2nd Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2017

The New Year can be a sort of doorway time that invites us to look back, and especially to look forward to the possibilities of change. Today's first Reading invites us to take seriously the possibility of extending God's salvation, as Isaiah put it, to the ends of the earth. Like so many of our Church words, salvation can so easily wash over us with no more impact than the cereal we had for breakfast this morning. Still, if salvation does not quite electrify us, the state of the world can leave us depressed; and our sense of powerlessness can leave us paralysed. It is precisely the desperate pain of the world that God wishes to save us from.

The problem is that we have effectively pushed the issue of salvation quite off the radar. We think of salvation as avoiding hell, an “out of this world” issue that we can ignore for a while yet. We have made it exclusively an individualistic concern at that, ignoring God's reassurance of constant mercy and forgiveness, and fearing ourselves and imagining others, particularly the ones we don't like, as totally bereft of love.

But if we listen carefully to today's First Reading, we notice that God does not speak of salvation as an individualistic concern. Isaiah, God's servant, was directed to speak to the people as a corporate reality, to the tribes of Jacob, that is, the former Southern Kingdom, and to the survivors of Israel, the former Northern Kingdom. More wonderfully, God wanted Isaiah to be a light to the nations, not simply to everyone, but to everyone in their national corporate political and religious reality.

The salvation God is concerned about, the immediate issue, has to do with the pain we cause each other, the pain we see every time we watch the TV news. God wants the kind of world we ask for in most of our Prayers of Intercession during Mass. For that better world to eventuate, God cannot wave some kind of magic wand. That kind of world involves radical change on our part. And that is complicated.

Since we have had the new translation of the Mass, we have been saying, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But look closely at today's Gospel. There we heard St John the Baptist saying of Jesus, Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. The sin of the world is something much more mysterious - that John's Gospel went on to explore. It used words like blindness, darkness; and referred to the sort of corporate attitudes, prejudices and instinctive reactions that communities take as natural, even virtuous, that are generally contagious, and rarely questioned. How could genuine, presumably sincere, religious leaders of the time have so consistently condemned Jesus to death?

We may sometimes notice such blindness in others, but rarely in ourselves. Why do the majority of Australians have little problem with the government's treatment of boat people? Why does ISIS do the barbaric things it does, in the Name of God? It is because of sin - not necessarily individual sins but the sin of the world. It is this sin of the world that causes so much pain in the world, that God is prepared to tackle. But God needs our cooperation. It is complex. That is why God sent Jesus, to coach us, to alert us, to motivate us, to convince us, to show us a whole new way to think, to live and interact, not as individuals but together, where possible as Church. It demands the radical change he called conversion. The process is gradual; success is incremental. But it is happening. If we open our eyes, we slowly learn to recognise it.

Isaiah: Light to the nations!       Francis: Peace! No arms deals!      

Jesus:  Love your enemies!        And we hesitate: Which ones? Why? What if? How?

Enough there for the year ahead.