22nd Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2021

In the course of his Gospel, Mark wrote about a variety of hostile engagements that Jesus had with various groups of Pharisees. But Mark was not so interested in simply giving us a history lesson. Jesus had been off the scene for thirty years by the time that Mark began to write his Gospel. What he was doing in writing about the Pharisees of Jesus’ time was really about addressing the “Pharisee” in all of his readers — and that includes us.

Today’s Gospel incident is meant for me, for you.

Jesus called them hypocrites. In his day, however, “hypocrite” simply referred to play-actors in a theatre production. In a play, actors play the role of someone else. And there lies the tendency in all of us. We do our best to look good before others. The problem is that we can consider ourselves in fact to be good. More often than not, we are quite oblivious to many of our faults. It is a failing of us as individuals. It is a failure so often of the broader culture.

At the moment most people are quite disturbed by what is happening in Afghanistan. We had gone in there to fight nearly twenty years ago — to fight for and champion democracy, freedom, particularly freedom for women and minority groups. We prided ourselves, and spoke to them, of respect, humanity, truth and virtue. But so often we did not live that way. We killed insurgents, or trained and equipped some local groups to do so. In the process, however, we killed many more innocent civilians than insurgents. We lived with that, by categorising the casualties as “collateral damage”— their deaths unfortunate but necessary. No wonder the Taliban could virtually walk into Kabul with minimum resistance — they were more welcome than the allies.

Why did Australia really go there in the first place, and then stay there for twenty years? I think, if we are honest, we did so because we wanted to be accepted as special friends of the United States in the hope that they will look after us in the case of future military threats on us. And the United States were there to avenge the humiliation of the “9/11” attacks — but spoke of their involvement in terms of a crusade of good against evil. If only it were good against evil! As it happens, Afghanistan also has huge resources of invaluable minerals, including uranium.

Personally, I shuddered as I was watching the ABC News on Friday night when I heard the American President say with regard to Isis-K, who had just killed 12 Americans and at least 60 innocent Afghans: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” He felt free to say that, no doubt, because he believed that the majority of people in the United States would agree with him. It suited their image — to play tough and to look strong.

The Scottish poet, Robbie Burns, once wrote: “O that God the gift would gi’e us to see ourselves as others see us” — very much today’s Gospel message. Who am I in actual fact? What do I really value? Might I have come to a more fruitful knowledge of my inner self if I had spent as much energy on that as on looking acceptable to others? Am I afraid? or just one more unconscious casualty of the culture in which I am inevitably immersed?