1st Sunday Advent B
See Commentary on Mark 13: 33-37 in Mark 13:24-37
Homily 1 - 2005
Stay awake! Mark repeats the warning three times: Stay awake! Why? What’s on? Advent has begun. We have four weeks to prepare. But, prepare for what? Certainly not for Christ’s birth – that happened 2000 summers ago. There is no point pretending that he will be born again. Then stay awake to what? To life.. to what is going on in my life.
What is going on in my life beneath the constant round of deeds and conversations, trips in the car, games, recreation, work, sleep, meals and Masses? As St John of the Cross, the XVIth century Spanish mystic, said so beautifully and so wisely: At eventide they will examine thee in love. They – the Father, Son and Spirit of God – will examine us in love – at eventide. Everything we do, every deliberate response to what happens to us, can be the concrete shape of love. But it need not be. If often isn’t.
What makes the difference between loving and not loving? between loving and simply being busy? between gently nurturing our spirit and busily suffocating it, clogging it up, drowning it in a deluge of activity? Part of the answer, I find, is being ready to reflect, to step back to look at my life, to ponder. Stay awake – to life!
But why get all excited about it at Advent? Simply because Advent reminds us, reassures us, that God has come among us and meets us in our lives, our interactions, our responses. The God who came among us that first Christmas has always been in his world and is still at large in his world today. How do we recognise him?
I suppose that among the many things that the first Christmas event told us is that he probably won’t look like what we might expect him to look like, won’t be where we might expect him to be, won’t be doing what we might expect him to be doing.
How did Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth recognise the advent of God entering and overturning their lives? They were familiar with their own inner world, present to the moment, responsive to the unexpected. They were awake to life and to experience.
We often say we’re too busy; there is simply too much to do and not enough time to do it - especially since we have amassed so many time-saving, energy-saving, labour-saving devices. Whatever about our busyness, in designing the world’s flow of days and nights, God ensured that there was always time, plenty of time, to do what he wanted us to do. Anything we realistically haven’t got time to do, and to do well, can’t be God’s will, can’t be energised by the life-giving, creative love of God – so in some way it will be undermining us, suffocating and even destroying our spirit. We need to discern what is going on in our lives. We need to step back to look at ourselves. Most of us need to slow down. Why don’t we?
Though he came into our world 2000 years ago, our world has hardly learnt to recognise him, to listen to him. The annual reminder of Christ’s birth among us can come and go once more, the 2005th time it has, and this year, will we have noticed? really noticed and learnt to prioritise? That might depend on whether we take to heart the invitation of today’s Gospel: Stay awake! Be present to the moment, not distracted, focussed.
In the Eucharist that is now about to follow we have privileged access to Christ. We know it; we believe it easily. Our perhaps harder task is to learn to hear him working in our inner self, throwing light on what is going on in our lives, wanting us to thrive, to grow. He is not interested in how hectic our lives are; he gives us no points for busyness. He simply wants our spirit to become more alive. And that is the point of Advent.
Homily 2 – 2008
I can go to the Supermarket and find there about thirty different breakfast foods to choose from. I need a new car, and there are thirty different models to choose from. I can live a whole day, a whole week, a whole month, and my life is full of endless alternatives from which I can choose. Some people see that boundless possibility for choice as one of the wonderful things about life in a capitalist democracy.
My take on that is that, despite the plethora of possibilities, a lot of people rarely make real, personal choices. What we buy, what we choose to do, even how we choose to think, are for so many, simply a programmed compliance to: the spiel of the advertising industry or the emphases of the media, public opinion, the culture around us, or simply our ingrained habits. Choices are seemingly unlimited, but so many are totally insignificant. Too many people don’t choose to live life – they are simply carried along by it.
But we can live life. The myriad details of our lives can have eternal significance. All these things we choose, all these things we do, can be conscious and deliberate expressions of something deeper. They can be expressions of love, acts of responsibility. They can be choices for life, for justice, for care and compassion – practical options building the Kingdom of God.
As followers of Jesus, he wants us to live life, to step onboard the Kingdom – to realise how every response we make, in the unfolding detail of our lives, can reverberate into eternity. The simplest of them can be expressions of faith, of hope, of love. The simplest things can enlarge our hearts, mould who we are, and give practical shape to our eventual eternal destiny. But, as someone said – one of the early Greek philosophers, I think – the unreflected life is a wasted life.
Jesus put it more positively in today’s Gospel: Stay awake! Stay awake! Keep your eyes open! Don’t live in a dream! Don’t drift! Don’t get distracted! See the potential there in every moment of your day. See the other dimension, the deeper dimension, to everything you do. Let everything you do contribute to the building of God’s Kingdom, the “hastening”, as it were, the eventual revealing of the currently hidden presence of the Son of Man.
Homily 3 - 2011
I would like to invite you today to reflect on your own experience, and I shall share some reflections of my own, taking my cue from today’s First Reading where Isaiah addressed the issue of his people’s sin. Isaiah embodied perhaps the highpoint of Israel’s insight into the mystery of God. Yet he wrote without knowledge of Jesus or of what Jesus had to tell us about God. At times he missed the point.
I want to explore some issues surrounding our sense of sin in the light of what Jesus revealed to us of his Father. There is a preoccupation among many of us with the question of God’s forgiveness. If we take notice of what Jesus had to say, there can be no question about God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness is simply God’s love as God engages with sinners. And we know that it is unconditional. It is constantly offered – always on tap, if you like. It doesn’t have to be begged for, or somehow won. Preoccupation with forgiveness misses the point. Forgiveness is where we start from, not what we aim for. In a certain sense, we can have all our sins forgiven, we can be spotless, as it were – but that only brings us from behind scratch to the starting line.
Mesmerised, too, by an emphasis on commandments, we can be sometimes obsessively concerned with merely observing them. But that misses the point too. People totally closed in on themselves, complete loners, don’t kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, etc. To not break commandments, all they need to do is to avoid people.
But Jesus has shown us that that is not what God is interested in. God offers us love. God enables and calls us to love – because only when we love do we become truly alive. And growth in love is more than a factor of not breaking commandments. It is about cultivating and nurturing the virtues that are the concrete building blocks of consistent love. We can take God’s forgiveness for granted. What God calls us to, after sin, is reconciliation – is engagement, relationship – a relationship of ever-deepening love.
But it takes two for any relationship. We aren’t reconciled, we don’t love, by avoiding people (or God), but by engaging with them. In any relationship with God, the uncertain factor is not God. It is us. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul pleaded quite emotionally about this issue: It was God who reconciled us to himself, through Christ, and gave me the work of handing on this reconciliation. It is as though God was appealing through me – and the appeal that I make in Christ’s name is: Be reconciled to God.
This raises the practical questions: How do I engage with God? How do I love God? How do I know I love God? The First Epistle of St John throws light on these questions: Among many things, John wrote: We can be sure we are in God only when the one who claims to be living in God is living the same kind of life as Christ lived. And later he warned: Those who do not love the brothers or sisters that they can see cannot love God, whom they have never seen. So our love for God is broken or cooled in parallel with our engagement with others. And our reconciliation with God runs parallel to our efforts to grow in our love for others – which is definitely more than merely being innocent of outright offences against commandments.
We haven’t got far, but I wanted to get this clear from the start. Our preoccupation need not be mere forgiveness. What is critical is what St John called living the same kind of life as Christ lived. What I would like to do next is explore, as the adult people we are, the practical shape of the sins we commit - moving beyond the somewhat trivial shopping lists of children to questions of conscience, blindness and our complicity in social sin.
Homily 4 - 2014
I am sure that I read somewhere on Friday, though for the life of me I can no longer remember where, that some organisation that Fr. Bob Maguire was connected with was running a Christmas raffle. The third prize, I think, was a car; the second an overseas trip for two, and the first prize was the opportunity to work voluntarily for a week serving soup to people on the margins somewhere in South Melbourne. I could have dreamt it – but I do not think so!
Fr Bob’s point was that serving the disadvantaged for a week would give the lucky winner far more happiness than winning a trip overseas or getting a new car. Happiness! Jesus spoke about it in the Beatitudes and in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. Fr. Bob has obviously read it. Most of us do not believe it.
Advent is the time in the Church’s year when once again we are invited to ruminate more deeply on the mystery of God’s simultaneous presence among us and his absence – how we can make the most of it, and experience that elusive happiness so dear to the heart of Jesus.
For me, I do not intend to do anything different – just more of the same. But I do want to listen more intently to Jesus’ recommendation to Stay awake! That does not necessarily mean doing more, but I would love to become more – more alert, more attentive to Jesus’ presence to me within the all-too-usual sense of his frustrating absence. I would like my prayer to be the experience of that presence deep within me. But it is not. It is more a constantly sharpening act of faith in God’s presence there in the apparent emptiness, and my learning to sit comfortably and peacefully with that.
I believe that God loves me; and that this love is unchanging and infinitely personal and intense; and that it is totally independent of whether I am asleep or awake, whether I am praying or not, whether I am helplessly distracted or not. I want to stop trying to entice God to love me more, to notice me, at least a little bit more than a few others I can think of. The infinite God cannot love more or less.
I want to engage with God’s love – the real me, which I am still not in touch with, but that God knows thoroughly and loves just as I am – not for God’s sake, or to somehow cheer God up, but for my sake. I do not want just to think about God present within me or to imagine or feel God – because I know that the real God is beyond my capacity to understand or imagine or feel. All I can do is sit, believe and hope, and wait. I feel a bit like Isaiah [impatiently or patiently?] crying out, Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!
What I am also hoping this Advent is that God will sharpen my vision – to be able to see others through the eyes of God, easily accepting that God loves them no more and no less than God is loving me. I am so far from that – and time is running out. All I can do is to be as open as I can be to the possibility, to try to get out of the way, to hope, to wait, and, in the meantime, to struggle along, trying at least to act “as if”.I am finding it less hard to sit comfortably with my powerlessness, and with my need to stand before God with nothing of my own getting in the way. Life is richer the simpler it becomes. It keeps getting better. I like growing older.
Homily 5 - 2017
What has media coverage been telling us is important this week? I suppose it is Don Burke and, perhaps still, fine-tuning issues around same-sex marriage. Today Advent starts – again! Do the two intersect at any point, the secular world with its media and the Church season with its familiar readings and symbols?
What echoes in my head from this weekend’s Gospel is “Stay awake!” I prefer to hear it as, “Be alert! Watch out!” or, even more simply, “Be alert! Watch!”, perhaps even better, “Watch!” Children are good at watching. I am not sure adults are; not, at least, at sustained watching, at looking deeply, pondering thoughtfully.
What Don Burke has been doing has not been a rarity. Fortunately, society is becoming much more alert to it. Sadly, the problem is more than the unbridled pursuit of sheer sexual pleasure; essentially, the issue is the use of sex as power. In relationships generally, people relate to each other on the basis of either intimacy or power. Intimacy is self-gift. Power is self-seeking – and expresses itself in defence or attack in some form or other, and both can be done actively or passively, be obvious or hidden. Manipulation or seduction can be as effective, and destructive, as outright violence.
The media coverage of the behaviour of Don Burke can serve as an invitation to the rest of us to look again at our own behaviour. Do we operate from intimacy or from power, not only with sexual partners but with everyone? One of the plagues of clericalism is the misuse of power. And with us clerics, as with others, it can be quite unconscious. It is difficult to recognize our personal behaviour once it has become habitual. But if we don’t look, we don’t change. And if we don’t change, not only do others get hurt, but we stop growing – and, in its own way, that can be just as tragic.
So we need to stop and, as Jesus said, to look, to watch. It takes time. The skill needs to be learnt. We need to be like the frog – sitting on our reed in the water, eyes wide open, looking [though not outwards for dangers but inwards at ourselves]. Like Mary, when experiences happened, she did not allow herself to be absorbed by them or overwhelmed, but she stepped back, observed what was really going on, in others and in herself, and responded appropriately. And in her observing and making sense of reality, she allowed herself to be stimulated by her knowledge of her scriptural tradition.
If we decide to, we can make the lead-up to Christmas less rather than more hectic, but to succeed we may need to be used to opening our eyes, and watching ourselves, watching what is really going on inside us, watching our desires, our fears, our addictions, our unfreedoms. That is a start. Gradually, we even learn how to discern and choose, and grow in freedom in the process. How else would you take to heart Jesus’ invitation to “Stay awake!” How else does it make sense in your life?
A final point for those of you disturbed [or not disturbed] by the same-sex-marriage outcome in parliament. Can you look more closely at your own marriage relationship, increase its attractiveness for your spouse and for yourself, and allow that attractiveness to show on your faces and in your simple interactions with each other? Others may notice. And obvious attractiveness is far more persuasive to the unconverted than logic or the power of the ballot-box or lobby-group. A final final point. You may not be able to change your spouse – but you may still be able to change yourself, even if only learning better to cope with reality without being embittered by it. But it all begins by accepting Jesus’ invitation and taking it seriously: “Watch!”
Homily 6 - 2020
It is good to be back once more as a flesh-and-blood congregation to celebrate together our Sunday Mass. I don’t doubt that, for many of you, the on-line Masses turned out to be quite a prayerful alternative to the real thing; and that the change of setting perhaps gave you the chance to hear better what can be sometimes lost in the sheer familiarity of our usual gatherings.
Our assembling once more may get us asking just what is special about the real thing. Different ones of you will have different answers. I hopefully believe that there are certain elements of the usual celebration that we can productively refresh and allow to stimulate our participation more fruitfully.
Sacraments are celebrations of the Christian community; and the Eucharist is both the source and the climax of them all. We need people to celebrate. Christ touches us simply through our presence to each other: knowing we are all here because of the same shared faith quietly strengthens and confirms our individual personal conviction. It is hard to be a Christian and a lone-ranger. We need the support that our being here together unobtrusively provides.
We could read the Scriptures alone at home. But hearing them proclaimed by another believer like ourselves can set up a powerful exchange. Their conviction and their enthusiasm can nourish ours, and our attentiveness can bring out the best in them. All of us grow through our shared faith in ways we hardly notice but that can be quite inspiring.
Celebrations are essentially connected to remembering. There is so much we need to remember about Jesus. It is fascinating that Jesus suggested that we gather together to share food and drink, specifically bread and wine, to remember him — particularly bread that needs to be broken to be shared and a cup that gets emptied as it is drunk. They remind us forcefully forgiveness and reconciliation, as he so often reminded us, constitute, in fact, the core of his message, and a symbolic commitment to “love one another as he loves us” — whatever our emotional reaction towards them. Our eating his body “given for us” and drinking his “blood poured out for us” give highly explicit emphasis to how seriously we are called to give witness to and to live the urgent non-negotiability of love.
Our “Amens” as we take the bread and drink from the common cup express our whole-hearted “Yes” and shared commitment to taking his message of love outwards into the general community, whatever the cost; and all is reinforced by our enthusiastic “Thanks be to God” at the end of Mass as we move off from our celebrating to engage once more with our needy world for which he died.