16th Sunday Year B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2024

The Second Reading of last Sunday’s Mass reminded both Jewish and Gentile followers of Christ of their wonderful dignity as sons and daughters of God through the death and resurrection of Christ. Jews generally were “the people who would put their hopes in Christ before he came.” Of the Gentile converts, Paul wrote, “Now you, too, in Christ have heard the message of the truth and the good news of your salvation, and have believed it”. Jew and Gentile, both, through Christ’s shedding of his blood on the cross, have “gained our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins” — bringing to fulfilment God’s original plan “to bring everything together under Christ as head, everything in the heavens and everything on earth.”

In today’s Second Reading, Paul expanded his sense of the shape of that togetherness. Speaking of the Jewish and Gentile groups within the Christian community of all believers, Paul wrote: “He is the peace between us, and has made the two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart … This was to create one single New Man in himself out of the two of them by restoring peace through the cross … Through him, both of us have in the one Sprit our way to come to the Father”.

I have been pondering these two readings against the backdrop of the tragedy unfolding in the Holy Land today. God’s plan for universal peace “determined from the beginning” by the creating Father is still so far from realisation. In some ways, God’s initial choice of the Jewish people as his own has not over the centuries eventuated in the “peace” God had dreamed of; and still remains a challenge for our world today.

God’s plan in choosing the Jews was so that, over the centuries, God could reveal to them the infinite extent of his unconditional love. He could work on them, by means of the Law that he entrusted to them and the prophets he sent to them, and eventually through Jesus himself, the Christ of God made flesh like us. God had hoped thereby to form and inform them so thoroughly that gradually they might share their wisdom with the rest of the world and that, through them, all the nations would be blessed.

Would it be unfair to say: ‘Instead, with exceptions, as a people, they simply basked in their being chosen by God, and in their specialness? — not unlike the rest of us’.

Without repudiating his former covenants, God, through Christ, entered into a new covenant, this time with the whole world — no one excluded. As we hear during the consecration of the chalice at every Eucharist, using the words of Christ himself: “This is the chalice of my blood, the Blood of the new and eternal Covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”

“Do this in memory of me”. To remember me, you do this. Do what? Offer - dedicate - your life, your energy, your love, with me, to clean up the mess we all make of our world through our sin, through our unwillingness to love.

I find it significant that in today’s Gospel, Jesus took pity [compassion] on the crowd because they were [pushed around], like sheep without a shepherd]. The practical shape that his compassion took was “to teach them at some length”. His message was simple: change, change radically. Learn to love; practise loving — not just those who love you [unbelievers do that!] but even your enemies.

If all of us Catholics [better still, all of us Christians], took Jesus really seriously, our world would be on the way immediately to becoming a remarkably better place.