33rd Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1- 2006

The imagery and language found in today’s first reading from Daniel, and then in the Gospel passage from Mark, developed during the time of Israel’s foreign occupation and domination. It was a kind of underground resistance literature.  It first showed up under the Greek domination of Israel a couple of centuries before Christ, and continued up until the end of the first century after Christ. The Book of Daniel is an early example of it; today’s Gospel is a later one.  The imagery and language were a kind of coded script, meaningless to the oppressors, but carrying a message of hope and vindication for the oppressed Jews “in the know”.

The struggle and oppression experienced by the Jews under the dominant world super-powers (first the Greeks, then the Romans at the time of Jesus and the early Church), were seen as expressions of the cosmic conflict between good and evil.  The message of the literature was that cosmic evil would be overcome, as would the historical agents of cosmic evil, the oppressive super-powers of the time.  Daniel saw the eventual victory of good personified in a figure he called the Son of Man. It was an ambiguous image, sometimes referring to an individual person, sometimes referring to those Jews who, as a group, remained faithful under oppression.

Jesus applied the image to himself. He saw himself personally conquering cosmic evil by means of his own death and later resurrection.  Mark described the moment of Jesus’ death thus: When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.  Not as graphic as today’s imagery: The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness and the stars will come falling from heaven. But the message is the same: Jesus’ death was the moment when cosmic evil was radically overcome.

But just as the Son of Man image in Daniel carried both a personal and a corporate reference, so, too, the conquest of evil across history continues through the faithfulness of the corporate Christ, the Church (whom Paul calls the Body of Christ).  Whatever the concrete shapes that cosmic evil takes across the centuries, the ultimate victory of good has been achieved.

The message today, as then, is a message of hope in the face of what at times may seem insuperable odds.  In our own day, cosmic evil finds expression, among other things, in terrorism and the endless violent retaliation it invites, in gross global poverty and hunger, in disease and epidemics, in the refusal to reconcile, etc.

As the Body of Christ in the world of the twentieth century, we see our role to be the corporate bearers in our day of the personal response already made by Jesus.  Like Jesus, we remain faithful: trusting in God, hopeful of change, irrepressible in our insistence on active loving resistance and forgiveness as the only effective ways to counter hatred, violence, indifference and ignorance.

As the financial experts of the world’s top twenty wealthy nations meet in Melbourne this weekend, let us pray that they will find the imagination, enlightenment, selflessness, resolve and capacity to move effectively and speedily to overcome the challenge and Make Poverty History.