3rd Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 – 2005 

With today’s Gospel passage Jesus gets launched.  He moved from Nazareth to Capharnaum and began to interact with people and to foment change.  His move was nourished by his holding in tension two important truths: the truth of reality and the truth of faith.

The truth of reality: he saw the poverty, hunger, slavery, injustice and oppression of others.  He moved beyond ignorance, beyond denial.  He allowed himself to stand in solidarity with those who suffered; he felt their pain.  That was one pole.

The other was the truth of faith: he believed that things could be different, he shared the dream of numerous prophets before him: poverty, hunger, injustice, oppression were not inevitable, indeed the Kingdom of God is close at hand.

He used the image of Kingdom, because that was the only social ordering that Jews had experienced.  He was referring to a new social order.  Matthew called it the Kingdom of heaven, (not because it had something otherworldly, something to do with the next life, after death), but because the pious Jew was reluctant to use the name of God.  Effectively he was proclaiming that God’s social order was accessible, possible, indeed, close at hand.

But to move from the truth of reality to the truth of faith called for a method, a practical way of approach.  Jesus called for repentance for a start.  He called for change, for openness to change, for action in line with the two truths of reality and faith.  His method involved a number of factors: we notice two of them in today’s short passage.

His first one was to make clear his convictions: to preach the message.  His second action was to form a network, to call together a group of key leaders: Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.  There is nothing mysterious about Jesus’ approach: many of you are familiar with it yourselves.  It is the basis of the approach of the St Vincent de Paul Society.  It is the approach of the Rural Australians for Refugees.  There are lots of other examples.

Where do we stand in the light of Jesus’ call? We begin by depthing our appreciation of the truth of reality, we begin to become sensitive to the way our world really is.  We become increasingly aware of the need to become better informed: What is the truth? And we leave ourselves open to feel the pain, the oppression, and our own indignation, our own rage.

A little example: the media have made the world aware of the plight of people devastated by the recent tsunami; they have shown us vivid images and kept them before our eyes: a quarter of a million wiped out, numerous others with their families, their homes, their livelihoods devastated.  We stood in solidarity, and we responded financially.  Does this exhaust the truth of reality? With a little more reflection we could open our eyes, for example, to another similar dimension of the reality: they are not the only ones in our world suffering; each day, for example, 25,000 children under the age of five die each day.  That means that, since the tsunami struck on Boxing Day, three times as many children have died of hunger as people were killed in the tsunami.  How many mothers, fathers, have been devastated by their deaths?

We don’t stay simply, however, with the truth of reality.  We seek to make a difference because we know in our hearts that this is not God’s will (and if we read our scriptures, we come to see it with even greater clarity).  We know that God wants a social order, a kingdom, where everyone is respected – with all that that means.  Jesus even goes so far as to say loved.  God has a dream for his kingdom.

But we also know nothing will change in our world unless we work to bring about change.  We recognise our own smallness; we feel our relative lack of power, but we are not insignificant.  We can begin to change ourselves: we can stop being part of the problem.  And, as Jesus did in today’s Gospel, we can seek to network with others who share our sense of contradiction.

We resist the temptation to trivialise: to restrict Jesus’ call to repent, and to focus in a self-absorbed way on our own miserable, often irrelevant, failings.  Like the disciples we allow ourselves to hear his call with enthusiasm, each in our own way, with our gifts, our insights, our opportunities, our availability of time, each in our own little, but not insignificant, corner of the woods.