27th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 -2017

Jesus was in Jerusalem. The time was shortly before his arrest and crucifixion. He was engaging, as the Gospel said, with the chief priests and the elders of the people, that is, with the nation’s political and religious power-brokers and decision makers. What was their problem? Why did these professional religious leaders kill Jesus? Why did they, as the parable colourfully inferred, seize him, throw him out of the vineyard and kill him? What was their problem? What was their problem with Jesus?

It was not that they were knowingly and deliberately bad men. They were no worse than any group of politicians or national leaders; or, perhaps, in a democracy like ours, no worse than any group of voters. Why do Australians treat asylum seekers the way we do?

What did Jesus see as people’s problems? What was new, different, for example, about the content of his Sermon on the Mount? Why did Jesus insist, Be merciful, as your heavenly Father is merciful? Why did he say, What I want is mercy, not sacrifice? Was not sacrifice what their long history and tradition had taught them to appreciate?

Jesus certainly invited people to a change of heart – but a change from what to what? Paul, in his epistles, wrestled with a similar question. Both tried to encourage people to grow, to move on from a law-based morality to a relationship-based morality – to look more deeply, to bring love, respect, sensitivity to each other, to everyone, into the forefront of their concerns. They asked people, not just to act in a certain way, but to be a certain way. Law can be helpful, but it can also be rigid, awkward, at times inadequate to address the complexities and conflicting values so often involved in human inter-relationships.

Listen to what Paul had to say in today’s epistle. He did not say, learn your catechism, get all the answers, know all the commandments. What he did say was, Fill your minds with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, etc.. Fill your minds with… Think about them; reflect on them; become sensitive to the values that make life worth living, learn to appreciate them, integrate them. Think about everything that can be thought virtuous. And when you come to think about that, you can come to see that virtue is the basis for law, but without law’s rigidity, without law’s blindness, without its coldness and aloneness, and, sometimes I wonder, even vindictiveness?

I think a lot about the sexual abuse tragedy, and why we Church professionals handled it so disastrously. We certainly categorised it as sin. We knew the law. But we seemed to be blind to, to ignore, the whole relational context of such human behaviour – and precisely its effect on the victims, its effect on the perpetrators. We knew the law, but we were short on virtue; instinctively short on love. We wanted the Church to keep looking perfect; so we kept it “in house”. We were fixated on perfection. So-called perfection can be sterile. Love gives life.

Paul could say, Keep on doing all the things that you learnt from me … and have heard or seen that I do. How comfortable would you feel saying that out loud? Jesus said well before Paul, Follow me! Same thing.

But I am not perfect. Paul was not perfect, either. Indeed. That is the point. None of us is. The challenge is to learn to live as fully as we can in a world where no one is perfect. That means constantly learning, growing – inevitably making mistakes. It means forgiving. It means learning to be genuinely repentant. It means continuing to explore, and to reach out towards, what is truly of value. It means having our antennae up for whatever is good, and encouraging it, wherever we see it.

Might some of these considerations be especially relevant to how the Commonwealth approaches the question whether to legalise same-sex marriage?