10th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2018

Seven hundred years before Jesus, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah had strongly decried many of his contemporaries who, he said, called “evil good and good evil”, who were “wise in your own eyes, and shrewd in your own sight”, who “legislated infamous laws”, diverting “the needy from justice”. And in today’s Gospel passage, we have the “lawyers”, up from the capital, from Jerusalem, accusing Jesus of casting out devils “through the prince of devils” – the very ones “wise in their own eyes”, and accepted as such generally within the culture, declaring that “an unclean spirit is in him”, in Jesus, the truly Holy One, the human embodiment of the mercy of God. Jesus calls such judgment, such blindness, such behavior “blaspheming, or sinning, against the Holy Spirit”. Ominously, he warned that such shutting self off from truth and love rendered even God’s forgiveness empty, powerless. Forgiveness needs to be received, as gift, for it to operate. Sharing in divine life, after all, is precisely sharing.

Calling good evil, and evil good. Sometimes it is conscious and deliberate. More often, it is so mixed in with the culture, with “the way we always do things around here”, that it goes unnoticed, and indeed people flatter themselves as being “wise in their own eyes”. We have seen it writ large through the recent Royal Commissions into Sexual Abuse in Institutions and the Banking Industry. It has been unearthed in the Police Force, and just yesterday, according to investigative journalists at the Age newspaper, in the Defence Forces’ elite SAS Regiment operating in Afghanistan.

I wonder, too, about the plague of domestic violence. Do abusers see their behavior as acceptable? Are they capable of calling it abuse? Do Catholic abusers ever name and confess their violence as such in Confession? Do workmates or neighbours choose not to poke their noses in, seeing it as ‘none of their business’?

Cultural deficiencies are always easier to see by others outside the culture than by those within it; but they are there, and they are destructive. One of the factors leading to not seeing, to denying their existence, is having a stake in the ‘status quo’. Does that make us Christians with our interest in morality susceptible, almost by definition? And what about us so-called Church leaders and teachers, the “wise in our own eyes”? That seemed to be the problem in Jesus’ day. Among Jesus’ greatest opponents were the official lawyers, the “scribes from Jerusalem”, along with the powerful and ubiquitous lay proponents of orthodoxy, the Pharisees. They thought that they were even doing God’s will in opposing him.

The stakes are high. As the Gospel put it, “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness”. I presume, I hope, that if I stop the behavior that constitutes such blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, if I can let go of the attitude of not needing forgiveness for my seeing “good as evil and evil as good”, and if I can stop considering myself “wise” and “shrewd” and having all the answers, then I can open myself again to the healing, unifying, reconciling working out of God’s forgiveness.

All that calls for humility. That is why the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse can be so helpful to us as Church. It can get us freely opening our eyes, getting us to know ourselves better, finding ways to listen to others, to each other, learning to discern and to work together. I do not think that that will happen without our taking prayer seriously.

I hope that the two-year period we have leading up to the Plenary Council will provide opportunity for precisely such change. Personally, I think that the preparation time, provided we give it our best shot and are prepared to take a bit of local initiative, may be more fruitful even than the Council itself.