21st Sunday

21st Sunday Year A

Homily 1 - 2005

Peter’s confession of faith got high praise: It was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. But, as we shall see as the Gospel unfolds over the Sundays that will follow, it was still only half the story. In the story so far, there had been opposition to Jesus but basically, being on board was perhaps even a bit exciting – at least comforting. Given the sorts of things Jesus had been doing, you could even feel important belonging to the “in-group”. Peter and the others had undoubtedly been quite generous, enthusiastic. They had left all and followed him. No mean commitment! But still only half the story! - and perhaps the easier part.

From now on in, Jesus would share with them, ever more insistently, the fact that he was going to fail, to be humiliated, even to be killed. In a sense, they could not hear that. They could not take it on board. But then he went on to try to get them to face the personal consequences of genuine faith. It would mean acceptance of his vision and his hopes for the Kingdom – a renewed world, not produced by the wave of a wand, but, with God’s help, produced by people coming to respect each other profoundly, and to relate in justice, compassion and love.

As Peter said: You are the Christ. According to the best of Hebrew tradition, certainly in line with Isaiah’s vision, Israel’s Messiah would be the one anointed by God’s Spirit to bring good news to the poor, to set captives free, to proclaim the Lord’s Year of Favour.

In the face of my own sometimes puzzling insensitivity to the state of the world, I find value in asking myself from time to time: How strongly do I believe in the Kingdom really? in its likelihood? even in its possibility?

The disciples probably thought they weren’t too bad at loving humanity. Their problem was more loving the three-dimensional each other. Jesus insisted that living from the Kingdom vision meant being prepared to serve – and not on your own terms, and even to see yourself as least of all in importance. They had problems arguing about: Who’s the greatest? They had to learn to forgive – each other. Basically they had to learn how to love, and what loving – unconditionally – meant in practice. Until they did, they were closing themselves off from the Kingdom experience. You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, said Peter. You are the one whom God’s Spirit anointed, chose, gifted appropriately, and set loose in a messed-up world.

But it’s hard to move from pious language - that says all the right things and knows all the right words - to face the stark reality of taking him seriously, more seriously than anything else, than any other ideology or political persuasion. It takes a lifetime, encouragement, support. We’re all unfinished business, work-in-progress. And to the extent that we have cottoned on to the vision of Jesus, and are in the process of living it out, we each of us begin to verify personally the experience of blessedness, happiness, togetherness and wholeness indicated by, among other things, the Beatitudes. Let’s keep on encouraging and supporting each other in the interests of our common blessedness.

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.

Homily 3 - 2011

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all carry today’s story. They all have Peter say: You are the Christ. They all finish the story with: He gave the disciples strict orders not to tell anyone that he was the Christ. In fact, Jesus never called himself Christ [or Messiah]. Why not? Simply because people would misunderstand it. Peter didn’t understand it. Nor did the apostles generally. They hoped for a Messiah who would lead them on [with God, of course, on their side], either to become the next world super-power, or, at least, to free their country from its Roman occupiers.

Matthew’s Gospel is the only one, though, that has Peter say of Jesus, not just that he was the Messiah, but that he was Son of the living God; and that then connects the Son of God insight with the founding of the Church: On this rock [on Peter’s faith insight] I will build my Church.

You are the Son of God. We take it for granted – but let’s tease that out. “You are the human expression, the human revelation, of God.” God is like Jesus; Jesus is like God. Jesus’ love, expressed practically in the way he lived, and particularly in the way he died, expressed the love of God. Jesus’ teaching expressed the mind of God. The only really reliable way to access the mind and heart of God is to look closely at Jesus.

Jesus’ love was often somewhat confronting. He reached out, for example, to those at the edges, to those over the top. He was criticised for eating with tax-collectors [generally regarded as small-time, sleazy, ruthless parasites], and with prostitutes. Imagine how tongues would get into overdrive if I regularly invited to meals in the presbytery back in Hamilton the local prostitutes [if there are any]. Jesus didn’t seem to care what people would think – or the newspapers might say, or even about giving bad example. Did God approve of the company that Jesus kept? Yes. That is what his being Son of God affirmed. Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven.

Jesus talked about love; about loving your enemies; about loving the nation’s enemies. He identified himself as gentle, that is, as non-violent. He unmasked sin; he resisted evil; but he did so non-violently. Eventually the power-brokers moved in and killed him. He allowed it to happen and accepted it, reluctantly, but freely and deliberately. Even after resurrection, he did not retaliate. Son of God, one with God, human revelation of the face of God.

It is on this sense of Jesus, on this sense of God, that the Church is then founded. It is in order to keep always before people’s minds this sense of God that the Church is founded. The Church is founded not just to teach this message, to bear testimony to this message, but in order to be the practical human expression of this kind of love, across the centuries and throughout the world. You and I are the Church. It is to show this Christ, to be this Christ, to this mini-world of Coragulac that you exist as St Brendan’s.

It is wonderful the way that you here have risen to the challenge – not just to hang on as a parish, not just to survive, but to thrive. God knows, our self-interested, consumption-saturated, frantic, unhappy, violent world needs you – to reveal the face of God who is love, and to love it with the three-dimensional, hands-on, love of God. You are the Son of God. On this rock I will build my Church.

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.

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?

Homily 6 - 2020

“Who do you say I am?” The more I think about Jesus’ question, the more I find myself out of my depth. Peter gave two answers. “You are the Christ”. “You are the Son of the living God”. But even in the culture of the time, those words meant different things to different people. What did they mean to Peter? Certainly, as the rest of the Gospel would reveal, Peter still had a lot to learn.

What did Jesus have to say himself? Who did he say he was? The Gospel that gives the most direct answers to that question is John’s Gospel, where Jesus says, “I am the bread of life”. “I am the light of the world.” “I am the gate of the sheepfold”. “I am the good shepherd”. “I am the way”. And the list goes on. They are all metaphors. And perhaps metaphors are the closest we can get in answering the question, “Who do you say I am?” at the deepest level.

Who do you say you are?

If I ask myself that question, I think I have to answer, “I don’t know”. At least, I don’t yet. Even at my age, I am still learning more about myself. I am still a work in progress. There are things about me that I know and that you don’t know. Just as there are things about me that you know but that I don’t know.

I can say to Jesus, “There are things about you that I find wonderfully fascinating and attractive. The better I come to know you, the more fascinating you become.” But I know I am only scratching the surface. I want to know him better. One thing I have found is that the more I love him, the better I come to know him. And, going hand in hand with that, the better I come to know him, the more I come to love him. That is why I so look forward to the next on-going phase of life in eternity.

Homily 7 - 2023

Today’s Gospel passage from St Matthew’s Gospel and the Second Reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans provide us with an invitation, an opportunity to reflect prayerfully about the mystery of death and dying. Michael’s absence from among us, too, this morning provides a fitting occasion, an appropriate context, to do just that.

In the Gospel, when speaking about the Church he would soon found, Jesus insisted that “the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it”. The “gates of the underworld” were the translator’s version of the Greek word Hades, which had no definite or agreed meaning, but served sometimes to refer to death or the domain of the demonic. Jesus, the Lord of Life, was maintaining that death as we experience it would be somehow overcome or eliminated. We would die, certainly, just as Jesus would die. But death would not remain “bad news”. We might say that death is not terminal.

One of the prayers used in the Liturgy of the Requiem Mass proclaims that, through death, “life is changed, not ended”. Life is not ended — though we are able at best to speak only metaphorically of what the changes might be. All we really know is that we don’t know much.

I love St Paul’s comments in today’s Second Reading: “How rich are the depths of God — how deep his wisdom and knowledge — and how impossible to penetrate his motives or understand his methods! Who could ever know the mind of the Lord? Who would ever be his counsellor? Who could ever give him anything or lend him anything? All that exists comes from him: all is by him and for him. To him be glory for ever!”

With death, we move out of time and space; and we believe that we move into eternity and infinity. We know the words. However, we have no sense at all of what the experience might be like, what those categories might mean relationally, and, even less, what they might feel like in practice.

So how do we face it? How do we cope?

Different people will cope differently, depending on our personal answers to another question — the one that Jesus put to his disciples in today’s reading: “You, who do you say I am”. Jesus’ question was not a Catechism question. Nor was he looking for a Catechism answer. Jesus was asking them what did he mean to them personally. He was not looking for a theological answer but essentially a relational one — expressed in their own words — not unlike Peter’s answer to Jesus’ question on the occasion when Jesus had shared with them his teaching on his presence in the Eucharist: “Will you also go away?” I simply love Peter’s down-to-earth answer: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

How we feel about the prospect of death and dying will be very much a factor of who Jesus is to us personally — how much we have quietly come to trust him, to understand his love. Naturally we may fear the possibility of physical pain or inconvenience or whatever. We may find it difficult to ignore the life-long habit of wondering whether we really merit eternity with God. But we can learn to ignore these fears, or to live with them, to rise above them — to the extent that we have learnt already to relax in God’s unconditional love.

We learn quietly to yearn to be with God.