1st Sunday of Lent B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2012

In tonight's Gospel, Mark quotes Jesus as saying, Repent, and believe the Good News…  Repent, and believe the Good News! It seems that repenting may involve, somehow or other, opening up to Good News. We're inclined to think of repenting as moral reform – pulling up our socks, getting our act together. While not quite ruling that out, really the focus of repenting is quite different.

Jesus was calling for a change of mindset, a different way of seeing things; and he saw it tied in primarily to how we see God. He had  just announced that the Kingdom of God is near at hand – and not only to the morally upright, the Law-observant, the professional religious experts. He was talking to "the great unwashed" - to anybody - and everybody. God is close to everyone, and everyone counts, no one any more [or any less] than anyone else. That can be a whole other way of seeing God. Repentance has to do with discovering God. And discovering God is a never-ending process that involves losing faith and finding faith.

I remember an incident from years back. I hadn't long left a parish when a good man from there committed suicide – he drowned himself. And he was a truly good man, and had paid the price, over the years, of being a good man. I couldn't get to the funeral, but dropped in on his widow a few days later. She told me how she worried about her recently-married eldest daughter: "She didn't come to Mass last Sunday".

I suspect that the girl, with all her confusion and shame, her hurt and anger, was also experiencing a crisis of faith. Her previous sense of God was shattered. "After all the good he [her father] had done, how could God have let this happen!!" What was her sense of God? I suspect that she saw God as the one who rewards the good and punishes the bad; as the one who, in his infinite power, is prepared to pull strings in the process, at least for some who get the approach right. A lot of people think that way. But, for her, what had happened had undermined all that. Thank God for her rejection of that kind of God!

 What were her alternatives [when the right moment might come]? To lose her faith? To avoid the issues, somehow, and perhaps resentfully to carry on? Or, to discover a new sense of God, to move on from a reward and punishment way of seeing life to an exploration of the meaning and consequences of love [which is  mystery enough]? To change her mindset – what Jesus meant by repentance.

Can we repent and change our world view,  simply by choosing to? I wonder about that. I think it is more a question of being open. I think it is our encounters with the complexities of life, with the complexities of ourselves, that raise the questions and invite us forward and deeper. At the right moment, a word or an experience come our way and "the penny drops" – the moment of insight, the chance for Jesus' kind of repentance! But we have to be open – and that is up to us. We have to be secure enough to allow our assumptions to be challenged, and our former certainties to be questioned. That can be scary. It can also be dangerous – especially if we try to pursue our journey into truth and love, into maturity and wisdom, alone, trusting simply in our own resources.

Jesus did not intend us to be "lone rangers". He has called us into community, into Church. But our experience of Church can be ambivalent, too, because Church is people - like you and I. Perhaps the best we can do is to ask God to give us the "nous" to "suss out" – to discern  - who is wise and who isn't. And that is not a factor of hierarchical rank or priestly ordination. Perhaps a clue that we're heading in the right direction might lie in recognising whether what we are moving towards is learning to trust, to believe, what seems more and more like Good News.