13th Sunday Year A
See Commentary on Matthew 10: 37-42 in Matthew 10:34-42
Homily 1 - 2005
Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Sounds challenging, heartless, even inhuman. Is it? In the original language the word prefer reads: “love more than”. Let’s work with that: Anyone who loves father (or mother, or son or daughter) more than me is not worthy of me. So much depends on what we understand by love, (and perhaps we never finish exploring that); but genuine love can never put us at odds with Jesus.
Personally, I have never had to test out the limits of loving son or daughter; and my relationship to Jesus and the Gospel never put my relationship to mum or dad under any strain. But I have had to face the reality of saying and doing things that I know deeply offend people (perhaps some of you), and trying always to love and respect them deeply at the same time when they have criticised me for what I have said or done. I have struggled, and not succeeded often enough, to absorb the criticism, take it on board calmly, and respond with respect in love.
I am sure similar experiences are not uncommon, and, with some of you, may even have occurred within your own families. Loving is a mystery; it seems a constant challenge – and yet, when we manage it, we know we have grown, and become freer. Loving children, for example, in the present cultural climate, might be harder than it was a generation or two ago: the advertising industry has become sophisticated over the years; peer pressure was always real, but perhaps even stronger today. So many parents don’t know how to say “no” to their children, or say it inconsistently or dysfunctionally, depending on their own moods or levels of nervous energy. Perhaps some believe that to say “no” is to withhold love. But that betrays not strength, or freedom, or maturity, or genuine love, but mutually destructive insecurity. And who is there to help them?
Loving takes lots of shapes, and one of those essential shapes is "tough love", and it may never be understood, never forgiven. That is sad, but the alternative can be as destructive of those we love as of ourselves, and a waving good-bye to self-discovery, to maturity, and to growth in freedom.
Jesus went on: Those who do not take up their cross and follow me are not worthy of me. There are many cultural attitudes in our current Australian society that conflict clearly with Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom. To challenge them, respectfully, and calmly to claim a different perspective, at the footy club, in the pub, at the family reunion, around the automatic coffee machine, at the play group, even, perhaps, in the prayer group, takes courage, and perhaps a reasonably strong sense of identity. That may be why those attitudes are not often challenged, and why our society has remained hard-hearted, xenophobic and self-centred.
Most Australians identify themselves as Christian, that is, as ones who follow Christ. Have we made enough effort really to find out for ourselves what Jesus is really on about? why he finished up carrying a cross to his death? and why he asked us to step into line behind him with ours?
I don’t believe that Jesus found it easy to say: Those who find their life will lose it; those who lose their life for my sake will find it. But he had to say it simply because it was true and because he loved us. He knew that the only way this world would become more human, just and peaceful, welcoming and inclusive, was by choosing to be different from the way it was: not from any attachment to conflict or a good fight, but from a mature and wise love – strong and confident enough to be stretched and tested, and sometimes to be hurt in the process.
Yet Jesus knows our fears and insecurities, our struggles to love, to live authentically. He doesn’t criticise us. Nor does he soften his call – he won’t step back from tough love, precisely because it is love. But he is willing to stand with us and to forgive us when we back down, even if seventy times seven.... He still hopes, and he takes pleasure even in our little victories – because they are good for us and for our world.
Homily 2 - 2017
I do not think that I can responsibly refrain from sharing where I am at in light of the summons to answer allegations of sexual abuse against minors served by the Victorian Police on Cardinal Pell in Rome last Thursday. My heart goes out to the men who have made the allegations; to Cardinal Pell who has to answer them; even to the Police who laid the charges. More immediately, my heart goes out to you parishioners who have to work with people, and live and mix with them, some of whom will ridicule you, and others who will despise and attack the Church that you love.
No doubt many of you will have already made your own judgments about the guilt or innocence of Cardinal Pell. Personally, I leave judgment to the Court. I have been a priest for long enough and heard enough Confessions not to be surprised at anything that anyone is capable of doing. If the Cardinal is guilty, he is not the first Cardinal to be found so. If accusations are found unsubstantiated, the accusers are not the first in that situation. I simply do not know the truth. It will be the task of the Court to reach judgment. I certainly would not like to be one of the jurors. In the meantime, I have to be content to wait – and pray that truth will prevail.
We have all had a tough time over the past twenty years. Most of us were bewildered and deeply wounded by the statistics released recently tabling the incidence of sexual abuse by clergy in our Church: seven percent of priests found guilty of abusing; 4,400 young children over the past sixty years who have had the courage to tell the stories of their abuse to the Royal Commission. We do not know how many others were offended against but chose to remain silent.
How do we survive in this kind of Church? I feel a bit like Peter when he said to Jesus, Lord, to whom else can we go?
It helps to be aware of and grateful for the enormous amount of good work done by so many people in the Church, which would never have been done without the motivation they have drawn from their belonging. The Church is not all bad – it is both bad and good, at the same time.
Yet, the question remains, how do we cope with our bewilderment, our hurt, our anger and sense of betrayal? We need to work at it.
Personally, I constantly draw hope from what St Paul had found out the hard way, too: God makes all things work together for the good of those who love him – “all things”, even sin! In the same Epistle to the Romans from which today’s Second Reading was taken, Paul also wrote, when reflecting on the outcome of the death of Jesus, where sin abounded, grace abounded even more. I do trust that the Church can come out of this shameful trial a purified Church, a humbler Church, a better Church, a safer Church. In some ways, that is already happening.
But, in the meantime, how do I live with the deep burden of sorrow that I carry? Jesus said, The kingdom of God is close at hand. However, to see it, we all need a new way of seeing, of understanding – what he referred to by the deceptively translated word repent. I keep being challenged, to say the least, by the last of Jesus’ Beatitudes as listed by St Luke, Blessed are you when people hate you, … abuse you, denounce your name … on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and dance for joy …. “Blessed are you!” "Rejoice!" That is counter-intuitive stuff that only makes sense when we in some way have personally encountered Jesus. For most of us, it is not something that we can reason ourselves into but that comes with taking time to pray.
If some of you, or others you know, are really finding it hard, do feel free to come and have a yarn with Fr Paddy or with me.
Homily 3 - 2020
Anyone who welcomes a prophet because he is a prophet will have a prophets’ reward. What is a prophet’s reward? During the week when talking to a friend, she promptly answered with a wry smile, “Wasn’t it to get killed”? Could be! But here, Jesus was talking of something else. Prophets particularly seem to be those who have deep insight into God and God’s ways — people who see the world through the eyes of God and criticise or encourage accordingly.
What does that say of one who welcomes a prophet because he is a prophet? Notice two things Jesus said: who welcomes the prophet, and precisely because he is a prophet. What does that say about the welcomer? To me, welcoming would indicate attraction to what is special about prophets — perhaps their closeness to God that enables them to see the world through God’s eyes, and their courage to criticise or encourage what they see.
What then might be the prophet’s reward that the welcomer receives from God? God can give only love, because that is all God is. And God has only one level of love — and that is infinite and unconditional. However … because we humans are finite, our receptivity necessarily limits and shapes the form that God’s love takes in us. The prophet’s reward, then, might be something along the line of God’s nourishing the welcomer’s thirst to draw closer to God and to see the world through God’s eyes and to respond to it accordingly.
This brings us back to my friend’s earlier comment. Is there a cost? Certainly, Jesus said: “… Those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” That is not threat — but promise.
Homily 4 - 2023
Today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew is situated within the time-frame of the Public Ministry of Jesus. However, even a quick look at the text will notice that it reflects a time some years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. While drawing on memories of the teachings of Jesus probably held in Matthew’s Christian community, it certainly had knowledge that Jesus died on a cross, and seemed to reflect a stage in the early Church’s life when disciples whom it called prophets were common. Its background might suggest the increasing threats of persecution that broke out towards the end of the first century.
From Paul’s letters and from Luke’s history of the early Church — the Acts of Apostles — we learn that figures called Prophets played important roles in the small Christian communities scattered around the Roman Empire. With exceptions, their role was not to foretell the future but to apply the remembered teachings of Jesus to the concrete circumstances and considerably different practical life-styles of each particular Christian community. In some ways they fulfilled the role of being the “corporate conscience” of the community.
I think their contribution may not have been all that different from what we priests try to do in our homilies at Mass. Luke had prefaced his Gospel, written about the same time as Matthew’s, by stating his aim:“I have carefully sifted through everything from the beginning, and have decided to put into writing for your sake an orderly account, Theophilus, so that you may come to know the sound foundation of the catechesis you have received.” Perhaps Luke had a few doubts about what some of the prophets had been saying. Most of you have been around long enough to wonder whether some of the things we priests have to say at Mass always reflect the mind of Jesus.
My hope, generally, is to stimulate your own consciences to think through the implications for your own lives of the short Gospel passages we have each week. And the human consciences of all of us have been made by God to become more and more reliable as we hopefully grow and mature through life. One of the things that fascinate me in the Hebrew Scriptures is the evidence they provide of how the Hebrew people’s sense of God and of morality developed over the twelve centuries and longer of their history — even if generally with a tentative “two steps forward, one step back”.
Matthew also has Jesus referring in today’s passage not only to prophets but to the ones he called “holy ones” [unfortunately translated as “holy men” — but there is nothing exclusive about holiness]. Wonderfully, there often are in our communities those people who have developed over their lives an obvious closeness to God and who serve as attractive examples to the rest of us. Their presence in any community is precious.
In today’s passage, Matthew also has Jesus promising to ones who “welcome” a prophet or a holy person what he calls a prophet’s “reward” or a holy person’s “reward”. Have you wondered what on earth they might be? I do hope that they might be something more than the equivalent of a “pat on the back” or a child’s dream of “a higher place in heaven”. I wonder if “a prophet’s reward” might well be an ever clearer ability to see and to understand the practical implications, in often complicated real-life conditions, of Jesus’ emphasis on the non-negotiable priority of love. Consistently, I also wonder if a “holy person’s reward” for the one who “welcomes” the holy person might be an ever closer relationship to God, the source of all life and love.
It is worth remembering that at our baptism each of us was called to be holy, and also to exercise a prophetic role within our community.