4th Sunday of Easter A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

I like the way that Jesus concluded the Gospel passage that we just heard this morning: “I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full”. Life to the full, fully alive – I really do want that. For Jesus too, it was what he wanted, what guided all his decisions. He wanted to live life fully himself, and, wonderfully, wanted us to have the same experience. I need to keep reminding myself of this whenever I listen to anything he said – because, sometimes, what he said can sound anything but.

Not long ago we celebrated Easter. For me, being still a bit lame, it was good not to be running the show myself, but simply being there and allowing the liturgy to carry me along in the flow – without my thinking what needed to happen next. On Friday, we remembered Jesus’ crucifixion with all its humiliation and dehumanization. So much for “life to the full” – and yet we call it Good Friday. The more I reflect on it, the more I realize Jesus did explore the furthest limits of life to the full. He was the quintessential human person fully alive. Tempted to despair, to bitterness, to loss of hope, to doubt even the presence of God, to some of those temptations we may have wrestled with ourselves in truly dark moments, he drew from his truest human depths and responded with hope, with forgiveness, with faith somehow in the dark presence of God – and with his trust in the way of love intact. Breath-taking! No wonder that even the Roman centurion charged with his crucifixion murmured, “Truly, this was a Son of God!” No wonder, years afterwards, St Paul was able to write, “All I want is to know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and to imitate his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death”. For Paul, engaging life, [as Jesus did death], with hope, trust, faith, forgiveness, meaning, made infinitely more sense than surrendering to despair, bitterness, unforgiveness, absurdity and meaninglessness.

As we look at the TV News of an evening, we are constantly confronted with pictures illustrating the terrifying consequences of war – with deaths from nerve gas in Syria, the destruction wreaked by ‘The Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan, to threats of the use of Atomic bombs from North Korea. And the random attacks of terrorists have had the effect of many people feeling deeply fearful. Hardly “Life to the Full”.

Then I listen to the Epistle from Peter in today’s Mass: Jesus “was insulted and did not retaliate with insults; when he was tortured he made no threats but put his trust in God”. Not unlike Paul, Peter also reminded his readers that, in doing this, Christ “left an example for you to follow the way he took”.

Jesus was certainly consistent. He was merely living out what he had insistently taught. “Love one another”. More than that, “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.” Did he come from another planet? Was he real?

Jesus was real. He wanted us to resist evil, and to unmask it wherever we encounter it; but he insisted that we do so without violence. In the culture of the time, the quaint-sounding examples he cited in the Sermon on the Mount, “Turn the other cheek”, “Walk a second mile”, “Give to your demanding creditor not just your cloak but your tunic as well”, were precisely ways to reassert personal dignity and to calmly alert the other to the violence of the behaviour.

Non-violent active resistance to evil is hardly the default response to injustice, whatever its shape. Our world is programmed to think violence, whether war on the international scene, or domestic violence closer to home, violence in sport, violence on the streets. I wonder if that is because we Christians have not always shown the beautiful possibility of Life to the Full, and how it can best be found.