26th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

In today’s Gospel, the disciple John was indignant that a person, who was not, as he put it, one of us, was using Jesus’ name to cast out devils - and, apparently, doing so successfully.  John wanted to keep the power associated with Jesus “in house”. He wanted to keep the power of God “in house”. His sense of God was constrained and narrow.  Jesus would have nothing of it. Jesus’ God was not a narrow God.

In the mind of Jesus, there is not a Christian God, a Jewish God, a Muslim God, a Hindu God ... God is simply God.  We try to put words to the mystery; and Christians will use Christian words, and Jews will use Jewish words, and Muslims will use Muslim words, and Hindus will use Hindu words - and the wisdom of each tradition is like the flame of a small match confronting the darkness of the night.  It is wonderful beyond words for us Christians to know that the face of Jesus is the human face of God - but the God behind the face remains mystery.

God is not on anyone’s side as though God were not also on the others’ side. God loves every person, and creates each one as one unique expression and embodiment of God’s own infinite beauty.  We can disfigure that beauty; we can ignore and devalue it. But God never stops loving or respecting and prizing each of us as uniquely precious. That vision of the human person consistently fired the heart and the mind of Jesus, making him particularly sensitive to the ones marginalised and discounted by the culture and to the sinners disfigured by their own destructive choices. 

As Jesus looks at our world today, he loves and respects George W Bush, he loves and respects the latest suicide bomber, he loves and respects everyone of us in between. And he weeps for all of us in our narrowness, prejudice, blindness, perversity and our beauty.

Jesus relies especially on his followers to keep alive his vision and his hopes - not for a Church triumphant but for a humanity redeemed and at peace.

In the second section of today’s Gospel, Jesus strongly warned his disciples to excise from themselves, both as individuals and as community, whatever might cause them to sin – ‘If your hand should cause you to sin, cut it off ...’

The word cause to sin is translated differently in different passages of the Gospel and in different versions – sometimes as cause to stumble, sometimes simply as scandalise. Technically it does not refer to sin in general but to the specific sin of losing faith in Jesus, losing faith in the vision of Jesus, losing hope that the world is redeemable.

It is important that we today listen to him. Our world at the moment needs vision. It needs hope. It needs the vision and hope of Jesus in the possibilities of humanity. The God of Jesus, our God, is not a confessional God, not a denominational God, not a national God. There is only one God; and this God loves all humanity. There are no first and second-class citizens in God’s Kingdom. To label anyone, as the disciple John did, as not one of us is to betray the vision and the hope of Jesus.

As followers of Jesus, as people of faith and of hope, we are always open to be pleasantly surprised, ever waiting for and expecting the next graced moment. But for that to happen, we need eyes that see and ears that hear. The never-ending process of our conversion needs to continue apace.