4th Sunday of Easter A
See Commentary on John 10:1-10
Homily 1 - 2005
I want to comment this morning on today’s first Reading from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, specifically from Peter’s first address to the Jerusalem crowd that had gathered after the spectacular outpouring of the Spirit that first Pentecost day. Without a deliberate effort on my part I find it difficult to hear it freshly. But with that deliberate effort, something wonderful emerges.
According to Luke, Peter insisted that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ. This Jesus was the one they crucified – the real flesh and bone Jesus, (whose life Luke had already written about so uncompromisingly in his gospel). The crowd had crucified him, probably carried along by mass hysteria that always so easily taps into the violence in people’s hearts just beneath the surface (the similar violence that fuels road rage, mindless vandalism, terrorism etc.). But not the leaders (or at least a determined, organised group among them) – they crucified this Jesus, because they saw him threatening precisely what they stood for – the comfortable “status quo” that they were doing quite well out of. They calculatingly crucified the Jesus who, from his sense of the loving God – as Luke had made clear in his gospel – saw people, especially the poor, as having an innate dignity, and insisted on treating them with profound respect.
It was this radically consistent Jesus, that God made Lord and Christ: that God vindicated as having fulfilled all that authentic Judaism – the prophets and faithful Jews across the centuries – had been leading up to: he was the perfect flowering, the fulfilment, of their most authentic tradition. His stand expressed the heart of God.
Peter invited the crowd to repent: to let go of their usual ways of thinking, to say Yes to what Jesus (and their tradition) had consistently called them to; to be set free from the domesticating but constricting power of their religious and cultural system, and in this way, to have their sins forgiven: sin – all that stifled their deepest longings and poisoned their interactions; then, having let go of sin, to be baptised in the name of Jesus: to let themselves be plunged into the same spiritual vision, the same spiritual energy that made Jesus unique and so utterly attractive. And in so doing, they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit: they would begin to live as Jesus lived – inspired, enlightened and enlivened by the same Spirit that inspired, enlightened and enlivened Jesus.
The story immediately went on to describe the life style of those who came on board (you might remember the first reading from two Sundays ago): the lifestyle of those who got the message, who repented, who took on the vision of Jesus: The whole community remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers... they all lived together and owned everything in common
They remained faithful to the brotherhood, living together and owning everything in common. They formed community where everyone was treated with the same respect: according to the vision of Jesus. Indeed they went even further and shared assets, income and food. They remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles. They sought to penetrate the heart and mind of Jesus by gathering regularly to reflect on Jesus’ message from the standpoint of their own experience and by asking the twelve to enlighten them further. They remained faithful ... to the prayer. They kept close to God, the giver of the Spirit, the powerhouse behind the whole movement. And they remained faithful to the breaking of the bread: they gathered regularly for the ritual meal where – freed to gather as friends around a common table – they sacramentally ingested the human Christ who continued to nourish them with his vision of community and, his commitment to life.
The story continues in the Church today as we continue to let go of our customary reactions and to see our world through the eyes of Christ – as we continue to let ourselves be caught up in the spiritual vision and the spiritual energy of the Christ we love, living into our baptism; as we find ourselves freed to follow our deepest longings, opening ourselves ever more to the same Spirit that inspired, enlightened and enlivened Christ – or, as Peter put it: as we repent, are baptised in a never-ending journey of baptism into Christ for the forgiveness of our sins and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Homily 2 - 2011
I noticed on the news recently that the Victorian Police Commissioner is in the process of sacking his deputy. The head of the Australian Defence Forces has also been in damage control mode over a few contentious issues. Also in the news, and more relevant to us as Catholics, has been the Pope’s sacking of the Bishop of Toowoomba, Bishop Bill Morris.
Tonight’s Gospel is to be heard against the backdrop of Jesus’ critique of the Shepherds, the leaders, of Israel - particularly, of the chief priests and the other members of the Jewish Sanhedrin.
All of these instances contain issues of possessing and exercising authority, power and control: Who has it? What is it for? How is it best applied? And how and why can it go wrong?
In discussing the Church at the Second Vatican Council, the Pope and the bishops assembled there spoke of the Church, firstly, as the People of God - a rather beautiful and evocative description of the Church. Only after having teased that out did they address the question of the Church as institution - with its various roles and procedures and rules.
Whenever you get a grouping of people, you need a certain organisation if there is not to be chaos. We need our institutions, our governments, and the myriad in-between groups that make up society - some necessary, some voluntary. They all have their various constitutions and office bearers and way of operating.
Institutions are made up of human beings, so they are subject to all the usual foibles of humanity. But something else can happen in institutions and to those with special roles and authority. Among other things, they can tend to be self-perpetuating. They can look after their own interests and be highly protective. When criticised, they easily become defensive and self-justifying.
Institutions have the frightening capacity to blind their members to reality. [A president of a powerful country can confuse national interest with the common good; and can even declare, with apparent conviction, that justice has been done when such is not necessarily the case at all.] Good people in positions of authority can do terrible things in good faith. And everyone of the membership, even those at the bottom, can so easily be complicit through their unquestioning loyalty or their unwillingness to make their views known. The higher the position in the institution, and the greater the authority, the greater the pressures, and the greater the potential, to get things wrong. Look at the corruption and injustice attributed of late to the once powerful leaders of so many Arab and African nations.
Given that potential to get things wrong, it is important that institutions and their members have ways of reviewing performance and of self-criticism. It can be helpful to have procedures of assessment - even of external assessment. Particularly in cultures like ours, where structures of transparency and accountability are taken more or less for granted, many members of the Church would feel more comfortable if the Church were also to take these procedures on board.
Of recent years, as my reading has made me more sensitive to the ways that institutions operate, and to the inevitable institutional pressures on those in positions of authority, especially in the Church, I have begun to be more alert to the passage in the Eucharistic Prayer, the Third one, where we pray: Strengthen in faith and love your pilgrim Church on earth, your servant, Pope Benedict, our bishop, Peter, and all the bishops, with the clergy and the entire people your Son has gained for you. After all, the Church has only one purpose, as Jesus reminded us in the Gospel today: I have come so that they may have life and have it more abundantly.
Homily 3 - 2014
Today’s Gospel passage seems to present a glorious riot of mixed metaphors. Jesus seems to be shaping up one moment as the shepherd, the next moment the gatekeeper, and then the gate – of all things! The passage has also been used to refer to the role of leaders in the Church. I suppose that the constant is that you are the sheep! Metaphors can be a mixed blessing – useful to draw a few comparisons, as long as we do not push the similarities too far.
In what sense are we all sheep? In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus spoke about mutual recognition and trust, about being nourished and enriched, about being safe. The point that strikes me is the observation at the end of today’s reading: I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. Jesus wants us to live life to the full. Life to the full! What might that entail? Maturing as self-aware, responsible, adult human persons?
Today is Mothers’ Day. What has made you good mothers? With your husbands, as far as possible, you have treated your children appropriately. Loving them was non-negotiable. When they were infants, that love involved your accepting total responsibility for your children and doing virtually everything for them. As the children grew older, you facilitated the process of their gradual learning to accept responsibility for themselves – by giving them little freedoms and allowing them to make mistakes. Importantly, you helped them to understand and appreciate true values such as integrity, honesty, love, compassion and forgiveness. You encouraged and supported them to choose wisely and to develop the courage to act in line with their values – which they slowly came to make more and more their own.
There came a time when you graciously allowed your children to be totally responsible for themselves – though you have stood by in the wings to provide help on request. The shepherd/sheep metaphor applied to you – with different nuances – until the children negotiated their teen-age years. After that, it would have been more hindrance than help.
What about in the Church? I am not sure that the Church has been all that good in helping people to mature, to become self-aware, to accept responsibility, to form personal conscience and to act from it. Sometimes an unhelpful situation of co-dependence has developed, where people want Church leaders to tell them – “Is it a sin…?”, “Is it OK if …?” – and where Church leaders enjoy the sense of power it gives them.
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. The Gospels generally show us a Jesus who is remarkably short on formal commandments, who tells parables precisely to stimulate people to think for themselves and to reflect on their personal experience. When he said, Come, follow me! he did not mean that we become anachronistic clones of himself, but that we learn like him to grow in wisdom and age and grace – exploring, as best we can, what makes him tick and why.
Maturing means getting to know him intimately, learning to trust him and his way, finding the freedom to entrust ourselves to him in love, as adult men and women, not as children. That requires time spent together, allowing the mutual love to become increasingly transforming. And the Church has not been good at that either. We have not helped people to do much more than to say prayers and to receive the sacraments. We have done little to encourage and to help each other to pray contemplatively. People who want to learn to meditate are more likely to turn to Buddhism than to the Church, despite a wonderfully sound tradition in that area.
Fr. Peter meditates. When he comes back, ask him to help you to learn to do it, too. You will be surprised at how fruitful the regular practice can be. Jesus dearly wants it: I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
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.
Homily 5 - 2023
Today, right around the world, the Church has traditionally asked us all to pray for more priests and nuns [not surprisingly, given today’s Gospel] — although of recent years the Church has also suggested widening our vision and praying that every Catholic comes to realise our vocation and our mission to accept responsibility to make the whole world a better and more just world. This responsibility flows naturally from baptism — part of the package deal [as it were]. When Jesus instructed his disciples to ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers into his harvest, he wasn’t thinking of priests and nuns — who simply did not exist at the time. He was referring to all his followers.
Still, there is a real need to pray for vocations to the priesthood and the religious life —though, in this present phase of the Church’s life, I wonder if it may be more important to pray, not for more priests and nuns, but for better priests and nuns; to pray that we current priests and nuns grow ever closer to Christ, ever more faithful to our vocations; to pray that we sharpen our capacity to discern what God is calling our Church to be and how to act within this swiftly-changing secular culture; to pray that we learn to listen seriously to you lay members of the Church and deepen our conviction that God can and does work creatively through you.
I also think that it is important to pray for those working in seminaries and noviciates that they possess the knowledge and skills to ensure that their charges [seminarians or novices] discern wisely whether they are really called by God to priesthood or religious life; that they have the basic psychological maturity needed to minister effectively among you; that they know how to pray personally, and how to help you laity to pray; that they have the necessary self-knowledge and genuine humility to work fruitfully with others and particularly to take seriously those marginalised by our present systems; and that they have sufficient intellectual capacity not to be overwhelmed in an ever more educated world.
I suggest that we start [or continue] by praying especially for Pope Francis. On the day when he was elected Pope ten years ago, he asked the huge crowd present in the piazza below [and the even bigger crowd watching proceedings on television screens around the world], to pray for him. He had the humility to know the impossible task confronting him without the prayerful support of us all.
However, praying for him is not enough. We Catholics believe that he really is the successor of Peter. We need to choose deliberately to listen to him respectfully. Listening is difficult in a world that seems to be increasingly confrontational and polarised. We are by no means a homogeneous world or Church: people inevitably think differently, and at the same time are more ready to say what they think. We are not practised in living together in this kind of world: we do not easily listen respectfully to others, especially when our ideas and expectations conflict.
Our world and our Church need to mature. Thank God that Francis recognises this and is familiar enough with the wisdom of our Church, accumulated over centuries of experience by saints and by scholars. He wants us to learn again the skills of honestly stating what we believe, and of listening respectfully to others doing the same thing. As with any living structure, constant adaptation and renewal are necessary if the Church is to remain relevant within a constantly changing human context.
Doing God’s Will will require committed prayer from us all. When our knee-jerk reactions are to criticise, we really need to check if we have prayed first in order to discern God’s Will.
So as we pray today for priests and religious, let us focus on the present situation and present needs. We can leave the future safely in the hands of God.