25th Sunday Year B - Homily 5

Homily 5 -2024

Early in his public life, Jesus was eager to get moving and to preach his message of the Kingdom of God around the towns and villages of Galilee. It was not long before he felt the strong need to enlist others, too, in his mission, even sending out his still-apprentice disciples on the same mission. Mark’s storyline conveyed an obvious mood of urgency. Later in the narrative Jesus still felt the gap between the urgency of the potential harvest and the availability of enough labourers to bring it in. He urged people to pray earnestly that God would arouse more labourers for the obvious task facing them. He was not thinking specifically about priests.

But Jesus’ message had threatened many of the Jewish elite. Jesus was perceptive enough to read the writing on the wall. It would simply be a question of time before they would have their way and execute him. In the light of that threatening change to the situation, Jesus recognised his need urgently to teach his disciples to carry on the mission without him [as we heard in today's Gospel].

As situations change, familiar behaviours need to change, too. Change is an inevitable factor of all real growth.

Of recent weeks I have been thinking a lot about change. I was seventy-five years old when I first came to work with Fr Paddy and the parish team here in Hamilton. That was nearly sixteen years ago; and now I am well and truly facing into my nineties. Recently, my health has suffered a few set-backs. I have developed some fluid on one lung, that has had an effect on my breathing; and I also feel frequently quite tired. As well as that, my hearing has deteriorated; and my memory, too, has become quite unreliable.

In the background, the diocesan nurse had been keeping a concerned eye on me, and just recently suggested that I consider whether now might be an apt time to think of going into an aged-care facility. The nurse made enquiries, and providentially there is a place becoming free at Nazareth House in Ballarat — but I needed to make up my mind immediately. I have prayed about it, and feel quite at peace with the prospect of going there … on Tuesday week.

It will be a big change for me. It will also be a big change for Hamilton Parish. Though I was not formally one of the staff here, I have been able to help with Masses and Confessions and a few other odds and ends. It is unlikely that another priest will take my place… though those needs will remain the same.

It is too easy simply to pray for more priestly and religious vocations. Certainly the Church needs priests — but the labourers for the harvest are not only priests. Laity like yourselves, after all, are the ones most in touch with the potential harvest. The way I see the priestly vocation is to motivate and to educate you, the laity, and to coordinate your ministries as best we can. Over the years the Australian Church has focussed its efforts almost exclusively on children in our Catholic schools and for a long time left the responsibility for that largely to nuns and brothers. As the Western world has become overwhelmingly secular, it is becoming increasingly obvious that that approach is no longer working.

To blame the teachers is to miss the point. I believe that we need a much more radical response. We need a lively, more attractive Church. We need laity convincingly engaged with Christ and enthusiastically sharing his mission to love the world and to take greater responsibility for it.

As Jesus himself showed us in today’s Gospel passage, changing situations call for a change of approach — of mind-set, firstly, and eventually of structure.

As the recently canonised Cardinal Newman once wisely observed: "To live is to change; and to be perfect is to have changed often".