14th Sunday Year B
See Commentary on Mark 6:1-6
Homily 1 - 2009
I get great assurance from this passage in tonight's/day's Second Reading from the letter that St Paul wrote to the community at Corinth. He talked about a thorn in the flesh which he interpreted as an angel of Satan to beat me ... and to stop me from getting too proud. He didn't say what it was - and I'm glad that he kept its identity wide-open. It gives me the possibility of identifying with it.
Whatever it was, he didn't like it, and wanted to get rid of it. He said that he prayed to the Lord three times for it to leave him. His expression three times isn't about how many times he prayed but about how intensely and feelingly he prayed. But, for all his efforts, it didn't work - and he was left feeling unhealed, inadequate and humiliated. He didn't get his way with God. But apparently it didn't stop him praying; and in his prayer came the insight - the voice of the Lord - saying: My grace is enough for you; my power is at its best in weakness.
My grace is enough for you. What does that mean? I love you.. That's enough. What more do you need? You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be in control. You can be weak. You can be anything - and I shall still love you. That's enough. What more could you need?
And, in case Paul thought that his thorn in the flesh made him less adequate to be an apostle, less able to do his thing for God, Jesus added: my power is at its best in weakness; At its best ... in weakness. And Jesus should know. At his weakest - humiliated, brutalised, mocked and abandoned on the cross, God had saved the world.
As far as helping the world was concerned, Jesus didn't need Paul doing his thing for God, but Paul letting God do, through him, God's will for the world. Not: God doing what Paul wanted, but Paul doing what God wanted. So, in his wonderfully full-on way, Paul could comment: So I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast ... for it is when I am weak, that I am strong.
Alcoholics Anonymous know that. They know that recovery starts only when you know you're beaten. And they also know that the best one to help an alcoholic is another alcoholic - one who has faced the problem, who has faced the utter weakness, and has experienced what can only be the power of God.
The best healer, perhaps the only healer, is the wounded healer. And we all qualify as wounded. We all have something that beats us: our thorn in the flesh. And if we don't think we have, we have still to grow up or still to own up. The wonderful 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, once wrote: “We need to sin ... or we would never know the mercy of God.”
My grace is enough for you. Let it be, believe it, surrender to it... wriggle and squirm as much as we like, but we don't have to have our act together for God to love us. What a miserable God it would be who would love only the worthy or the perfect! And if we worry about our influence on others ... we can listen to Jesus saying: My strength is at its best in weakness, and do a "Paul" and discover, and then shrug our shoulders, and boast that only when I am weak am I strong.
It hurts our ego; it undermines our self-image. It can all seem back-to- front. That's why we have to be open to change first before we can believe the Good News of God's Kingdom.
Homily 2 - 2012
I watched 4-Corners last Monday night on the ABC. It was on the subject of clerical sexual abuse in the 80s and 90s. It highlighted the devastating effects on the victims particularly, but also on their families. With the Parliamentary Enquiry soon to begin in Victoria, I presume we shall hear more of such things in the future.
How do you feel about it all? Have you become more aware of the on-going, long term, destructive effects on the innocent victims, and the enormous heart-break of their parents and families? Can you understand the depth of their hurt and the anger that they feel? How does that affect you? Do you feel protective of the Church? - defensive? Or, do you take it on the chin, trying to understand, perhaps, how it could ever have happened, and wondering if there's something you can do? Do you ever think: "Where might God be in all this?" Is the painful publicity, as well as being cause of genuine lamentation, also opportunity to learn? to grow?
Like today's Second Reading, for example – that paradoxical answer that Paul got to his prayer: He was convinced that Jesus said: My power is at its best in weakness. Whatever Paul's unidentified weakness was, it was something real, something that distressed him. Can God's power work in our only too obvious and distressful weakness? Can God enable good to come out of evil? And if so, how?
Paul's reaction was to boast of his weakness – which sounds a bit "over-the-top". But at least it meant that he owned it, he wasn't paralysed by it, and somehow he probably learnt from it. What can we learn from this on-going painful ordeal? Pope Benedict's response so far has largely centred on two areas: Some years back he put legal measures in place to guide the responses of the bishops. And he has clearly denounced the perpetrators, and described their behaviour as both sinful and pathological.
I recently read – skimmed through actually - an excellent book on this issue. The author, Marie Keenan, is a very accomplished, professional therapist and researcher, intimately involved in the Irish abuse scene. She made the comment a few times that the surprising thing was, not that so many clerics offended, but that so few did. In her opinion, the way things were in the Irish Church, it was virtually inevitable that problems would occur. She is one of the few researchers to have interviewed the offenders. Interestingly, she said that they all started off their training as good men, deeply and honestly wanting to be good priests or religious. The bishops involved were not mavericks, but conscientious, obedient to Rome, observant of Canon Law, and devoted to what they saw as the good of the Church for which they were responsible. What then went wrong?
She believes that the Pope's response goes nowhere near far enough. She found that the perpetrators were emotionally immature, compulsively perfectionistic, confused about and repressive of their sexuality and heavily into denial. They were lonely men, struggling to live celibate lives without having the gift of celibacy, avoiding love rather than allowing it to blossom. She does not excuse them, but seeks to understand what happened.
Like a lot of other priests and bishops, [and I inevitably include myself in this], they belonged to a clerical culture that gave them a certain prestige and power - but hardly called them to accountability, and offered little deep friendship and support. She believes that seminary formation encourages cover-up – "Keep your nose clean and your head down, and you will get ordained" … that it skips too easily over the continuing challenge of psychological and moral development. … that it is oblivious to the difficulty of real dialogue so long as every sexual thought or action is regarded as a mortal sin. The clerical culture kept women at a distance … and still has a very confused sense of clerical celibate masculinity. The practical implications of obedience and loyalty are rarely discussed, nor are the tensions around confidentiality and trust.
My personal hope is that the current pressure on the Church will encourage us to look deeply and humbly not just at the appropriateness of our efforts to police acceptable behaviour, but to examine Church culture as a whole and to move forward in the direction of personal and systemic maturity. I don't believe that that can happen unless laity and clergy work together.
We are not perfect, and never will be. But God's strength is at its best in weakness. God desires, as Paul wrote elsewhere, to make all things work together for the good of those who love him.
Homily 3 -2018
Remember last Sunday’s Gospel: a young girl, on the threshold of adulthood, dead. She was the daughter of the head of the local synagogue, symbol of the Jewish establishment, keeper of the culture, keeper of the faith. Yet, for Jesus, even the girl’s death was not final; but her father, the establishment personified, had to change. Jesus was clear: “Do not be afraid; only have faith.” Have faith – trust the way of Jesus; adopt his vision, his approach to life. Accept that God is love, and all is gift. But to have faith, he needed to face his fear. His fear was the fear endemic to all institutions, to Judaism then and today to the Church, the fear that without their firm control, grounded in the tradition and expressed in the familiar, everything would fall apart. As it unpacked that story, the Gospel included another, by way of contrast, of an older woman, this one with an incurable hemorrhage, and so ritually unclean, excluded, in fact exploited, without hope. She faced her fear, trusted Jesus – both his power and his readiness - and was healed. Confirming her attitude, Jesus said to her, “Your faith has saved you.”
Today’s Gospel passage addressed similar issues – but by way of contrast. Jesus was back home, in Nazareth. Why would they not believe him, not trust him? Their motivation sounded like envy. He challenged the pecking order, seemed more important: “This is the carpenter, surely?” But there was something else that blocked their freedom to see the obvious. They could ask the questions, “Where did the man get all this? .. What is this wisdom? … these miracles?”, but were afraid to answer. Their former companion’s wisdom and miraculous power, that could and should have been opportunity, were seen as threat – threat to the familiar, to their assumptions, their expectations, their comfort. “Jesus could work no miracle there.” In their fear, they were as good as dead. There was nothing there for him to work with. “He was amazed at their lack of faith.”
Today marks the beginning of NAIDOC week, an invitation to celebrate indigenous culture and contribution to the common wealth. I wonder at times whether our attitude might mirror that of Jesus’ former childhood companions from Nazareth. We can be compassionate; but we have nothing to learn from indigenous culture. We have the answers, the superior culture. Why can’t they be like us?
Can we hear our question? Here we are, destroying our world, not only by wars with their increasingly destructive armaments, but exhausting and wrecking our natural environment, driven by an economy that has got out of control. We seem unable to stop. In the process, we seem to be destroying our very selves, our inner peace and capacity for genuine joy, with our addiction to productivity, busyness, frantic-ness.
Could it just be that the wisdom of indigenous Australians might help to heal us, to save us? Their respect for the environment, drawn from their acceptance of their relationship to it, and their appreciation that enough really is enough, is more than skin deep. It has been bred into them over millennia. Along with that, they have not completely lost the ability to take time, to have time. Is there some way we can learn from them? For us Catholics, could they model for us, and help us, like Mary, to treasure life’s experiences and to ponder them in our hearts?
Sadly, our culture has been slowly destroying many of them, despite a stubborn resilience in others. We can help them; they can help us, beginning with mutual respect, openness and cooperation. We need to identify our fears and face them. We shall all be the poorer for it unless we do. It calls for a deep change of attitude on our part, and along with that, readiness to meet and to engage with each other.
This is as true for us as Church as it is for Western Culture as a whole.
Homily 4 - 2021
Last Sunday, Mark’s Gospel gave us two brief cameos of people with faith. The first was a Jewish woman who had suffered from a chronic incurable haemorrhage for twelve years. The other was a distraught father of a dangerously ill young Jewish girl who, in the course of the incident, went on to die. The woman was healed from her haemorrhage when she touched Jesus’ clothes. The dead child was incredibly brought back to life by Jesus. To the woman Jesus commented that her faith, her trust in him, led not only to her healing but to wholeness. Faced with the death of his child, Jesus had invited the father to trust the unprecedented possibility of his child being brought back to life. “Courage”, Jesus said to him, “only believe”. He trusted; and Jesus brought the man’s child back to life.
Mark recounted the two incidents, not simply to rouse his readers’ interest or to illustrate for them the power of Jesus. Rather he wished to hold up for them a mirror of the kind of faith they also were called to cultivate as disciples of Jesus.
Something similar is going on with today’s story. Mark’s purpose was not to confirm his readers’ criticism and judgment of Jesus’ former hometown acquaintances. Rather, as in last week’s Gospel, he wanted to hold up a mirror for his readers, not for their imitation this time, but to alert them to the possibility of their unknowingly nurturing similar attitudes in their own hearts. Jesus’ home-town acquaintances, disappointingly, could not recognise the wisdom and power of Jesus that others were astounded by.
The sad thing is that it was a problem by no means special to them. It infects us all. In the case of the people of Nazareth, there was a further problem as well. Along with their unnoticed psychological blindness, there was a further aggravating problem of an unconscious sense of hostility. Listen to how Mark described their reaction: “Where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been granted him, and these miracles that are worked through him?” Their blindness was partly fed by a hardly-hidden jealously, that in turn led to a festering resentment. “This is the carpenter, surely, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses and Jude and Simon? His sisters, too, are they not here with us?” How come he has been singled out and not themselves? Their resentment was fuelled as well by an assumption that, if he were special, that meant that they were not special. The result? “They would not accept him”. They “would not” — it was their choice. And they felt self-righteously justified in their reaction. Tragically, they were perfectly oblivious to the whole destructive dynamic.
Different expressions and degrees of the dynamic are present in all of us. That was why Mark was so concerned to mirror it as clearly, yet as gently, as he could to his readers, his fellow struggling disciples.
Two thousand years later, we are still so blind to much of how we feel and what we do and why. Our current world is seething with hidden envy and, accompanying it, anger. We polarise so quickly. We categorise others; we fail to let each other be the unique individuals that we all are. We close our ears to whatever they say, and are quite unwilling to possibly learn more and readjust our thinking or to move beyond our familiar prejudices. We are threatened by difference.
A question to take home with you: What was Jesus’ response to the challenge exemplified by his former childhood friends [but not limited to them]?