21st Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2017

I wonder what sense Peter made of all those things Matthew has Jesus apply to him – rock-like foundation, the gates of the underworld, keys of the kingdom, binding and loosing. Not that everything applied exclusively to Peter. Jesus said that the gates of the underworld would not hold out against the Church; and the binding and loosing, whatever that might involve, would also, two chapters later, be shared with all the disciples.

What I would like to reflect on this morning, however, is just one of these metaphors: the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it, i.e., the Church, i.e., the People of God, or, closer to home, us. In those days, the vulnerable section of the defensive walls of any town worth the name was the gates, which needed to be especially fortified.

The underworld that Jesus was referring to was not the dark world of the drug barons, or their equivalents. Actually, the original Greek has the word Hades, which had a variety of meanings or connections in people’s minds. Sometimes the word was unhelpfully translated as “hell”. But here it means, not a place, but a power. What Jesus was saying was that the power of evil in our world will not hold out, ultimately, against the alternative energy available to the Church, the People of God. I find that very encouraging, and inviting.

It is so easy to be mesmerized by the obvious evils afflicting our world: people choosing to ignore the degradation of the environment, the dangerous warming of the earth’s atmosphere; the proliferating use of weapons and the obscene amounts of capital invested in the defence industry; the numbers of people, migrants and refugees, displaced by the wars raging around our world; the insidious ways that warmth and hospitality are being gradually replaced by fear, hostility and competitiveness. The list goes on.

Against this background, Jesus assures us that evil will not hold out forever. Evil is not the whole story. There is a greater cosmic energy, and it is love. There is so much good in our world – though it rarely makes the headlines with the same emotional impact. It does not sell newspapers nor grab the TV ratings. To see it, we often need to seek, deliberately. It is there, mixed in with the mess that is humanity. It is there within ourselves, if only we would consciously own it.

And the Church? The Church is comprised of humanity. So there is evil in the Church – and the media confront us with it constantly. Thank God they do. There is also good; there is love. What is special about the Church, perhaps, is not that we have any monopoly on good, on love, but that we have a mission to see and encourage the good, love, wherever we find them in our world. We can do so, confident that evil will not ultimately hold out against the innate vitality of love. To become sensitive to the good, to the love present in our world, is one aspect of the response that Jesus referred to when he called us to “repent”.

Yet, so often when we, as individuals or as Church, encounter criticism or hostility, our spontaneous response is defensive, hostile. We almost think that we need to fight back – and we often use that kind of language: the fight against abortion, the fight against same-sex marriage, the fight against euthanasia. Some seem to think that we need to fight the Royal Commission. Why fight? Is there an alternative way to respond? Does Jesus give us a lead here? What if our spontaneous starting point were always love, respect? What if we looked first for what might even be of God in our critics’ attitudes? To see where we agree, what we share? To understand where they might be coming from? If we were to respond with respect and sensitivity, might there even be a better chance that our concerns be listened to?