23rd Sunday

23rd Sunday Year A

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!

Homily 2 – 2011

It’s Fathers’ Day – which, I suppose, also means Husbands’ Day – [just as Mothers’ Day also means Wives’ Day]. The commercialisation of the celebrations is a pity. It is much easier to give a gift than to cultivate respect - genuine respect - and love. Respect and love are hard work. They both need to grow and to deepen across life or else they rust out and atrophy. When two people marry, time does not stand still. Across time they both change, so much so that, had they met each other as they had become ten years later, they may not have chosen to get married. But they did. And that’s the wonderful thing. In getting married, they undertook to love each other until death do us part. Since it is Fathers’ Day today, it is worth noting that the best way to parent children is for spouses to love each other – and to make it obvious. Loving is the only way to become truly human.

It can be difficult to talk about married love, when the reality is that many marriages do not work out. Sadly, relationships can become poisonous, destructive. People don’t put up with violence any longer, whether it be physical or psychological. Simply for partner or children to survive, it is necessary for some partnerships to break up. Once that has happened, sad and hurtful as it may be, the experience can be a great way to learn wisdom. The task becomes to get on with life; and getting on with life means getting on with the task of continuing to grow as a loving person.

Having said that, how does today’s Gospel address our reality? It takes for granted that where people rub shoulders, there will be splinters. We are all works in progress. We are all individuals, not only with real needs, but with myriad wants, desires, addictions and fears. Growing in love means learning to notice these, learning to sort them out – what comes from our obsession with ourselves, what truly leads to fuller life. It means learning to let go, to compromise, to die to selfishness. In the meantime, we hurt each other; we clash. We want, above all, to control outcomes, to control how the other thinks and behaves.

It is interesting to see what else the Gospel suggests. It started off by saying: If your brother [or sister… or husband or wife] has something against you… In talking of brother etc. it presupposes a relationship – one of respect, a determination to love. Unless we respect the other and are truly determined to interact in love, t then … lay off! Wait until we do. I remember the suggestion given some years ago at a Marriage Encounter Weekend I attended. The Leaders were talking about how to fight constructively. Their suggestion – this is, for husband and wife – was to hold hands, to look each other in the eye, to restate their love, and only then to air the grievance. Do we take the Gospel seriously?

The passage continues: If they listen to you, you have won your brother/sister/ husband/wife. Not: If you win the argument..; or If you gain control..; but, if they listen.. What the passage didn’t add – but could have done – is this: To expect one to listen, both must listen. Listening is an attitude, a skill, which needs deliberately to be worked on.

The final point is also worth exploring: If they do not listen to the community, treat them as pagans or tax-collectors. Jesus did not exclude pagans or tax-collectors. He took steps to include them. He did not win them all … perhaps he won precious few … but he did not give up. He continued to respect them. He continued to invite them. But it also supposes: Know your limits. And: Love never means control. Having said all that: Happy Fathers Day to all the fathers present.

Homily 3 - 2014

Happy Fathers’ Day! Perhaps it is as much “Husbands’ Day” as “Fathers’ Day”. What I have picked up over a lifetime of listening, reading and observing is that the best way fathers and mothers can be good fathers and mothers and most effectively love their children is to clearly prioritise their love for each other. Loving an adult, an equal, is the great school of love – indeed, loving an imperfect, unfinished, adult, especially when you are an imperfect, unfinished, adult yourself. Learning to love is a lifelong project. We change as we learn to love. We begin to see, to think and to behave differently.

In every other relationship, we instinctively assess others against our sense of ourselves. We try to sum them up, work out how far we will trust them, where they figure in relation to us, to what we think and to what we are doing. Instinctively, we judge them. Then on the basis of that judgment, we calculate how much of ourselves to reveal, how much to share. Usually the judgment we make also determines how much we will like them or dislike them – potential friend or potential threat – whether we are open, or cautious; whether, and how much, we defend, attack or simply not engage. Effectively, the relationship depends on what they are like.

But as we learn to love, things become different. What others are like becomes less important. What they are in themselves, as themselves, becomes more prominent. They can annoy us no-end, yet we continue to see them with love. We can feel deeply angry, yet know that the relationship is safe. Indeed, the more that every feeling reaction can be recognised and expressed appropriately and caringly, even our own feelings of shame, the safer the relationship becomes. We see imperfections as clearly as before, more clearly than before; but they have no impact on the depth of love. Differing, deeply-held convictions present no threat. Judging, keeping the score, tit-for-tat, become irrelevant.

Our vision broadens. It deepens. We see and accept and rejoice in the other as the other is. Interestingly, at the same time we learn to see, accept and rejoice in ourselves as we are. We see them with compassion, knowing that their cry of anger, like our own, masks a cry of pain. The previous “What I see is what ‘I’ see” gives way to “What I see is what in fact is.” The distorting lens of self-absorption gives way to an ever-clearer grasp of reality in all its complexity, paradox and richness. Well, that is the possibility – and there lies happiness. A wonderful thing is that such happiness is not a factor of the other’s changing but of our growing.

Yet, if we want real happiness, there is more. The Seekers used to sing, “We’ll build a world of our own that no one else can share, and we’ll leave all our troubles behind us there. And we know we shall find there’ll be peace of mind when we live in a world of our own.” It is a great tune; but a terribly unsatisfactory message. In today’s Second Reading, Paul suggested instead, Avoid getting into debt – except the debt of loving each other. Not just “in family” but beyond. He quoted the Hebrew Scriptures, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus went further and insisted that we love even our enemies.

It is easy to agree with his observations when we are in Church. Is it possible? Given the real world as we see it on our TV screens, is it safe even to try? Good News? Bad News? Was Jesus right? Do I want him to be right? Our response may hint at how much we are learning to think differently and to love.

“Happy Fathers Day” to all the fathers among us! And “Happy Lovers Day” to all of us!

Homily 4 - 2017

In today’s Gospel passage, Matthew has collected a number of remembered, or half-remembered, sayings of Jesus touching on some practical details involved in living together as a community of disciples. What does living as a Christian community ask of each of us? What sort of personal virtues does it suppose?

Of course, any Christian community of disciples is a work in progress. We all struggle to be the sort of person we would like to be and to behave consistently with our personal ideals. We even differ in our levels of understanding of what those ideals might be. Misunderstandings are inevitable – but they need not be irreversible.

As I reflected on today’s passage the other evening, I was struck by some of the suppositions quietly sitting there; and just how difficult it is for me to act from them.

Take the opening comment, for example, “If your brother does something wrong …”. Before going any further, do I, can I, see everyone in the community as my brother or sister? Do I even want to? Jesus just seems to take it for granted that that is how we all view each other. I am inclined to think that, until we do, the rest of his suggestion just might not apply. What right do I have to correct any of my fellow parishioners until I have at least begun to treat them as brothers or sisters? Do I honestly speak with love, genuine love? With respect, compassion and sensitivity?

When Jesus challenges us to treat the persistently errant parishioner as a pagan or tax-collector, what did he mean? How did he model such treatment himself? Have any of us reflected enough on that issue to learn how to respect someone whose ideas or behaviour we do not approve, someone, perhaps, who does not respect us or our beliefs?

I won’t look at Jesus’ second comment about binding and loosing, because I have no idea what on earth they might mean in relation to us generally, especially when the comment figures without any context to give us any hint.

But let’s move on to the third comment and listen to it carefully – the comment about prayers being granted. Do you remember what you prayed for last week in the Prayers of the Faithful? Were your prayers answered? And if not, why not? Didn’t Jesus say they would be? Who might be falling short, him or us?

He started off by saying, “If two of you agree to ask anything at all …”. I wonder if that is our problem. What might “agreeing” involve? If we are not to some degree already brothers and sisters, how could we be said to agree in any meaningful way? We can thoughtlessly say “Yes” to some shared petition, or to some personal request, out of courtesy, or without really giving it a second thought, or without prioritising it in any way. But is there any real meeting of hearts, of shared, deeply felt desires? Might we first need to work hard at becoming real brothers and sisters before we can agree to ask?

My final reflection comes from Jesus’ comment, “Where two or three of you meet together in my name, there am I in your midst”. What on earth does “in my name” entail? The phrase, or its equivalent, occurs a few times in the Gospels. To my knowledge, the meaning is never teased out specifically. Personally, I think I would be praying in the name of Jesus when my prayer reflects his attitudes and expresses the desires of his heart rather than the other way round, trying to get him to think my way and accept my priorities, etc.. Two or more of us would be meeting in his name to the extent that we have absorbed his Spirit, his sense of God, his love for the world, his hopes and desires. Would our prayer, then, be other than “Thy will be done”?

Homily 5 - 2020

We have heard much about discernment in our preparation for the Plenary Council; but we may not have learnt much about what discernment means. For disciples, discernment means trying to work out what God is asking in a particular situation. Typically it means opening to the guidance of the Spirit of God. When what we seek as faith community coincides with what the Spirit inspires us to seek, then we can reasonably expect our search to be blessed by God. However, discerning together the guidance of the Spirit is not always easy. In today’s Gospel Jesus said that a prerequisite is that we agree on our request. He meant “really agree”, not just courteously or unthinkingly go along with someone’s suggestion.

In the last two bishops’ Synods in Rome, Pope Francis encouraged participants to discern the guidance of God’s Spirit. He emphasised the necessity for speakers to speak with integrity, to say honestly what they really meant, to clarify as far as possible why they thought the way they did, and to give an indication of their depth of feeling — and in the process to go beyond repeating mere ideological mantras. Easier said than done.

That was only half the process. He asked those listening really to listen, especially if they thought differently — to listen with respect and to be open to the possibility of the speaker’s saying something significant they had not considered before. This could well be harder than speaking honestly.

After everyone who wanted to speak had said what they wanted to say, Francis then said surprisingly, there would not be a vote where the majority opinion or those with power would carry the day. That only sets up winners who may learn little and losers who may not commit to outcomes. The real task of discernment is to reflect and to pray so as to be sensitive to the leading of God’s Spirit; then to seek a way forward that reflects what the whole group can honestly agree on — not what individuals or factions want but what the group as a whole can accept and commit to wholeheartedly.

With unity the goal, and love and respect the motivation, former intransigence can disappear and unexpected ways forward can appear, seemingly from nowhere.Then the voice of the Spirit can be heard. Not surprisingly, when disciples consciously embrace the heart and hopes of Jesus, he is right “there with them”.

Homily 6 - 2023

I find today’s Gospel quite relevant and hopefully helpful in our current political mood.

Jesus considered a case where two members of the discipleship community were in disagreement with, possibly even hostile towards, each other. What do you think might have been Jesus’ alternative hope or vision that led him to speak as he did?

Today’s short passage does not quite give enough information to arrive at a totally satisfactory conclusion — but it raises a few helpful points for consideration. Firstly, Jesus referred to the two disciples as “brothers”, inferring that their engagement should be based on a deliberate respect and care for each other. Where one or both did not start with that attitude, Jesus suggested a further step where one, in the hope of not escalating the disagreement further, would seek one or two other community members to help convince the other to change. Where that did not work, it became obvious that a further more radical step would become necessary.

Jesus considered that harmony within every discipleship community belonged to the very definition of community and therefore had to be preserved however possible. No hostile argument could be allowed to divide a community of disciples. The disciples would need to face the issues squarely and to discuss together the practical outcome — keeping in mind always the divinely-given dignity of both protagonists.

Jesus had had to face this dilemma himself. In his case, tax-collectors, prostitutes, pagans, lepers and others who were regarded in the broader community as public sinners, regularly came seeking his company. Jesus did not repel them but enthusiastically received and even shared meals with them. Most do not seem to have stayed with the groups of disciples who followed Jesus. But Jesus did not dissociate himself from their company. As far as Jesus was concerned, every disciple was sinful in some way or other — and some well-known ones were spectacularly so. Jesus was constantly calling disciples to deeper and deeper conversion. Suffice for him that they sought, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to leave sin behind.

Inevitably, disciples disagree, rightly or wrongly, with aspects of others’ behaviour. What is not-acceptable is that disagreements lead to hostility or other withdrawals of love. That was the pharisees’ problem. Wrapped-up in their own perfection, they excluded themselves from membership of Jesus’ discipleship communities.

Christian communities are communities of disciples trying harder [but always unsuccessfully], to love God, to love each other, to love themselves, and to love all God’s world.

For us to love like this requires that we learn to listen carefully to each other, that we be open to accept each other even when we disagree, that we be open and honest enough to change when appropriate, that we seek not to impose our own wills, but learn to discern what “we” can freely and respectfully agree to accept as the best that “we” can commit to together in the present situation. This calls for real and deliberate effort, and for constant practice.

Sadly political ideologies these days seem to be listened to more eagerly than the mind and heart of Jesus, even for many of us Catholics. To win and to impose our wills seem more important than to cooperate. Unlike Jesus, we have not explored how to work with “pagans, tax-collectors and sinners”.

That is why I am particularly grateful, at this time as the Referendum on the Voice to Parliament approaches, for the Social Justice Statement recently issued by the Bishops’ Commission for Justice and Peace. Its title, “Listen, Learn and Love”, sums up its contents admirably. I find it very much worth reading and prayerfully pondering— and I heartily recommend that you also make a point to do the same.