The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket

Almighty God, you enabled Saint Thomas Becket to lay down his life with undaunted spirit  for the rights of the Church. Let his prayer help us to deny ourselves for Christ in this life,  and so find our true life in heaven.[We make our prayer] through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,  who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,  God for ever and ever. Amen.

Murder in the Cathedral ~ T. S. Eliot                               Interlude

The Archbishop preaches in the Cathedral on Christmas Morning, 1170 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'  The fourteenth verse of the second chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

     

Dear children of God, my sermon this morning will be a very short one. I wish only that you should ponder and meditate the deep meaning and mystery of our masses of Christmas Day. For whenever Mass is said, we re-enact the Passion and Death of Our Lord; and on this Christmas Day we do this in celebration of His Birth.  So that at the same moment we rejoice in His coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.

It was in this same night that has just passed, that a multitude of the heavenly host appeared before the shepherds at Bethlehem, saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men'; at this same time of all the year that we celebrate at once the Birth of Our Lord and His Passion and Death upon the Cross.

Beloved, as the World sees, this is to behave in a strange fashion. For who in the World will both mourn and rejoice at once and for the same reason? For either joy will be overborne by mourning, or mourning will be cast out by joy; so it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason. 'But think for a while on the meaning of this word 'peace.'

Does it seem strange to you that the angels should have announced Peace, when ceaselessly the world has been stricken with War and the fear of War? Does it seem to you that the      angelic voices were mistaken, and that the promise was a disappointment and a cheat?       

Reflect now, how Our Lord Himself spoke of Peace. He said to His disciples 'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.' Did He mean peace as we think of it: the kingdom of England at peace with its neighbours, the barons at peace with the King, the householder counting over his peaceful gains, the swept hearth, his best wine for a friend at the table, his wife singing to the children?

Those men His disciples knew no such things: they went forth to journey afar, to suffer by land and sea, to know torture, imprisonment, disappointment, to suffer death by martyrdom. What then did He mean? If you ask that, remember then that He said also, 'Not as the world gives, give I unto you.' So then, He gave to His disciples peace, but not peace as the world gives.

Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought. Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once Our Lord's Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen.

Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ?  By no means.  Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and in the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs. We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them; we rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of men.

T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), p. 198