19th Sunday Year B

See Commentary on John 6:41-51 in John 6:22-50 & John 6:51-58


Homily 1 - 2009

Over the years I have interacted with countless people.  We all have.  Of these, some few have stayed in my memory as people who, on meeting them, had the effect of my somehow feeling more alive – consistently.  There were others who had the opposite effect, who seemed somehow to drain life from me.  Most people would lie somewhere in-between, their effect on me being minimal, or basically neutral.  There are different ways of being alive, different degrees.  

Where lies the difference?  That is hard to pin down.   Somehow, some seemed full of life, not so much with physical vitality or vivaciousness or good looks, but with something deeper, less vigorous but strongly nourishing – perhaps wisdom, warmth, even love.  At the other extreme were those who were sometimes full of themselves, sometimes full of nothing much, empty, depressing.  There were those who were alive and life-giving; and those who were effectively lifeless in themselves, and deadening on others.

In the Gospel today, Jesus spoke of people who have eternal life.  What was he getting at?  Eternal life is life that is primarily proper to God – yet something that we can obviously share in in some way.  From what we know of God as revealed by Jesus, the life of God takes shape in loving, in creativity, integrity, etc.

Jesus affirms quite clearly that we can all be drawn into that magnetic field to God's life.  We can learn, we can choose, we can be empowered to love, to be creative and to live in touch with truth.  It can happen now.  What is equally fascinating is that that kind of living obviously continues beyond physical death into the eternity that is the way of God.

Jesus said more.  He said: Whoever believes has eternal life; and went on further calling himself the living bread, and insisting that anyone who eats this bread will live forever.

To believe in Jesus is not so much a matter of beliefs.  It is something truly dynamic.  It is like eating him as we eat our food – savouring him, his message, his vision, his life-style; making him our own; being nourished by his wisdom and his love; open, yearning, to be transformed and empowered to think, to feel and to act like him.

Jesus, of course, is the one come down from heaven, the one who has seen God – the God whom he calls his Father.  To see Jesus is effectively to see God.  Jesus is the revelation, the reflection, the human embodiment of God.  Consequently, to entrust ourselves to him, to commit our lives, to believe in him is our way to become like God.  It is to be alive with the eternal life being lived by God – now, on this side of the grave, and later, on the other side of the grave.

As Jesus said: He will raise us up on the last day – not as disembodied souls, floating about like ghosts, but as the same living, fully human persons that we are, but wonderfully transformed and somehow even divinised.

The key to it all is taking Jesus seriously, trusting him and entrusting ourselves to his vision, to his life-style, to his way, his truth.

Whoever believes has eternal life.


Homily 2 - 2012

I am not sure how many athletes will have competed in the London Olympics by the time the last events are finished. I am not sure how many of those thousands who compete will go home with gold or silver or bronze medals.  But I do know that the vast majority of athletes there will win nothing – … the vast majority.  The winners will get the accolades.  The losers?  Some will get criticism.  Most will simply be forgotten or ignored.  How many of them will be better people from their experience of victory or defeat?  How many of them will learn from their experience to become more fully human, more genuinely alive?

Whatever about the Olympics, I think that losing can be a far greater occasion for genuine human growth than winning.  Look at your own lives, and at those experiences that became the context for your becoming more gracious, more sensitive and compassionate, wiser, more human, more fully alive.

In today's Gospel, Jesus is talking about our becoming more alive, more humanly alive.  He sees it happening by our coming to him, our believing him [that is, our trusting him and his way and entrusting ourselves to him and his way.]  Today he used the metaphor of himself a

s  bread – as the bread come down from heaven, as the bread of life, as the bread that ensures our living, beyond death, forever.

Elsewhere in the Gospel Jesus uses other metaphors to refer to himself and his mission: living water, light of the world, good shepherd, a vine of which we are the branches.  The images are all driving at the same point.  To the extent that we follow him, attach to him, nourish ourselves on him, are refreshed by him, are led and supported by him, we will become more alive, more human.

Interestingly, Jesus became source of life for us not by winning but by losing – by his being killed: The bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world …  intriguingly, for the life of the world that would kill him.  What was significant about his death, however, was not so much his losing, his failure, as the unshakeable love that sustained and motivated him in the midst of his brutalizing death and defeat.  Yet his failure was important.  As the Epistle to the Hebrews noted: He became perfect through suffering.  In suffering, he touched into, drew from and actualised the deepest recesses of his humanity – and, in the process, he became fully alive.

He says that the way to life for us is to believe him – that is, to trust him and his way.  A favourite author of mine once wrote: "If we don't love, we are already dead.  If we do love, they will kill us!"

Taking part in Eucharist is challenging; but it confirms what life already teaches us:  The setbacks, the disappointments, the little defeats that punctuate our lives can be, have been and will be the arena where we learn best to love, to grow, to become more beautifully human and life-giving to others.  As we shall insist after the Consecration at today's Mass: "When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again."


Homily 3 - 2015

The message of today’s readings is always relevant – though it is easy to take it for granted. We hear that sort of thing often enough in Church, are not surprised by the message, and assume that we agree with it – by and large. Yet, it seems to me that it is getting at was critical for Jesus, and, indeed, that it is anything but common sense. The Gospel today, as over the past couple of weeks, mentions eternal life, and talks about it in the present tense. Eternal life means more than life after death. It refers to the quality of genuine life in the now. It is the sort of inner life proper to God – and Jesus offers the experience to us now.

The life of the Trinity is essentially conscious, joyfully creative love. As shared by us, it is not a “you either have it or you don’t” kind of experience, but allows for more or less – the more the better: conscious, joyfully creative love and life! To identify it as love can sound a bit boring. So the writer of the Epistle got more specific, Never have grudges against others, or lose your temper, or raise your voice to anybody, or call each other names, or allow any sort of spitefulness. Interestingly, he focused first on the negatives. But then he went on, Be friends with one another, and kind, forgiving each other as readily as God forgave you in Christ. That is not common sense. Forgiving does not rate highly in today’s culture – just listen to the nightly news bulletins on TV. Yet forgiveness almost defines the attitude of the conscious, joyfully creative Trinity: Forgive each other as readily as God forgave you in Christ. If God does not forgive us, God would not be either joyful or creative! And to the extent that we are not forgiving, we are neither joyful nor creative. [Forgiveness, of course, needs to be clearly distinguished from codependence – that sometimes looks like it. True forgiveness is an expression of strength and of maturity.]

For the past couple of weeks, the Gospel has been presenting Jesus variously as the Bread come down from heaven, the Bread of life. It has challenged us to believe in him [meaning to trust him and his way of life], to let him nourish us, even to eat and assimilate and thereby become him. The Epistle said the same thing: follow Christ by loving as he loved you. We are smart enough, I hope, to know that for him loving us requires constantly and consistently forgiving us.

Our world is threatened by forgiveness, if we take it seriously. I want to be real here. I know that forgiving can be virtually impossible for some after the hurt or betrayal they have sometimes suffered. At times, I even wonder if it is harder to forgive someone who has hurt one we love, than it is to forgive the one who has hurt us. 

God does not say that we have to forgive. I don’t think that God says we even ought to. I don’t believe there are any “musts” or “oughts” with God. God simply makes the offer, Jesus demonstrates the possibility… but gently they warn us that Life to the full, if we want it to be ours, will depend on it. And they offer us their forgiveness to empower our moving more deliberately towards it.

Forgiveness, of course, does not rule out judging. We forgive what we judge to be wrong. But they are two quite different processes. God judges; Jesus judges. That is the source of their practical commitment to justice, even of their commitment to forgiveness. But God does not punish. God does not need to punish. Punishment is intrinsic to the offence itself. The punishment of unrepented sin is simply the impossibility of enjoying life to the full. Hostility towards others, selfishness, [even non-forgiveness] are of themselves incompatible with joy. That is why God constantly calls us beyond sin and unforgiveness. And sadly, that call is radically countercultural.


Homily 4 - 2018

I read in the Spectator this week that people in Hamilton lost six million dollars on the Poker machines over the past year – on average, sixteen and a half thousand dollars a day; and it is repeated every day {and I even checked the arithmetic]. That is equivalent of two and a half thousand dollars lost, per family, per year. Given that not every family consistently plays the pokies, then some families must be losing considerably more than that. The figures amazed me. How can some of the people, some of the families, of Hamilton afford that? The thought of it saddens me. So many people persistently hoping that they can become richer, happier, without working [and they don’t – they keep on losing!]. But they apparently continue to believe that one day they will. Like little children, they still fervently believe in magic.

It is so easy for me to tut-tut, to feel superior, to congratulate myself on being so much more sensible. But what do I achieve by that – for them? or for myself? Where am I on the happiness scale, on the inner-peace scale? Perhaps, a bit of magic-thinking plays out in me too, thinking I can be really happy, and grow in it, without consciously working for it, without even thinking about how I might arrive there, or even what it might concretely consist in. Pope Francis noted once that too many Catholics walk around looking like they have just been to a funeral. Hardly advertisements for the joy of the Gospel! Hardly surprising that not too many are lining up to join us! What sort of a model of joy am I, for that matter?

It is against this background that I have been thinking about today’s Gospel. My first reaction was that I have heard it all before; but I have to say something to you – so I looked at it once more, more closely this time. And whatever I might say to you, what is the Gospel saying to me – now, this week? The lines that catch my eye are these: “… No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me… To hear the teaching of the Father, and learn from it, is to come to me… I am the bread of life…, the living bread which has come down from heaven …”. In our experience, life allows of more or less. Some people seem barely alive; some seem only half alive; others are bursting with life. And life can be more fulfilling or less so. As the bread of life, Jesus sees himself as able to nourish people’s lives and to help them become ever more fully alive. That is because he in turn has drawn his life from the Father who sent him, the spring of all being, of life and of love.

Jesus was attractive because of his warmth and love, his sense of justice, his wisdom and constant compassion. These he sourced from the Father who sent him, the Father whose very being he revealed to the world. It was these that made him fully alive. It was with these that he wanted to nourish us.

But not everyone was attracted to Jesus. Not everyone wanted to come to him – only those who already felt their innate attraction to such things as warmth and love, justice, wisdom and compassion. This is where the Father comes in. In creating us, in giving us existence, God made each of us an individual instance of that divine being. In giving us existence God gives us also the capacity, an innate compatibility with and instinct for wisdom, a sense of true justice, compassion, and so on. We access these as we develop our consciences – that inner human depth of ours where we are in touch with God.

We come alive as we come to Jesus, sent from the Father for the very purpose to nourish us, to be our bread of life.


Homily 5 - 2021

How fortunate we have been in this South-West corner of Victoria to have been preserved safe from all contact with the Covid virus! So far, none of us has been its immediate victim; and few have had family members or friends from elsewhere brought low. Our major inconvenience has been each successive lockdown and its flow-on intrusions — which have been real, but infinitely preferable to the direct effects of the virus itself. I do not share the resentment felt apparently by a significant number of citizens whenever a new lockdown has been imposed by our political leaders and their professional medical advisors. I keep my annoyance for the vagaries of the virus itself, and the wilful, careless neglect of the lockdown rules by the few. Even a superficial comparison of the official responses to the recent crises in New South Wales and in Victoria, and their different outcomes, reassures me of the value of the clear, prompt and firm choice of lockdown.

Certainly, each successive lockdown has had its consequences, whether in the areas of financial hardship, nervous and mental stresses for young and old, medical treatment, schooling, appropriate and respectful celebration of funerals, weddings and family occasions — [and the list goes on]. Many of these effects could have been, and still can be, mitigated by timely financial and professional assistance provided by federal and State governments — a question primarily of political priorities. Again, the ultimate problem lies not necessarily with the lockdown, but with official response and the virulence and unpredictability of the virus.

Currently, individual citizens are being faced with the choice to opt for the available vaccinations or not. The choice is complicated by uncertainty about possible destructive longer-term side-effects of the vaccinations on certain individuals. How destructive and how likely are they in relation to the relatively certain outcome of the vaccinations? If enough people choose positively, the population as a whole will become safely immune from the otherwise inevitable outcomes. Do governments have the power to compel their citizens to be vaccinated, or to make vaccination a necessary condition for other needs such as employment, or hospitalisation? The question of choice introduces the need for moral responsibility — and the stakes are high.

Those of us who are Catholics are helped by the example of Pope Francis who has already publicly chosen to be vaccinated, and urged everyone to act similarly. In this he has himself been guided by the continuing development in the Church over the past fifty years of the science of Social Justice, in parallel to the spread in society generally of democratic governments and political freedoms. Individual political freedom is not an absolute right, even though it does spring from the fact that all human persons, made as they are in the image of God, have an equal and inviolable human dignity. To exercise individual human freedom requires that such freedom be granted equally to everyone else. Individual rights exist and thrive only within the context of the Common Good of everyone.

There is nothing new in this for followers of Jesus. Jesus was crystal clear in his insistence that we genuinely love each other, every other, going so far as to require that we love even our enemies. In the Kingdom of God, we are all brothers and sisters. Genuine freedom on our part means that we respect the similar freedom of everyone else. We cannot insist simply on our own rights while disregarding the radical and equal dignity of everyone. Jesus not only taught it — he lived it; and died for it.