29th Sunday

Year B

29th Sunday Year B

Homily 1 - 2006

The Son of Man came to serve, not to be served, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Ransom is a figure of speech, of course, not a literal statement. Jesus didn’t pay anything to anyone. But he did “pay the price”, as it were, of his determination to love, his decision to love the many - that undefined, unlimited multitude, that we are. He paid the price of his commitment to love us unconditionally by being killed for it. According to the wisdom of the world, you don’t love that seriously: If everyone did that, it would undermine radically our familiar ways of relating as society.

I was thinking the other night about those of you who have been married for years. You, in your way, have “paid the price” of loving – of loving each other and your family. From the moment that the glow of the honeymoon started to fade, you realised that you had committed yourself to a spouse who was far from perfect. You realised how deep was your own self-centredness, how limited your patience and your energy. Over the years you have had to die to self for your love to survive, to grow and to thrive. You have willingly “paid the price” of loving for the sake of the one you loved.

Your choice to love your children constantly, consistently, and unconditionally has also meant that you have had to die to yourself: Many of you have known the ache of being unable to share with them your own enthusiasm for your faith. You have felt a gnawing burden of guilt. You have seen them making obviously unwise choices on major issues - and you have had to bite your tongues and live with the powerlessness and with your uncertainty about whether you should have done more. You chose to serve not to be served, and have paid with your lives the price of your love. And so many of you have become beautiful in the process: wise, serene and life-giving.

Those of you (of us!) who never got married, or who became widowed or separated or divorced have also known the inevitable pain of the choice to love and to live authentically the loneliness, the unfulfilled desires, the tiredness - especially when you have chosen to dedicate your energies to the service of the community, or to work for justice and compassion.

The second reading spoke of Jesus being tempted in every way that we are, though without sin – he always chose life. A life of faithful commitment to love is a life of constant temptation – the temptation to step back, to think of ourselves, to refuse to be stretched any further. We can all know the pain of dreams unfulfilled, of hopes not answered, of friendships betrayed, of service unappreciated. We have known the temptations to futility, despair and bitterness. Jesus knew them, too.

In one shape or other, a “price to be paid” seems to lurk in the background of all those who allow themselves to feel and to follow the enthusiasm associated with love. Yet the choice to remain committed - and to be stretched - surprisingly is the way to peace, fulfilment, joy, serenity, and wisdom.

It’s all something of a mystery - a wonderful mystery before which we can only stand quietly grateful, and somewhat overjoyed. It’s the sort of experience we would love to hand on to others. It is the energy, indeed, behind the Church’s commitment to mission – which we celebrate particularly today. The Church desires so much to share her insights into love, and her access to the love of God made visible in Jesus.

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.

Homily 3 – 2012

In the Gospel passages over the last few Sundays Mark has shown Jesus on his final journey to Jerusalem where he would drink the cup of suffering and of total loss and after that be raised out of death to fullness of life at the right hand of the Father. Mark used Jesus' journey as a symbol of every disciple's journey to and through death and loss to resurrection and life beyond imagination. He interrupted the journey narrative with a series of teachings about the basics of discipleship. The section began with the disciples' arguing about who of them was the greatest. Jesus' comment: If any want to be first, they must make themselves last of all and servants of all.

His series of teachings concludes with today's issue where James and John ask Jesus can they sit one at his right hand and the other at his left in his glory. [In the culture of the time, to sit at the right hand of another meant to share in the power and prestige of the other.] Jesus used the brothers' question to repeat his earlier point: Anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first must be slave to all.

I think that the need to be the greatest, the need to have power and status, are both expressions of the underlying compulsive need to be in control – one way of the other: through strength, through smartness or manipulation, through possessions, through the influence of those we know, through whose side we are on, etc. Is there any way out? Yes, there is. Jesus wants us to follow him on that journey to freedom but he could talk about it only by way of paradox – greatness by becoming servant, even slave, first by becoming last. Elsewhere in the Gospel he had spoken about finding ourselves by losing ourselves. Last week, acquiring what we lack by giving away what we have. Before that, coming fully alive with eternal life by cutting off our right hand, pulling out an eye, cutting off a foot should they get in the way.

It all sounds so negative and off-putting. What is he trying to say? Jesus is not a spoilsport. He wants to set us free. He wants a better world where all might live life to the full. We need to keep alert always to that unspoken context of everything Jesus says: The Kingdom of God is close at hand…. Believe the Good News! Basically, our compulsive need to be in control [through whatever means best suit us] comes from our sense of insecurity – often unrecognised and effectively suppressed, and even loudly denied. The only answer to such primal insecurity was there in last Sunday's Gospel. The one thing the rich man lacked is sadly the one thing that all of us lack – the one thing that Jesus wants to give to us.

Last week, Mark observed: Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him. Later, he remarked that Jesus gazed at the disciples. It is what we all long for: to be loved – without agendas, to know we're loved, and to believe it. To be loved by anyone is a start. What is truly effective, however, is to know and believe that we're loved by God. As we come to believe we're loved by God – no strings attached – we can begin to love ourselves gently, peacefully.

It's not easy. Letting go of familiar addictions is never easy. We need to drink the cup – as Jesus did, and that the disciples also had to do. Yet, as we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of love, the way we see the world changes, too. Others cease being rivals or threats. We don't need to be better than, stronger than, speak louder than. Comparisons lose their importance, their meaning: first/last, greatest/servant. So what! We learn to be at peace with, and unthreatened by, difference. We can disagree - without aggression. Gradually we become free. Our addictions and compulsions begin to melt.

The Kingdom of God comes nearer – and it truly is Good News. It's what we celebrate with every Eucharist.

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.

Homily 5 - 2021

“I have a right to do what I like!” We have heard that said fairly regularly in recent weeks, especially in the context of mandatory vaccination. We also hear it asserted increasingly in relation to euthanasia, as we have heard it argued in favour of abortion: “I have a right to do what I like with my body”. Often when I hear claims like that, I feel like saying, “Hang on! Have you? Perhaps, it is not as simple as that… What if what you claim as your right contravenes what I believe is my right? And, if it does, how do we decide which one prevails?”

Do I have a right to travel as fast as I choose on the road? I’m a free person. But what if that endangers others’ lives? Whose right prevails? And how do we decide? and on what basis? And what do we do when we disagree?

Once we have agreed as citizens to live together peaceably in community, we accept that others have rights just as we have. Just as we have rights, we also have duties towards our neighbours. Who decides which rights prevail when one person’s or group’s rights contradict others’ rights? Over the years we have entrusted our governments to work out general laws to safeguard what we call the “Common Good”; and we rely on our police forces to ensure that laws are observed.

Some rights are absolute, springing from the simple fact of our human dignity — such as everyone’s right to life. However, even those rights or duties that we believe are absolute may not be seen as such by everyone, even by the majority. We may disagree with the government; but, if we wish to live in peace and harmony, we have no alternative but to obey the laws or to accept being punished some way. In the meantime, of course, we can try [we may need to try], non-violently, to have the laws in question changed.

To succeed in living in harmony with people who disagree with us requires deeper motivation than simple self-interest. For some, sadly, the sole effective motivation is the threat of punishment. Jesus suggested an alternative — an unfashionable one is his time, and equally unfashionable in our time. He said that any followers of his need to agree to try to move beyond self-interest and tribal or national interests, and to love even their enemies. Over the twenty centuries since he first spelt that out, we in the Church have hardly taken him seriously.

Human society has so far managed, imperfectly, to struggle along motivated by self-interest. But now that humanity has evolved to the stage where one man can wipe out whole nations by the press of a button, or the world’s delicately balanced ecological systems be destroyed simply by doing nothing, self-interest and the survival of the fittest are no longer working. Nations need urgently to learn to work together in mutual respect and even compassion. It sounds unrealistic, but we are reaching the stage where everyone needs seriously to learn “to love our enemies”. Jesus was prepared to live and even to die, that way himself. By accepting death, he hoped to show that such love is possible, and to motivate us to choose his way. As we heard in today’s Gospel, “the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.

May we, finally, take him seriously.