HOMILY FOR MASS FOR ARC CONFERENCE TUESDAY OF THE 6TH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME (1)
ST MARGARET’S AND ALL SAINTS LONDON, 18 FEBRUARY 2025 (FEAST OF BLESSED FRA ANGELICO)
In December of last year, NASA telescopes in Chile identified a 100m wide asteroid, with the catchy name ‘2024 YR4’, that will come rather close to the earth in 2032.[1] While it’s not big enough to cause a mass extinction event were it to crash into the earth, it is big enough to wipe out a city like London or to cause a rather nasty tidal wave if it landed in the sea. Were it to hit earth, it is estimated it would unleash the energy of 8 megatons of TNT or 500 atom bombs. So I’d be careful exactly when and where the 2032 ARC Conference is held—even if the odds of earth impact are presently estimated at only 1% and likely to decline as scientists track it’s trajectory more precisely.
Human beings love apocalyptic and not just in their Scriptures. Planetary calamities—including asteroid crashes—are the stuff of many novels and movies, such as Deep Impact, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm and Moonfall. The more improbable the story, weak the acting, but deadly the disaster, the better the box office. So what’s the appeal?
Part of the attraction is surely the productions themselves, which usually offer spectacular special effects of approaching heavenly bodies, drastic weather events, and great cities and monuments reduced to rubble. However lame the story lines and acting, there are usually heroes tasked with the impossible: to persuade the scientific establishment and the politicians to take the threat seriously, to propose some fix and make it happen, and so to save what’s left of the planet, often at the cost of their own life. And so, there’s courage along with catastrophe, sacrifice that conquers dread.
Whether fact or fiction, existential threats can also elicit a renewed appreciation of the value of life, the beauty of the world, the gift of our own being and that of those we love. We can fail to appreciate these things as they become over-familiar and are eclipsed by present challenges and humdrum. So, a healthy dose of impending doom can be a corrective…
Our first reading records such a civilizational moment. With wickedness rampant, God decides to purge creation through a terrible flood (Gen 6:5-8, 7:1-5). The righteous Noah is instructed to build an ark for the safety of his family and the survival of at least one breeding pair of every species. For us Christians the wood of the ark foreshadows the wood of the cross that in time would serve to save all humanity. Perhaps the name of our conference is a deliberate pun, as we too confront a civilisational apocalypse: certainly, it’s a happy coincidence that the story of Noah’s ark is read this week!
We know less about the particular evils of Noah’s day than we do about the wickedness in our own societies today, but no sin since the first has been particularly original. All have entailed turning away from God toward something less worthy, and from self-giving to self-serving. The stories of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, Cain’s violence, the Tower of Babel’s vanity, and Israel’s meandering are all, one way or another, about the inclination to make ourselves gods rather than surrendering to Reality.[2] But as the biblical narratives expose, that proclivity is an existential threat to our souls and has disastrous effects on our communities and cosmos. Amidst such catastrophe, we reach out for the safety raft of the cross.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples to be alert to the corrupting ‘yeast’ of the civil and religious authorities—the Herodians and Pharisees (Mk 8:14-21). He’s aware of the virtue signalling of the first and the faux piety of the second. He deplores their hunger for power and adulation, rather than righteousness and service. Even His own followers seem more concerned about filling their stomachs with bread and their imaginations with signs and wonders, rather than the real meaning of His miracles. How are we to guard against such self-deception? Christ counsels them—and us—to open our eyes and ears, our minds and memories.
“Do you not remember?” God asks in the voice of Jesus. Not remember Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and family; Abraham and Moses, David and Isaiah, and all the rest. Not remember my own actions amongst the disciples, amongst you all? To sin is to forget. To forget God, His gifts and His plan. To forget our history, sacred and profane, and so ourselves. There’s amnesia afoot in every soul but also at this time a civilisational forgetfulness, a loss of collective memory that leaves us unmoored from our spiritual and ethical foundations. In turn our mores, laws and institutions become weakened, inconsistent, unintelligible…
Pope Benedict proposed an appreciation for beauty and so for the arts as crucial for reawakening sacred memory. Indeed, he famously claimed that the only truly effective apologia for Christianity today are “the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb”.[3] And today the Church celebrates someone at the intersection of the two, the great Renaissance painter, Dominican friar and patron saint of artists, Fra Angelico. His body of work testifies to deep faith and his Dominican vocation. His beautiful frescoes and altarpieces of the Annunciation, Madonna and Child, Crucifixion and more were works of contemplation and worship, of theology and preaching. In the National Gallery here in London there are panels of Christ at the Last Judgment, surrounded by His predecessors and followers, with small panels of the Dominican saints and beati up to that time—giving the happy impression that joining the Dominicans is a sure fire way to heaven. Angelico’s scenes draw upon the Sacred Scriptures and Tradition, clothing the divinely inspired words in brilliant pigments, and serving as sacred recollections, foundations without which we are lost.
At San Marco in Florence there’s another of Angelico’s apocalypses, again with Christ surrounded by saints, but this time with those rising to new life dancing their way into a renaissance paradise, and others writhing in a gothic hell. Sacred memory draws us one way, to salvation through the waters of the flood that is baptism; but forgetfulness the other, towards disaster of truly epic proportions…
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/30/asteroid-spotted-chance-colliding-with-earth-2032
[2] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1849-1851.
[3] Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report, 129.
