30th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2012

I read a book a couple of months ago written by an Irish woman, Marie Keenan.  She was reflecting on what had been revealed in the Government Inquiries into clerical sexual abuse in the Irish Church.  Her main concern was to get behind the behaviour of the offenders - and to seek to understand why they behaved the way they did.

Of the perpetrators who consented to be interviewed by her, all of them had started off their formation wanting to be good priests or good religious.  What went wrong? She spent time examining the clerical sub-culture within the context of the culture of the Church as a whole.

In many of the submissions made recently to the current Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry, people have strongly condemned "the Church".  In most cases they are referring to the bishops, sometimes to the offending priests and religious.  Perhaps, we are all inclined to speak loosely of Church like that.

Whatever about the past, as we live the present and look forward to the future, we are all responsible, in our different ways, for the shape that the Church will take into the future.  By far the greatest group in the Church is the laity.  We all need to change.  Easier said than done! Conversion is a never-ending process, an ever-deepening process.

I don't know if you have noticed the Sunday Gospels over the past few weeks. Jesus wants us to follow him on his journey to freedom and to fulness of life, but he could talk about it only by way of paradox – greatness by becoming servant, even slave, first by becoming last.  Earlier in the Gospel he had spoken about finding ourselves by losing ourselves.  Two weeks ago it was 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.

The way that Mark tells his story, the disciples didn't get it.  They heard the words, but they didn't get it.  Most of us don't get it.  But Mark included today's Gospel incident, I think, to give us hope.  By the end of today's story, the blind man followed Jesus along the way – the way of discipleship, that would in fact lead to Calvary, and then to resurrection.  The blind man was not one of a kind.  With due respects, we are all blind.

Conversion [or repentance as it is usually translated] is not primarily changing our behaviour.  It is first learning to see.  But to learn to see, we need to want to see.  And to want to see, we need to accept that we don't see.  I think that to want something strongly enough to seek to get it, we also need to have hope.  Bartimaeus knew he couldn't see; he wanted to see; he put his hope in Jesus - and it all came together.

In the Church, we sometimes tend to think that we know all the answers.  We're right.  It's all there.  Until we realise that we don't see, that there is so much that we don't see, we learn nothing.  We don't grow;  we don't mature.

As Jesus insisted over the past few weeks, what we need to learn to see is that being last, sitting lightly with [even giving away] all we rely on, not lording it  over others, are good for us.  Painful – but necessary.

Bartimaeus had it right.  Jesus, have pity on me.  Rabbuni, let me see again.  Robbie Burns, the Scottish poet, got close to it when he wrote: "Oh that God the gift would gi' us to see ourselves as others see us."  Better still: "to see ourselves as Jesus sees us".  As Mark said of the rich man: Jesus looked steadily at him and loved him.  Try it and see what happens.

The current Inquiry won't go very far.  It may help a bit.  But there is so much that we need still to do ourselves – and it will be on-going.  Lord, let us see – again, and again, and again.