoples, let us pray above all that religions, the will of God, fulfil their true purpose in the service of mankind, furthering loving relations between them.

Amen

[1] Cf. Mt. 13 ; 14-15 [2] Cf. Lk. 4; 16-21