17th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014

Those of you over forty and still happily married… You have been able to experience something that in its own way seems to relativise everything else, whether nice house, decent car, respected job, smart looks or even health. Their importance to you simply grows less and less the firmer your relationship grows. Those of you single like me – whether never married, widowed, separated… A life of service of others can have a similar effect, giving a sense of meaning, purpose and personal worth that make everything else lose their grip on you - they might be helpful, perhaps, but not necessary. The consistent practice of meditative/contemplative prayer, whatever form it takes, can have a comparable effect. 

I think that that is what Jesus was driving at in his examples of the unearthed treasure, the pearl of great value and the net full of fish – things that to their finders were of such value that other things paled into insignificance: … they sold everything they owned; they threw away the useless fish.

Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is somehow like that – not business as usual, not life like it was before or simply like everyone else’s, but an experience or insight that seems to tip us on our heads and shows everything in a different perspective.

Let us unpack that further.  What is common in all three experiences I mentioned is that they are all instances of loving. More than that, they are experiences of loving forged at personal cost and requiring constant letting go of self-interest, a love that necessarily and increasingly becomes forgiving and unconditional. It is a love that gradually replaces as first response the otherwise instinctive or at least habituated automatic judging or summing up of another. It is not easy. It does not just happen but requires repeated determination and effort. It can be felt as a painful dying to self yet at the same time be mysteriously experienced as deeply fulfilling and satisfying.

I believe that there is a further dimension to it. Somehow it is beautifully connected with a gaze of mercy. As we increasingly learn to observe our inner life, we notice our spontaneous, usually unconscious, habitual, even addictive responses to others and to life in general. We recognise them as our inappropriate way of handling our personal inner wounds and our fears of some mysterious, formless, inner emptiness that we carry from infancy and childhood.  As we slowly learn to accept ourselves gently and respectfully, we find ourselves able to do the same to others. We learn in time to recognise the other’s cry of anger as a cry of pain, not unlike our own.

Wonderfully, I think that the natural process of growing older sets us up for this merciful gazing. We fail more often than we succeed – but that does not faze us unduly, though we may quietly weep. Our increasing insights into the kingdom-experience carry us on. I believe that that is what Jesus meant when he called us all to repent [that dreadful mistranslation!] and believe the Good News. He draws us into his own experience of love.

So now, through Christ, and, as the Gospel of John would have it, with him, and, indeed, in him, through the unifying action of the Spirit, we are drawn to share in the loving living of God – now, as we celebrate this Eucharist.