24th Sunday Year B
See Commentary on Mark 8:27-30, Mark 8:31-33 & Mark 8:34-9:1
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.
Homily 2 - 2009
When I hear Jesus in today's Gospel say, if any want to be disciples of mine, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me, my first reaction is to feel awkward, vulnerable, perhaps, even, ashamed.
I don't have a cross. My life is a song. I see pictures, and hear stories, of the poverty and the oppression of so many people in other countries and I have it so easy. I know that there are so many people closer to home, here in Australia, who suffer - victims of violence in their own families, kids unfairly picked on in schools, partners suffering the heart-break of broken or breaking marriages, people of homosexual orientation made fun of, judged, picked on, sometimes beaten up.
I have it so easy. Not that there haven't been disappointments over the years, but Take up my cross! Where is it? And there have been on-going struggles – the kind of things Jesus was referring to when he said, for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the Gospel, will find it.
At the time that Mark was writing his Gospel, Jesus' comment was for some literally true. That's hardly the case for us but the call to be disciples consistently, thoroughly, can mean a metaphorical dying to self.
Accepting the call to be disciple involves openness to loving our enemies, loving our neighbour, even simply loving each other. Jesus was talking about genuine loving, of course - not just getting on with, or avoiding or ignoring people. Perhaps, most of us would claim we have no enemies - but we all have people we don't agree with, we feel awkward with, who annoy us, who think and behave differently, who vote differently, who have a different sense of what the Church should be like. We can try to let ourselves off the hook by saying, “There is a difference between loving and liking.”
Where does Jesus stand with that? How would you feel if he said that he loved you, but no way did he like you? Then there are those who have hurt us deeply, deliberately. Genuinely to love these people can be simply beyond us. But it's not beyond God and us. God can free us up to do what we can't do by ourselves.
Jesus can, and wants to, share with us his freedom to love anyone, to forgive anyone, even to like them. He does it by loving us – because his love (perhaps anyone's love), once genuinely believed and accepted, changes us. His love achieves what our will-power can't.
I believe that the desire and the capacity to love others begins by letting God love us – unconditionally. It sounds simple. We probably want it. But we rarely let it happen. We shall know we are getting somewhere when we notice ourselves not condemning ourselves so spontaneously as we learn simply to notice what we are up to, and then gently begin in smile at ourselves – as we do with those whom we truly love.
Once that begins, we shall probably also notice something similar happening in the way we start to relate to everyone.
Homily 3 - 2015
As the Church today marks Child Protection Sunday, it is good to step back and to look more closely at how and where we are going. I get the sense that most Catholics feel indignant at the self-serving response made by the Church as institution when, years ago, allegations of abuse by clergy were first raised by parents and other concerned adults. The Royal Commission has done enormous good in alerting the whole community to the repeated failure of many people in positions of authority.
I think we can all be glad that we have become more vigilant, and that the Church has already put into place sound systems to ensure that the problem will be contained as much as legal procedures can do that. Children will be much safer in the future than they were in the past.
I wonder, however, if we have done enough. As I see it, there are still so many past victims of clerical abuse who have not been helped adequately. Sometimes it is hard to reach out to them, given that many are very angry and some are quite psychologically broken people. The difficulty does not absolve us. It merely heightens the need. What is the Church’s pastoral response to these people? We have been forced to look at issues of financial compensation; but that is hardly a pastoral response. How do we respond to them as persons in need? And might you lay people be more able to help them than members of the clerical caste who hurt them? The Church has yet to seriously address this issue.
A question that exercises me is, As Church members are we better, more caring, more compassionate, more sensitive and responsive people now than we were before? Has the Church “climate” warmed at all? Are we more mature, more responsible, more truly conscientious people than the generation that preceded us?
As the spotlight is trained back on the generation that went before us, we sometimes wonder, How could so many have been so blind, so naïve, so heartless? Where past generations were blind to issues of sexual abuse, is this current generation equally blind to other issues staring it in the face? Will today’s children ask of us what we ask of our predecessors? Take the issue of asylum seekers, for example. Will later generations ask, How could they have been so heartless? so gullible as to swallow slogans and sound-bites? so blind to how innocent people were detained out of view and forgotten, and used in order to deter others – all justified by the “national interest” – which, too often, is simply pure self-interest on a national scale.
Just as it took the image of a young Vietnamese girl on fire with napalm running in utter panic and pain towards a media photographer to alert Americans to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the poignant image of a little boy lying drowned on a Mediterranean beach seems to have galvanized Europe to respond better to the tide of refugees fleeing over their borders from countries tortured by war and injustice. Emotional engagement can release incredible energy and goodwill. But in my present mood, I still wonder whether it necessarily leads to genuine conversion and lasting human growth. What sort of nation do we want to be – comfortable? or compassionate?
I listen to today’s Gospel against the background of Child Protection Sunday, conscious, too, that our annual Social Justice Sunday is just two weeks away, and reminded that Friday was the anniversary of the terrorist destruction of the Twin Towers in New York that spawned the so-called “War against Terror” and ushered in unbelievable turmoil around the world. Can there be real personal growth, genuine social progress, hope for a healthier and more life-giving Church without, as Jesus put it, taking up our cross, and somehow losing our lives in order to save them? And what does that ask of me, and you, in practice?
Homily 4 - 2021
Over the years, whenever I have prayed over the final part of today’s Gospel passage from St Mark, or whenever I have preached about it, I have thought about it in terms of its advice to us as individuals. Over the last few days, I have been wondering how it might also be pertinent to us as the collective community we form. In that case, we would need to change the wording somewhat — but I can imagine Jesus giving the same message to us as Church: “If you want to be my Church, renounce control of your image and reputation; take up your cross and follow me. If you think primarily of yourself and your image, you will lose them. Rather, forget about image; forget about how things used to be. Take my example and message seriously, and follow them for my sake, enlightened by my Gospel message, and you will become what I have always hoped you would be.”
We have been getting smaller, losing numbers, irrelevant at best to most of society, “on the nose” at worst, or somewhere between. People have changed, and are still changing. We approach authority differently now, whether in families or in society as a whole. Public protests are common. People do not do things simply because commanded, or because they always have. In many ways we are more captive to the social media.
How might we as Church come to terms with all that? I remember years back when I was a young priest stationed in Ballarat. I used to drive out to Creswick each Friday afternoon to hear the Confessions of the nuns who worked out there in the Catholic Primary School. Around this time of the year, I used to marvel at the clumps of daffodils growing beside the road, just over the fence but otherwise in the middle of nowhere. They dated from the gold-mining years, planted in the gardens of miners’ cottages no longer in existence. For years no one would have taken the least care of them — but faithfully, each springtime, they would burst into flower, burst back into life. The memory of them speaks to me still — wonderful examples of dying and rising: Christ's Church is irrepressible.
The present experience of being Church perhaps can free us up — free us to concentrate on reaching out enthusiastically, and helping our world: not preaching or teaching from some unreal moral high-ground, instead simply reaching out in love, patchily perhaps and even not too successfully, but reaching out to share with whoever might be interested our personal experience of being disciples of Jesus.
Questions of whether we are better than others or worse are irrelevant. More pertinent might be whether we are more peaceful, more fulfilled, whether we see life as meaningful and worth living, even whether deep down we are more joy-filled.
There is no need as Church for us to be defensive. People can think of us as they like. That is up to them. To be defensive is to view ourselves as too important. God is the source of any life-giving influence we have. Jesus, I think, calls us into Church, so that we can deliberately, freely, work together to support each other in our weakness without losing heart. He invites us to celebrate life sacramentally, to celebrate jn symbol our vision of God’s unconditional love in Eucharist, and in a rediscovered Reconciliation — where he assures us he is also present, with us, because he simply wants to be, because he likes us.
What does it matter if we become bigger, smaller, or stay the same? But Jesus did warn us that inner peace, meaning and joy may come with suffering. Wonderfully, they can co-exist. Even those who treat us as enemies can’t stop us treating them with respect, care and, perhaps, courage.