33rd Sunday

Year B

33rd Sunday Year B

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.

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.

Homily 3 - 2015

We look at Syria and the rise of terrorism, not only there, but in other places, too, around the globe. Our world experiences with increasing frequency and tragic effect natural disaster after natural disaster. As the result of both, thousands of people are uncontrollably on the move around the world.

Can our present political structures of self-interested national states and global corporations agree even to approach the problems realistically and resolve them effectively? Does our current economic system allow such solutions? Effectively, do politicians and bankers have the vision or the will needed? Can they save themselves?

That is the issue that today’s Gospel passage addresses. For a start, it seems at least to be saying, in highly graphic and original imagery, that the world as we know it won’t always be as things are now. In those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. The passage leaves open whether that is good news or bad news. It also leaves it to us to work out whether the ones responsible are ourselves, or God.

It continues: And then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in the clouds'with great power and glory, and then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds… The passage is referring to what is often called the Final Judgment. That raises a couple of extremely important issues in my mind. The first is this. Is the Son of Man about Judgment? Is there an element there of threat? Or at least of uncertain outcome? My answer is ‘No!’ He comes to reassure forgiveness to a certainly guilty humanity. The God whom Jesus reveals is a God who loves.

My second issue arises from where the passage states that the Son of Man will gather his elect from the four winds. Who are they? Only some, or everyone? I believe the answer must be ‘Everyone’. I believe that, primarily, because divine love is neither arbitrary nor conditional. But there is another reason. I am sure there is so much of my sin, of my destructiveness, that I am not aware of. The culture I am part of, the community among whom I live, has an enormous influence on what I simply assume to be right or wrong. That goes for all of us. Inevitably we are all complicit in each other’s blindness.

And then, there is the matter of freedom and responsibility. I was given a good start in life. I was loved. But I often wonder about those who never really knew love as children? What chance have they had to assess the meaning of much of what they do? We all live in a culture where competitiveness, envy and hostility are endemic. There is not much love out there beyond family and close friends. Again, we are all complicit. To condemn one fairly would be to condemn everyone. As he was being crucified, Jesus said of his murderers, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. If in Jesus’ mind they qualify for forgiveness, who might possibly be excluded?

There is no doubt about God’s love. But there is about ours. And it is the world’s lack of love, empathy and compassion that undergird our political structures and economic systems – that are now finally revealing their inability to save us. Yet we were created in the image of God. We are made for love. We can love. Because no one is an island, and we are all children of our culture, we have the mission to call it to conversion; to mirror and to bring love, respect, compassion and generosity to our political structures and to our economy.

We need conversion ourselves. Pope Francis believes that conversion will deepen from a deliberately contemplative approach to our God and our world.

Homily 4 - 2018

At the time of Jesus and of the next generation or two afterwards, Palestine had been, and still was, an occupied country under the rule of the Roman Empire. The lives of ordinary Jews in their homeland were tough. Most of them faced alarming levels of poverty. An armed revolution had taken place during Jesus’ childhood, only to be brutally suppressed by Roman legionaries. Most Jews yearned for liberation. Some still dreamt of armed revolution; most, particularly pious Jews, hoped that God would intervene on their behalf, destroy their enemies and usher in the glorious end times. And they had the Book of Daniel, one of their sacred books written during an earlier foreign occupation a century or so earlier, to confirm that hope.

Jesus and the disciples had arrived in Jerusalem. Jesus had commented that the magnificent Jewish temple there in the city would face destruction. For disciples, the destruction of the temple was virtually unthinkable. It was the abode of God, where God became accessible. In their minds, the destruction of the temple would be the equivalent of the end of the world. Totally confused, they asked Jesus when it would happen.

Jesus’ answer referred specifically to the coming destruction of the temple, which in fact happened about forty years after Jesus’ death. Effectively Jesus made the point, in richly imaginative language, that life would go on as expected. Today’s Gospel passage gives us the conclusion of Jesus’ reflection, where he pulls aside the veil, as it were, to include a reflection on the deeper meaning of history in general.

The language about the sun being darkened, etc., made the point that the deeper meaning would be crucially important, metaphorically world-shattering. Ordinary human behaviour is never ordinary, never insignificant. How we behave, how we respond to what is going on, affects our experience of life in society now and into eternity.

As far as Mark was concerned, the Son of Man came in power and great glory when Jesus deliberately faced his murder out of his love for humanity. His death expressed his judgment on the world – his unshaken commitment to the dignity of every human person and his universal, unconditional forgiveness of sin.

But that initial coming of the Son of Man continues, unnoticed, generation after generation. The deeper meaning of our behaviour now is that, through it, whether we consciously realise it or not, we express either our acceptance or our rejection of Jesus’ forgiveness and of his way of love. Across history, God is gathering his chosen from the four winds. The generation that personally witnessed the human life of Jesus has passed away, but history goes on. Heaven and earth pass away, but Jesus’ words do not pass away – they remain as relevant today as they were when he first uttered them.

When we remove the veil, as it were, what is really going on? Nothing in our lives is insignificant. Our interactions with each other matter. Our choices to love matter. Our practical respect for the human dignity of everyone matters. Opening our hearts and minds to understand and respond to the nation’s First Inhabitants matters. Our cruelty to those desperate people who arrive unannounced on our shores matters. How we respond to victims of all kinds of abuse matters. Our response to those who are homeless matters. How protective we are to those still within the wombs of their mothers matters. How we treat our environment, whether we hand it over enhanced to the generations following us, matters.How we cast our votes – whether motivated by self-interest [what’s in it for me?] or whether we have in mind the common good – matters.

We do not see the Son of Man. But he is near, at the very gates. He is here because he loves our world, and wants to motivate us, to empower us, to choose the ways of love and of mutual respect – consistently, enthusiastically, energetically and courageously.

Homily 5 - 2021

In today’s Gospel, Jesus, true Jew that he was, broke into a way of speaking that was familiar to his contemporaries, but totally foreign to us — what Scripture scholars today label “apocalyptic language”: highly imaginative scenarios, graphic images, a kind of code language. Today’s passage, the concluding part of a much longer discourse, is an example. Looking to what was still future to them, he talked about “the sun darkening, the moon losing its brightness, the powers of heaven being shaken”. [It was the sort of language that the evangelists briefly used to comment on the meaning of Jesus’ death. Remember how they wrote that, as Jesus was hanging on the cross, “darkness came over the whole earth”, “graves were opened”, etc.]

Good news or bad news? At least, it was saying that something momentous was happening.

Today’s passage continued: “They will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory”. [During his trial before the High Priest, Jesus said that the High Priest would “see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven”. When? Apparently as Jesus was dying — Jesus wasn’t around after that for the High Priest to see.]

What was he talking about now in today’s passage? Apocalyptic language again to refer to something momentous about to happen that, whatever it might involve for the High Priest, would be good news for disciples of Jesus: “The Son of Man … will send the angels to gather his chosen from the four winds”. We are in the position now to realise that he was talking about the incredible change wrought to the whole world by Jesus’ saving death and resurrection. Jesus’ death and resurrection ushered in the Kingdom of God, and eternal life.

Is life in the world different since Jesus lived, died and rose? Partly, I suppose. But the problem is that most of the world has taken little notice of what he came to teach us by his life, and to exemplify particularly by his death. Essentially, Jesus came to teach that the key to experiencing the Kingdom is that people genuinely respect and love each other, even their enemies. Jesus did. He faced death as the price for his insistence. But though we claim to be his disciples, we tend to fall short of his central teaching.

Pope Francis has asked Christians everywhere to observe this Sunday as World Day for the Poor. He introduced the observance five years ago. For whatever reasons, I took little, if any, notice. But on Friday, I read the message he addressed this year to the Church everywhere. The whole message calls out to be pondered. I shall read to you now one fascinating paragraph, among many:

“The poor have much to teach us. …they know the suffering Christ through their own sufferings. ... We are called to discover Christ in them, to lend them our voice in their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to understand them and to welcome the mysterious wisdom that God wants to communicate to us through them.

Our commitment does not consist exclusively of activities or programmes of promotion and assistance. What the Holy Spirit mobilises is … above all an attentiveness that considers the other in a certain sense as one with ourselves. This loving attentiveness is the beginning of a true concern for their person which inspires [us] effectively to seek their good.”

I need a lot more time to let the whole message soak in.