30th Sunday

30th Sunday Year A

Homily 1 - 2005

Love God with all your heart, soul and mind; and love your neighbour as yourself. Quite a project!

Love is about relationship, connectedness. Usually it starts off as attraction; it can feel overwhelming. “I can’t live without you. You are the answer to all my dreams.” In fact, I am in love with what I imagine you to be. I think that our love for God begins that way. God is the answer to my needs: for a sense of order, for meaning, for inner peace, for security, for warmth and reassurance. The God who won’t let me down, who might answer my prayers, who will see that the innocent won’t suffer. The trouble with our human relationships is that in fact you are not what I imagine you to be. You are yourself, a mystery, out of my control, a person in your own right.

For the love to deepen, I must move beyond attraction to intimacy – to learning who you really are. I must begin to trust the mystery that is you, that I don’t control and often don’t understand. And I must begin to reveal the real me to you if the relationship is to be reciprocal. To stay together we need commitment. It can be a lifetime project – and not without struggle. As a mediaeval author described it: All that I am just as I am offered to all that you are, just as you are. Something similar happens with our movement into God. I need to lose faith in the God I formerly believed in: We live in a world of tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts, in a world where the innocent are oppressed, terrorists go unchecked, where hearts are broken, prayers don’t get answered and questions remain unsolved. God is not what I first imagined, indeed hoped. I can’t understand God. I feel bewildered at times, let down, angry.

For my relationship to grow, perhaps even to survive, I must discover the God who is – no longer just useful somehow to me, but mystery; who loves, perhaps, (though I no longer feel confident that I quite understand what love is). We must grow into reality, and relate with genuine intimacy, beyond control, beyond usefulness, to contemplation. God is already there; I am the one who needs to mature. This, too, can be a lifetime project – and not without struggle.

There is more. As a French author described it about sixty years ago: Love is not two people gazing at each other, but rather standing shoulder to shoulder and looking in the same direction. Beyond intimacy, and the commitment it calls for, lies the possibility of a gradual attuning to each other’s heart and mind. No longer absorbed in each other, but peacefully confident in each other’s commitment, learning wisdom together, we look outward to our world in our desire and capacity to give life and to nurture, in care, and in a sense of shared responsibility.

The same can happen in our relating to God. In time our contemplation leads to finding that our hearts begin to beat in time with the heart of God. We look outward to our world, wanting and able to give life and to nurture, to reconcile, to stand up for justice. We find that we begin, indeed, to love our neighbour as ourselves, not because we should, but because, carried along in the energy of God’s creating love, we want to.

Loving God with everything, and our neighbour as ourselves, are not two commandments, but two movements of the one divine energy.

We have gathered today to celebrate Eucharist as the Year of the Eucharist comes to a close. We remember Jesus’ death. We remember that he was murdered by the guardians of the social order because of his insistent, practical concern, as a faithful Jew, for what the First Reading called the aliens, widows & orphans, and the poor. He loved them because his heart was attuned to the heart of his Father to whom we all are equally precious. We celebrate his death as we open ourselves to the same stream of creative love.

Homily 2 - 2011

The question was: What commandment in the Law is the greatest? Jesus answered it, telling his hearers that in fact the greatest has two parts to it: Love God with everything, and Love your neighbour as yourself. Neither part is complete without the other. Jesus then added for good measure that these two parts are the basis of all behaviour and sum up all the rest of the Law and the teachings of the Prophets.

But there is a problem – a problem St Paul was acutely aware of. Of themselves, laws are powerless – whether it’s civil laws or Church laws or any Laws. Knowing what to do doesn’t enable or empower us to do it. What St Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Romans speaks of the experience of us all: I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

In civil society, the threat of sanctions or punishments may encourage us to keep the law – but that’s hardly appropriate in this case: Love me – or else! The threat of punishment makes genuine love difficult, if not impossible.

Jesus answered the lawyer’s question – but he was not himself on about law. Certainly, he showed us how to live; he spelt out the consequences of loving . But loving, and keeping commandments, are not the same thing – by a long shot. Friends, couples in love, do not give commandments to each other.

Jesus started somewhere else. His starting point was: The Kingdom of God is close at hand. The initiative is God’s. The source of all love is God. God is love. Love is the essence of God. God is totally and only love. The process begins with God, who loves us totally, infinitely, unconditionally. [All true love is unconditional.] It is that love of God that all other loves are powered by – whether people are clearly conscious of the fact or not. It is God’s first loving us that interests us, moves us, and then empowers us to love in return; and, with and in and like God, to love ourselves truly, and to love others similarly.

Once we find ourselves caught up in that flow of love, then we seek guidance about how best to do so. And Jesus showed us and taught us precisely that. But until we open ourselves to receive God’s empowering energy of love, all the laws in the world and all the threats in the world won’t empower us genuinely and freely to love. And if it’s not free, whatever else it is, it is not love.

Here we are today, celebrating Eucharist together. Eucharist is the great occasion when we Catholics hold all that together and celebrate. Eucharist puts us in touch with the crucified, the risen and forgiving Christ. In and with him, it connects us to the Father, who sent Jesus into this violent, unsorry world to save us from ourselves and from each other. We open ourselves in profound thanks to that love. [Eucharist means, precisely, thanks.] And God’s love, once received, carries us out to each other. We do Eucharist together – open to God and open to each other. Then, as the Father sent Jesus, Jesus now sends us. We are to bring the love of God to all we meet, to incarnate that love in our lives, to make it tangible, three-dimensional, to give it skin.

As we celebrate Mission Sunday today, it is important to remember that mission involves us all. Mission in not complicated. You don‘t need a university degree. You do not need to be a priest, or a religious. We only need to let God love us, to open to that love, to fasten on to it. And, as God’s love shapes and transforms us, we bring that love to all we encounter.

Homily 3 - 2014

The Extraordinary Synod called to prepare for next year’s Ordinary Synod on marriage and family life has just finished. Pope Francis was apparently thrilled with the approach followed by the Synod at his suggestion. Right from the start he had asked the bishops to say what they really thought – without looking over their shoulders to gauge how he or others present might react. That in itself sounds basic – but it was not the way that things had generally happened in previous Synods. The result was that differences of opinion became obvious. Sharp tensions arose. That was the price of honesty, and opened the way for the gentle action of God’s Spirit.

Interestingly, with all the tension, when the final summary of the many interventions and small group discussions was put to the vote, all of the points listed received majority endorsement, and only two fell short of the two-thirds majority normally required – those on welcoming remarried divorcees and gay people. Given the closeness of the voting on those two issues, Pope Francis decided that they be retained and the voting recorded. The final document of the Synod now becomes the focus of the Church’s homework for the next twelve months. It will constitute the agenda for next year’s Synod when the bishops will seek to discern together the guidance of God’s Spirit.

Differences of opinion need not mean disunity. What matters is that people respect and accept each other as brothers and sisters, and learn to agree to live together despite disagreements. Today’s Gospel succinctly sums up the response: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Clear – but notoriously difficult! Love does not come naturally. Our spontaneous reaction is to assess everyone according to how does this person affect me? Habitually, we assess; we judge; we defend ourselves.

The Bible’s delightfully insightful creation myth puts the original temptation like this: You will be like gods, knowing good and evil. And since then, we have been labelling everyone good or bad accordingly – judging, condemning, fighting and destroying each other. As with most temptations, the original temptation was partly right. God can assess good and evil. But tragically that sense of God was overwhelmingly incomplete. Firstly and essentially God is love. God looks on us with love. God sees our beauty - we are made in God’s image. God is the source of our dignity and treats us with respect. God sees our mutually destructive behaviour, and assesses it as such; yet God then looks at us with profound sadness, and with equally profound compassion, aware of our radical insecurity and our unconscious wounds buried below the surface.

We condemn; we compete, because we are radically insecure. We have not looked into the eyes of the infinitely loving God who gently loves us. Since we do not see ourselves through God’s eyes, we have not learnt to see each other either through God’s eyes. To this blind world God sent his Son – not to condemn but to save. The way of redemption involves our learning to look into the eyes of the loving God. Then we can begin to see ourselves and each other, and to sense that all-pervading insecurity through those loving eyes of God. We learn to approach each other with respect. We learn to tune in, beyond the stated opinions, to the fears and the hopes from where those opinions ultimately spring. Together we can move towards the “capital-T Truth” that constantly beckons us beyond where we are.

We need that enlightened approach so much in our Church today. We have been fixated on orthodoxy but light on love. We need respect so much in our world today. But how can we speak credibly to the world until we begin to live the truth ourselves? No wonder Jesus summed up his life’s work of saving our world in the urgent insistence: First: Love God with everything. Then: Love your neighbour as yourself.

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.

Homily 5 - 2020

Remember the comment that Jesus made in last week’s Gospel… “Give back to God what are God’s”. Today’s Gospel spells out what he meant, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind”. Jesus called this “the greatest and the first commandment”. The idea of commandment may not sit comfortably in relationships of deep love. The Mystery that is God stretches out infinitely beyond our clearest human expressions. At best, our words are like sign-posts. They face us in the right direction — but the right direction, while very helpful, is not the destination.

Yet, for those who truly love, the desires of the beloved can be experienced by the one who loves as non-negotiable need… “Commandment” goes close to defining the experience — but is not quite it. Jesus also said, “The second [commandment] resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself”. The word “resemble” may be another finger-post. It does not quite capture the real idea, but it points in the right direction.

Loving our neighbour as ourselves “resembles” the inner need to love God above everything in the sense that it makes God real, as it were, and connects heaven with earth. Through the created world of persons and things we engage with God “through whom all things are made”. And — wonderfully — when we truly love God, we find ourselves motivated and wanting to love our brothers and sisters whom God creates and eternally loves.

We are used to the idea of loving our neighbours at the individual, inter-personal level. Excellent! but that is too narrow a vision. The greatest good and the greatest harm are done to our neighbours within the world fashioned by politics — the practical shape that human relationships take at the community level.

God entrusted the created world, with all its fruitfulness, productivity and potential — the common wealth — to be shared equitably by all. Through means such as taxation, etc., our various leaders have the noble role to determine, on the community’s behalf, how that common wealth is shared equitably. As members of that commonwealth, we give our compliance with their directives, or our criticism and opposition to what we judge to be unfair, corrupt, partisan or ideologically polarised.

Within this realm of practical care for our neighbours, our love for God takes shape.

Homily 6 - 2023

It does not seem a happy world we are living in.

There is so much mutual hatred, so much extreme violence. And the deliberately targeted victims are too often civilians — hundreds and thousands of them. The obscene amounts of money and resources squandered on the world’s armaments industries dwarf the amounts spent on feeding, clothing and housing the world’s poor and hungry.

We can thank God, at least, that our own nation does not face the threat of war, though we sometimes choose to join in them.

Today we have come to Mass to be greeted with three Scripture readings, each mentioning in its own way the theme of mutual love: love between God and us, love between neighbours, and redemptive love flowing from the heart of Christ to a world still suffocating in its sinning. I hope that today’s is a message that we all here find wonderfully attractive. As we let God’s love soak into us, we find ourselves wanting to love God more. As we begin to love God more, we find ourselves increasingly wanting to love others — to be brother or sister to all.

No wonder! We are made for love. The powerful dynamic of the world’s love originates from God. Creation is saturated with love. We human creatures bear the image of God … who is love. Yet therein lies a profound problem. So that we might love, we were necessarily created to be free. Unhappily, in our insecurity, we have too often freely chosen to use that freedom to turn away from the ways of love, and to opt for selfishness; which all inevitably results in deeper envy and fear; and in turn floods our world with further hostility and violence.

Yet God has not hesitated for one moment to seek to save us from ourselves. God insists on loving this world, on genuinely loving us all. God eventually sent the Second Member of the Trinity to become human and to live among us, in order to save us from ourselves and from each other.

With so much divine love at our finger-tips, all we need do is to make ourselves available to it in order for us to receive it into our heart and so into our world. What a difference it would make to ourselves and to our world if we deliberately set ourselves to engage with God each day, even briefly: to hear God address us by our name, to hear Jesus call each of us his friend! We are so close to God, but it so easy for us simply to remain unresponsive to God’s caring, thoughtful presence.

We worry and feel sad about the violent wars being currently fought in our world. We yearn to be able somehow to bring about peace between the warring sides. We feel so useless, so powerless. Pope Francis, among others, urges us to pray. But we can wonder whether prayer ultimately achieves anything.

At least, let us give it a go. We can say prayers we have learnt by heart. We do not need to say anything. It may be better for us not to say anything. It is enough, as the wonderful mediaeval mystic, Teresa of Avila, once wrote of prayer, to imagine God there within our hearts … or, better, “simply to gaze upon God, present within us”.

If all of us Catholics around the world undertook to pray with greater dedication, especially if our prayer reflected a genuine love for everyone, what an enormous surge of love that would bring into the world!

Would it be enough to influence the world’s mood? There is little else truly constructive that we can do. It is worth trying. And at least our little world around us will be better for it.