21st Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.  John’s reflection on Jesus’ significance is perhaps puzzling.  John’s language is often a kind of code language and he loves playing with opposites. Here he is contrasting spirit and flesh. What does he mean by spirit? by flesh?

Flesh for John is usually human nature as it is, of itself, unredeemed; it’s human society as we unfortunately experience it –  people at war - destroying, oppressing, fighting - our world divided between poor and wealthy, free and unfree.  At the beginning of his Gospel, John had said: The Word of God became flesh, and dwelt among us - became one of us as we are, one of our world carrying on as we do. 

And John had also said of this Word: In him was life, and that life was the light of all people... to all who received him he gave power to become children of God.  By the Word of God becoming flesh as Jesus, flesh became open to spirit. The unredeemed could become redeemed. A world of people destroying themselves could become a world of people appreciating, respecting and even loving each other.  There was another energy – life - abroad in the world, another vision,  another possibility, another hope.

This brings us to another way that John uses (and contrasts) flesh and spirit.  He sees them as filters through which people view themselves, and others, and the world and society generally.  To view it according to the flesh is to view it in an unenlightened, ignorant, distorted and distorting way; to view it other than through God’s eyes, as it were, and so to miss the truth, the depth –  genuine reality.  To view ourselves, others, our world, according to the spirit is to view things through God’s eyes, to see us, others, our world as Jesus saw them, knew them, to see their truth, their meaning.

By becoming flesh as Jesus, God has given to those who want to see a breath-taking insight into the value of every human person, and of human society.  God has taken on this humanity of ours in all its need: our brokenness, our bloody-mindedness, our ignorance; and by becoming flesh, has given us new dignity, worth, possibility,  and hope.

In our world today, some of us see according to the spirit; some according to the flesh. We are not surprised (it takes a lifetime to see consistently according to the spirit); but it is sad that so many people do not know or appreciate or respond to their own dignity or that of others.  They do not know or hope that our world could organise itself differently, on the basis of mutual respect and justice, and not simply on the basis of national interest, consumerism and power relationships.

Today the Church observes Refugee and Migrant Sunday. It also happens to be the fifth anniversary of Australia’s heartless treatment of those asylum seekers on the Tampa. Those who still see according to the flesh so often see refugees and asylum seekers as threats to our comfort Zone, burdens on our economy, unwanted nuisances, and therefore to be excluded and degraded. Worse, they so often seem to presume that they could well be terrorists. We are not surprised, but sad.  Those who see according to the spirit see them as brothers and sisters in need: need of protection - justice, and peace - as welcome with rights to life and justice equal to our own.

Eucharist is a powerfully earthing sacrament. Jesus is present among us as flesh and blood - like yours and mine. We receive that body of his, crucified, because he stood up for his vision of (and his hopes for) a humanity redeemed because he called it forth from its ingrained self-destructiveness, aggression and fear to another  possibility.

Through the Eucharist the flesh of Jesus becomes the vehicle of spirit and of life.  It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.