1st Sunday of Lent B

See commentary of Mark 1:12-15 in Mark 1:12-13 & Mark 1:14-15.

Homily 1 - 2006

One of the suggested formulas when applying the ashes on Ash Wednesday is one we rarely use, but this is the way it goes: Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return! People can hear that differently. The reaction of the ancient Epicureans was, Well, Let’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die!

What got me reflecting along these lines were the funerals in Mildura the week before last of those six young people. In some ways it was a bonanza for the media:  they were young; their deaths were tragic; and there were six of them. The reaction was not unlike that to the death of Princess Diana. The combination there was:tragedy, beauty, if not youth, and popularity. Or even to the death of Pope John Paul II. In his case, there was not tragedy but fame and a certain degree of the exotic, the esoteric. 

I wonder if, as time goes on, anything much will have been learnt from any of those events. In all of them there was a degree of the unreal, a lionising of those who died: they were the greatest, the popular ones, universally loved, etc. What is going on? Why do people need to make them the greatest, the most popular, the most loved? 

Perhaps one answer, among others, is: If we can as it were canonise them, since they are no real challenge to ourselves, then we’re OK. There’s nothing to learn, no need to change – just be sad.

From our faith view, what has happened? One of the Prefaces of the Masses for the Dead has a line that reads: For your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended. Life is not ended. There is a whole new adventure waiting, symbolised in the mysterious event of Jesus’ resurrection – whatever that means.

 If life has been changed, not ended, it will not be the first time for any of the six young people of life changing, but continuing.. Sixteen or so year ago, they moved from nine months of unconscious, comfortable, non-demanding life in the womb (Phase 1 of their lives) through the traumatic experience of being born to life as we know it  (Phase 2). We have all been through it. We couldn’t prepare for it, though our parents did: they gave us our DNA and a lot of other inherited and instilled traits that have influenced inexorably our present experience of living.

 For the next stage of the adventure (Phase 3), DNA won’t matter, inherited traits won’t matter. What will count is who we are, and the groundwork we have put in developing those aspects of our now lives that carry over into the next – basically our capacity to love (not the fall-in-love kind of love but the giving aspect, the serving kind), with its counterpart, the dying to self-interest, to self-centredness, to looking after “No.1”. What mattered for each of the six in Mildura who were in Phase 2 of life one moment and in a flash into Phase 3 was: Were they learning to love? Were they beginning to wake up to their inevitable self-centredness and the peer-group tyranny? Were they learning instead to think for themselves, to choose for themselves, and from there to reach out in love? Nothing else mattered: not intelligence, not sporting skill, not popularity.

 Death is the one absolute certainty; and if properly appreciated, it puts everything else in perspective. Especially it encourages us to get on with living, really living, being truly human, learning constantly to love. From this context, perhaps the alternative Ash Wednesday invitation is preferable: Turn away from sin, and believe the Good News!

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.

Homily 3 - 2015

What is all this business about God making a covenant with Noah? I think the story-writer had a magnificent fleeting intuition of the mind of God. Effectively, he had God declare, “I shall never destroy the earth. I shall never wipe out a civilization. I shall never destroy anything. I shall never destroy anyone. There is no violence in me.” God could have gone on, “You might destroy the earth, or yourselves – but I shall not. In fact, if you keep close to me, if you learn to know me, you will not want to either.”

All that was in the pre-historical past. What about today? What sense do you make of what is going on in the world? What do you make of things after you have listened to the TV nightly news? The Good News of God? the Good News of the Kingdom?

Jesus stepped into a world not essentially different from ours. In his world, seven out of eight people lived at or below the poverty line, often going to bed hungry. Life was better if you belonged to the lucky elite with a bit of power and wealth. Yet even Herod, despite his being King, was paranoid about security. No right to freedom of speech for John the Baptist, arrested and rotting in prison. That was the world to which Jesus talked about the Good News of God, the good news of the Kingdom. But he did not stop there. He said, “Believe it, trust the God in whom there is no violence. And because invariably, instinctively, you do not believe that, change! Think again! Learn – somehow!”

Over the last two years we have heard Pope Francis waxing eloquent about the joy of the kingdom, the same Pope Francis who deplores the fact that we have lost the ability to weep. Wise people can live with paradox.

Getting back to Jesus. He had just come out of forty days in the wilderness, tempted by Satan, the personification of evil. We encounter Satan, rather, in the enculturation of evil. The culture has been saturating us with it since we were weaned from our mothers – so effectively that we do not see so many of our destructive assumptions. We take them for granted – our selective, ‘enlightened’, indignation at the behaviour of others, our instinctive trust in further power and violence as the best way to peace, our obsession about protecting our sovereign shores, whatever the cost.

“Change!” said Jesus. But even he did not know how to interest and enthuse with his sense of God or his vision of the possibilities of the Kingdom people with ears that would not hear, eyes that would not see. How do we learn to see what is staring us in the face? 

How did Jesus learn to see? John the Baptist got things started; then the Voice from Heaven; and the Spirit of God coming down on Jesus like a dove. The next thing, with a remarkable change of metaphor, that gentle, dove-like Spirit, drove him out further into the wilderness to engage with the persuasive possibilities suggested by personified evil.  Mark said Jesus was there for forty days – forty days that turned out to be the couple of years of his public ministry and that culminated in his death at the hands of the Roman empire, the embodiment of culture.

And Lent for us? Forty days, or rather a lifetime, learning to hear the voice that says, “I am the God who loves you. I am the God who is love, undeserved, forgiving, merciful love – the God in whom there is no violence.”  Forty days, a lifetime, learning to see the real, to see that others are as precious to God as I am. Forty days struggling to let others matter to me as much as I matter to myself. Forty days learning to weep. Forty days learning to be joyful – living with paradox, as Pope Francis would have us do, and growing in wisdom.

Homily 4 - 2018

Immediately before the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness, we had Mark’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. This had concluded with the momentous pronouncement of the voice from heaven, You are my son, the beloved; my favour rests on you. We are not surprised – we have heard it before. But it is worth pausing a moment and pondering. That the voice came from heaven gives us the clue that it was God who was speaking. In Matthew’s Gospel, God spoke to the by-standers. What they heard was, This is my son, the beloved; my favour rests on him. But Mark had God speaking to Jesus, You are my son, the beloved; my favour rests on you. This was a message for Jesus. Why did God say this to Jesus? Did Jesus not know already that he was the son of God? If he did, why tell him?

We believe that Jesus was both divine and human – fully human, fully divine. We know what it is like to be human. We have no idea what it is like to be divine, no idea what it is like to be both divine and human at the same time. Sometimes, in our minds, we make Jesus a sort of mixture of divine and human, often at the expense of his humanness. The Epistle to the Hebrews said of Jesus that he was like us in all things, except sin. Like us in everything – growing in wisdom [as Luke’s gospel put it], as well as in age and grace. If he was like us, there must have been lots of things Jesus did not know. He could well have noticed that he seemed to be different in many ways from his contemporaries, but perhaps had never thought that there was much, much more to him, that the differences between them were profound, mysterious. The voice from Heaven may have astounded him. He needed time; he needed a lifetime to come to terms with it.

Immediately he felt impelled by the Spirit to go into the wilderness – not so much by choice, but driven [as Mark said] – and there he was tempted. The Epistle to the Hebrews said of Jesus that he was tempted in every way that we are – not to “Mickey Mouse” sins, but more likely to the really deep ones like loss of faith in a God of love, loss of hope in people, bitterness and unforgiveness, conformity rather than conversion. Mark said Jesus was there for forty days, an echo of the forty years the Hebrew people spent in the Sinai wilderness, where they were tempted – but also where they came to know God and to be formed as a people with a purpose. Mark also said that he was with the wild beasts. It sounds like some of the visions contained the Book of Revelation. In the apocalyptic literature of the time, wild beasts usually referred to the various foreign kingdoms that threatened the survival and integrity of the Jewish people. Mark may have been referring to the powerfully attractive, tempting, values of kingdoms or societies in general – consumerism, prestige, power. Do we ever think of Jesus tempted, as you and I are, to sacrifice mission and integrity for the sake of comfort, popularity and influence?

The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse was something we did not choose, but found ourselves driven into. Might it have been the Spirit ultimately who drove us there? The Report has been presented, and the future lies before us. My fear is that we may be tempted to hope that it all dies down, that the rest of society over time forget about it, that we be able to get back to business as usual. My hope is that angels come and minister to us, calling us to deep conversion, particularly that they help us to recognize and to respond creatively, even enthusiastically, to the challenge confronting us in the clerical, patriarchal culture that quietly lay behind so much of why and what we so tragically did and failed to do.

Homily 5 - 2021

The Spirit that Jesus had just seen coming down on him at his baptism waited for Jesus to hear the voice from heaven assuring him that he was loved. It then immediately bundled him off out into the wilderness — and there Jesus stayed for forty days. During that time he was also tempted by the Satan, lived with the wild beasts, and had his needs met by the angels.

At least the wilderness was conveniently close, and gave him space — and the time he needed to come to terms with all that had just happened. It seems he found the space and time helpful — because in the Gospel account that unfolded, Mark frequently referred to Jesus going off to be alone and to connect undisturbed with the Father who loved him.

Time and space seem to be scarce commodities these days for most people, at least for us in this Western world. We find ourselves in a “Catch 22” situation. We need time and space to come to terms with the destructiveness of not giving ourselves enough of either. And here we confront another “Catch 22” situation. The myriad things that relentlessly consume our time and space were so often acquired in the hope that they might give us more time and space. A recent report published in the United States revealed that children there, aged between eight to eighteen, spend on average seven hours and twenty-eight minutes a day plugged in to some electronic device — an iPod or a television or the internet or a mobile phone. Factor in a little bit of time for sleeping and eating, and it does not leave all that much over. I ask myself what sort of example the youngsters get from the adults in their lives.

Sadly, most of us know the feeling! I wonder if Lent could provide the occasion for us to be a little more kind to ourselves — not to give ourselves less but to give ourselves more, more time and space, to do more interesting, more helpful, more healthy, even more holy, things than we are doing now, but which do not seem to be touching the spot. Could we find the courage, or perhaps the discipline, or even the sheer common sense, to bite the bullet, and deliberately, resolutely, set aside some time each day simply to be still, and even, like Jesus used to do, to gently connect — sometimes — with the God who loves us? Or haven’t we had the time to find out that loving is what God really insists on doing?

[Personally, I have found that to fit in some new practice, I need to firmly decide what current practice I shall choose to cease doing.]

The thrust of Lent is to expose ourselves to the “Good News” of God. Jesus realised that to find that out for ourselves, each of us needs to put a bomb under ourselves — [a better translation of the word used by Jesus than the anaemic “Repent” that we generally find]. The solution to our “Catch 22” quandary is not “rocket science”. Jesus said it is “close at hand”.

 Homily 6 - 2024

We are into Mark’s Gospel today, and Mark leaves us almost breathless as we listen to him. Let me begin two verses before today’s short Gospel passage. John the Baptist had just baptised Jesus. Mark wrote: “Immediately, as Jesus came up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit descending, just as a dove does, into him; and a voice came from the heavens; ‘You are my son; I love you; in you I am delighted’. Immediately the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by the Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him.”

Those of you who were at Mass on Ash Wednesday might remember the Gospel of that Mass: “When you pray, go to your private room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place…”

Jesus did even better: he went out into the the total isolation of the Judean wilderness. As the Gospel unfolds later in the year, we shall hear of other occasions when Jesus spent the night in prayer, or went out early in the morning and prayed.

I find it fascinating that even Jesus felt the need to be alone with God his Father, to come to terms with and to integrate what was going on. The voice from the heavens that spoke to him just after his baptism: ‘You are my son; I love you; in you I am delighted’, seemed to have required six weeks of pondering. I am not surprised.

Mark’s Gospel then gave us, as we heard this morning, the outcome of his pondering and the insights that it stirred: “After John had been arrested [they were dangerous times!], Jesus went into Galilee. There he proclaimed the Good News from God. ‘The decisive time has come’ he said ‘and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News’.”

As Jesus gave himself forty days to ponder — to come to terms with and to integrate — the message of the voice from heaven, the Church suggests that we might spend these forty days of Lent endeavouring to come to terms with and to integrate and to bring up to date the present and immediately future implications of the reality among us now of the Kingdom of God.

We need to spend time alone, too, with God. Don’t be frightened. Give it a go. Try something new, if necessary. Perhaps even forget about the possible distractions attached to fasting. Don’t even call it prayer, if that is likely to put you off. As Jesus advised, just “go to your private room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place”. Just sit with God. No need to say anything. Just know, believe, that he is there with you in the silence, in the darkness. It will probably take no time for you to get distracted. Don’t worry. Just let the distractions float away, like a small branch floating along on the surface of a river, and return again yourself into the silence and the darkness. It won’t feel like what you probably expect prayer should feel like. That’s OK. Don’t call it prayer, if that worries you. God can, and does, communicate a bit like “osmosis”. You will possibly notice, however, a gentle “difference” happening to you later in the rest of your ordinary, daily life.

Make this Lent something different.