21st Sunday Year A - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2008

Last Christmas I was given an iPod.  I am not a great music buff, but I do download a number of podcast interview programs from ABC Radio, and listen to them at my leisure on my car radio as I drive around.  Last week I was up in Mildura, returning via Lake Boga (near Swan Hill), so I had about eight hours or so to listen to All in the Mind, Background Briefing, Encounter, Big Ideas, the Religion Report, etc.  I listened to one of the programs twice: two Buddhist nuns were explaining different aspects of Buddhism.  They started me thinking.

Buddhism is about the pursuit of happiness through enlightenment, which it sees happening as people learn to set themselves free from the various human emotions that are the causes of personal suffering.  It is a kind of self-help therapy; and it contains a lot of real wisdom.  In lots of ways, its sense of the need for the inner journey – and the importance of self-knowledge – mirrors the Christian appreciation for the same things.  As the great St Augustine prayed so long ago: Lord, may I know myself so that I may know thee.

Yet, there is a radical difference between Buddhism and Christianity.  Buddhism seeks detachment.  Its gaze is inward; and its goal of happiness through enlightenment is reached by learning to rise above suffering and becoming free from it.  Christianity, on the other hand, is about engagement.  Its gaze is outward.  Its theatre is the world, community, others.  Its goal is to love, and it is achieved by loving.  Happiness is a side-effect.  Christians seek to save the world by loving it.  They love it by opening themselves to the power of God, who so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that all who believe in him might be saved…and might have eternal life.  We look to God’s only Son, to Jesus, as God’s anointed one, the Christ (that’s what it means), anointed by God as king of a worldwide, all-embracing kingdom.  As followers of this Christ, anointed like him at our baptism – and thereby christened – we trust him.  We embrace his way of love for others, as the path to happiness for all.  

We see love taking practical shape in work for justice and in the struggle for peace.  We understand that all striving for justice and peace must express a profound sense of respect for every person, and for all human life – from the womb to the tomb.  Consistently, it must always follow the way of non-violence, and so of vulnerability, often, of short-term ineffectiveness, and, fairly inevitably, of opposition and even of suffering.  In our here and now world, for example, we accept the responsibility to try to change the mindset of a society that coyly gives a personal Christian name to a baby whale… and that then prioritises the saving of its life above the lives of unborn human children, whom it prefers to leave nameless.

Peter, in today’s Gospel passage, got it right!  Jesus is the Son of the living God – the very embodiment – the incarnation – of the mystery we call God.  Jesus is the Christ, the one chosen and anointed by God to set the world free from its own violence and destructiveness, and to lead it to life: genuine life, eternal life.

And this Jesus, this Christ, calls us and empowers us, his followers, to engage with our world, and to love it out of its fascination with death; to construct communities of persons that interact in love and to lead all to life to the full, and to that ultimate experience of inexpressible happiness that God has dreamt for us.