5th Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

I was walking down the street yesterday, having just been to the hairdressers, and I met one of our parishioners. “Oh! You’ve had a haircut”, she said. ‘Yes”, I answered. “I hope I don’t look like Nick Kyrgios”. She said something to me, that I did not quite hear; and we kept on walking our different directions. I was wondering to myself what she said. It sounded like, “Oh, don’t be so negative!” I hope it was. I know I am so often spontaneously critical, even hostile. And I wish I weren’t. But I do not want to be simply more careful about what I say. I would love to be a different sort of person, who is not spontaneously critical. I would like to feel differently. I would like to be naturally joyful, positive, respectful, at home in the world.

I do not think that being salt of the earth and light of the world are moral issues, behavioural issues. I think it is Jesus’ challenge to all of us to be a different kind of person. He had already spoken in the beatitudes about the importance of being merciful, pure of heart, and peace-makers. That is more than behaving differently. That, it seems to me, is being different. Being very different, in fact. It means seeing differently – the ability to see the God-spark in each one. And I am not sure whether that is the consequence of being different or the way to becoming different. In either case, I suspect that it is the gift of God. But to ask for it honestly, to want it genuinely, I think that we need at least to suspect that we are much better at seeing the speck in our neighbour’s eye than the log in our own. From what I read from within the Church’s tradition, that radical personal change, that growth in authentic maturity, is the fruit of Mary’s habit of treasuring experience and pondering it in her heart, or in other words, of a commitment to meditate regularly.

The back page of today’s parish Bulletin has a helpful warning about the on-going work of the Royal Commission. This month will be devoted to examining closely the Church’s response to the sexual abuse that has occurred, and particularly why, and its plans for the future. It will be tough going. I apologise to you in advance because it is largely yourselves out in the broader community who are exposed to the ordinary person’s anger and criticism.

I am afraid that we priests and bishops have been anything but salt of the earth or light of the world. To the contrary. We have lost most if not all credibility. But 99.5% of the Church are you. You can be and need to be, in your wonderful and different ways [like Sr Anne Gardiner, this year’s Senior Australian of the Year], giving taste to the earth and lighting up the world.

The world needs you. It seems to be a very angry world at the moment – a confused and angry world. It is not enough to address the symptoms of so much anger, even though it is necessary to protect the community. If we do not better identify the anger and address it; if we do not seek its causes and search for plausible ways to tackle them, then, fuelled by our own anger, we can keep on shouting, “Lock them up!” We may build more and better [whatever that means] prisons, and succeed only in making their inmates angrier and more violent.

Salt of the earth! Light of the world! How? Jesus listed mercy, singleness of heart and peace-making. Later on, he simply said, Love. But the love required asks for more than improvement. It asks for change, radical personal change, a new way of seeing the world – where everything becomes different.