23rd Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2008

We learn what to desire by seeing what others desire.  Our desires, essentially, are contagious.  If we lived alone on a desert island, our desires would be very simple.  But, put us in a highly developed consumer society, and we find that our desires are almost infinite.  [Our whole economy is driven by the mechanism of creating ever new desires; and, in such a society, desires and wants come quickly to be felt as needs.  Ask the successful advertising agencies.]  Twenty years ago, we didn’t even know about mobile phones.  But now, ask a group of teenagers if they need one, and they’ll say: Of course! – not just to make an occasional phone call but to take photos, to watch TV and to surf the internet.

As human beings, we yearn for security.  In a consumer-driven world, we look for it through possessions, power, superiority, social acceptance, prestige, honour etc.  And none of these touch the spot.  We remain inherently restless.  In our world of limited resources, desire gives rise to envy..  Other people are competitors, and competitors can become enemies… and envy can escalate into violence.  In a world of competitors, we become defensive of our own space.  We can be hurt, and hurt can be handled in endlessly inappropriate ways – from withholding forgiveness to violent retaliation, all of them, in one way or another, reacting to the attitude of the other.  Our emotional world is governed by the stance of the other – we are unfree.

Really, we yearn for love.  Until we learn to accept love, we’re locked into our world of competitive desires and envy.  Until we learn to give love – gratuitous and undeserved love - we’re locked into a world of reaction, retribution, and tit for tat.  We’re unfree, desperately unfree.  Our Western world prides itself on freedom; but in reality we’ve tied ourselves up with unrestrained addictions and co-dependant reactions.

Jesus broke into this world to set it free.  He did that by changing the name of the game and rewriting the rules.  He insisted simply on loving people, forgiving people - undeserving and unrepentant people.  It was quite a novel thing to do – a terribly dangerous thing to do, because, when you love, you’re vulnerable.  And, in fact, we simply killed him.  But, wonderfully, by facing into death, freely, he showed that death really is powerless.  The resurrected Jesus just keeps on loving and doing the same thing: Peace be with you.  He lives, and he assures us that we shall, too.

He calls us to bear witness to his resurrection, and to the powerlessness of death, by simply living as he did – breaking free from the addictions of desire and envy, and of reaction and retribution:  letting ourselves be loved gratuitously, and finding ourselves empowered to love others with the same undeserved graciousness.  Whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven… Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.  We can set people free, or, we can keep them, and ourselves, locked in to the futility of endless desire and the eternal cycle of retribution.

All this depends on the fact that we discover and surrender ourselves to the gracious love that God has for us.  We need to discover it not simply with our heads but at the deepest level of ourselves.  That is the task of the inner journey.  You may have read in the weekend bulletin that the parish has chosen to employ Sr Jacinta Rice as a Pastoral Associate, beginning from next year.  Jacinta has been asked to focus on helping to shape the parish and its various undertakings in ways that encourage parishioners to focus on and to deepen that inner journey into the heart of God.  Where two or three meet in my name I shall be there with them.  Stand by for further developments!