2nd Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

I still hold in my memory from one of the TV news bulletins the week after the tsunami the image of  food being dropped from a helicopter to a group of survivors below who were struggling one against another in their desperate attempts to get the food.  Did they keep struggling, like seagulls fighting for bits of fish from a fisherman’s catch? I felt that that effort to give aid was probably counterproductive.  It seemed to ignore the dignity of the people to whom it was given.  The rescuers went about it the wrong way.

$190m has been raised from the people of Australia to be distributed through a variety of aid organisations: World Vision, Care Australia, the Red Cross.  I believe that Caritas Australia has received at least $4m (not counting what was contributed in churches last Sunday).  How can the Church work in this area of human rescue and development so that it does not ignore, or (worse still) destroy, people’s human dignity?

I remember listening some years ago to one of our priests who had recently returned from working for five years in South America Along with a number of priests and religious he had responded to the request of many Third World bishops at Vatican II.  Generally they were confronted by a scene of strong Catholic piety and devotion, and fierce poverty, injustice and oppression.  Fresh in their ears was the statement of the first Synod of Bishops: Action for justice is essentially part and parcel of preaching the gospel.  Many of them courageously focussed much of their attention in that area.  However, other volunteers from the United States, Canada and Europe, were also working among the poor of South America – but they were professionally trained teachers, nurses, social workers, etc..

Soon the religious realised that those others were doing the same things as themselves but more competently.  They began to reflect and to ask: Are we here to be incompetent social workers? or can we contribute something that is special? In consultation with the local laity, they came to the insight that they could show that there were deeper needs in life than health and education, adequate housing and infrastructure.  They could show how people could take responsibility for their own lives, and how they could do it together – listening, loving, forgiving.  They could convince others that they, too, could work together respectfully and in harmony – rather than build their own kingdoms – by the way they did it themselves.

They would be what the Church in fact is – as one of the early documents of the Vatican Council outlined clearly: a living, loving faith community, sent by God to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.  They would take to heart Jesus’ beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers, i.e. the reconcilers, the community-builders.

That was at the basis of Isaiah’s insight – as we heard in today’s first reading.  Isaiah saw his contemporaries as indeed God’s Chosen People – but they were chosen, so that they could themselves come to know experientially and to introduce to the rest of the world God’s love, God’s wisdom and God’s forgiveness – not as theory read from a book, or message preached from a soapbox, but as visible and tangible in their own lives.

Paul, writing to the little struggling faith community in Corinth, stressed a similar theme.  They were indeed the Church of God in Corinth, the holy people of Jesus Christ, called to take their place among the saints everywhere.  They were called together not for their own comfort, consolation and enjoyment, but that, together with Jesus, the Lamb of God, and sharing in his mission, they might confront the sin of the world and take it away (as John said of Jesus) overcoming it by the power and witness of their own lives.

Here we are today, God’s Church in Horsham, the holy people of Jesus Christ, called together – as in the vision of Isaiah and of Paul – to experience God’s love, wisdom and forgiveness.  We live it together, not as individuals (which proves nothing) and we concretely witness to its power by our integrity, our acceptance of responsibility, our care for each other, our stance of mutual acceptance and forgiveness our search for consensus, our sitting lightly with power and our own point of view, 

Through our witness we confront the divisive, self-focussed, power of sin in our own hearts and in the community at large so that God’s salvation may, in Isaiah’s words, reach to the ends of the earth.  This is the approach that the Church brings to the complex question of human development.