3rd Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

Jesus seems to have got people together right from the start: in today’s Gospel, Peter, Andrew, James, John, and later, others.  When the Church got under way after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the disciples who survived generally were not the lone rangers but the ones who grouped together.  Even Paul, when he went round on his evangelising missions, didn’t travel alone.  He invariably had someone else with him, and as soon as they propped, they began looking for contacts, sometimes to stay with, certainly to have somewhere convenient to meet.

When they got together, they relived the Lord’s Last Supper – a welcome meal of friends, of people open to each other and accepting of each other on the basis of their shared faith and hope in Jesus.  On the occasion of their gathering, they also re-read the Jewish scriptures, searching them for some echo of Jesus, they talked over what they had been told about Jesus and what that meant for them in their daily lives; and they prayed together.  What can be learnt from that? If we are to survive, we need each other; we need to get together regularly.  Unfortunately, lone ranger Catholics don’t last for long.

The message of the Kingdom in not about how to live as a hermit, but how to grow in love supported by others who share the same vision in the midst of the people who make up our world.  It is about how to come to see people as possible to love, and as in fact important to love, whatever their attitudes towards us, (and some of them persecuted or ridiculed or certainly misunderstood the first disciples)

Ultimately that is what conversion is about.  But to want to love, to succeed in loving, we need a firm conviction of why to love.  Why try? Why bother? One answer is perhaps that it is only by loving that we become the person whom we were made to be.  Until we are that, we are not truly at peace.  Another answer, and perhaps equally important, is that people are meant to be loved, because, like us, they are loved fiercely by God.  I think we also need to know that it is possible.  Jesus himself is proof of that.  The more we know him, the more we share his Spirit, the more convinced we become.

So: Change! Grow! Set free that capacity to love - our own and each other’s!  A new world, a better world, is possible!  Or, as Jesus said, The Kingdom of God is close at hand.  Repent, and believe the Good News!