22nd Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1- 2005

Today’s being Migrant and Refugee Sunday prompts me to reflect that the Jewish people, our forebears in the faith, began their history as migrants. As the Epistle to the Hebrews wrote of Abraham and his family:They were only strangers and nomads on earth. When Matthew painted his picture of the early years of Jesus’ life, Jesus’ family were refugees, first over the border in Egypt, fleeing from Herod the Great, then in Galilee, out of reach of Herod Archelaus.

All of us here are descendants of, or even first generation, migrants... Perhaps the forebears of some of us were more refugees than migrants. There is something attractive in the make-up of migrants and refugees; something that makes them different from those of their countrymen who stay put: among other things, the initiative to move, and courage, sometimes enormous courage.  

Nearly always they are drawn and energised by a dream, a sense of something more. As the Epistle to the Hebrews again put it, in speaking of Abraham and his family: They were longing for a better homeland. Today’s responsorial Psalm talked about longing, too, a different, deeper longing. O God, for you I long, for you my soul is thirsting; my body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water. Jesus knew the feeling, and assumes that we all know it, too. That is why he could say: Anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it - for my sake, because captured by love. Or, as the Psalm put it, Your love is better than life.

The starting point of the Christian journey, (or for those of us who are cradle Catholics, born into the culture, the taking-off point), is the intuition of love - of being loved, of being loved by the mysterious reality sustaining the whole cosmos, that we call God. Given that intuition, we know that our response to that God - all or nothing at all - sits right with our deepest sense of ourself. We reverberate in tune with Jesus: we know what he is talking about.

Yet, as if we don’t have enough trouble coping with our own innate self-interest and self-centredness, Paul went on about our need to adopt a counter-cultural stance towards our world: As he said in today’s second Reading: Don’t model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you. Yet being different, not going with the flow, can be demoralising. And it costs; at times it hurts. With Jeremiah we can say: The word of the Lord has meant for me insult, derision, or, in our own case, at least the sacrifice of what we would often have liked. Again with Jeremiah, we can feel at times like shouting, You have seduced me, and I have let myself be seduced. Or, like Peter in today’s Gospel, we can prefer not to face it. But we are fascinated, irresistibly drawn by God.

We still struggle to live consistently. We are walking paradoxes, courageous cowards, blind teachers of partial truths, filled with misconceptions no less than fired by high ideals. But we manage, we struggle on, because we know what Jeremiah was talking about: the fire burning in our hearts, imprisoned in our bones. We don’t volunteer for hardship for its own sake – that would be sick, perhaps pathological, but when it’s the price of love, we’ll have a go, and take up our cross and follow him. We grow in our capacity to love, consistently, unconditionally. Provided we are in touch with his love stirring in our bones, we know that our choice makes sense; it rings true.