Homily given by Fr Christopher Colven for Westminster Civic Service at Westminster Cathedral on Sunday 16 March 2025.
On the journey towards Easter, we have reached the Second Sunday in Lent. In a month’s time we shall move into Holy Week and during the Maundy Thursday Mass, as he does each year, the Cardinal will wash the feet of twelve Chelsea Pensioners – a reminder of what Jesus did for his first disciples at the Last Supper. By tradition, during the feet-washing a response is sung: ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est’. ‘Wherever charity and love are to be found, God is there’.
The passage of Scripture which the Lord Mayor has just read is attributed to Saint John. John was, supposedly, the youngest of Jesus’s first chosen disciples, and as such the one closest to his heart – the only one not to suffer a martyr’s death. John is the great apostle of love, and it is from his Gospel and his Letters that we gain unique insight as we try to answer the age-old questions: ‘Who is God?’ and ‘What is God really like?’
For Saint John, three short words tell us everything we need to know, and indeed everything we can ever know: ‘God is love’. The first two words stand on their own. They tell us not just that there is a God, that He exists, but that He ‘is’ – not that He stands as an onlooker but that He is ever-active within the created order of which he is the source and origin. The God-who-is, for John, is revealed uniquely in the Person of Jesus whom another John, this time the mystic John of the Cross, describes simply as ‘the All of God’.
The third word which completes the definition of God is ‘love’, and ‘love’ for the Scriptures is essentially about action not feeling, conduct rather than emotion. ‘In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us.’ The Christian understanding is that, in some way which goes way beyond our comprehension, the God who is love, shares that love, which is the essence of his own being, with those He has made in his image and likeness. We are capable of loving because we are inspired, quite literally, by Divine love. In a sense, we love, in our turn, with a love which overflows from the heart of God ‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est’. ‘Wherever charity and love are to be found, God is there’.
We have come together this afternoon to share in a Civic Service. Our prayers are specifically offered for those who serve in the governance of this great City of Westminster, and we do so with gratitude for all the time and commitment that the few give to provide for the needs of civil society. There is much cynicism about those who serve in public office today – it is unfair and misplaced.
Pope Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, began his own pontificate by writing an encyclical letter based on the passage from Saint John which we heard earlier. After reflecting on the theology of love, the late Pope moved on from theory to practice and he devoted several paragraphs to those who work for the common good in civil society, and the need for collaboration with the faith communities.
‘Love’, he wrote, ‘”caritas”, will always be necessary, even in the most just society. There is no civil order, however, just, that makes the service of love superfluous. There will always be suffering that needs comfort and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need in which help that shows concrete love for one’s neighbour is indispensable. A society that wants to provide for everything, that absorbs everything into itself, ultimately becomes a bureaucratic body that cannot ensure the most essential thing any human being needs – a deep personal attention. What is needed is not a governance that regulates everything, but one that generously recognises and supports the initiatives that arise from the various social forces and that unite spontaneity with closeness to people in need. The letter goes on to identify the Church as ‘one of these living forces. In her beats the dynamism of love, inspired by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not only give material help but also peace and care for the soul, a help often more necessary than material sustenance.’
The Catholic Church as with the other faith communities, sees itself as a community of love existing for the service of love. Our ever-expanding corpus of social teaching, with its threefold cornerstone based on human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity has been further enhanced by Pope Francis’s emphasis on the need for mercy in our relations with one another, both individual and corporate. There is a richness here which is open to be shared more widely. In the complexities of a modern City like Westminster, with all its demands and challenges, Catholics alongside other believers, join in wanting to make their contribution to building a just and compassionate environment in which all may flourish, and where those on the margins find their rightful place within civil society.
On Maundy Thursday as Cardinal Nichols washes the feet of the Twelve Chelsea Pensioners, he will symbolise, he will sacramentalise, the conviction that our only response to the God who is the source of all that is loving, must be to wash the feet of our brothers and sisters, metaphorically, if not literally. The same Saint John who gives us the definition of God’s essential nature can also say: ‘Those who do not love the brother or sister they can see, cannot love the God they have never seen. So this is the commandment that He has given us, that anyone who loves God must also love his brothers and sisters.’
‘Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.’ ‘Wherever charity and love are to be found, God is there’.
Source: rcdow.org.uk
