24th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

Some people in our society seem to think that to be a Catholic is to be mesmerised by suffering, wary of life, a bit of a kill-joy. To be a religious or a priest was considered to be heavily into self-denial, mortification and penance.

Perhaps the idea came from what we heard in today’s Gospel: If you want to be followers of mine, renounce yourselves, take up your cross and follow me... those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save them. Yet elsewhere in the Gospel we have the line: I have come that you may have life and have it to the full. Some might think that Jesus was talking about life after death, a sort of super-reward for suffering in this phase of life – but he was talking about more than that.

Where the confusion lies seems to be in grasping what it means to live life fully. In lots of ways our culture seems geared to facing in the wrong direction. As one author said some time back: "We are in danger of amusing ourselves to death - distracting ourselves through entertainment - trivialising life. Even our so-called news shows are entertainment - homogenised to the extreme."

Much of our public discourse is infantile point-scoring, a succession of sound-bites, and always changing, brief irrelevancies. Be thoughtful, nuanced, tentative or complex on TV and you lose your ratings immediately.  The issues that seem to absorb people’s energies are celebrities, sport, fashion and food – while most of the world starves. It is appallingly oppressed or involved in mindless, never-ending killing.

I suppose that you need to focus on the surface if you have no idea of where you come from or where you’re heading, the best way to get there, and even why you exist at all – if you really don’t know who you are.

There is a surface level of various energies alive and well in all of us - the little desires, the self-interest and self-centredness, the unreal fears. It was to these that Jesus was referring when he talked about renouncing self – renouncing the unreal, light-weight self. That renunciation is simply the necessary “clearing of the decks” so that we can be in touch with our true self, our deep desires, and our profound possibilities not just for the serious but also for the genuinely joyful that doesn’t grow stale after two or three days.

Yet suffering will be in our lives. It is in everyone’s life. Whole-hearted Christians are not protected from it, nor do they have any monopoly on it; but perhaps we have a special version of it.

Jesus spoke about losing our lives for the sake of the Gospel, and he showed us what he meant by means of his own way of living and dying. Jesus doesn’t seem to have been singled out for his asceticism. Indeed, he was criticised for its absence, He was labelled as one always eating with tax-collectors, and called a drunkard and a sinner. He didn’t seek suffering, but it inexorably came his way, and he would not avoid it. It was inflicted by others because he lived his Gospel: he challenged the power-structures and vested interests of his day. He lost his life for the sake of the Gospel.

Yet in dying Jesus was imbued with trust in God, hope in people, forgiveness, and a clear conviction that the way of loving was the only way that made sense in the long term.  The Epistle to the Hebrews talks about his reaching perfection through suffering. That is the special version of suffering that followers of Jesus can choose – though often we back off.

That experience of Jesus, and of his followers (some of his followers!) is light years different from lives (and deaths) lived out in emptiness, bitterness, without goal or meaning, confined within the boundaries of narrow egos, constantly in competition, fearful and always grindingly busy.

Thank God for the better way.