3rd Sunday of Easter C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2016

When God creates us, when God calls us into being, God gives us, with that, a wonderful dignity. The being that God gives us is the outflow of God’s own loving. In gifting us with being, with life, loving life, God creates us in God’s own image and likeness. God fashions us as beings created to love. That radical dignity can never be lost. We cannot disown it. Nor may anyone take it from us.

In creating us as love, God calls us to love – to love God, to love ourselves, to love others. That is our basic human calling or vocation. We grow, we flourish, we blossom, we mature, by loving – by engaging with others, by respecting their God-given human dignity, by accepting responsibility for each other. That blossoming takes individual shape in each of us, depending on our unique personal characteristics and gifts, our opportunities, our supports and environment. We each have a unique human vocation – to bloom where we are planted.

Those of us baptized into the life of Father, Son and Spirit, have an added dignity. By becoming members of the Body of Christ, we live with, indeed, within, the inner life of God. 

Following on our human dignity and our personal vocation, we each have a mission.  In being called to love others, we automatically have a responsibility for each other and for our world. That is our mission, simply as human beings. But the world that we live in is a world that over history has been scarred by the inroads of sin. Sin destroys our relationships of mutual love, and turns us from the outward orientation of loving and respecting others to the inward obsession with self-interest and its various extensions.

It is to this world that we Christians have been given by the risen Christ a further specific mission – as we remember from last Sunday’s Gospel: As the Father sent me, I now send you … Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained. That mission reminds us, and reaffirms and highlights the fact, that God’s love is unconditional. That was particularly obvious from last Sunday’s Gospel. One way or the other, the Church’s mission, our mission, is to encounter the mystery of sin and to overcome it – with love. That is the purpose of the Church. It is the purpose of the faith community of Ballan, in which the Church takes concrete shape here. So let us take a look at the local faith Community.

I believe that today’s gospel is very appropriate for the situation you are experiencing at the moment, as you move towards discerning your on-going and future leadership. In today’s Gospel, Jesus moved beyond that mission to the world of forgiveness, entrusted to the whole group of disciples, to address the issue of individual responsibility within the community. He commissioned Peter personally to feed the members of the flock of believers. This raises the issue of ministry and charisms within the community itself.

Through the brief dialogue between Peter and the risen Jesus, Jesus reminded him clearly of his weakness and sin. But his repeated questioning gave Peter the opportunity to realize that, along with his sin and, in a certain sense, coexisting with his sin, he also undeniably loved Jesus. Only after Peter had recognized both his weakness and his love did Jesus confide to him the responsibility for the ongoing protection and nourishment of the community. Forgiven sinner himself, he was in position to offer hope to other fellow sinners – not from any pedestal but from their shared fragility. He could be trusted with the ministry of service within the believing community. All ministries within the faith community are acts of service by sinners for fellow sinners 

I wish you wisdom and generosity as together you face the continuing task of discerning new leadership and responsibility within you local faith community, that will help you to fulfill appropriately the mission that is yours as local faith community to the yet broader community of Ballan.