29th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2018

When I think of Mission Sunday, I still tend to think spontaneously of foreign missions, and their need for prayer support and financial assistance. Yet I know that the issue of the Church’s mission is much much richer than that.

Why do we ask God to send more labourers into the vineyard? What are we seeking? More Catholics? A bigger Church? Do we want to save more and more people? Certainly, we used to think like that. At one stage, most believed “Outside the Church, no salvation”. What did we think we were saving them from? From hell? From God’s anger, God’s revenge and punishment? But God is hardly the problem. God offers forgiveness to the guilty; and forgives easily. Our Jewish forefathers learnt that long before Jesus came among them. And Jesus certainly reached out to unreformed sinners.

Salvation is salvation from the violence and hostility people show towards each other, and from their unwillingness, and sometimes even inability, to love – and particularly from the awful consequences of such failures to love. God seeks to save people from their own hostility and rejection of themselves. Unloving people are unhappy people – potentially for eternity if they choose to stay that way. Imagine living among a conglomerate of people who hate and reject both themselves and each other, without any compensating distractions – for eternity. That is hell – not a punishment, but a freely chosen consequence of their own free attitudes and actions.

Jesus came not to change God’s heart and mind, but to change human hearts and minds. God’s forgiveness reaches to whoever is prepared to accept it. Jesus came to get people to change enough to accept it. He came to call them to love – beyond limited family and tribal boundaries. He came to show them what loving means; and that loving is humanly possible; and to enable them to love similarly.

But why did he suffer and die then? The answer is easy. We tortured and killed him. He freely accepted that as the price of integrity in a sin- and violence-saturated world. His freely-accepted, tortured death showed unmistakeably his commitment to unconditional and universal, non-selective love. His total lack of recrimination after his resurrection clearly confirmed that.

The epistle to the Hebrews stated that Jesus’ became perfect through suffering. Suffering drew him beyond theory to reality, beyond  conviction to  proof. Jesus was not simply resuscitated but raised – raised to a new and perfect way of being human by the action of the Father. His humanity was transformed. Wonderfully, the epistle went on to state that Jesus became source of similar salvation to each single person who wholeheartedly accepts his way of love, and to the whole world when everyone else does likewise. We become perfect through him, with him and in him.

Getting back to the issue of mission. The Church is the community of those of us who are prepared to accept Jesus’ way of loving unconditionally and universally. Our mission is to become disciples who are prepared to support each other to live Jesus’ way; and to show the world the efficacy of Jesus’ way as we invite, motivate, encourage and empower, and, in little ways, organise the rest of the world to do likewise.

But, we constantly confront an inevitable pull-back from loving consistently or thoroughly. Competitiveness and envy, mutual hostility and mutual violence, revenge, closing ranks, are powerfully contagious. It takes energy to counteract them. Hence, there is an essential need for continual mission to keep ourselves focussed, in order to get the rest of the world to act likewise and to help each other. Simply belonging to the Church is never enough.

And yet we in the Church, though we have all the incentives, do not have a monopoly on love. God's Kingdom is bigger than the Church. As God’s creative Spirit breathes where it will, there are people everywhere co-operating with God's Spirit better than many of us do, changing the world for the better and contributing to its salvation.