21st Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

The Royal Commission rolls on, an unintended but perhaps graced opportunity for the Church to learn and to change. Yet it is tough going, particularly, I imagine, for salt-of-the-earth people like yourselves.  I don’t know if you are ever confronted by the challenge, “How can you keep loyal to a Church like that?” I was talking a couple of months ago to a woman who felt deeply angry with the Church, and yet felt disloyal and guilty at the same time for feeling angry. A parishioner told one of my priest friends recently about his son-in-law, not a catholic, refusing to allow his child to be baptised into a Church like the Catholic Church.

I can appreciate how they feel. And if any of you are strongly feeling that way, I would prefer to give you my ear, rather than to preach the message I am about to do…

Why do I stay around? Precisely because of Gospel passages like today’s. Like Peter, I can say to Jesus that I honestly do believe that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. More than that, I have come over the years to love him deeply; and that is still continuing. The challenge is that this Jesus whom I love said to Peter, You are the rock on which I will build my Church. Unlike some, I can not honestly say, “Jesus-Yes! Church-No!”, because for him the Church is part of the package deal. Now, we are used to thinking of Peter as St Peter, and all the apostles as St This-or-that. That was not how Jesus saw them. For all Peter’s undoubted enthusiasm, he was second-rate. He did not understand. He went to water under pressure – even denying to a servant-girl that he ever knew Jesus. In next week’s Gospel we shall have Jesus saying to Peter, Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path, because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s. The other disciples were no better – consistently missing the point, and getting it wrong.  Only as the reality of Jesus’ resurrection sank in did they gradually change. What a great foundation for his future Church. Why them? My sense is that anyone else would essentially have been no different. 

What does that say? It reminds me that the reason why God became human in Jesus was precisely because all of us were sinners. None of us can beat it; and so God has chosen simply to forgive us all. Not that God’s offer of forgiveness stops us consistently mucking up our world and causing each other at times immense pain and suffering. God yearns for us to stop doing that. Yet God has no one else to rely on than us who are the problem. Humanity is saturated with sinners. So is the Church – because the Church is simply a segment of humanity. Hopefully, we are sinners wanting not to be sinners – but none of us has yet succeeded. Wonderfully, of course, the world and the Church are also saturated with saints, popping up in unexpected places. We have to be alert to both. 

I am still in the Church, not because it is the community of the sinless, or even of the less sinful. I am in it because Jesus sees it as necessary. I am in it because I am a sinner, and I need the help it does in fact give me. Some people in it annoy it. But it is to the Church and to people like you that I owe my knowledge of Jesus and my love for him, and my sense of responsibility, such as it is, for the world. I accept that Church members struggle and mess things up. That is why I can be at home in it.

I also accept that there are lots of others who do not see things my way.