5th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

Poverty was endemic in the rural Galilee of Jesus’ day. And as happens everywhere that you get endemic poverty, you get endemic sickness and a variety of disabilities. In the “Holy” Land of Jesus’ day, sickness and disability were assumed to be caused by transgression of some kind, whether conscious or unconscious. It resulted in the sick being regarded as sinners and categorised as unclean. They were pushed to the edges of respectable law-abiding society – along with prostitutes and tax-collectors. Right at the bottom of the pile were those diagnosed as possessed by demons.

Today’s Gospel passage said of Jesus, He cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another; and he also cast out many devils… Later in the narrative, it will comment that he was criticised for eating and drinking with tax-collectors and sinners.

Jesus’ first response to their situation was to tackle their marginalisation and consequent feelings of worthlessness and insignificance. He reached out to them especially, and they responded to that immediately. He respected them. He touched them and let them touch him. To him they were not unclean. The Gospel asserts clearly that his engagement with them enabled them to shed their sickness and recover from their disabilities. He healed them.

However, he sought particularly to change the prevailing social mindset that was content to settle for the fact that some were in and some were out; some were respectable, some were sinners; some were clean, some were unclean. Societies need their distrusted, disliked, discriminated against and marginalised minorities. They need their scapegoats to carry the floating angers and hostilities of the respectable, of the “us”. In Jesus’ day, those scapegoats were the unclean, the sinners. Over the course of history, it has been the Jews; and in more recent times, the aborigines, the communists, or the latest wave of immigrants. And today?

It is interesting to observe how Jesus taught. He addressed both categories. To the poor, the non-violent and the despised he gave hope. In the Kingdom of God, he said, you shall have your fill; you shall inherit the land; you shall be comforted. But he directed greater attention to the unquestioning, the satisfied and the respectable – calling them to nothing less than conversion. He challenged the priority given to specialness, separateness, and purity. He called instead for engagement, for compassion, forgiveness and for love even of enemies. Rather than the judging, excluding, holy God, his God was the merciful, welcoming and life-giving God. He did not challenge the unclean and the marginalised minority to get their act together. Rather, he called for a change of heart in the self-satisfied majority.

In Australia today, might our society’s tendency to feel uneasy about or hostile to one minority or other, and to push them to the edges, be directed currently towards Muslims and the feared fundamentalists and even potential terrorists among them? 

Certainly their leaders must do their best to counter any tendencies towards mindless fundamentalism. But do we, the respected majority, contribute in our own way to any terrorist potential here in our midst? I read a recent comment in relation to the terrorist murder of the journalists of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo: “… if you are frustrated by an intense social and cultural isolation, growing up in a culture of rejection, in a suburban Parisian ghetto, angry at always being outsmarted by an arrogant, sneering secularism, then using murder to punish a godless world makes sense to you, [especially] if your religious belief alone gives you dignity and purpose”.

Rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press are to be respected. But societies are held together by responsibilities to the common good, that are guided in turn by wisdom and even common sense, motivated by respect, and expressed in genuine acts of welcome and generosity to those who feel otherwise excluded - certainly not in hate-based ridicule. The nature of the truly demonic is that it is unrecognised as such and taken as normal.