25th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

Who is the greatest? The past week in politics was caught up precisely in trying to work that out. Tony Abbot or Malcolm Turnbull? It is easy to take potshots at politicians – but we all get trapped in similar interpersonal dynamics. Inevitably, we are constantly assessing our relative status. We yearn to be taken seriously and respected. "I am the greatest", of course, and everyone else is potential threat, unless they see and accept my worth. As St James warned us in the Second Reading, the question is unfortunately regularly clouded by hostility; and hostility undermines peace of mind and drains much of the joy out of life. Being on guard is so much part of our life, and has been for so long, that usually we fail to notice it – yet it leaves us feeling vaguely dissatisfied with life. That is not the experience of God’s Kingdom.

Is there an answer? a way out of our pervasive, low-level but consistent dissatisfaction with our lives as they are? I believe that today’s Gospel passage is quite relevant. The catch is that it calls us to change. Business as usual, commonsense, will not do. Jesus consistently invites us to conversion, and his message is inevitably counter-intuitive.

The answer begins by unseating ourselves as god, no longer seeing ourselves and our personal self-interest as the centre of the world. Jesus invites us to welcome the real God, the one who sent him; and he sees us welcoming the real God by firstly welcoming him. What a beautiful word – welcoming! Welcoming God! It talks of warmth, readiness and anticipation – without any trace of reluctance or competition. Jesus was disturbingly down-to-earth, however. He used a child as an example – and it wasn’t his child. He put his arms around the child, in warm, perhaps enthusiastic, welcome. That was a self-demeaning gesture in Jesus’ world – because other people’s children were totally insignificant, unimportant, and overlooked in their powerlessness. Things have changed over the centuries.

As a nation, we do not like to welcome strangers. Yet, interestingly, we are not a notably happily satisfied nation. Our need to own ever more, ever better, things seems insatiable. Perhaps, if we learnt once more to welcome strangers, particularly, as Jesus did, the insignificant, unimportant and overlooked, we might experience a deeper peace and more real contentment in our hearts.

Before he put his arms around the young child, Jesus had said something else interesting to his disciples, to those men who all saw themselves, and intensely wanted others to regard them, as somehow “first”. He invited them to consider themselves “last of all and servants of all”, indeed, not even “servants of some, some of the time” but simply as “servants of all”. It does not come naturally. How can anyone honestly see themselves as “last of all and servant of all”? Yet, in his seriously counter-intuitive style, Jesus saw the choice not as burden but, when undertaken voluntarily and whole-heartedly, as liberation – and as the way to a life worth living.

He knew what he was talking about. It would not be long before he would be paraded as “last of all” and, in the words of the Book of Wisdom in the First Reading, “… tested with cruelty and torture, … and condemned to a shameful death”. That was his way of being “servant of all” – and he managed it! He explored the extreme reaches of loving, which he had been practising all his life. As another scriptural author put it, “He became perfect through suffering”; and in the process showed us that such love was possible; and clearly in his case, that such love climaxed in rising to life. I believe, however, that Jesus did not have to wait for the third day to experience life, but that he was experiencing it with ever-growing intensity right across his life as gradually he “grew in wisdom and age and grace”.

Filled with hope, he invites us to follow.