4th Sunday Lent A - Homily 1

Homily 1 – 2005 

The Jewish authorities - defenders of the status quo, of what they believed was the good of the people – saw Jesus and his attitudes and actions as subversive.  They did not plot to get rid of him because they thought he was a nice, gentle and inoffensive sort of pious fool.  They saw bigger issues at stake.  He was a threat to law and order, to the established ways of doing things.  He was re-defining who was in and who was out.  His views were unsettling, to say the least, destructive to be more accurate.  He was, in their view, highly dangerous.  Given their concerns, they labelled his actions as evil.  They effectively called good evil, and saw their own evil plotting of his execution and removal as eminently good.  They were blind.

John’s Gospel does not spend much time giving its readers any insight into the teachings of Jesus.  Written sixty or probably more years after his death, with two generations of experience behind it, it asks rather the questions: what difference does Jesus make in our lives?  who is he to us?  how do we experience him present and at work within us and within our community?

One of John’s answers is brought out in today’s episode: he is the one who enables us to see; he is the one who enables us to see evil as it is, to name it, to unmask it; he is the one who liberates us from the oppressive power of culture, media and officialdom to call evil good and good evil; he is the one who enables us to see the bigger picture, to be a wake up to the easy solution - the quick fix - that ignores the structural problems; he reveals society’s tendency to focus its anger and outrage on a single victim or a single class - to scapegoat the already oppressed, in order to divert attention from the bigger problems needing to be addressed.

In New South Wales deep problems have surfaced in Macquarrie Fields, taking shape in three days of rioting.  The response has been to get tough, to crack down heavily on those who fought with the police, particularly their ring-leaders – and by and large to leave it at that.

But why have problems broken out in Macquarrie Fields and not in Sydney’s affluent North Shore, for example? Studies have shown that Macquarrie Fields is an area with extensive structural problems: unemployment, family-breakdown, early school-leaving.  Are these the problems that need addressing?  Is that where the real and more destructive evil lies – the evil that leads to unrest, to hatred of authority, to violent explosions?  

These problems are difficult to address; they are extremely complicated; their ramifications are wide; they call for change, perhaps reasonably radical change, in society as a whole.  It is too easy to scapegoat.  That is how society got rid of Jesus.

Who is Jesus to you, to me?  John claims that he is the one who gives sight to the blind; who liberates our world so that we can distinguish good from evil, and name them as such.  He then asks us the question: Do we believe Jesus?