1st Sunday Advent A
See commentary on Matthew 24:37-44 in Matthew 24:32-51.
Homily 1 - 2007
This time last week, the issue on everyone’s mind was the election. Well, now we know. As a nation, we expend a lot of energy on the political process. And that’s important. Politics has a big effect on how we experience life as a community. There is always a hope that, if they get it right, life will be better…
I think we all yearn for something better. Like us, Jesus, too, yearned for it. He called it the Kingdom of God. But, interestingly, he didn’t say: “Make me king, make me prime minister, and you will experience it.” Rather, he said: Change! Repent/be converted! Change – radically – all of you!
There is something more basic than changing policies: and that is personal. Without that, politics will never touch the spot. If we just stop and think, it becomes so obvious that the need for our world to change radically is urgent. There is a madness abroad. - Nations have enough weapons to destroy the world a thousand times over, and still want to produce more. - We have the intelligence to explore the galaxies, but we can’t apply ourselves to distribute the world’s resources. - We know that our climate is changing dangerously; we know that our lifestyles contribute to that change, but no political leader seems brave enough to make a genuinely realistic response. - The world’s populations simply could not share the standard of living adopted by the West, yet we continue to base our economies on the demand for ever more consumption.
What are we to change? Not policies, not representatives, but ourselves. And not just once, but continually. The change that Jesus envisaged would be a major change, a change of mindset: of assumptions, the things we value, our habitual behaviours and attitudes and judgments.
You might have heard the story of the wise old Jewish rabbi discussing with his students the question: How can you tell when night has given way to dawn? One student answered: When you look out and see the shape of the tree in the yard. Another answered: When you look out and see the colours of the flowers in the garden. The old rabbi himself answered: Day has dawned when you look out and see that the man on your doorstep is your brother.
In today’s second reading, was Paul optimistic when he said: The night is almost over, it will be daylight soon? How do we make our own the rabbi’s insight? In one spot in the Gospel, Jesus said: Ask, seek, knock. I think he meant: get in touch with what you want, with your desires. If we look hard enough, we begin to notice layer upon layer of desires, each layer expressing in more concrete shape the deeper layer beneath. If we keep asking, if we keep seeking, we can notice ever more clearly those deeper layers.
And the deeper we go, the closer we get to our real self created in the image of God, and christed through our baptism. The more we learn to observe - the deeper we go into our self - the closer we get to recognising ourselves caught up into that dynamic mystery of love that we call God. Surprisingly, we find that our deepest desire is to love – inclusively and unconditionally. So we need to learn how to notice, to observe our inner world of desires and fears, to penetrate beyond our violence, our compassion, our joys and sorrows, and to draw closer to the dynamic of love there in our deepest core.
As Jesus said in today’s Gospel: simply stay awake, stay awake, stand ready. Paul took up the same refrain: you must wake up now. We just need to learn to see, to be alert to the energy of love there in our deepest core. By undertaking the inner journey; by staying stay awake and keeping our eyes open, we learn to see. Unless the world learns to see, we run the very real danger of destroying ourselves.
Homily 2 - 2010
I warm so easily to Isaiah: his vision, his hope, the words and images he uses. What stirs me tonight is his invitation – (or is it his challenge?): O House of Jacob come. Let us walk in the light of the Lord. Perhaps, if he were speaking to us, he would say: O disciples of Jesus come. Let us walk in the light of Our Lord – and then he might add: consistently, totally consistently. The fact is “I don’t”. There may even be, at times, an “I won’t”. It boils down to: Do I trust God? Do I trust Jesus? If I walk in his light, always, what will happen? Does it pay off? Isaiah spoke of God wielding his authority and establishing peace. Can God be trusted to do that? Whatever about those people swept away by the Flood (that Jesus mentioned). Don’t bad things happen to good people?
What is the authority – the power – of God? As far as we know, God’s authority, God’s power, is the power of love – only love. When you think of it, love is the source of all true growth, of all true life. Anything other than love does not nurture growth, but inhibits, or controls, or paralyses or destroys. The catch with love – the catch with God’s authority and power – is that, it doesn’t control; it doesn’t restrict; it doesn’t coerce. It certainly isn’t magic. Somehow, it works from within human freedom.
For all God’s creative energy, all God’s infinite power, God is vulnerable. There is paradox here. In a sense, can vulnerability be powerful? Look at Jesus – helplessly crucified, helplessly vulnerable. Yet it is precisely his deliberately chosen vulnerability that is so powerful – the source of all true life, the source of eternal life, the source of redemption. It has changed me. It still is. And it has deeply influenced you, and is shaping you into the persons you are.
I spend so much effort trying not to be vulnerable. Security, acceptance, comfort are strongly attractive. Yet I know in my heart of hearts, for example, that I would prefer to be not healthy but with a sense of meaning, serenity, wisdom, and readiness to love and forgive than to be perfectly healthy but without meaning, restless, self-absorbed, resentful or empty.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter what happens, so long as God is around with the divine capacity to call forth, even in the midst of tragedy, life and wisdom and gratitude and wonder.
Isaiah was right to invite Israel to walk in the light of the Lord. Paul was right when he said in tonight’s Second Reading: Wake up. Jesus was right when he said: Stay awake – stay tuned, alert and responsive to the infinitely empowering, life-enabling love of God that is always there, somewhere, always accessible, whatever else is happening, or however vulnerable we may feel. We don’t need to be in control – just more observant, perhaps, more contemplative.
The wonderful woman Julian of Norwich said it so beautifully, so long ago, when she insisted (as I have quoted before, on more than one occasion): All will be well. All will be well. All manner of thing will be well. It is just that well rarely means what we expected.
Homily 3 - 2013
Our Church needs God. Our world needs God. Wonderfully, God is around; God is at work, and deeply concerned for us all.
Today we begin the season of Advent. Advent, of course, means “coming”. In less than four weeks we shall celebrate Christmas, remembering how God first came among us, as one of us, in Jesus. That is past history. The Readings today reflect on the final coming of Jesus, when history as we experience it will come to its fulfilment.
The thought of Jesus’ first coming among us normally generates a joyful response. Is our reaction to Jesus’ final coming at least as joyful? Do we look forward to it as eagerly as we look backwards to his birth? Perhaps, for many of us, we do not think much about it at all. We are more preoccupied with our own death and its outcome than we are with what happens to humanity. Our world, whatever about us, prefers not to think about either; and hesitates even to mention the word “death”. It need not be so.
During the week, Pope Francis published a great document called “The Joy of the Good News” or “The Joy of the Gospel”. I managed to read it quickly; and will go back to read it again more slowly, reflectively and prayerfully. Yet, even after that quick reading, I sense a wonderful lightness and new-found hope. In fact, I feel not unlike how I felt fifty years ago, in the early years of my priesthood, after Pope John XXIII had written his two ground-breaking encyclicals, “Mater et Magistra” and “Pacem in Terris” on the pressing issues of justice and peace; and when, not long afterwards, they were followed up by the Council’s final document on “The Church in the Modern World”.
The joyful Good News is simply, as Francis says, the fact that God loves us. We have heard it before; but he invites us to listen this time, and to let the wonder of it sink in. I love the way that he wrote: “one who shares the Good News must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral! Let us recover and deepen our enthusiasm, that delightful and comforting joy of sharing the good news, even when it may be “in tears that we must sow”…
In todays’ Gospel, Jesus urged us to “Stay awake”,and to keep our eyes wide-open to reality – to the reality, simply, that God loves us and this world of ours. In the Second Reading, St Paul went further, telling us to “wake up – now!” He warned us against turning our backs on reality: “no drunken orgies” [how people deaden themselves to reality], “no promiscuity or licentiousness” [how people engage without love, ignorant of their dignity and potential], or worse, what Paul calls “jealousy and wrangling” [the hostility and mindless violence by which we destroy ourselves and our world]. They all, in one way or another, lead into emptiness and ultimate despair.
We are loved! We can love! That is what we were made for: “Wake up – now!” “Stay awake!”; and as Jesus added with an eye to our future destiny: “Be ready!” Sadly, despite God’s offer and Jesus’ clear invitation, we can miss out: “One will be taken; one will be left”. One will be taken into the embrace of God; one will be left – left to their own self-absorption, their utter emptiness and total lack of love.
There is no mystery about our final outcome. We shall simply experience clearly, and with infinite intensity, what we are already committing ourselves to now in the myriad choices of our lives. The choice is ours – now! We can let the wonder of reality, of God’s love, pass us by– drugged, distracted or, worse, resistant to the way of love. Or, we can let ourselves be loved – loved unconditionally, passionately, by God; and find ourselves wanting, empowered and swept up into that vortex of love, transformed, and loving God, ourselves and each other with the very love God has for us.
Homily 4 - 2016
There is an emptiness inside us that strains to be filled. There is something missing. Life surely could be better, is meant to be better. Years back, St Augustine summed up the situation when he wrote, Our hearts are meant for you, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in you. A lot of people are not convinced. They feel the emptiness, want desperately to fill it, but look in the wrong direction. In today’s Second Reading, Paul mentioned orgies, promiscuity and licentiousness. Sounds like Saturday night – people yearning for something. What is behind the ice epidemic? Is it the excitement, or the narcotic? People look everywhere – the body beautiful, the exotic meal, the perfect house, the overseas holiday, whatever. Nothing wrong with any of them, but disastrous if they have to be substitutes for the real thing. And how do you tell? The thing about substitutes is that they become obsessive but they never satisfy. Ask the alcoholic, ask the drug addict, ask the sex addict, the compulsive perfectionist. The yearning for more is there. It is good. It is essential – an indispensable energy source if life is to be lived, if we are to become fully alive.
I think that is what Advent is ultimately about. Isaiah will figure a lot in the Advent readings. Isaiah was a poet; he was a dreamer – not a day-dreamer, but one who dreamt of a better, a perfect future. He had had some initial special experience of God, which he had then nurtured across his life. It was his sense of God that filled his life in the present and nourished his confidence in the future. He knew that God was good and was totally convinced that life was meant to be good. His visions of the future were not just wishful thinking. They flowed from his sense of God. [Peoples] will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war. We have been waiting a long time. Was he simply wrong? Yes, and no. He was right about God and God’s hopes and intentions for the world. The catch is that the God who creates us in love and respect works together with, and never against, people created to be free.
Jesus insisted that his disciples Stay awake! St Paul, that the believers in Rome to whom he was writing Wake up! And the Church, with the coming of Advent, politely invites us to wake up too. I hear it as a call to keep my eyes open. I do not pretend that Christ will come at Christmas. Rather, I keep clearly in mind that Christ has indeed come, and what is more, has assured us that he is with us now. I take note of how he came at that first Christmas because it alerts me to what to look for as I search for his presence and action today. If we discount the angels that Luke mentioned as his way of informing his readers of the mystery of what otherwise was unknowable, Jesus, the revelation of God, came among us unnoticed, unrecognised and powerless. Yet he was God.
I need to learn that sense of God, to become familiar with that kind of God, if I am ever to be aware of God’s presence today in our world. I need to be alert and responsive to the other signs of God’s presence and action, too – to love, mercy, compassion, wisdom, freedom, peace. Wonderfully, they are around everywhere, even when so often mixed in with their opposites.That was the God whom Isaiah and St Paul had come to know and to love.
Our hearts were made for you, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in you. Advent reminds us that we do not need to look far afield to find that God.
Happy Advent!
Homily 5 - 2018
As I get older, I am slowing down; but I still like to walk around the lake on three mornings or so most weeks. Depending on the time of the year, my walk can start with the sun just below the horizon, and before I am halfway round, it has slowly risen and become visible through the rising mist across the lake. Some mornings, most mornings, the experience is quite magic as I share it with the magpies and the water hens and the occasional frog. The moments I like best are before the actual sunrise, when the sky and the clouds so often are coloured in brilliant orange or various shades of red.
At the moment, despite the impatience of most shopkeepers, the Feast of Christmas is just below our horizon – but it is close. For me, with no family, I find this period of Advent more beautiful, more fulfilling, than the coming feast itself – like the dawn before the sunrise. The Scripture Readings, so many taken from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, I find quite fascinating – so hope-filled and graphically expressed, like poetry.
Today’s first Reading is a case in point: “swords into ploughshares … spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war. O House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
The Gospel today, at first sight, seems more sombre: “the Son of Man comes … the Son of Man comes … the Son of man is coming”, with its repeated counsel, “Stay awake … stand ready.” In the Gospel itself, just before today’s passage, there is a clear reference to a vision of the prophet Daniel who wrote, “They will see the Son of Man coming with power and great glory”. How do you hear it? as threat or as promise?
You might remember from our Palm Sunday readings of the Passion how Matthew wrote that immediately after Jesus died, “the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom; the earth quaked; the rocks were split; the tombs opened and the bodies of many holy men rose from the dead..”. Somewhat cryptically, Matthew seems to have wanted to show Jesus’ death as the mythical moment of the coming of the Son of Man.
We know ourselves that, according to Jesus himself, the only power that gives life is the power of love, exemplified so conclusively in the love that motivated his dying on the cross. There in his death he expressed the life-giving power of God, and, the same time, revealed the heart of God. So Isaiah’s yearning was spot on when he wrote – “there will be no more training for war ... Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord”.
So, what might “staying awake, standing ready” involve on our part? Standing ready: perhaps each of us needs to take time to tune in to the Spirit of God in order to hear what the Spirit is saying, personally tailor-made, to us. That is the point, after all, of this expectant season of Advent. Staying awake: perhaps practising to see and to appreciate the presence of the Son of Man already at work in our world, wherever we see love at work – in our own lives and in the lives of others.
Our institutional Church may be battered and war-wearied. Let’s hope we accept being humbled, and hopefully grow in humility. But at the same time, let us keep our hopes high by seeing and welcoming love everywhere, even in the most unexpected places.
Let me finish with a quotation from my favourite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“ … Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces”.
Happy Advent!
Homily 6 - 2022
I love today’s First Reading from the Prophet Isaiah. The Jews whom he was addressing had been experiencing exile in Babylon for about fifty years, but events unfolding on the wider world stage were giving them hope of a final return to the land of Israel. They had suffered enough; their time of punishment by God for past infidelities under their generally idolatrous kings were behind them. The founding prophecy made centuries earlier by God to Abraham might finally be coming to realisation. They would become once more a great nation through whom the foreign nations of the world would be blessed; and all would come to know and worship the one God Yahweh; and in their shared faith they would come to live together as brothers and sisters. Swords would be refashioned into ploughshares and spears into sickles. Wars would be a thing of the past.
A wonderful vision — but, not surprisingly, still awkwardly based on an understanding of God as a wonderfully merciful God who yet rewards and punishes. Their experience of love, their sense of God, needed still to mature further from a mercifully just God to an unconditionally forgiving God. Both Jews and Gentiles would need to wait a further six or seven centuries until the Word of God, the Christ, would become human in Jesus — and reveal to us the heart of God.
At the end of today’s Gospel, Matthew presented Jesus saying, “… the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” I wonder how Jesus would have felt as he said that — perhaps not unlike how he felt when he accepted the title of “King” before Pilate. A variety of prophets had referred to the coming Messiah as “king”. Early Christian writers spoke of him also as “priest”.
It was the Book of Daniel that referred to the future coming of the “Son of Man” and to his “sovereignty, glory and kingship”. Jesus identified himself as the “Son of Man” in his trial before the Jewish High Priest and the whole Sanhedrin. Just a few hours afterwards, Jesus died his tortured, tormented death by crucifixion. In doing so, he radically reinterpreted the whole idea of kingship, glory and priesthood — and of sovereignty and judgment, associated with the title of Son of Man.
Jesus had died because of his refusal to deny any elements of the message of unconditional love that he had repeatedly insisted on during his public life. He had even died murmuring, “Father, forgive them; they know what they do.”
Three days later, Jesus was raised from death to life. In all four Gospels, Jesus immediately wished forgiveness to the men who had deserted him, one of whom had even denied all knowledge of him and association with him. Remarkably, perhaps, Jesus appeared to his disciples as the crucified one. The wounds he suffered had become permanent elements of his risen body; and he made a deliberate point not only of mentioning them but of inviting the disciples to touch them — before ever a mention of repentance on their part. For Jesus, totally unconditional forgiveness was intrinsically and inseparably associated with his redefined kingship and priesthood — as is also his judging, his awareness, his knowledge. Jesus judges as a doctor judges symptoms — to be alert to past experiences and their influence on the present, not to condemn or confirm the character of the patient but to understand, to heal and to forgive.
During the two thousand years of Israelite history, the Jews gradually came to a more and more refined sense of the mystery of God’s love. Something similar can happen in us. As we grow in experience of life and love, we can come to an ever more accurately refined sense of our own and of God’s love. Eventually, we can begin to understand, to appreciate and to make our own the possibility of unconditionally loving another, and, given time, perhaps even of loving our enemies.