6th Sunday Year B

See Commentary on Mark 1:40-45

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.

Homily 2 - 2012

In Jesus' day, leprosy was much more than a physical ailment.  Like all physical abnormalities in Jesus' day, leprosy was seen as a result of someone's sin – personal sin or family sin.  The affected person was automatically condemned as sinner.  Lepers were ejected from the community – from the family circle, and consequently from the possibility of earning a living.  By healing this leper, Jesus reinserted him into community

In our own culture and time, some would see AIDS as the equivalent of leprosy.  In lots of ways, the irrational fear, the strong distaste, even disgust, or instinctive awkwardness that people of Jesus' time felt towards lepers are not all that different from what many people today feel towards AIDS sufferers, and, for that matter, to homosexually oriented people in general.

Some people go so far as to see AIDS as God's punishment for sinful behaviour.  Attitudes to homosexuality may be changing in our world - but there is still a lot of confusion right along the spectrum of responses, from libertarian to hardline conservative.  The issue is topical at the moment because of the push in federal parliament to legislate in favour of gay marriage.

What I would like to do right now is to take off my teaching hat and simply to float a few thoughts to stimulate your own reflection.  I do this because I am not confident enough about what I think and feel myself on the issue.  I would expect that, in any normal congregation, some of those present would have a close family member who is homosexual.  Given the current cultural climate, the family members affected often struggle to accept the fact, are saddened by it and generally are inclined to keep it quiet.

Some people with a homosexual orientation choose to remain celibate.  Some don't - and become sexually active.  Current Church teaching is that all homosexual acts are morally wrong.  Does that mean that all homosexual people who act out their sexuality are sinners?  Not necessarily.  To personally sin, people need not only to do something wrong.  They need to know the wrongness and freely and deliberately choose that wrongness.  It would not surprise me that some homosexual persons might know that homosexual activity is wrong because the Church says it is; yet, for the life of them, cannot appreciate that wrongness [sort of know it "in their bones"], at least in their own particular case.

It's a bit like heterosexual spouses who know that artificial conception is wrong because the Church says it is, but can't themselves see that wrongness, certainly in their own situation.  Often, their experience of growth in mutual love, in their active caring for others, and even in their love of God, seem to confirm their stance.  Who knows what goes on in another person's conscience?

The issue before parliament is whether a committed homosexual union be regarded as marriage.  That raises the question of how a given culture understands marriage.  Traditionally, the term marriage has become restricted to the life-long, pledged and exclusive relationship between a man and a woman, geared to the possibility of producing children.  In the popular mind, that understanding has been under a lot of pressure.  The life-time and exclusive commitment is no longer legally required, even though the intention is usually expressed at the wedding.  The openness to children is becoming less important.  What has taken centre stage is the emotional relationship and the felt love between the couple.  It is this pared-down sense of marriage as simply the affective relationship of the couple that has led to the present question whether the couple even need to be heterosexual.

Some are asking if two homosexual people love each other as deeply as heterosexual couples, why can't their relationship be classed as marriage? My personal attitude is to direct my energies to strengthening marriages that embody the lifelong and exclusive loving union of a man and a woman, open to the natural procreation of children - rather than the continuing watering down of that ideal.  At the same time, I would think that a committed and genuinely loving relationship with one another is far preferable than a lifestyle of promiscuousness for the small percentage of the population who are not heterosexual and for whom the ideal of marriage is not possible, and who find a celibate lifestyle, in our current highly sexualized world, either unduly restrictive or virtually impossible.  Could the union be given, perhaps, some other title, other than marriage?

Homily 3 - 2015

Do you ever wonder why Catholic politicians, or Catholics who vote for them, presumably all good people, sometimes seem to be unconcerned about party policies that to others contravene important matters of conscience? Today’s Second Reading looks an inoffensive little passage. But it occurred to me during the week how deceptively relevant it is to this issue of conscience.

Ask people how to live as Christians, and they might tell you, “Keep the commandments!” Yet St Paul spent much of his apostolic life trying to wean his Jewish compatriots away from their fixation on the Law and Commandments. The Commandments, of course, were very quickly seen to be inadequate to address changing situations and times. Though they retained their iconic importance, the Jewish scribes and lawyers recognised the need to continue to tease them out and adapt them. Their added regulations became more numerous and more detailed, yet never kept quite up to date and dangerously missed the inevitable cultural blindspots. Paul saw the futility of the whole exercise. In addition, he recognised that knowing laws does not help you to keep them. Even more significantly, he saw that living under directives and restrictions, even those understood as originating from God, was to live as slaves. For him, the distinctive experience of followers of Christ was that they were free agents, in personal relationship with him, and guided by his Holy Spirit.

So if commandments were out, what was in? How were Christians to live their lives as free followers of Jesus? How could they open themselves reliably to the guidance of the Spirit? Effectively, Paul said, “That is what your conscience is for”. Unfortunately, the Church has been slow to trust Paul. Church lawyers and theologians took over where the Jewish lawyers and rabbis left off; and morality became an exercise simply of obeying what we called “The Commandments” but which in fact were the hundreds of rules and regulations that surrounded them. Conscience was made redundant; and all we needed was a good memory and a readiness to obey. 

Here is where today’s passage is enlightening. It finished up, Take me for your model ... Paul said model, not overseer. A model invites imitation, but does not impose it. He then said that he took Christ as his model. To do that and, more importantly, to want to do that, he needed to know Christ well. He had never been a disciple of Jesus. He knew him by loving him, just as you and I can get to know and to love Christ – through spending time thoughtfully, prayerfully, with him. [Those who are happily married know how love opens them to ever-deeper knowledge of, and commitment to, their partner.] Motivation clearly comes from the heart, and familiar knowledge does, too.

As far as Paul was concerned, the Jesus he knew was totally focussed on God his Father. So, not surprisingly, he saw as the non-negotiable starting point of all conscience formation a spontaneous sense and personal valuing of the centrality of God. He insisted, Whatever you do, do it for the glory of God. Simple, but crucially important. Unless God really and personally matters, Christian conscience formation is impossible. 

Essentially, we give glory to God by choosing to love one another. That is the next requirement for conscience formation. As Paul put it in today’s passage, Never do anything offensive to anyone. Notice the two words, never, and, anyone. He then stated the same principle positively, Be helpful to everyone at all times, the operative words being again, everyone, and all times. How do we arrive at such respect? It is a process; it takes time, a lifetime. That choice originates in the growing insight into our own dignity as persons loved unconditionally by God despite all our failings and persistent blindness; and then in coming to realise that God values everyone else to the same extent. From that it follows that the common good is the basis of every peaceful society.

The truly formed conscience comes into its own from there, and gives more motivated and clearer direction than a thousand commandments.

Homily 4 - 2018 

Today’s story presents problems for translators. It seems that Mark himself, or the tradition he was drawing on, had somehow mixed together two separate stories – one the healing of a leper and the other an exorcism. Most translators try to blend them seamlessly into one.

As a nation Jews had a strong sense of the holiness of God. For them holiness meant specialness. That God was holy meant that God was superspecial, totally different, separated from worldly things. They concluded that they, as the People of God, also needed to be a holy people, different, separate from, above, their pagan neighbours. To mark their difference, they considered certain things and events commanded or forbidden. Over time these things became sort of taboo – highly charged emotionally – rendering people what they called pure or impure, or clean or unclean. Men had to be circumcised. Food had to be kosher. Bleeding was taboo, as were physical disfigurements or disabilities. But worse: sickness or physical disability were seen as God’s punishment for sin. So sick or disabled persons carried the label “sinner” and were regarded as “unclean”. In addition, as we heard in today’s First Reading, lepers, with their clearly visible disfigurement ,were totally ostracized and excluded from community: they had to “live apart: .. live outside the camp”. Once excluded from family, village or whatever, the ritually unclean persons were unable to work, to earn a living, to enjoy others’ company. They had to rely precariously on the charity of others.

The priestly families policed the system. Impurity infringements had to be compensated for by sacrificial offerings, which only the priests could perform and which, once done, allowed them to declare the person ritually clean, or pure, once again.

The translation we heard today approached the incident as the simple curing of leprosy. It began with the leper saying, “If you want to, you can cure me”. Consistently with that translation, the story continued, “Jesus felt sorry for him”. He touched the unclean man and said, “ ‘Of course I want to .. Be cured’ ”. But then come a number of anomalies. The mood seemed inexplicably to change: Jesus “immediately sent the man away”; he spoke to him “sternly”; and commanded him to “say nothing to anyone”.

In fact, the translation can be rendered more strongly. The man’s request to Jesus could have been, “If you want to, you can make me [or declare me] clean”. Instead of “feeling sorry” for the man, Jesus “felt anger”. Instead of “sending him away”, he “cast him out”. Rather than “sternly ordering” him, he “angrily snorted”. Even the command to show himself to the policing priests “as evidence of his recovery” may rather have been “to get up their noses”. All this sounds more like an exorcism of an evil social and religious system than the cure of a man’s affliction.

According to this translation, Jesus was exorcising/casting out an evil spirit from the religious system that, under the mistaken pretext of protecting the holiness of God, tragically used God to exclude innocent people from their local village community and from society as a whole. No wonder Jesus was angry, not at the leper, but at the whole cruelly destructive system that tortured people in the name of God; no wonder he snorted; no wonder he forbade the evil spirit to speak to anyone. Too many religious leaders exclude “sinners” from respectable society in the name of God.

A similar irrationally cruel dynamic of exclusion can be at work in secular society. Over the last seventeen years, as the result of the “crusade against evil”, and in the name of God, millions of people have had to flee their homelands and become refugees. Some have arrived on our shores; and, in response, we have coldly chosen, in order to keep our nation pure, to imprison them, psychologically torture them in the process. We have shown no regret, rather patted ourselves on the back for the cruel effectiveness of our measures. Who needs exorcism?

Homily 5 - 2024 

God knows how many times I have read this Gospel, thought about it, prayed about it. But this week, once more, I needed to think about it again with the view to addressing you all today, and inviting you to think about it again..

I tried to imagine how it would have felt in that Jewish culture at that time for that man to have contacted leprosy. Not only was he immediately branded as ritually unclean. He was seen as dangerous. He was feared. He was meticulously avoided. He was abruptly excluded from continuing to live with his family or to be in contact with, or even to stand near, anyone. What would it have done to his own sense of himself? He would have believed it. He probably would himself, in earlier days, have felt that way about other lepers. In addition, he would probably have thought that even God himself had condemned him for some reason [or possibly even, for no reason].

The utter isolation! The total loss of hope! It did not arise from the experience of the disease itself, bad and all as that might have been. It was the merciless exclusion by others — the utter loneliness; and perhaps worst of all, the inner suffering, his rejection of himself.

I wonder what it was about Jesus that brought the leper to have hope once more. Perhaps a variation on the observation by so many that Jesus spoke with an undefined “authority”. Might that elusive [and attractive] effect that he had on many have also had something to do with an undefined sense of compassion, or solidarity even with the otherwise excluded.

Jesus was concerned with persons. He made a point of connecting with those whom the general culture avoided, excluded and identified as “sinners” — not just lepers on occasion, but the universally unpopular and shunned tax collectors, and apparently even prostitutes. Jesus, we are told, shared meals with such “sinners”, just as he shared them occasionally with Pharisees. It was not that he approved their behaviour — but because he saw in everyone the radical image of God in which we have all been created. It was to save us from ourselves and from each other that God, who loves everyone infinitely, sent Jesus among us. God loves us all; God forgives us all. Jesus is the one human to have understood this, and to have done likewise. Sometimes, God’s love for everyone truly puzzles us.

The leper hoped that Jesus would love him. He was not disappointed. Jesus not only healed him. Jesus did so with that profound love that Jesus has for everyone. Even though this man was a leper, Jesus went so far as actually, and unnecessarily, and at great subsequent inconvenience to himself, to touch him. Mark drew the attention of his readers to the fact that, as we heard today: “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside where nobody lived.”

He would do the same for me, for you. In fact, moved by his love for us all [no exceptions], he let himself be crucified.

That is what we come to remember every time we take part in the Mass.