3rd Sunday of Easter B

See Commentary on Luke 24:35-49

Homily 1 - 2006

Luke used a number of words to describe the initial reactions of the disciples that night when the risen Jesus stood in their midst: alarm, fright, agitated, doubting, unbelieving in joy, dumbfounded.

I wonder what words would suit us today as the risen Christ stands in our midst?

Some of the first disciples’ reactions are not surprising: after all, he had been killed.

What sort of things might they have been saying to each other all Friday night? all Saturday?

“We could see it coming." “Anyone could see that they would try to get him, and silence him." “He was really asking for trouble." “It was his own fault." “He went too far, far too far."

“It’s OK to criticise the way people were being oppressed and marginalised, and not just by the Roman occupation, but also by so much of their own religious system that had drifted drastically from its roots. But to be concerned for people – to take your own faith convictions so seriously as to flout the authorities to their very faces, and even to symbolically close down activity in the temple???

“Some of the prophets had tried that same sort of things centuries ago, Jeremiah among them. Everyone knows what happened to him! But that was centuries ago."

“What Jesus did was unreal: and to do it without any power backing was idealism gone mad! Not that violence would have achieved much anyway – the two guerrillas crucified with him made that clear enough! He should have just kept quiet! or stayed up in Galilee, out of reach of the power of the Sanhedrin....

If they were thinking like that, no wonder that Jesus’ sudden appearance in their midst affected them the way it did! There he was: up to the same thing! His first words were: Peace be with you! It was Jesus alright - the wounds were there in his hands and his feet; he ate with them.

What did it all mean?

If God had raised him from death, it could only mean that he had been right all along, that he had read the mind of God accurately. It meant that the fact that the religious system of Israel (and the military system of Rome) had oppressed and marginalised people, did matter enormously to God.

It meant that people mattered to God: what people did to each other; whether people interacted with respect, with justice and compassion touched into the very heart of God!

Having wished them peace, having enveloped them in his peace, Jesus went on: they were to proclaim forgiveness of sins to all the nations.

Forgiveness of sins... the world’s sins - those destructive things people and nations do to each other.

What does forgiveness involve? Forgiveness happens as love replaces self-interest; as justice replaces national interest; and as welcome and acceptance replace revenge, unwelcome and exclusive privilege.

But, as Jesus made clear, the necessary accompaniment is repentance. That’s where it becomes personal. We are his disciples, too. The mission continues through us.

We are to proclaim that. We are to give hope; to show what hope involves in practice; and to live it first ourselves.

Do the nations want to hear it? our own nation included? Not necessarily, indeed, hardly likely, but that makes no difference. Did Jesus expect the chief priests to listen to him?

Do the death and resurrection of Jesus throw any light on: how we deal with the Solomon Islands and the rest of the South Pacific nations? how we respond to the chronic poverty of so many of the people of our world? what we do with our uranium supplies? how we respond to the urgent issue of global warming?

Repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, and continuing to the ends of the earth into the twenty-first century. If not by us disciples, then by whom?

Do we feel a bit like the first disciples that Easter night? alarm, fright, agitated, doubting, unbelieving in joy, dumbfounded?

Homily 2 - 2009

Today's First Reading from the Acts of Apostles got me thinking.

Just to get the scene: The apostles Peter and John had just cured a lame man at the Temple in Jerusalem. The man they had cured had then headed off, jumping and leaping for all he was worth, in and out of the Temple porticoes.

Not surprisingly, a crowd gathered; and Peter took the opportunity to explain what had happened and why. He said it was through the power of Jesus that the fellow was healed... Jesus, who was dead and buried, was no longer dead and buried, but risen and wonderfully alive and active through his disciples.

Then the threw the book at them:

The same Jesus you handed over, and then disowned in the presence of Pilate – after Pilate had decided to release him. It was you who accused the Holy One, the Just One, you who demanded the reprieve of a murderer while you killed the prince of life ...

But then he went on to say:

Brothers (interesting?),neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing...

You didn't realise what you were really doing. You made a terrible mistake then, but it's not too late to change your minds. You are not caught in your sin.Jesus, in fact, would love, still, to save you.

But to enjoy salvation, you have to change your whole sense of God and of what God is like. You've got to let God love you, and let his love change your whole mindset, and your behaviour - how you see and relate to each other, and to others in general.

You must repent and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out.

Peter said that they didn't really realise what they were doing. I think he could also have said that they also didn't know why they did it. Why did they shout out for Jesus' death? Why were they complicit in his murder? I wonder if they knew.

Why the Reading got me thinking was because of what I had seen and heard on the news in recent days. Peter was direct in his criticism of the people's actions. But he didn't say that he hoped they would rot in hell.

We have heard that judgment passed a couple of times recently: about Indonesian people smugglers, before that, about possible Black Saturday arsonists, and, months ago, about the Bali bombers.

What makes political leaders express such judgments? What makes so many people agree with them? Why do they do it?

Well, history... and literature... and theology seem to show us that, when societies are under pressure, or their leaders insecure, particularly when their own consciences feel vaguely guilty, we look for scapegoats, whom we label evil.

Finding a scapegoat has an incredible power to unite us at a certain level, and to enable us even to feel virtuous by comparison. It seems to quieten our consciences, and distracts us from facing up to our own evil and making the difficult decisions for genuine change and growth.

We need a Peter to lead us to realise what we are really doing - to name our sin. We need a Peter to lead us to realise why we go along with what we often vaguely feel uneasy about.

We are protective of our boundaries. One of the reasons why Jesus was eliminated was because he did away with boundaries. In fact, he wanted us to remember him as the one who respected everyone, and who was prepared to welcome anyone, simply because he knew that his Father loved everyone and was prepared to forgive anything.

Jesus said that he would be particularly present with us whenever we gathered together to share a meal in memory of him, where all would know that we're sinners and where all would be welcome.

Let's move into our Eucharist!

Homily 3 - 2012

I remember in the old days when visiting the hospital how some people would want to show me the incisions resulting from their surgery. I am not sure people do that these days: with the advances made over the years in surgical techniques, the incisions are usually so small they are hardly worth showing to anyone.

What was the risen Jesus up to in showing his hands and his feet to the alarmed and frightened disciples? Was it simply to prove that he was real, that he had indeed risen or perhaps something more … ?

I think it might have been to show the connection between his death and his resurrection, between his historical experience and his now risen state. He carried the wounds of his death with him - into eternity. Those wounds were the concrete illustration of that death that he had endured as the price of his deliberate commitment in love to the project of the world's salvation.

That love in the face of torture and death had shaped Jesus … the Jesus who was raised and who lives now into eternity. Those wounds will be with him forever.

Likewise the responses that we make to the experiences that come our way during life shape the persons we are now and how we shall continue to be into eternity. We bring with us, as it were, the wounds that give testimony to the choices we make and the persons we become.

Every source of suffering across our lives provides the opportunity to somehow respond, to choose, and, in the process to shape ourselves now and into eternity.

Jesus suffered rejection, abandonment, hatred, torture and death.

He could have lost hope, become bitter, refused to forgive – and each of those responses would have shaped who he was becoming. But he chose to trust, to continue loving those who hurt him, and to forgive.

Jesus' first words to his terrified disciples who had denied and abandoned him in his moment of need was simply "Peace be with you!" He chose to meet hostility with forgiveness.

In the process, as the Epistle to the Hebrews put it, he became perfect through suffering.

Personally, I live a pretty charmed life. I don't suffer much. I have very few specific hurts to forgive. What gets at me is more diffused and on-going. It's not personal.

What hurt me are the attitudes and actions of certain people, often those in positions of authority, especially in the Church but also in the civic arena. Simply, I disagree with them, as they, no doubt, disagree with me.

How to respond? I can become hostile, recklessly critical, passively aggressive, cynical, withdrawn … or I can try to live peacefully with difference, to respect those I disagree with, to relate responsibly as adult to adult, to work for change where I can, to acknowledge and to forgive the hurt that I feel.

The choice is important, because it shapes the kind of person I am and the person I shall be into eternity.

Will the wounds that I bring into eternity witness to love and to trust … or to opportunities missed, and to resentment and bitterness?

Some of you, I don't doubt, have profoundly deep and personal hurts to cope with. One way or other, how you choose to respond will shape the person you are now and the person you will be in eternity.

We struggle and we don't always succeed. Perhaps, success is not the issue, but rather what, deep down, we really want – despite our reluctance, our confusion, our weakness, and the cost involved.

In this Eucharist today, as we encounter once more the risen Jesus, may we each hear him say to us in our brokenness: Peace be with you!

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.

Homily 5 - 2018

There was a lovely old lady in a parish where I was stationed many long years ago who was a great pray-er. Every Sunday morning I used to go over the church to open the door early, and she would be standing on the front steps, often in quite cold weather, waiting to get in. So the next Sunday I would go over earlier to open up. And there she would be. She would never complain. I am not sure if I ever beat her and got there first. Anyhow, she would go in and pray her heart out for the hour or so remaining before Mass began. Eventually, the years caught up with her, and she was given only a short time to live. I went round to her home to visit her – and there she lay, scared of dying. She was frightened of meeting God. I felt so sad. I wondered to myself, who was the God she had been praying to so faithfully all those years. Essentially, she anticipated meeting a ruthless, judging God. How come? I think that that was the God she had been taught, taught by an homogenized combination of parents and teachers, and ultimately us priests – not maliciously, but very effectively, all the same.

Why did we not hear? The Gospel message is clear. It shows us not the ruthless, meticulous, condemning judge – but God the forgiver. I think we can be so mesmerised by the familiar, that we become unable to hear, unable to observe how our insights into loving and relationships change over time. Children cannot get it. For them everything is arbitrary; and mum and dad often are inconsistent, sometimes unloving; but even when not, young children cannot understand. As they grow older, their insights into loving and relationships are challenged and change, until, with adulthood, and, for most, marriage and parenthood, they find themselves able, wanting to give themselves totally, unselfishly, in love, able to love unconditionally, selectively perhaps and not consistently, but when at their best.

Did you hear this morning how Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to understand that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed to all the nations, to everyone? In order to proclaim it, disciples themselves need to repent, to think as adults, to grow up and to learn to trust that God is a forgiving God – because nothing changes, sadly, in our relationships until we learn to trust, to believe, to love. Mistakes are what we learn from. Sin obviously presents no big problem for God. The only thing that stymies God is denying our sinfulness.

Look at Jesus! Peace be with you! – the first thing said by the risen Jesus to that band of guilty former friends who had abandoned him in abysmal, crass, blatantly self-absorbed fear.

What does that say about Jesus? How could he say that if it were not where he was at? if he were not totally at peace himself? And how could be at peace with them unless he loved them? How could he love them unless his love was unconditional? How could he love unconditionally unless he had grown up, and learnt that that is the way love is, love at its best. And how did he learn that this is the way love is?

What do you think? I think that we learn love by learning to trust that we are loved; by practising to trust another, and then to entrust ourselves to that other, in time reciprocating their love; through observing, reflecting on experience, often suffering. It can be hard. I think unconditionally loving, forgiving, was part of the struggle, agony, Jesus went through in Gethsemane.

Repentance embraces all that – seeing differently, growing up, becoming consistent, learning to trust, risking love. This is the message that we are to proclaim: the forgiving Christ, the revelation of God the forgiver. It is a message with little credibility until we learn to live it ourselves.

“Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you!’”

Homily 6 - 2021 

Here we are, on the eve of the first day of the week, assembled, like the first disciples, to break bread together. We may even be hoping that our hearts will “burn within us” as we invite Jesus to break open the word for us.

However, though I have no difficulty believing the truth of Jesus’ resurrection, I often find difficulty in knowing what to say when it comes to the homilies every year at Easter — a time that I expect to be the easiest of all. Often enough, nothing particularly seems to grab me and enthuse me. It is not that I do not believe it. In fact, I think it might be that I do believe it so much that it has become second nature to me and nothing jumps off the page any more.

I feel anything but like the two disciples who encountered Jesus on the way to Emmaus, and who couldn’t get back to Jerusalem fast enough to tell the other disciples. Or like Peter in today’s First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles. He was irrepressible — prepared to take on, if only it were possible, the whole population of Jerusalem. For them it was all new. They felt wonderful.

I’ve heard it before. I know it is wonderful; it still directs my whole life — but I no longer feel it. A couple of lines from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins come to my mind that give me heart:

… sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

I easily relate to “plodding”. In my mind’s eye, I readily conjure up a charred log at the edge of an evening camp-fire, rolling over, a few smouldering coals falling from it and suddenly bursting into a momentary gold-vermilion flame — unexpected, and beautiful.

My present feeling is like the “blue-bleak embers”, virtually unnoticed, but having still the potential, beyond my control to “gash gold-vermilion”.

I do draw a bit of heart from the last lines of this evening’s Second Reading, taken from a letter of St John, the author also of the better-known Gospel. He wrote, “When anyone does obey what God has said, God’s love comes to perfection in them.” I may have mentioned to you on some earlier occasion how the word “obey” in the Scriptures means more than our current English word conveys. It involves seeking, wanting, to explore the inner heart of the one giving the command, the reasons why they make their command, what they value and why — so that we can accede to their wish freely and even joyfully.

What John was saying is that the effort on our part to “obey” God [to get inside God, as it were, to discover God’s ways of seeing things and what God values and why], allows God’s love, over time, to become more and more our love. “God’s love comes to perfection in us”. That, I think, has little to do with feelings, but everything to do with faith and trust and determination. It is the reason why I pray as I do.

Not long ago, the Prince of Wales quoted some lines from another poem of Hopkins, referring to the alternating life-experiences of dark and dawn.

… There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs —
because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I think that the knowledge of those “dearest freshness deep down things” is what keeps us going when life seems boring, dull and pointless— and all we can do is “plod” along. To Hopkins mind, it is all the work of God’s “Holy Ghost”, our “God of surprises”.