2nd Sunday Year A - Homily 8

Homily 8 - 2023

The short passage from Isaiah in this evening’s First Reading put us in touch with the source both of the prophet’s message and of the conviction with which he preached it. It was the voice of God present within him, the God he met through one earlier unforgettable experience in the Jewish Temple and later, but less spectacularly, in his regular moments of prayer.

The Second Reading gave us a practical example of the confidence that had increasingly inspired Paul, too. Earlier in his life, Paul had had a mystical experience of Christ as he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians who had moved there from Jerusalem for breathing space. In that experience he sensed the Risen Jesus saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me.”

As he reflected later on the message he had heard, he concluded that there in that mystical experience the Risen Christ had identified the small Christian community with Himself. The rest of his life would be one constant prayerful coming to terms with the practical consequences of that identification and its application to the everyday situations arising in the lives of Christian communities.

His first mystical experience opened the way to further personal encounters with that Christ whom he came to know and to love ever more deeply. It became the source of his ever-increasing confidence, and his practical insights into the will of God.

In the third of this evening’s Readings, John, the writer of the Gospel that bears his name, wrote of the role of another John, John the Baptist, or, as the gospel writer prefers to refer to, as John the Witness. John the Baptist bore witness to a few of his disciples of his privilege to witness a mystical experience happening to Jesus, as he put it: “I saw the Spirit coming down on [Jesus] from heaven like a dove, and resting on him.” John had himself been previously informed by God, somehow, that “the man on whom you see the Spirit come down and rest is the one who is going to baptise with the Holy Spirit.” John’s earlier experience was confirmed by the later experience of Jesus to which he bore witness. After this experience, Jesus began his Public Life, and became unstoppable.

At our baptism, the priest anointed us on the head with the Oil of Chrism to illustrate to us that, through our baptism we were soaked in the Spirit of God [the creative energy of God’s love], identified with Christ [or christened], and equipped as Christian disciples to perform the threefold role of Jesus the priest, the prophet and the king.

We have the lives of those three wonderful individuals — Isaiah, Paul and the Baptist to inspire us… At least, in their conviction of the necessity to tune into God through the determined and regular practice of prayer.