27th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

In today's Gospel the Pharisees' question whether a man could divorce his wife arose out of the culture, but it assumed an attitude that Jesus would have nothing of. In the unchallenged patriarchal culture of Jesus' day men virtually owned their women. Women had no legal rights. It was taken for granted that a man could divorce his wife. Of course! No question!  Jesus would not buy that attitude because, in his mind, men and women shared the same humanity; they shared the same human dignity.

That vision of Jesus reflected the ancient story of the creation of man and woman that we find in Genesis.  To make Genesis even clearer, Jesus used the image of their union being like a shared yoke, husband and wife, side by side, sharing in the common project of creating each other and other human beings, setting each other free, and nurturing the human growth and wonderful potential of each other through love.  Neither superior. Neither more important.

In today's Gospel Jesus went even further. It was not just adult men and women who shared the same humanity. Children, too, simply by their being alive, shared that human dignity also.  Jesus had a wonderful insight into the heart of God. God loves every person. Consequently, every human person has a God-given dignity. It goes simply with being human and alive. It can neither be surrendered through sin or other crimes nor disregarded by others for any reason.

The deep, passionate conviction of Jesus of the God-given dignity of every human person seems particularly appropriate in our own day.  We already confront the on-going issues of abortion, euthanasia, the inhuman deprivation and dispossession of peoples of the Third World, the total and heartless absence of hospitality to genuine refugees and asylum seekers, and even the practical discounting of the less powerful and well-off in our own society.

Another distressing issue has confronted us recently the issue of torture, or its euphemistic equivalent, aggressive interrogation.  I was reading an article in The Age yesterday that talked about how the advent of terrorism in the West had changed the goal posts. It raised the question of whether the greater good of protecting nations from further potential terrorist crimes justified the use of torture (and aggressive interrogation) of terrorism suspects.  Whatever about those who do not share the vision of Jesus, those of us who have consciously chosen to follow his way could never condone the use of torture.  Culture, of course, tends to blind us. The Church itself in past centuries, to its shame, condoned and even encouraged the use of torture just as it condoned slavery and the suppression of women.

But we have haltingly moved beyond that, and we had hoped, too, that civilised humanity had done so as well.  The argument that the greater good justifies the degradation of individuals is a very shaky and undefined claim.  The end does not justify the means, if the means undermines the very basis of human dignity. Torture violently degrades not only its victims. It also degrades the torturers and the society that condones it.  If people want to talk of the greater good, it is important to remember that deliberately and in cold blood to degrade ourselves morally is to compromise a higher and greater good than the good of our own possible protection from random acts of terrorism. Jesus consistently stressed that we may not save our lives physically by destroying ourselves morally.

It was Caiaphas who said: It is better for one man to die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed. Eminently sensible the greater good! The one man, obviously expendable in the interests of national security, was Jesus.

Those of us who think Jesus' way are a minority. But we do believe ourselves to be a privileged minority. Jesus has entrusted to us a mission - to make our world a human world, a civilized world - in other words, to spread the values of the Kingdom of God.  We cannot impose our vision. To try to do so would itself compromise it. Any vision based on the sense of the dignity of the human person clearly respects the value of human freedom. But we have a responsibility to speak out as clearly as we can, and to try to convince anyone who might be prepared to listen to us.