2nd Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

How would you feel if I came down to you there in your pew, poked my finger in your chest, and said to you, “You need to get a firm grip on reality!”  You would probably think that I was the one who had lost it – perhaps last week’s heat had got at me, or a bit too much sun.

Get a firm grip on reality! You know … I think that that is what Jesus meant when he went around Galilee, saying, “Repent, the Kingdom of God is close at hand!”  To repent, radically, means to get a firm grip on reality.  Why I do not have a firm grip on reality is because I live in a world, a culture, where most people do not have a firm grip on reality.  But the fascinating thing is that we are so sure that we have.  What prevents people from getting that firm grip on reality is what John the Baptist in today’s Gospel passage, called the sin of the world.  Buddhists talk about illusion.  Elsewhere, Jesus spoke about blindness.

I gather that, in the United States, everyone has a gun – in order to feel safe in a society where everyone has a gun.  Our country spends millions of dollars on Border Protection, and mobilises our brave navy, to protect us from small boatloads of unarmed people fleeing from violence, seeking a peaceful life, and apparently invading us in an unorganized succession of leaky boats.  Border Protection.  National Security.  Might there be better ways to help make our nation, our world, a safer place, a less violent place, a peaceful place?

On a more personal level, I fill my life with labour-saving, time-saving, devices – and work harder and longer in order to afford them … and get stressed because I seem to be getting busier and busier … and there is less time [or no time] really to relax and to give to the family.  I fill my life with social media, and keep in contact more and more constantly with more and more people, only to find that my life is somehow more and more empty, and perhaps even more and more lonely; or to find there is more and more opportunity for me to criticise others, or, worse, for others to criticise me.

It is easy for me, from my ivory tower, to poke fun at what others take to be deadly serious.  But, what am I blind to? What have I got out of focus? What do I see with a jaundiced eye? How does the sin of the world blind me?

Is there an antidote?  John the Baptist, somewhat optimistically perhaps, said that Jesus was the one who would take away the sin of the world.  Did he? Could he? Can he? Can he do it alone? Can he do it for us?  Or, can he only do it with us?  Jesus would, in fact, take away the sin of the world in partnership with us.

John the Baptist said that Jesus would baptise us with the Holy Spirit.  That is a great image.  But forget about a few drops of water on a baby’s head.  Think more of immersion, total immersion, being plunged into, swept along by ... the Holy Spirit!  Holy Spirit is a sort of code word in our Church culture for the personalised love of God, the unimaginably powerful, creative, unpredictable [perhaps wild], transformative love of God.

Jesus’ answer to the world’s blindness and meaninglessness, and violence and addiction that flow from them, is to live instead from love, from compassion, from forgiveness, from justice, respecting, listening, observing, reflecting … and allowing ourselves to be changed, softened and eventually transformed, and finally enabled to see … and, at last, to get a firm grip on reality.