6th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

I gather that there are about 90 to 100,000 abortions in Australia each year.  Multiply that by 25 - roughly the year’s of any one woman’s fertility - and that would amount to about 2 ? million.  Given that women are about half the population, it would seem that about 1 in 4 women in our nation have an abortion sometime in their lives.  Why are so many women open to abortion, even if reluctantly? Why do so many of their male partners agree, perhaps even insist? While we are at it, we might also ask: Why are so many men open to war, even reluctantly? Why are so many women prepared to support them?  Why do so many, men and women, in the Western World allow so many people – babies, children and adults – in developing nations to die unnecessarily, rather than change their lifestyles? Answers to all those questions are many and varied.  Apparently few people see human persons, human life, human dignity, as really non-negotiable.

It wasn’t the case with Jesus.  As we saw in today’s gospel, he reached out with compassion to those whom sickness or cultural taboos prevented from living with dignity.  He challenged the power elites.  He tried to change the culture.  He sought to alert people to their own, and everyone else’s, innate dignity as loved and created by God.

Getting back to abortion, seeing that it’s in the air at the moment.  The recent Senate vote was not really unexpected.  Politicians largely reflect the values of their society.  Most are themselves products of the culture and think and react like most other people, like the rest of their electorate.  Some are not game to be different.  Sometimes, perhaps, they can be successfully pressured, or persuaded, or informed of the thinking of sections of their electorate.

So we’re back to where Jesus was.  He couldn’t persuade the power brokers to change.  We don’t change the power brokers, either.  What’s left? Change the electorate? That’s what Jesus tried to do.  We echo his call to conversion.  Will it work? With Jesus, it didn’t in the short term.  In the long term? How long is long?

How do we try? For starters, we need people to be ready to listen to us and to take us seriously.   For that we need to be seen to be different, attractively different.  (I wonder if we are seen that way.)  Are we people who obviously live differently? love life? love people? respect dignity? work for dignity? work for justice for the oppressed?  Pope Benedict recently asked precisely those questions.  If we would like others to listen to us, are we prepared to listen to others? really listen to their hearts?

Why do so many seek abortions?  Is the huge number not really surprising given the casualisation of sexuality in a large section of society? Can we show a better way to live life sexually? to love life richly?

Crowds were impressed at the way Jesus taught with authority – not that he had a Ph D nor that he had a PR firm advertising that he was Son of God.  People were simply attracted to him, even those who weren’t sick.  Well, they killed him in the end, and he let it happen because he wouldn’t agree to stop loving.  Interesting.... because his death is precisely what strikes us about him and attracts us to him.

We have a long way to go, but at least we know the way.  He is the way, the truth and the life – as we all acclaim.