12th Sunday

12th Sunday Year A

Homily 1 - 2005

The first reading today gave us the spectacle of Jeremiah urging God to act violently against his enemies: Let me see the vengeance you will take on them. Then in the gospel we saw Jesus simply assuming that violence would be the response to his disciples’ openly proclaiming the truth: What I say to you in the dark, proclaim from the housetops. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body. Jesus himself became the focal point, the convenient scape-goat, of violence as traditional enemies – high priests, the Roman governor, the urban crowd – unanimously colluded in wreaking on him the most violent form of public execution in their repertoire – crucifixion.

Why? They would all have had their own reasons, and they would have all been different. So what was the real reason, that they shared in common, that led them to crucify Jesus and later to persecute his outspoken followers? Probably, they were not in touch with it, and perhaps even refused to look at it: the same reason that moved the otherwise admirable Jeremiah to invoke that violent retributory response from God on his behalf.

Well, there is a leaning towards violence that lurks in the hearts of us all. Other people threaten our self-esteem and self-image, our sense of being in control, our comfort and convenience, our cherished beliefs, our heroes and our idols. In most cases we can live with our spontaneous instincts towards violence. We keep them in check. But eventually we gang up together, overlook the violence we feel towards each other, and channel it onto socially acceptable victims: homosexuals, asylum-seekers, the axis of evil, and so on. We usually don’t know why we do, but we feel safer when we do.

Most Australians apparently approved of the vicious practice of putting asylum-seekers, even their wives and children, behind razor-wire fences, to protect us from them, and readily believed that they were the kind of people who would throw their children overboard to save themselves. Thank God for yourselves, other Christians, and all those other people of good will who put their hands up to be counted! Some change seems to be happening to our national policies - but I won’t hold my breath.

Jesus was killed because he chose to show the futility and destructiveness of retaliatory violence. He said: love your enemies. Imagine it! He revealed the truth that societies refuse to face – the sublimated violence that holds them together. Everything that is now covered will be uncovered. By maintaining his own innocence, he showed violence clearly for what it was, however much it was passed off as defensible “in the national interest”; or, as the high priest in his case said: It is better that one man die for the nation than that the whole nation perish.

They managed to kill him easily, but they could not corrupt him – they could not get him to play their game. He did not wish them violence. He persisted in his determination to forgive the very people who were in the act of killing him. He wasn’t afraid of those who kill the body. What he would not do was to compromise his soul, his deepest truth.

And he directed his disciples to do likewise: Hone your awareness of cover-up, of double-speak, of what you are up to, of what you are frightened to face. Then, as you discover the truth, share it. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the daylight. What you hear in whispers, proclaim from the rooftops. He didn’t ask of them (or us) what he had not done himself. I stand in awe, not just at his courage, but at his freedom and strength to face death without bitterness.

Does his option for non-retaliation and non-violence work? Certainly its opposite hasn’t all these years, these centuries. People still kill those they identify as their enemies, and think they are virtuous, even claiming that God is on their side, as did Hitler. Most nations are the same, even when their gods are different. They will still build their monuments to their wars and have their national holidays.

It seems clear: Jesus’ way does not pay off in the short term. That is why he says: Do not be afraid. Not because there is not plenty to be afraid of! But don’t let it get the better of you. And he makes the promise: If any declare themselves for me in the presence of men, I will declare myself for them in the presence of my Father in heaven. Because they have lived the truth that they proclaimed. They did not allow themselves to be corrupted. It can be dangerous to tell the truth in love. But, as far as Jesus is concerned, it seems to be the only way to save the world.

Homily 2 - 2008

Don’t be afraid! – said Jesus. And he repeated it: Don’t be afraid – even of those likely to kill you. Little wonder he repeated it – violent death is scary. Jesus himself had to deal with his fear, certainly during his prayer in Gethsemane – and he struggled to do so.

In today’s short Gospel passage, Jesus was talking to disciples sent on mission – in the case of the first disciples, personally sent by himself: a mission around Galilee, tyrannically ruled by Herod, and at a time not long after the execution of John the Baptist. In Matthew’s case: he was writing for his own community of disciples living in the Roman Empire. Don’t be afraid, even of those who kill!

What was their mission? Remember last week’s Gospel? Jesus felt compassion for the crowds because they were harassed – oppressed, exploited, and because of the despair that they felt in face of it. As the Gospel said: They were dejected, like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus’ response was to send his disciples out among them: Proclaim that the Kingdom of heaven is close at hand. Tell them that God loves them, that they have a dignity. But, don’t just tell them: be channels of that love, approach them with deep compassion, as Jesus himself had done: Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. Their mission was not to establish an opposing regime … but the message they preached radically subverted the values on which the Roman Empire was built.

We live in a different world. No one is likely to behead us or crucify us – whatever we say. But it is a world where a lot of people are simply lost. They mightn’t think they are; they probably see themselves as eminently free, but they’re lost – like sheep without a shepherd. With no appreciation of a God who loves them passionately and gifts them with life, they have little sense of their radical human dignity or of the preciousness of every human life.

A topical illustration is the current legislation before Parliament in Victoria - seeking to legitimise abortion even further. Around the world, in one single year, there are over 40 million abortions. People are lost, bewildered. What to do? The Church has proclaimed its teaching on abortion quite clearly, and has been doing it ever more loudly over recent years, but, whatever about the strength and clarity of its argument, abortions are increasing year by year. Most people have simply tuned out. They don’t look to the Church any more for enlightenment. In their eyes, the Church has little or no credibility, and perhaps is seen by most as harsh and authoritarian. One temptation is to seek to exert power, to lobby, or to threaten. That is the way of Empire.

There seems to be no short-term solution – not until people know in their bones the truth of the radical dignity of every living person. To know that best, they need to know the God who loves people – all people. But words – teaching – while helpful, are not enough. The only words that will be listened to are words spoken in love. People need to hear that they are loved and respected. Only then can they face the task of living not just as free persons but as responsible persons as well. And the love and respect that enlighten, liberate and truly empower are not communicated by words but by attitudes and deeds.

As disciples of Jesus, we are sent to our world to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is near at hand – and we do that as we cure the sick, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils – that is, as we relate to people with the obvious compassion of Jesus. We start behind the 8-ball. We’ve lost a lot of credibility. Our message is largely counter-cultural. But, as Jesus said: Don’t be afraid. Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven.

Homily 3 - 2017

Would you say that Jesus in today’s Gospel is warning, even threatening, or encouraging, in fact, quite upbeat? I tend to the latter reaction. After all, we have the refrain, Do not be afraid, repeated three times in the first two paragraphs.

When I hear the phrase, Proclaim it from the housetops, I spontaneously picture a modern house with its TV antenna or satellite dish in full view. And sadly, in today’s world, as far as the Church is concerned, TV and other media have been the means whereby Everything covered was uncovered, and everything hidden was made clear. The Royal Commission has exposed inexorably the sad story of gross sinfulness that, till then, we had not even heard in whispers.

That was hardly what Jesus had in mind when he was giving his advice to his disciples – to the contrary! And yet his repeated refrain, Do not be afraid, remains surprisingly relevant to our current situation. The greater danger for the Church is not that it lose its prestige and privilege, even its influence, but that it lose its soul. In that context, the Royal Commission is a precious call to repentance. There is no need to fear those factors, loss of prestige, privilege and influence, that metaphorically can kill the body. What we need to fear is not an external him, such as the media, but the attitudes and behaviours of those of us in the Church which can destroy the Church’s soul.

We need to ponder thoughtfully, to look closely at ourselves. What motivated us? What enabled us to not see, to not speak up; and to cover up and hide so successfully the evils happening in our midst? Unfortunately, whatever it is, it is something quite complex, hard to identify and hard to change, something that has both its strengths plus, at the same time, its crippling weaknesses. We could call it Clericalism, and it is; but that is too vague. It affects not just priests and bishops, but most others, too, in the Church who are implicated to various degrees with us, and have preferred to remain passive and undisturbed, and, without complaining, to not grow up spiritually or morally. From outside the Church, the Commissioners struggled to understand it; and I think most of us, from the inside, are still puzzling.

Yet, I think that it is very much that that today’s Gospel could be challenging us to do. Do not be afraid. The God who has counted every one of the hairs on our heads, and to whom one sparrow falling to the ground is still of consequence, cares infinitely deeply for us.

I have the strong conviction that in any situation we find ourselves, no matter how tragic it may seem, God is present, not orchestrating events or pulling strings, but present, enabling us somehow to grow in the midst of it, not necessarily solving our problem or changing anything, but quietly empowering life, offering insight, strengthening hope, setting free our capacity to love. St Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, expressed the same insight more briefly: God makes all things work together for the good of those who love Him.

The Church can exit from the Royal Commission a purified Church, a compassionate Church, a humbler Church, a trimmer, less encumbered and more effective Church, a different Church, perhaps even a hardly unrecognizable Church. It may even become a Church able to encounter and to influence the impact of our changing culture. But it will not happen by magic. It can happen by grace. However, we shall need to look hard, to reflect prayerfully, to grow up. And we shall need to do it together.

We can take for our model and companion Mary, of whom St Luke observed: As for Mary, she treasured these things and pondered them in her heart. She accepted reality and searched there for the traces of God’s presence and action.

Homily 4 - 2020

When sending the disciples out on mission, Jesus was not backward in letting them know that living a life of committed, practical love might prove to be quite dangerous. Even in the short passage we had as our Gospel this morning, he repeated twice the message: “Do not be afraid”. We Christians in Australia have never had reason to be afraid of being mortally harmed for our faithfulness to Jesus — unpopular, perhaps, and criticised [though most of that, tragically, for our having failed to live the message of Jesus].

In other areas of our present world, the story has been quite different — and many Christians, along with other ethnic and religious groups, face real persecution.

Yesterday was World Day for Refugees. In recent years, our nation’s response to the world’s refugees has been spectacularly self-centred and short-sighted. And we in the Church have hardly been noticeable for our clear and strong dissent. It is almost as if Jesus had never said a word about loving our neighbour, or clearly indicated that neighbours can precisely be those from beyond our borders, desperately seeking care and protection and the possibility of a decent life.

Why are we surprised that helping others in a truly just way would cost us something, perhaps even a lot? or that taking Jesus’ message seriously would deeply annoy a lot of others? Jesus even talked about loving our enemies. But we Catholics have rarely stood out as different — except for the wrong things. Did Jesus mean what he so clearly said? Do we ever wonder why he prioritised the things he did? He must have believed that we could do it. He must have wanted us to do it — even at a cost.

I hope we as a nation learn something from the serious disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. We do seem to be accepting that we are in this together, that we can surprisingly work together; and that it is acceptable to run up enormous national debt to help those most in need.

Who wants to get back to normal?

Homily 5 - 2023

Jeremiah was one of the few prophets who told us about himself, usually in accounts he wrote of his struggles with God. The passage from today’s Reading is typical Jeremiah. The message he received from God to then relay to the “power-brokers” of the Kingdom of Judah was a threatening message. It was certainly anything but popular.

His prophetic faithfulness brought him many influential adversaries and rendered him vulnerable to constant criticism and danger. He turned to God for protection — indeed for more than protection. As we heard today, his prayer to his God was: “Let me see the vengeance you will take on them, for I have committed my cause to you”.

Did God hear his prayer? Jeremiah did not yet realise that there is no vengeance in the heart of God. Yet God allowed events to take their natural course, that so often finished up of itself in disaster and chaos for wrong-doers [and sometimes for everyone else as well]: what the Scriptures call “the Anger”, or “Gehenna” [often translated as “hell”]. Wrong-doing creates in this life its own retribution, its own suffering. Not so much “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth” on a one-to-one level, as a corporate suffering for all the members of a culture that unquestioningly accepts such behaviour as normal. Inter-cultural violence is what regularly feeds the nightly TV News channels and everyone seems to assume is "regrettably inevitable".

God did hear Jeremiah’s prayer, but in a roundabout way. God nourished Jeremiah’s personal integrity, his strength of character, the supportive depth of his personal relationship with God, even, perhaps, his inner peace. But, then, God’s ways are certainly not our ways.

In his letter to the Romans, St Paul wrestled with a similar problem. How does God deal with the world’s evil? In today’s passage, Paul referred to the disastrous experience of generalised evil as “death”. And it is not a bad term. We are all so inherently accustomed to it that we hardly notice it. But it saps our peace, our energy, our harmony and mutual support. We walk around at least “half-dead” — without realising it. It is like the spiritual equivalent of living in a hopelessly smog-affected city, or like living in Hiroshima or Nagasaki after the dropping of the atomic bombs.

Paul put it well: "Sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned”. But then he proclaimed the good news: “If it is certain that through one man’s fall so many died, it is even more certain that divine grace, coming through the one man, Jesus Christ, came to so many as an abundant free gift.”

God deals with the world’s sin through Jesus, particularly by Jesus’ radical re-defining of the issue of power. Our sense of power is based on human competitiveness, leading to the need to dominate in order to survive; and on it goes inexorably to hostility and violence. Jesus challenged us from the first moment he was born — with the power of a baby. As he came to adulthood, his power became the power of his personal integrity. As he began teaching, he explicitly warned his disciples to keep away from the unredeemed concept of power as dominance and insisted that “anyone who wants to be great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first must be your slave.” Loving our enemies is possibly the neatest way to disarm them. The message of Jesus’ death illustrated his clearest expression of power — and his clearest, most powerful, reversal of sin.

Yet how often in our world do we look for signs of God’s care in examples of God’s dominance over nature or over people, rather than look instead for the truly transforming but hidden and gentle action of God in people’s minds and hearts?