33rd Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

I studied to be a priest at an international College in Rome, with students from all over the world, and, naturally, from many different languages. The common means of communication was Italian.  Each year, some of us English-speaking students used to play an annual game of cricket against students from the Venerable English College in Rome. I remember one year, a Vietnamese student – with not one word of English – came to watch us play. He could make no sense at all of what was going on… So one of the students tried to explain.  Well, if the Vietnamese student was confused before, he was even more confused after, as the Australian student – in his best Italian – started to explain what was happening. The problem was: How do you translate into another language the terms we take for granted: square leg, short leg, silly point, slips, no-balls, maiden overs, leg breaks, batting crease, etc.? Taken literally, the terms are nonsense. You need to know the code.

Today’s Gospel, and also the First Reading from Daniel, are a bit like that: You need to know the code. That way of writing, believe it or not, was common in Jesus’ day. It is called apocalyptic writing. Jews understood what was being said, but foreigners – in this case, their Roman oppressors — did not.  Apocalyptic was the language of the resistance; it was meant to keep the powerful ones in the dark. As we listen to the Gospel Reading today, the language is not to be taken literally, any more than the language of cricket can be taken literally.

Today’s reading is short -- a couple of paragraphs from a much longer discourse. Jesus was telling those disciples in the know how to make sense of history, how to make sense of what is happening in people’s lives.

We need to look at life at two levels. There is the surface level of whatever is going on – the things you hear on the National News, and the things that happen closer to home.  But there’s more to it than that, a whole other level – the engagement of redemptive grace with the deeply embedded sin of the world.  What is going on at the surface is essentially the complex of deeds and attitudes that give practical expression to the workings of grace or the workings of sin.

Whatever their context or their shape, they are practical expressions of love, respect, justice, reconciliation, non-violence on the one hand, or of self-interest, rivalry, injustice, confrontation, revenge and violence, etc. on the other.  From our point of view, the practical shapes taken by what happens to us and to our world are not essentially the issue. What matters are the responses we make to it all, and our motivations behind those responses.  Are we drawing on God’s empowering grace to choose integrity in the midst of whatever or do we sell ourselves and our neighbours short, by answering evil with evil, and allowing ourselves to get caught up in the same tired spiral of sin in the world?

God is around. As the Gospel said so graphically: the Son of Man is coming into our world, our real world. God is in the process of gathering into ever deeper union with Himself his chosen from the four winds.  People are responding – from the most unlikely places and in the most ordinary ways – saying “Yes” to integrity, “Yes” to responsibility, “Yes” to forgiveness, and so on.

With the crucifixion of Jesus when the Son of Man came definitively into our world, the sin of the world has been essentially overcome.  We’re in the “mopping up” phase – though the persistent resistance to the work of grace is still fierce.  They tell me that a wounded bull is especially dangerous.  So, let’s open our eyes to the unexpected signs of God at work in the hearts and actions of so many people.  It’s not all doom and gloom. As the Gospel says: know that he is near, at the very gates.