3rd Sunday Year B

See Commentary on Mark 1:14-20 in Mark 1:14-15 & Mark 1:16-20


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!


Homily 2 - 2009

Today's Second Reading from St Paul's Letter to the Corinthians can seem somewhat off-putting, certainly on first hearing.  Essentially, Paul was asking his readers to keep their lives in perspective - but he based his sense of that perspective on an incorrect assumption.  Paul believed that, as the Second Reading put it, the world as we know it is passing away - our time is growing short.  He expected Christ to return to the world at any moment.  There is nothing like the prospect of imminent death to sort out priorities, and to put a different complexion on the things we value.

Yet, though we don't share Paul's assumption about the return of Christ, there is still a point in reviewing our priorities - and the beginning of a New Year is not a bad time to do so.  Time is short.  We're always complaining that there's not enough time for the things we plan to do or that others expect of us.  And our energies also are limited.  Even if we had the  time, we don't always have the energy to do the things we plan to do or that others expect of us.

How often do we see people, sometimes friends, who get so engrossed in their work or their careers that they don't have  time or energy to nourish their relationships with spouse or children? How often do students get so carried away with boy-friend or girl-friend that their studies are seriously affected? How many people honestly believe that they have neither time nor energy resources to give to meditation or reflection which they need to cultivate their spirit? How many get so caught up having what thy would call “a good time” that they have neither the time nor the energy to exercise and to take due care of their physical health? We could go on...

People can find themselves so pressured that they feel  it impossible even to give the time they  need to examine their lives and get them into perspective.  It was that sort of concern - to keep life in due balance - that was the basic issue behind Paul's comments in today's Reading.  Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a crisis to get people to look at their lives.

In our Judeo-Christian tradition, we have  the wonderful institution of the Sabbath Day - the  weekly opportunity to deliberately build into our lives, once each week, a day of leisure.  The Jews connected the origin of the Sabbath to their founding experience of former slavery.  Once liberated by God, they would never again let themselves be enslaved - especially by themselves.

It's a sad commentary on our modern world that, for all our labour- and time-saving devices, so many people seem to connect their self-esteem - their sense of their own worth - to how busy they are.  As the New Year gets under way, I suggest that we all look hard at ourselves and our life-styles, truly sort out our priorities and bring some adequate, and life-giving, order into our lives.  We all need our Sabbath.


Homily 3 - 2012

Jesus is on the move in today's Gospel of Mark.  He had, not long before, chosen to be baptised, deliberately accepting his solidarity with sin-scarred humanity; he had heard the gentle voice revealing him to be Beloved of God, indeed, Son of God.  Immediately following that, Mark had Jesus alone in the wilderness for six  long weeks, engaging with and mastering his own inner demons.

At last, Jesus embarked on his mission, spreading the word throughout Galilee: The time has come.  The Kingdom of God is close at hand; and urging people to change radically their familiar ways of seeing and evaluating life, to believe and to live out what he said was truly Good News.  Immediately Jesus began to form around him a nucleus of followers who were attracted to his vision and eager to be involved in his project.  The Kingdom of God … something radically new, and given the kingdom they were already experiencing, a profoundly different counter-culture.  But Mark's Gospel did not spell out immediately the determining features of that counter-culture. 

We find a hint of it, surprisingly, in today's First Reading, the quaint, perhaps puzzling, story of the prophet Jonah.  Jonah is presented as a prophet, called to preach repentance, who, himself, miserably failed to repent.  Jonah remained, throughout the whole story, stuck in his own self-righteousness and his hostile, judgmental stance towards foreigners; tenaciously clinging to his sense of God as a vengeful God.  The surprising thing is that the author of the story depicted God as the one who repented: God relented and did not inflict on them the disaster which he had threatened…  A God changing from violent hostility to generous mercy; from a "God-on-our-side" to a God open to the world.

As we continue to reflect on the Gospel of Mark during this Year B, we shall find that the God exemplified in the life of Jesus and proclaimed in his teaching is a God in whom there is no hostility, only anxious care – a God no longer the protector of the self-righteous but the God who reaches out to those marginalised by prevailing social  and religious judgmentalism, and particularly, and perhaps shockingly, to sinners.

It might be helpful to notice how Paul, in today's Second Reading, has run with the vision of life in the Kingdom.  With the resurrection of Jesus, [and the possibility opened to everyone to share somehow in it], disciples began to see life no longer as a cyclical process of eternal return, leading nowhere, but as heading for a definitive fulfillment.  Human history is leading somewhere.  Time is not limitless; it will end.  As Paul wrote: Our time is growing short … the world as we know it is passing away.

Life as we know it is not all that there is.  There's more to life.  What is so desperately important in a world heading nowhere becomes relative.  We can sit lightly with life.  Paul teased out some of the consequences: Contrary to the patriarchal attitudes of his day, wives would no longer be useful simply for bearing male heirs and continuing the bloodline, but seen for the persons they were - no longer owned, but related to and loved.

The joys and sorrows of life are not everything, however intensely felt at the time.  No longer desperately dramatic, they become opportunities to respond to and through which to grow.  In this new way of understanding history, material things lose their importance.  They are there to be respected, cultivated and used appropriately, but no longer carry the impossible expectation of filling the emptiness of human hearts [that can be filled only by the creating, loving God].  

Like Peter and Andrew, James and John, we have been sent to a world still scarred by violence – from the domestic to the international levels, and everywhere in between – a world where people are not seen as equal partners, as brothers and sisters, but feared, excluded, kept at arm's length or exploited.  We have been sent into a world where the unchecked greed of financial marketers has driven, and threatens to drive still more millions, into austerity or poverty.  We have been sent into a world where people's wealth or life-style are seen to determine their self-esteem and often define their very identity. 

We ourselves are by no means totally free from the values of our prevailing culture.  … Nor were Peter and Andrew, James and John.  They failed often enough.  We can't afford to be like Jonah – blind to our own self-righteousness.  But as we struggle to live lightly in this world [that no longer has to be all that there is], we can attract others to our vision and together reach out to the possibilities of life in the Kingdom of God.


Homily 4 - 2015

The First Reading today gave us only a brief extract from the story of Jonah. The story is a sort of parable, told by an unidentified author – a humorous story, but one whose punchline was anything but humourous.

You know the main thrust of the story. An old-time prophet, Jonah, is commanded by God to preach doom to Israel’s brutal enemy, the Assyrians. Jonah does the opposite. He heads off, by sea, to the far end of the earth. But he does not get far. God sends a cyclone, and the boat goes nowhere. The storm gets worse. The superstitious pagan sailors assume that some god or other is angry. So they all pray like anything, but it does not work. God must be upset about someone on board. So they toss up to find out – and Jonah loses the toss.  Reluctantly they toss him overboard – and the storm stops immediately. Lucky for Jonah, a whale is passing by with its mouth open just at the moment that Jonah hits the water; and it swallows him alive.  Three days later, unable to digest him, the whale vomits Jonah out onto dry land, not all that far from Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. God tells Jonah to get moving. So he does. He goes off and preaches his threat of pending disaster. He then moves away a bit, makes a patchy shelter for himself from the sun, and sits hoping to see the fireworks. There are none. The Assyrians take the message seriously and reform. Jonah goes mad at God. All along he knew in his heart that God would be a “softie” and would change his mind.  And now these hated national enemies of Israel would be saved – and that was the last thing he wanted. God responded by giving him a short homily. And that was the end of the story.

The point of the story was to stir the listeners’ interest and then to leave them up in the air, wondering. What was the point? The author was addressing Jewish exiles recently returned to Israel from Babylon - many of them still hostile to their former captors, crooked on the people they found living now in their country, on their lands; and feeling very insecure. Most of them reacted, as frightened people usually do, by safeguarding their identity by drawing the boundaries ever more clearly. They very definitely wanted a “God on their side”, and not only that, but a “God against the others”.

It sounds not unlike a “crusade against the axis of evil”, the “war against terror”. Whatever the justification for due vigilance and concern about necessary safeguards in the world at the moment, there is always the danger of extending rejection of violent fundamentalist extremism to the non-violent and guiltless mainstream.

Today’s Gospel introduced Jesus’ early mission with his proclaiming “the Good News of God”. What is the “Good News of God”? that God will sort out our enemies eventually? In fact, Jesus will go on to reveal a God not unlike the one whom Jonah was crooked on - a God who “causes the sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and the rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike”. Indeed, precisely in that context, Jesus would add, “Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful”. 

On a more personal note, how would you feel when you got to heaven if you found someone you strongly dislike, someone whose attitudes and actions you deeply disapprove of, already there, and perhaps even slightly higher than you? If we could not enthusiastically rejoice, in fact we would not be in heaven. We would still be in Purgatory. We shall experience heaven only when we have shed the last vestige of self-preoccupation and self-importance, and have learnt to love everyone just as God does – totally, without reservation or conditions, and with vibrant enthusiasm.

The parable about Jonah was on to something – the Good News of God!


 Homily 5 - 2018

As I get older, I seem to get more and more out of Mark’s succinct summary of Jesus’ message: “The Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent. And believe the good news.” When we are dealing with “God things”, words are never enough. But if we are to share our insights, we need them. However, it is important to realise even then that we never quite “get it”, even if getting closer. Like Mary, we need to keep pondering.

By the way he related to people, as well as by so much of what he said, Jesus made it increasingly clear that the God of the Kingdom he preached is a God who loves. Full stop! The catch is, we never stop discovering what love means - and we do that only by growing and changing. That need never stop. But in order to be convinced that this Kingdom of this loving God is “close at hand”, we have to deliberately develop the habit, and the skill, to see the presence of that loving God in everything that is going on in our world and in our personal lives. Where is God in this situation? What is God offering in that? or through that? That is the “pondering” bit. That is the “good news” bit. Then we need to believe it. And we have to be careful that we do not kid ourselves here. When Jesus uses the word “believe”, he means trust; and then entrust ourselves.

Surprisingly, you would think it would be easy to trust God’s love. That is not my experience. I still like to feel I have some control of things - at least a bit. Though I know in my heart that love – the love that matters anyway – is unconditional, I find if I look more closely, that I like to think that I deserve God’s love a bit, because of the way I have performed, or tried to perform.

Jesus talked not just about his loving God, but the Kingdom of God. The idea of God’s Kingdom was not new to his contemporaries; but in the course of his short ministry he would radically redefine kingship and priesthood and power – virtually beyond recognition. The Kingdom was the focus of his life and clearly had to do with life in this world. Yet, it is not enough that God never stops loving. We need to believe “the Good News”. We need to get the message and align our lives accordingly. Doing so relativises everything and eliminates all addictions [as St Paul was saying in this morning’s Second Reading]. To the extent we do, we find also that our inner peace, joy and thankfulness deepen and keep pace with it.

That leaves “Repent”. And that notoriously translated word refers to the necessary change that ensures that we have eyes that see, ears that hear, hearts that understand - or whatever is needed to shake us up and move us on from what we take for granted, somehow. The people of Jesus’ time either did not wake up to the radical change he was introducing; or they did only too well. Some of them refused to budge. The power-brokers assassinated him.

The Royal Commission has recently challenged the Church to effect a change in culture. It has asked for greater accountability on the part of bishops and priests, and the elimination of what is often seen as ingrained attitudes and structures of patriarchy and clericalism. Specifically it has requested that the Church re-examine how women can have a stronger formal voice in determining Church policy. Effectively the Commission is asking the Church here in Australia to Repent. As in Jesus’ day, the problem is to see the problem! How do we get eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand? It cannot be just a cosmetic job – a change of structures or a set of rules, without genuine change of heart.

We have been given our homework for the years ahead!


 Homily 6 - 2021

As far as I can remember, I have never in all my life preached on the Book of Jonah — but I want to today. It is a quite short book and takes no time to read — less than three pages in my bible. It does not seriously pretend to be history. Rather, it is a good-natured short-story, with a clear moral — though many of us know little more about it than Jonah’s adventure with the whale.

The gist of the story is that God sent Jonah to the king and people of the distant capital of the oppressive Assyrian empire, Nineveh, with the mission to preach their destruction unless they radically changed their destructive ways. Jonah had no desire to go, because he knew that God was “a God of tenderness and compassion”, as he put it, and would pardon the nation if they did repent. Jonah preferred to tell them nothing. As the cruel enemies of his own people, he wanted them to be destroyed. So he caught a ship and headed off to go as far as he could in the opposite direction. God arranged a storm at sea to happen. Jonah was thrown overboard; and an accommodating whale swallowed him, only beach itself on dry land three days later and vomit him out. God sternly repeated his commission.

Jonah was in a fix. But by now he was frightened of God, so he went to Nineveh and reluctantly preached his message — one sentence, eleven words, as we heard in today’s First Reading: “Only forty days more and Nineveh is going to be destroyed”. True enough, the king took the message seriously, ordered everyone and everything to do penance. And God did relent — just as Jonah had feared.

In some ways, Jonah’s story reminds me of the pandemic. There are a number of people resisting cooperation, who are unwilling to sacrifice their freedoms and familiar comforts, even if not sticking to the restrictions unnecessarily puts themselves and others at risk of infection and consequent death. This creates problems for civic leaders. The only way for them to satisfy the sceptics would be to do nothing, or too little — as has happened in the United States, England and elsewhere. Yet the more successful the inconvenient imposition of quarantine, lockdowns, closed borders, etc. has been [as here in Australia], the harder it has been to convince the sceptics that the dangers are real, and dangerously so.

And now comes the issue of the vaccines. The longer the use of a vaccine is delayed, the longer people remain in danger of infection from this present virus and further mutations that could develop. The sooner the vaccines can be brought into operation, and the more general their use, the safer the whole community will become. Whether we like it or not, we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. To take the vaccine is our responsibility, not only for our own life and health, but for the health and lives of others.

For that reason, Pope Francis, speaking from his experience in Italy [which has been significantly different from ours], has clearly said that we have a moral responsibility, for our sake and for the sake of our world, to consider getting vaccinated, and as quickly as possible. Both he and Pope Benedict have already publicly done so, hoping their example might encourage others.

May the story of Jonah, the classical anti-hero, warn us it's dangerous to mess with God!


 

Homily 7 - 2024

What a great Gospel passage this evening! Let’s take it slowly, and see how far we get!

“After John had been arrested, Jesus went into Galilee…”. Not exactly a safe world for him, and perhaps not for the population in general. Galilee was an occupied country, administered by a paranoid puppet-king, Herod. Even the popular figure, John the Baptist, had just been arrested and would soon be executed. This was the atmosphere in which Jesus chose to work.

“There (Jesus) proclaimed the Good News from God.” “proclaimed the news..” Something was stirring; something was about to happen — and, as far as Jesus was concerned, it was “Good News”.

“‘The time has come’” he said. The past is past. Things are changing “‘and the kingdom of God is close at hand’”. Can we feel his excitement? And he was the one charged by God his Father to start things moving. This Kingdom of God would be quite different from anything they ever experienced, perhaps even could imagine. But it is something essentially to be experienced, not so much to be learnt.

But what it will involve would be change on their part. Their cooperation would be necessary. They were to be part of it, not on-lookers, not free-loaders, not students. What the Kingdom of God would involve on their part would be that they “Repent, and believe the Good News”. By “repent” he meant change — to change, to let go of how they have looked at life so far, and to adjust their behaviour accordingly. And by “believe the Good News”, he meant, not to learn it and to accept it, but something much more personally involving: to trust it, to recognise its “good news” dimension, to radically re-adjust their lives accordingly.

Since Jesus’ is himself an essential agent of the Kingdom, and his presence an indispensable constituent of the Kingdom, to “believe the Good News” involved learning to trust him and to entrust themselves to him.

Immediately, that was precisely what He asked Peter and Andrew, James and John, He invited them, perhaps even challenged them to do: “He called them at once … (and) they went after him”. For them, personal relationship with Jesus would be what the Kingdom was about, and what would make the Kingdom Good News.

And here we are: Catholics, at Mass, in Hamilton, in 2024. Are our numbers growing less? As a community, a Church, we are not exactly “the flavour of the month”. Who is to blame? Is anyone to blame? Do we want to blame? I suppose blaming others relieves the pressure on ourselves a bit. That hardly sets us up effectively to “proclaim the Goods News”.

When Jesus challenges people to “Repent, to believe the Good news”, does he see the change required on our part to be a “one-off” decision or a constant “way of life”? Do we like changing? Are we constantly on the look-out for how we can change for the better?

Why did Jesus challenge the disciples to “follow him”, “to go after him”, if not because He wanted them to keep on getting to know him, and especially to come to love him, to see what burned in his heart, how he faced life and the ever new challenges that confronted him, to hear what he had to say to them, to discover how important each one of them was to him, how much they mattered to him.

Have we in the Church continually prized, prioritised and worked on our personal relationship with Jesus? We know enough about our faith. We have got our act reasonably together. How do things stand with Jesus? Admiration, worship even, are perhaps not enough. Could we work more on the “heart to heart” relationship?
Surely we want to?