29th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

It's a great story that the Gospels give us during these final weeks of the Church's year - the Christian journey in miniature.  Jesus and the disciples are on the way to Jerusalem.  Their journey across the plains and hills, and down into the valleys, and their experiences and dialogues along the track, pick up many of our experiences as we cover the hills and valleys that mark our journey across life.

Today ... the request of James and John to be “big time” in the coming Kingdom: Allow us to sit one at your right hand and the other at your left in your glory. They are obviously men who dream, men who desire, men who want to excel.  Last week it was the rich man and possessions; this week, it's prestige and power.  It's all ego-fed, of course, perhaps inevitable, given that we are all born into a family and a culture that shape us according to themselves. Still, it's what gets us started, gets us moving.

St Bernard said that the first step to perfect love of God is love of ourselves. But, there is more to life than possessions, power, and prestige, along with the competitiveness, rivalry and violence that they generate.  We can be born again, born from above. It's what we seek to celebrate in baptism, but it can happen only as life unfolds, the kind of lived baptism that Jesus experienced, too.  As Jesus asked of James and John in today's Gospel: Can you drink the cup that I must drink? Can you be baptised with the baptism with which I must be baptised? That lived baptism is the way to genuine growth, and to ultimate freedom.

Somehow, usually through the experience of failure, through diminishment of some kind, or suffering, or boredom, or depression, we have to face our limits, our powerlessness.  Somehow, the insight has to dawn that power, prestige, possessions – or Botox – are empty. They're illusions. They aren't what life is about. The task of the second phase of life is to let go, and to become real - to discover and to become who we truly are.  And the only way to do it is to accept life, with its pain, its inevitable diminishment, and the myriad “little deaths” that lead up to it, to take it on board, even to embrace it, to learn from it, and to let it mature us.

We are not good at courageously accepting life as it is, or at accepting death, which is part of life. Instead, some are tempted to cast themselves as victims – Why me? or to rage resentfully against their luck, their fate. They avoid death – and fail to live; some frantically search to distract themselves, to run away from it, or they'll try to protect themselves, by killing others, if necessary.  Some will even try  to control it, to master it by orchestrating their own death by mindless risk-taking or, sadly, by suicide.

The letter to the Hebrews claimed: Jesus became perfect through suffering; he matured through suffering life and death, through facing them. He chose to accept reality. He chose to love in a world that is frightened to love, really love, and so is inevitably caught up in violence and death-dealing.  He accepted the reality of being excluded, the reality of death, rather than withdraw from his own truth, and the reality of living authentically.  He trusted God; and, in the process, he became the source of salvation for all those who attune their deepest selves, their hearts, to the rhythm of his deepest self.

Baptism, being born again, is not so much something that Jesus does for us as an experience which he invites us to share in – with him. Then, at each recurring Eucharist, he offers to us the cup that is his blood, shed as the price of his living life - and we choose, deliberately, to drink the cup that he drank..  With him, we choose to face, full on, both life and death not in control, but in trust. We accept the cup that life offers, the baptism that life presents – and we discover that life is always opportunity.