5th Sunday Year B
See Commentary on Mark 1:29-39 in Mark 1:29-31, Mark 1:32-34 & Mark 1:35-39
Homily 1 -2006
Next Friday or Saturday the Church observes the World Day of the Sick. This year it is being celebrated in Australia, in Adelaide, and one of the Curial Cardinal will be there. Whatever about that, today’s Gospel presents a beautiful cameo of the ministry of Jesus: That evening after sunset they brought to him all who were sick and those who were possessed by devils... He cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another, he also cast out many devils...
Widespread sickness, at least on a statistical basis, is often a factor of poverty. Many people in Jesus time faced poverty: agriculture was changing from small family farms to big landholdings owned by absentee landlords (like today’s banks).
The common diagnosis of possession by evil spirits was almost always a mis-diagnosis. People had no concept of emotional or mental illness and mistakenly lumped such sufferers under the heading of possessed.
Even with the more common sicknesses, little was known about their natural causes. Sickness was the result of someone else’s action: the evil-eye of envious neighbours, the punishing hand of God or the arbitrary behaviour of angels or devils. To be sick was not to become the object of society’s compassion but to be labelled sinner and condemned, sometimes ostracised, or to feel powerless and fearful before the superior power of witches, angels or demons. It meant being unable to work, to earn, to stay alive or to support a family. (And that sometimes meant either begging or starving.) Sickness was bad news!
Jesus didn’t just cure people, like an antibiotic might. He related to their feelings of fear, guilt and self-worthlessness. He related to the structural sin that kept them marginalised and poor. His healing touch reached right to their deepest core.
Against this background it is interesting to listen to today’s first reading, from the Book of Job. Is not life on earth nothing more than pressed service, time no better than hired drudgery? Like workers with no thought than their wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me. Lying in bed I wonder: When will it be day? Risen I think: How slowly evening comes! Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. My life is but a breath, my eyes will never again see joy. It reads like a classic case of depression.
Depression is not altogether unfamiliar in our current world, and frequent enough in rural communities, sometimes leading even to suicide. Winston Churchill suffered from depression and called it the Black Dog. Thank God there is a growing awareness in the community of the reality of the problem of depression, and along with that, of mental illness, too. There was a time when the Church would refuse Catholic burial to a person who committed suicide. Thank God we know better now, though there is still so much ignorance. Perhaps we could do more as a parish to know more about it.
It can be a medical condition, and therefore can be controlled medically. It can be an emotional condition that can be addressed as well. What is going on in a person’s world may be out of their control, but the crucial issue is not what is happening but how they view it and react to it and handle it. Here people can help each other; and professional help can be invaluable.
Many people certainly experience our present world as stressful. Stress is a condition that can be noticed, monitored and dealt with. One spin off of meditation can be stress-reduction. That is the main reason why some people in fact meditate. I see the purpose of meditation quite differently, but if it has beneficial side-effects, all the better.
The gospel today went on to say that after Jesus had been with the sick and suffering, he went off to a lonely place and prayed there. I certainly see prayer as part of the package deal of keeping life in perspective. In prayer we can touch into the mystery of Being, which we also know is love. We can slowly come really to believe it. We can surrender into mercy. We can find true inner peace.
Homily 2 – 2012
Today's Gospel presents us with a pretty busy Jesus with a pretty busy schedule: healing the mother of Peter's wife… then half the town's needy people, all drawing on him, until at last he gets to bed. The bit that catches my attention, though, is: Long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. Jesus found it necessary to stop working, to take time out [not to watch the telly] and to pray. Jesus felt the need to pray.
I sometimes feel that most people have been sold short when it comes to prayer. Over the 2000 years of its life, the Church has developed a precious tradition, a deep wisdom, around the issue of prayer. But we keep it a secret – as it were. Most people can say prayers or read them from a book; but, for a lot of people, that sort of praying, after a while, doesn't lead them anywhere, doesn't deepen their relationship with God.
Jesus prayed. How? The Gospel doesn't tell us. A pin-up of mine, a wise woman who lived in the 16th century, Teresa of Avila – a feisty Spanish woman – wrote a lot about the experience of prayer. In one spot she wrote: Prayer is nothing more than intimate friendly interaction and frequent solitary [one-to-one] conversation with the one whom we know loves us. I would think that that was what Jesus was up to: … intimate friendly interaction and one-to-one conversation with the God who loved him - the God he called "Abba" [which is how family members called their father]. That is not complicated.
The same Teresa wrote: We have only to find a quiet place where we can be alone and gaze upon him present within us. Gaze upon him … present within us ... God is within us. Depending on our sense of God, we can be wary, even scared, of that, or we can be wrapped – or somewhere in-between
People's days [for many of you, at least] are full. We consistently complain that there isn't time. I've known of priests who thought that way. With all due respect, and with perhaps some real exceptions, I think that that's nonsense. But to give time to being regularly with God calls for discipline, for a change in priorities, for letting go of something else, possibly worthwhile. And that's hard – changing our program, letting something important go, breaking free.
Some time back I read a book written by Mary McAleese, the recent President of Ireland. She also lectured in Law at Trinity College in Dublin. She would have been, probably, in her early forties. She had a husband and three growing children. She would meditate for two half-hours every day – not bad for a "youngish" mother, successful career woman and public identity.
Perhaps, in another age when the Catholic sub-culture was so strong, and so protective, personal prayer may not have been so crucial – though I'm not convinced of that. But, today, it seems to me, without a disciplined, helpful prayer life, without a real relationship with the real God, it's hard to just sit on the fence any longer. Almost inevitably, people, more and more people, fall off and finish up no longer connected in any real way with the believing community.
A catch is, if we have a go at prayer, at developing a real relationship with the real God, that it usually doesn't turn out the way we expect it. That can throw us. We can get disheartened. We can conclude that we're not really cut out for it … so, instead, we'll make our work our prayer. Early in the morning, well before dawn, [even] Jesus went off to be alone and prayed.
Because the experience can confuse us, because life can confuse and disappoint us, it can be helpful to have a talk, sometimes regularly, with someone walking the same journey towards the heart of God, someone more in touch than we are with the Church's wisdom. If you want to have a go, or to have a go again, or to have a more focussed go at what Teresa called gazing upon the one present within us, the one whom we know loves us, I'm happy personally to walk with anyone on the journey, as best I can. Feel free to ask me.
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.
Homily 4 - 2018
In the morning, long before dawn, Jesus got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there.
Most mornings, these days before dawn, I get up, too, and leave the house, and go off to Lake Hamilton for my daily constitutional. And sometimes, my thoughts, with a bit of help, turn to God. One morning this week, I began wondering what was Jesus’ sense of the one to whom he prayed; and what did his prayer involve.
My musings wandered around a bit, and I thought that, though we use the one word 'God', so many of us have widely different ideas of God. Some view God as implacable judge; some kill and torture in the name of God; some see God as the one who makes the rules, lots of them, and most of them forbidding the things we might otherwise enjoy. No wonder there are so many atheists, so many who can’t be bothered finding out more.
But then I mused on myself, and noticed that my sense of God had changed noticeably over the years, and is still being fine-tuned as I grow older. The Gospels state that Jesus grew in wisdom and age and grace, which is no surprise since, as the Epistle to the Hebrews notes, Jesus was like us in everything [but sin]. Did Jesus’ sense of God, then, develop as his capacity to integrate new experiences deepened and with it his ability to think with greater nuance and to handle complexity? Did his maturing intelligence raise new questions, new doubts – and contribute to his growing in wisdom?
My musings led me to think that we might all be better off if we gave up using the word God, when so often we are in fact talking about something we understand differently, and that with many of us, hopefully most of us, is still a work in progress. I think that most people, even atheists, suspect there is more to life than what we can see and feel, even than what we can think or imagine. Astrophysics, astronomy, quantum theory provide more questions than answers. Some people sort of satisfy their sense of the transcendent by putting a capital letter before certain words like Science, or Beauty, or Truth, or Love, or whatever – and in doing so align closely with what others simply, though not always helpfully, call God.
It was then that the old-time tune came into my head from the operetta, "Naughty Marietta", of many years back:
Ah! Sweet mystery of life at last I've found thee Ah! I know at last the secret of it all; All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning The burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that fall!
It might be better to substitute “'capital M' Mystery" for God. If we were to do that, we might keep searching more: we might even be prepared to search together; we might not fight so much; we might even be more humble, less dogmatic, and more open to grow – as was Jesus, and presumably Mary who had the habit of pondering in her heart.
The song went on to say:
For 'tis love, and love alone, the world is seeking, And 'tis love, and love alone, that can repay! 'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living For it is love alone that rules for aye!
Has anyone of us yet got to the bottom of the Mystery of Love, and found out all there is to know about it? And wasn’t it St John who wrote, God is love?
In the morning, long before dawn, Jesus got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. Jesus knew that the Mystery behind life was in fact personal. His own life became the fullest human expression of that Mystery that is personal. How blessed we are to know him, and to be still continually getting to know him better.
Homily 5 - 2021
Did you notice how, on three occasions in today’s short Gospel passage, Mark made reference to people suffering from diabolical possession? “They brought to him all who were sick and those who were possessed by devils”… “he cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another; he also cast out many devils” ... and then “he went all through Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out devils”. As we read the Gospels, people possessed by devils seem as common as people who were sick. There seem to be as many accounts of exorcism as there are of healing. That sounds extraordinary — and quite beyond our experience.
Some of the cases were probably common mis-diagnoses. People generally in those days knew much less about illness and its causes than we do today. Possession generally seemed to cover a whole spectrum of different cases — from highly colourful descriptions of evil or destructive behaviour, through simply uncharacteristic or culturally different behaviour, to obsessive or compulsive behaviour generally. In a few more heated discussions with some groups of Pharisees, Jesus himself was accused by them of being possessed; and in one encounter, he said that those opposing him had the devil for their father.
During the past week, the Victorian Parliament passed a Bill that outlaws recommending or using exorcism in attempts to change anyone’s sexual orientation. Some religious groups today obviously see any orientation other than heterosexuality as a possible case of diabolical possession.
Why was Jesus so concerned about issues of real or generally accepted cases of diabolical possession? Essentially because it was an assault on human freedom. For him, freedom was necessary for all genuine human life and human growth. He believed he was sent by the Father to redeem, or liberate, people from everything that served to reduce or destroy human dignity, and the freedom on which it is based.
He saw such reduction of freedom arising from within persons themselves in the shape of their personal addictions and compulsions, in their entrenched vices and habits, and in their illnesses both physical and mental,.
He also opposed external violence in all its forms, because it, too, disregarded or limited or inhibited the personal freedom of others. Especially he was alert to the power of cultures to undermine people’s genuine freedoms. Cultural influences are so ambivalent. They can blind people to genuine value; and even reinforce truly destructive behaviours.
Most of Jesus’ conflicts happened in the synagogues of Galilee or in the Temple in Jerusalem — much more there than by the sparkling lake or on the green hills. The synagogues and the Temple were the home-ground of the culture — and there criticism was strongest.
Over the months leading up to the American Presidential election, American culture came under constant scrutiny and our TV screens provided endless opportunity to see its strengths and its weaknesses. At times I felt truly frightened.
Recently I have become more aware of my own tendency to not listen to those with whom I disagree. I find myself distressed by the many politicians who simply speak in slogans or ridicule whatever an opposing party says or does — yet find myself behaving similarly. Generally I try to be calm. But touch my buttons and I begin to argue, arrogantly asserting my own opinions, and certainly not listening to the other with the view perhaps to learn something — but rather simply to hear something to contradict and attack.
My behaviour becomes uncharacteristic. I get carried away. I lose my freedom — I become another person, as it were, as though some hidden power has taken possession of me.
“Jesus went all through Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out devils.”
Homily 6 - 2024
We are still in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Mark is introducing his readers to the different elements that made up the public life of Jesus. Today we are alerted to the indispensable importance of prayer in the public ministry of Jesus: “In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house and went off to a lonely place and prayed there.”
Does that surprise us as perhaps unnecessary? or would we be surprised if he didn’t deliberately connect with his Father? Our attitude might depend on whether we tend to focus automatically more on the divine or the human nature of Jesus. Perhaps some of us even tend to consider Jesus as a kind of hybrid — quite different from ourselves; not as St Paul insisted: “like us in all things but sin”.
Jesus obviously saw prayer-contact with his Father as important. I think that it is important for us all. Last week, with the help of Google, I came across a quotation from St. Francis de Sales. He wrote: “Every Christian needs a half-hour of prayer each day, except when he is busy. Then he needs an hour.” [Excuse the exclusive language: he was a product of his time.]
A half-hour a day can sound a bit regimented — and perhaps it is. But our relationship with Jesus, or with God our Father [his Father], is somewhat unique. We can’t see Jesus. We can’t hear Jesus. Basically, our relationship is based on faith. But, in some ways, all decent relationships are based on faith. We can’t turn on our feelings at will — and words are only words. Ultimately we have to believe our partner.
I believe that Jesus is in me, and that I am in him [as we read in the Gospel of John]. It all flows more or less from there.
Christians like us have been praying for centuries — and many learnt a few helpful skills in the process. A fair number of them wrote about various ways of praying. It is fascinating. St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wrote some very helpful things. St Teresa of Avila also, St Francis de Sales [whom I mentioned earlier] … closer to our own day, St Therese of Lisieux. A number of more or less contemporary authors have applied much of this wisdom to praying in our time.
Personally, I have been fortunate to have read a fair bit of the current literature. Better still, over the years I have been blessed to have had access to a few very helpful, understanding mentors [or Spiritual Directors]. Time spent alone with God has become a cherished feature of my life.
When I was first ordained, I used to be chaplain to a number of young leaders in what was called then the “Young Christian Workers” Movement. Most of us younger priests were YCW chaplains, in those days. The Movement was based on a wonderful, practical, personally formative method that encouraged the leaders to be alert to their world, to bring the light of the Gospel to bear upon it, and to decide how they might introduce a bit more justice to our world, and a bit more respect and even love. In the process, so many of them developed a real, personal relationship to Jesus.
Then we seem to have become distracted, or the culture changed — or both. A few other things have happened over the years: Marriage Encounter, the Charismatic Renewal, Teams of Our Lady … that also did much to help the ordinary parishioner to get to know and to love Jesus more intimately.
But, as I said, we got too distracted — both priests and laity. As I look towards the future, I wonder… I hope … I pray that a prophet will turn up who can revitalise the Church once more…