30th Sunday Year A - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2017

Today’s short passage from St Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians at first sight sounds fairly uninteresting, yet it contains something quite challenging and worth thinking about, especially in our current climate where we have been discussing and arguing about social behaviour issues such as same sex marriage and euthanasia, as well as the longer term things that do not go away, like our treatment of asylum seekers and our first inhabitants, and our respect for the environment.

With me, it raises questions. Why do I get interested in some things more than others? Why do some questions assume a priority in my value system and take up a lot of my energy, and others not? A similar dynamic may explain why Church leaders seem to speak more regularly on matters involving sex in some way than they do on matters of social justice? and why we seem to spend more energy worrying about such sex issues, too? Two out of the ten commandments speak about coveting, or desiring. Have you ever met Catholics who worry about their desiring, what they desire, how much they desire, etc.? Desiring is, after all, the energy that fuels our consumerist society. Just look at any advertisement. So much for “Thou shalt not covet …” 

I wonder if any of us reflect on our priorities. My sense is that we, myself included, are less thoughtful about them than we would like to admit we are, less rationally motivated. Does the problem lie with those who taught us – our parents, our teachers? Perhaps it does, partly – but not in the way they think. We tend to pick up our values, not from what significant others set out to teach us, but from how they act in practice.

Jesus had very little time for commandments, nor did Paul who followed him. They both taught by practical example. Jesus said simply, “Follow me”. Paul called his converts to “become imitators” of him. They observed “the sort of life we lived when we were with you”. And what motivated his converts to imitate him was “the joy of the Spirit” that apparently made him so attractive. In turn, those converts generally set out to teach no one, but they became, nevertheless, a “great example to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia”. 

The trouble with all this is that, if we want society to change for the better, we need to live what we say; and we need to embody its attractiveness. What Paul called “the joy of the Spirit” at work in us needs to be clearly noticeable. Too often, I believe, we are tempted to try another tack than that of attraction and conviction – the way of power. We want the government to make people behave the way we think they should.

Sometimes law can bring about conformity. But Jesus was not interested in conformity. He consistently invited to personal conversion, and refused to go the way of coercive power. He was interested in loving relationships – with God, his Father, and with each other. He was not interested, either, in reward and punishment [which involve a kind of manipulative power], although he often intimated, and showed those with eyes to see, that lives lived in love brought their own intrinsic rewards, and lives lived other than from love their own suffering.

Perhaps, there was a time in the past when the Church had some power. Catholics were a more homogeneous group, or more obedient, and numerous enough, sometimes, to swing a vote. That is hardly the case now. We do not all think, or desire, the same things. Bishops and clergy have lost credibility even within the Church.

Perhaps the only power we have now is the power of example. That is not bad news – but the way things should be. It asks much more of us. It asks for integrity, for more spontaneous joy on our part. It asks that we be seen really to love our neighbour as ourselves – because we love God with everything.