23rd Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

This past week or so the media have had a bonanza: Don Chipp – "Keep the bastards honest!" – died; then Steve Irwin - in spectacular circumstances, and yesterday, Peter Brock was also tragically killed.  The popular outpouring of emotion has been considerable.

During his pontificate Pope John Paul II canonised a whole sack of saints. With a few exceptions, no one seems to have been particularly inspired by any of them, even though apparently they were all heroically virtuous.

Somehow, personal sanctity did not seem to figure much with Jesus. He was always saying: Your faith has saved you, your readiness to trust, not yourself or your performance (that was the Pharisees’ ploy!), but to trust the power of God.  What mattered was not perfection. He didn’t say: Your faith in God has made you perfect, but: Your faith has saved you, has made you safe ... your trusting God has made you safe, God has made you safe. Perhaps that’s all that matters.  (Peter, in some things, was a disaster. Paul had his problems. But they let God love them, and ultimately that is all they worried about.)

Interestingly we can be inspired by people with clay feet, perhaps more easily than by those who seem perfect. Most of us with any experience under our belts can agree that it is honesty, indeed often the trusting sharing of our weaknesses, that draws us powerfully into intimacy... Simply because it is real.

The institutional Church shies away from facing its shadow, and so ... the knee-jerk reaction to sin has been to cover up. We are not good at naming our own sin.  As a priest I feel a strong pressure to strive to be perfect, and, if I can’t be perfect, at least to look perfect, and the thought of being found vulnerable can be quite scary.  Church leaders can sometimes seem to adopt the moral high-ground and even aggressively insist on their monopoly on moral truth ... with the result that most people take little notice of what the Church says, and even seem instinctively to resist it.

We have, in fact, precious insights into human dignity, and a respected tradition of clear thinking in areas of morality and social justice. Yet in the upcoming conscience vote in Parliament on the issue of embryonic stem cell research, how many will be open to the Church’s message?

The Gospel today presented us with a Gentile unable to hear – anything, unable to speak, to share an idea, an opinion, a preference – isolated from ordinary social conversation, oblivious to so much going on between people, inevitably consigned to the margins.

Jesus took him aside, away from the crowd, and made him the centre of his attention; he then gave him some idea of what he might do: by touching his ears and his tongue, with his spittle (which in the culture of the day was seen as a healing agent), he signed language to the deaf and dumb man the possibility of healing. What might have gone on in that man’s heart? - the beginning of hope? - the possibility of trust? perhaps blocked, held back by uncertainty, confusion, and fear. And then Jesus said: Be opened!  Nothing about Be perfect. Open up; Be freed; Let the hope, the trust, flow free.

We need to forget our own virtue, and no longer to rely on our own performance. We need to focus on God - the one who saves, who loves unconditionally.  We need to face reality – with all our ambiguity, with our goodness and our badness, with our “already” and our “not yet”. We need to hope, to trust; and surprisingly, to the extent that we let God’s love flow into us, we are changed. We, too, begin to act lovingly. We become compassionate, like our heavenly Father.