3rd Sunday of Easter B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2015

Sexual violence and abuse, whether domestic or institutional, have become a growing source of worry within the community. The media fill our screens with stories of military and terrorist violence, or simply an endless spate of local murders and other tragedies. Much of what we see is the result of appalling individual human choices or social policies. As well there is the untold suffering caused by accidents or simply by unsuspected or uncontrollable natural causes.

In his Gospel today Luke presented us with Jesus saying “… it is written that the Christ would suffer”. In his sequel to the Gospel, his Acts of Apostles, Luke had Peter proclaiming, “God said through all his prophets that the Christ would suffer”. Why was it inevitable that God’s anointed one would suffer? 

Christ’s suffering, of course, was not due to natural causes or the result of any accident. Peter made that quite clear when he said to the assembled crowd, “You demanded the reprieve of a murderer while you killed the prince of life”. Interestingly, he added, “… neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing”. They knew they were killing him all right. They did not realise that he was “the prince of life”.

Human violence is endemic. Most of it is not much more than low-level rivalry or hostility; but, given enough provocation, it regularly breaks out in recognisable brutality, and does not distinguish between innocence and guilt. Yet even low-level hostility can be debilitating – for agent as well as victim. All of us, depending on the occasion, are both agents and victims of humanity’s hostility. Sadly, it is so embedded in the culture that we are unaware of its destructiveness. That was the sin that fuelled the murder of Jesus; and it is in such sin that we are all complicit.

Jesus “… showed them his hands and his feet”. Presumably they bore the scars of the nails. The risen Jesus still carried the marks of the murder he had undergone. How come resurrection did not clear that up?

Every experience of our lives contributes to who we become. Each experience happens only once and is past, irretrievably. But to every experience, we respond somehow. It is those responses, the choices we make in relation to the experiences, that are part of the on-going personal process whereby we either mature in our humanity or lock ourselves ever further into obsessive self-centredness, hostility and bitter resentfulness. For Jesus, the scars on his hands and feet marked the context of his response of trust, love and forgiveness in face of the world’s hostility and sinfulness. They expressed who he was at that moment. And it was he, as he had become through his myriad life-choices, whom his Father raised to new and unimaginable life.

No one is forever inevitably locked into sin. God forgives everyone, whatever we may have done. God is love. God cannot but forgive. But God’s forgiveness is useless unless, and until, we are prepared to surrender to it and allow ourselves to be swept along in its flooding-out beyond ourselves to everyone else. Love [and forgiveness, its counterpart] is a dynamic energy, not a static declaration of innocence. That is what Jesus, and his messenger Peter, referred to when they called everyone to “repent”. It is what John was referring to in today’s Second Reading, “We can be sure we know God only by keeping his commandments … When anyone does obey what he has said, God’s love comes to perfection in him”. The same John, elsewhere in his Epistle, had made it clear that the command of Jesus was precisely that we love one another. Through our loving, every enduring trace of self-seeking eventually gives way to self-giving, and, as Peter put it, is thereby “wiped out.” 

Until our respect, appreciation and love for others are seen to be recognisably counter-cultural, we shall never turn the world around.