28th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

The rich man in today's Gospel was a good man - he kept all the commandments; he truly wanted to inherit eternal life.  He is the only person in the whole of Mark's Gospel of whom it is said: Jesus loved him. But, when challenged by Jesus, as the Gospel put it, he went away – sad. What was going on?

He wanted to become holy. So do I. So do you.  But I think all of us have our own idea of what's holy. We'll be open to grow within that mindset - even if it asks a bit of us.  But no way would we question our sense of what's holy; and we wouldn't, for a moment, listen seriously to anyone who called into question our conviction,  our certainty, of what's holy.

That is largely the problem that Jesus encountered.  The ones who weren't interested in holiness were not those who believed that they needed to quiet Jesus by killing him. It was the ones who were concerned about it.  Jesus had called for conversion. There is one sort of conversion that says: My actions, my behaviour, is off-target; so I must change.  But there is the deeper conversion – the sort of conversion that Jesus called for – that says:  My thinking might be off-target; what I've so far taken for granted may be off-target; what I'm familiar with, what I'm proud of, what I've tried hard for, what I've made sacrifices for, may be off-target. But, if I am convinced of my position, what could ever lead me to be so disloyal as to question it?  That, essentially, was the Pharisees' problem. It's the problem of every good, law-observant, religious person.  Jesus did his best to crack it – he succeeded with some; but failed with many.

We need to be free enough in order to be self-critical. We need to be free enough to hear the criticism of others. We need to be wise enough to discover what truth there might be, if any, in the attitudes, and even criticisms, of others.  To be free enough to be self-critical, we need to be drawing our sense of identity, our sense of who we are, from the fact that we're loved – ultimately, that we're loved by God - unconditionally, whatever we're up to, wherever we're at. And we need to be comfortable with the fact.  To get a taste for truth, to discern where truth lies, we need to listen to God - to God speaking sometimes what we'd rather not hear.

As the Second Reading put it tonight: The word of God is something alive and active: it cuts like any double-edged sword but more finely; it can slip through the place where the soul is divided from the spirit, or joints from marrow; it can judge the secret emotions and thoughts.  In order to hear God telling us that we're loved, we have to listen – intently. To hear God calling us beyond where we are, possibly challenging us, we have to listen. Essentially, we need to pray.

Tonight's first reading from the Book of Wisdom, put it nicely: I prayed, and understanding was given me; I entreated, and the spirit of Wisdom came to me. But, too often in our prayer, we do the talking.  More important is to listen, to say nothing. Listening, no matter how hard we try, we usually seem to hear nothing.  So our prayer can be saying nothing, hearing nothing - but, in the saying nothing, and in the hearing nothing, it's surprising what does happen - not to our heads, but to our hearts.