26th Sunday

Year B

26th Sunday Year B

See Commentary on (Mark 9:38-48) in Mark 9:38-41 & Mark 9:42-50

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.

Homily 2 - 2009

I happened to see a photo in Friday’s Herald-Sun of the three young men who had assaulted an Indian doctor in Williamstown with a baseball bat twelve months ago. They fractured his skull and destroyed part of his brain - and they did it all, apparently, for a bit of fun. The photo showed them, as I saw it, insolent, arrogant and showing no remorse whatever.

Seeing it, triggered off in me a strong feeling, firstly, of dislike, but also of hopelessness, almost despair. My fear is that they are not unique. I think there is so much deep, floating anger around in our world – the same sort of mindless anger that was probably behind the vandalising of a stained glass window here in the Church on Friday night.

Today is Social Justice Sunday. As is its custom, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference has sponsored another of its annual statements. This year the statement addresses "Youth and Social Justice", following up on the World Youth Day in Sydney last year. Among other things, it encourages young people to get actively involved in promoting justice in society. But it also speaks of young people being among those most vulnerable to the injustices abroad in society.

The Statement got me thinking again about the three young men who attacked the doctor last Christmas. Without denying their personal responsibility, I wonder if they have been profoundly let down by society.

Confronted by the depth of my own spontaneous dislike for them, it occurred to me that, that is not how Jesus reacts to people. His consistent response to all of us, at all times, is unconditional love – real love, masculine love. It is a gross simplification, perhaps, but I fear that, as a society, we don’t know how to initiate young men into a responsible stance towards their world. So many fathers are not sure any more how to father well. Many of them, sadly, were not fathered well themselves.

Recent decades have witnessed a wonderful development in respect for women, and a better understanding of women’s place in community. However, a real, though quite unnecessary, side-effect of the long overdue rise of feminism has been that many men have become uncertain of their roles. Fathers have taken a back-step – some of them totally withdraw from the scene – and their sons are often the worse for it.

A father’s love is different from a mother’s love. A father’s love sets boundaries and places expectations. Fathers need to know how to channel the testosterone produced in their sons into proper confidence, trust, initiative, self-discipline and courage. Our culture doesn’t help in this. Sometimes – almost, perhaps, in helpless reaction against the feminist revolution – culture promotes the macho image: masculinity run wild and untamed, unredeemed and dangerous. Men, who simply happen to play football well, are held up as role models – as if football skills summed up the ideal of genuine, wholesome masculinity.

As a society, we have sold short a lot of our young males. We have no idea how to initiate them. That does not absolve them of responsibility. But it is too easy to scapegoat the worst of them, rather than to look seriously at ourselves and make any necessary changes.

As today’s Gospel warned: ‘Anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better off thrown into the sea with a great millstone round his neck.’ The context might be different, the language colourful, but the depth of feeling behind it is clear.

When Jesus loves, he also has expectations. Jesus’ love is a masculine love – it inspires, it calls forth, it energises, it encourages, it releases potential. And it expects self-discipline. It knows where and how to draw the line on what is unacceptable behaviour.

I wonder if those three young men ever experienced love like that.

Homily 3 – 2012

I think that it’s true enough that our major political parties seek to present themselves as family-friendly. Yet invariably, economic interests trump family welfare. The reality is that many families, perhaps most, find life pretty tough going most of the time. It can be hard, for example, to have quality family time together. Financial pressures, the need to pay off the mortgage, can mean that one or both parents have to work long hours or irregular hours - with the result that they're rarely home together. Work can at times be pretty difficult to find, particularly personally fulfilling work - so many are forced to accept casual or part-time jobs with inadequate remuneration and little security. All of that makes for stress. Add to that the fact that families these days come in many shapes and sizes - two-parent families, one-parent families, single mothers, blended families, serial fathers, etc.. And Catholic families are no exception to this generalized picture. I remember, over thirty years ago, being surprised at the number of children in the local parish school whose experience was not that of the stable nuclear family. Each of these various home situations has its own particular stresses and strains - inevitably worked out on the children involved.

Today the Church observes Social Justice Sunday. This year the Social Justice statement focusses on [you might have guessed by now!] the family; and invites us to reflect thoughtfully on our present situation with a view to seeking better ways of living together. Rather than just compiling a wish-list of practical suggestions, its primary thrust is to ask us to step back and to reflect. Are we happy with the ways our culture keeps developing? We have become a consumer-oriented, consumption driven society. In the light of the recent Global Financial Crisis, we were urged to spend more - on anything! and it seems to have worked, at least in the short term. But might our consumer society be really good for us as individuals or as families? What sort of people does it tend to make us?

We have become a society fuelled by competitiveness - keeping up with the Joneses - needing to have the latest of everything, and more and more of it. Is that contributing ultimately to our welfare as individuals, and to our mood as a society? The influence of the culture we are immersed in, its values, its ever-changing priorities and its fashions is very strong - the more so since we are hardly conscious of its operation.

Today’s Gospel is perhaps relevant - another example of Jesus’ radical questioning of generalised attitudes. He challenged the status quo of his day because he saw through its emptiness and deception. Last week’s Gospel dealt with society’s fascination with “Who’s the greatest?” This week’s: Are they in step, or out of step? One of us, or rocking the boat? Jesus’ response, for all its hyperbole, was: “Don’t swallow it!” Think twice about what you choose to grasp, the path you follow, what looks attractive.

How can we become more reflective, more alert, more aware of how we’re being subtly swept along by currents that don’t lead to genuine life to the full? In the midst of a day that is already too full, already too exhausting, we need to prioritise time to contemplate, to pray. One more thing! that, surprisingly, clears the mind, simplifies everything, brings life into perspective, and eventually sees us gleefully letting go of what we have come to see as not necessary at all. Check with someone who does it!

Homily 4 – 2021

Today, as we celebrate Migrant and Refugee Sunday, we are invited to think more deeply about the opportunities that migration opens up. Migrants and refugees are very much one contemporary instance of the larger dynamic of difference becoming oneness —perhaps an illustration of Jesus’ comment, “Whoever is not against us is for us”.

Early in my priesthood, the Second Vatican Council had called our Catholic Church to the value and the need for co-operation with other Christian Churches. At the same time, it summoned the Church in the West to seek ways to cooperate practically and personally with the Church in the East and South. Both calls flow naturally from the insight behind Jesus’ observation: “Whoever is not against us is for us”. That was nearly sixty years ago. It was a few years later that I found myself very much involved working with other Christian Churches in our common financial and personal support for refugees recently arrived on our shores. That cooperation led to the Action for World Development initiatives of the seventies [that some you might remember]— a wonderful example of inter-Church teamwork that has continued to deepen since then.

Just as the Vatican Council had called our Catholic Church to think and work ecumenically with other Christians, it spoke also of the need and value of inter-faith cooperation — with Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims among others. Such cooperation has become possible, and more necessary of recent years, as migrants and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries have entered or are seeking to enter our country.

Recently Fr Paddy and I have had the privilege of sharing our space in the presbytery with Javid, a young Muslim refugee from Afghanistan. I was fortunate to have shared many a conversation with him over an evening meal. I was deeply, deeply, impressed by his devotion to God and to God’s mercy, by his prayer, even his fasting. It opened my eyes, and challenged some of my prejudices.

Certainly, we Catholics are, for some time now, experiencing the value of the presence in our Church of Catholics and, indeed of Catholic priests or seminarians, who have arrived here from India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Africa and elsewhere.

Jesus’ comment in today’ Gospel, “Whoever is not against us is for us”, makes me wonder if even the Muslim presence here in Australia may lead in time, as seems possible also in so-called Christian Europe, to our Western cultures generally finding once again a more significant place for God in our otherwise increasingly godless life-styles. Sadly, many of those refugees have suffered deep trauma during the many vicious wars fought in their homelands by armies from the West, including Australia. They need time and help, understanding and welcome, particularly from us Christians — we at least, I hope, are sensitive to our shared dignity as children of the one, merciful God our Creator, and can comfortably reach out to anyone and everyone, whoever they are, as our sisters and brothers.

To appreciate that “Whoever is not against us is for us” is true will, in their case, given the terrible past experiences of many of them, require us to take the initiative, to show them welcome and sensitively to help them, where possible, to integrate and eventually feel “at home”.