3rd Sunday Lent C

See Commentary on Luke 13:1-9 in  Luke 13:1-5 & Luke 13:6-9

Homily 1 - 2007

I love this story from Exodus that we heard in the first Reading today. In fact, I have loved it for more than fifty years. It was the first ever text from Scripture that seemed to jump off the page and hit me between the eyes – something the professors at the University had never managed.. I was reading a book by a French author; I think his name was Père Colombe. I was studying in Rome at the time. The book was about catechetics, and the catechetical revival at that time was just getting under way  - in Germany and in France, especially - ten years before it got the rubber-stamp from the Second Vatican Council. The book’s title was either, From Life to Catechetics, or From Catechetics to Life – I can’t remember now. Anyhow, the author was using Scripture, (today's passage, in fact) and for the first time in my life, Scripture came alive for me. I have been profoundly grateful for him ever since. He started a process that has never stopped. 

Anyhow, to the text – today! Moses, way out in the bush, in the wild, empty desert of the Sinai Peninsula, looking after sheep and goats for his father-in-law ... maybe missing his wife intensely ... Doing it tough. Back where he came from, in Egypt, he now had a price on his head for murder. Dangerous to go back there. He knew he wasn’t Egyptian: - he was a Hebrew, though he never knew his father or mother, or any other Hebrews, for that matter. In Egypt Hebrews had become slaves – they had been that way for quite a while.

One day, out in the Sinai desert, he had an experience.. and he knew he was on holy ground, a sacred space. As the story said: there was a bush blazing but it was not being burnt up... “I must go and see this strange sight, and see why the bush is not burnt up”, said Moses... God called to him from the middle of the bush: “Come no nearer; take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground”.

Most of you, at some time in your life, have probably had an experience like that – not as spectacular or clear cut .. but a sense of being in on something beyond yourself... Perhaps triggered by a sunset, or the birth of a child, or the ocean or the bush – something that touched you but that you struggle to, or can’t, put into words; and that somehow does something to you – leaves you different.. More often than not, shared with no one and not followed up.

In Moses’ case, the Book of Exodus said it was an experience of God - and what a God! the God of Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob - the God of men who dreamed, who believed, and who hoped the impossible – that they would be blessed, and through  them the world would be blessed. They were landless! Abraham had been childless, (and, when he got a son, Isaac, had thought that God wanted him to kill him in sacrifice!). Jacob, in his turn, just missed out on being killed by his brother.

This God, who summoned towards the future, was a God who was also attuned to the present - a God who cared that people were oppressed and hurting and powerless,  without leadership, to do anything about it. This God would be a liberating God.

We believe in the same God – a God finely attuned to the suffering of the world, and caring profoundly for the oppressed – a God who is quintessentially a liberating God.

Back then, God worked through people who dreamed, who believed, and who hoped - who hoped that the world would be blessed through them.

God has not changed. God is the God WHO IS – who cannot be different: I am who I am. We know little of that mystery, beyond what God has told us. The God who sets people free from oppression still hopes for a better world, a blessed world, where people respect themselves and respect each other, and seek to build their lives on truth, justice, love and freedom. 

God relied on people like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God still relies on people who can dream, and believe and hope. God relies on you, and me. Marvellous – isn’t it!

Homily 2 - 2010

In the Gospel today, Jesus spoke firstly, of our need to repent, and, then, in the parable, of God’s patience: God waits with expectant anticipation.

But we easily misunderstand repentance and see it as sometimes like a business transaction: If I do certain things – certain difficult things that I would prefer not to do – then God won’t punish me. Well, that’s what repentance looks like to someone who has only started to repent. The motivation is misguided; but, early on in our journey towards God, we do need to strengthen our wills sufficiently to establish some control over our otherwise unguided appetites and desires.

That seems to have been what John the Baptist was calling for. Certainly, it was what the Pharisees required of each other. But that is just the start, and, perhaps, it is never going to be completely successful. We need to move on. To repent really involves seeing things differently, getting a different mind-set, standing ourselves on our heads, as it were,

Life with God has nothing to do with business, with earning, or with merit. Life with God is love – without attachments. When God loves us, there are no conditions, no expectations – just limitless commitment and expectant hope. And God’s hope is that we recognise that love, and accept it, and, in our turn, find ourselves wanting to love God without conditions and without expectations, and, perhaps, hesitantly rejoicing in the joy we give each other.

But, God can love us until God is blue in the face, and it will make no difference to us (or to our life in eternity) unless we believe it – really believe it. We need to accept God’s love, learn to delight in it, and respond, on our part, with a love that puts no conditions on God and no expectations, but trusts and waits to be surprised. That is what repentance is: It is our part in what is a necessarily two-way relationship. Without it, there is no relationship. Without relationship, we simply remain closed in on ourselves, avoiding the issue, or caught up in the balance sheet, and in keeping the score.

Jesus earnestly warned that, without repentance, we would perish. He doesn’t mean that God will punish us. We simply miss out on what God is yearning to give us – absorbed in ourselves – for eternity. Repentance is learning to forget about ourselves, and about our interests, and even about our own perfection.

The Christian God is relationship, that we endeavour to express as Father, Son and Spirit. And life for those created in the image of God is likewise relationship. Truly to repent is to stop looking inwards, absorbed in ourselves, and to learn to look outwards towards others. It is learning to see God not so much in a distant heaven but, particularly, in people, even in ourselves.

The Israelites, as we heard in the First Reading today, learned to discover a God who, as the Reading put it, has seen the miserable state of my people, who has heard their appeal to be free of their slave-drivers, and who means to deliver them. So, in uniting us with God, repentance orientates us, as well, towards others.

Love is all of one piece. It is not selective. Our hearts are all of one piece. They either look inwards, or they look outwards. As we learn truly to love, our love opens out to God, to others, even to our true selves. That’s what Jesus was like; and in that lies life to the full.

There’s our program for Lent, and for every day of the rest of our lives: With God, like God – with Jesus, like Jesus – to see the needs of our neighbours, to hear their appeals for help to be free to live, and to commit ourselves to free them from whatever hinders that life. And our neighbours are those in our own homes, our own town, our nation and the world at large.

Homily 3 - 2013

Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.  Unless we repent, we will all likewise perish. Bringing it even nearer to home: Unless I repent, I shall likewise perish.  Do I believe that? Or is Jesus talking to others? Can I get to a stage where I no longer need to repent? where I have changed enough? or where, although I can still improve, I have done enough, at least to avoid perishing?

From what I know of the Gospels, what concerns me is that the ones who thought they were going well were precisely the ones that Jesus thought weren't.  The Pharisees, for example, tried really hard to be good – harder than most others.  By and large, they had got their act together – certainly they thought they had.  They honestly could not see their sin.  What makes me think I am different?

I have been a priest for fifty-five years.  It is sort of "in my bones", and I am glad to be.  Yet, at the same time, belonging to that clerical sub-culture has a deep effect on me and on the way I see things and on what I take for granted.

When the clerical abuse exposure first broke, some time in the late 80s or early 90s, my instinctive concern was not the victims.  Instinctively, I felt defensive of the Church.  I still react a bit that way in light of some of the generalisations made by the media.  But my desire to fine-tune the details can be a distraction from the appalling harm done to the victims – a concern that has not yet become so instinctive.  I am fortunate to live in a presbytery where the parish priest has had for a very long time a highly sensitive concern for people, and particularly for victims of abuse.  I have learnt so much from him.

What else does the clerical sub-culture blind me to? I am lucky also to live in a parish where the pastoral associate has no problem calling me to order, at times, for the way I can speak about, or ignore, women.  We priests as a whole do not call each other to accountability.  And Canon Law gives parish priests a fair degree of independence - that is not always healthy.

Where does that leave you? Might you have blind-spots of which you are blithely unaware? Just belonging to Australian society can blind us and de-sensitise us to certain values.  We take a lot for granted.  We don't lose too much sleep now about abortion.  We can be insensitive to the complex issues and deeper motivations associated with aboriginal reconciliation or treatment of asylum seekers.  We have our scapegoats – who relieve us of the need to examine critically our own conduct.  And the list goes on.

Jesus warns us that without conversion, we perish.  That does not mean that God's patience can eventually run out.  God cannot stop loving unconditionally.  But eternal salvation involves a two-way relationship, and needs our response of love.  Without our love, there is no relationship.  The same goes for peace and fulfillment this side of the grave.  Until we deliberately opt to follow Jesus' way of non-selective, determined and non-violent love, our world will remain as it has always been; and the Kingdom of God will continue to elude us.

We began our celebration this morning by quietly calling on Christ for mercy.  We have listened to his word, seeking to understand it and its implications.  In a few moments we shall remember his death.  We accept our own complicity in that death.  But his death has touched us.  We have chosen to be here.  We could be somewhere else, if we had chosen differently.  We come trusting in resurrection, seeking new life, wanting to see and wanting to change.  We insist on proclaiming his death until he comes in glory.

 Homily 4 - 2016

The nations of the West seem to have grown increasingly frightened of difference – frightened sometimes of each other, frightened particularly of peoples from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan, fleeing in their thousands from conflict and wanting to settle in the West. Australia, somewhat selectively, has become paranoid about its borders, protective of its uniqueness, defensive of its exclusiveness. Foreigners are instinctively seen as threats, not as at least potential brothers or sisters.

Jesus was familiar with the mood of exclusivism; but in his day, the motivation was religious, rather than social or racial. His country was an occupied country, politically weak and in danger of being absorbed by the culturally stronger Roman Empire. Some Jews felt the imperative need to protect their religion. Their God was different; their God was unquestionably superior to the pagan gods; their God was holy. And since their God was holy, they, as a people, needed to be a holy people. These Jews called themselves Pharisees. They saw other peoples as unclean, their ways of life impure. They insisted on difference, separateness and exclusivism.

Jesus’ emphasis was different. Without denying God’s utter holiness, he insisted that the distinctive feature of God was mercy. Since God was above all merciful, his followers likewise were to prioritise the way of mercy. He saw others, not as threats, but as brothers and sisters. He insisted on inclusiveness, on love and intimacy.

I find today’s First Reading fascinating. It speaks of a God who is both holy, “Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground”, and merciful, “I am well aware of [the people’s] sufferings. I mean to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians”. And it was precisely God’s mercy, not God’s holiness, moving God to act on behalf of the oppressed people. This was a pivotal story for Israel’s self-understanding and for its further exploration of the mystery of God. I love today’s Psalm, “It is [the Lord] who forgives all your guilt … who crowns you with love and compassion.  The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy”. After fourteen centuries of both faithfulness and forgetfulness on the part of God’s people, that divine compassion would come to its fullest and clearest expression in the life and death of Jesus. Later it was familiarity with the best of Hebrew spirituality and his close friendship with Jesus that enabled the disciple John to make the profoundly simple observation in one of his Epistles, “God is love”.

Today’s Gospel passage had two stories of sudden deaths, the first the result of violence on the part of the occupying Roman army, perhaps in response to provocation on the part of the Galileans, and the second the result purely of an accident. Jesus insisted that neither was to be understood as God punishing people for their sins. Jesus’ God does not punish. Yet, still, many people, including Church dignitaries, instinctively associate death, particularly violent or sudden death, with God, either punishing sin or, as people sometimes say when someone dies young, “God only chooses the best”. There is no death in God. For God, death does not have the meaning that it seems to have for most people. Death is the transition from life to life – not unlike birth, which marks the transition from life in the womb to life outside the womb. As one of the Prefaces in the Funeral Mass puts it, “For your faithful people, Lord, life is changed, not ended.”

Then what about Jesus’ comment, “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”? That may simply mean that unless we learn to prioritise the ways of mercy, to love and to become loving persons, then we shall be unable to experience the joy of the life beyond death [in what we call heaven], which consists strictly of intimately, lovingly, relating to God and to the whole communion of saints.

Homily 5 - 2019

I feel awkward talking once more about the sexual abuse debacle in the Church. Yet I am also very conscious that today’s Gospel reading almost forces me to do so. I know some Catholics, particularly the ones like you who keep coming to Mass regularly, are often tempted to think, “Ah, that is past now. Let’s move on”. But for me to move on from the whole disaster without having learnt from it, and without having grown stronger because of it, would be tragic.

I hear very clearly Jesus’ message in today’s Gospel. “Unless you repent you will all perish as they did”. And he said it twice to make his point clear. And then there was the story at the end about the non-productive fig tree, and the observation, “Leave it one more year and give me time to dig round it and manure it: it may bear fruit next year; if not, then you can cut it down”. Let us not be deceived by the word “Repent”. It is a dreadfully inadequate translation. What Jesus meant in this context was, to grow up and mature, to become adult friends, He an d I, with a head and a heart of my own. And he also recognised the importance of the passage of time for a genuine personal relationship to grow. All maturing takes time; and it does not happen inevitably.

I gather there was a good insert in last Sunday’s bulletin, an article written by Francis Sullivan, who until recently was CEO of the Church’s “Truth Justice and Healing Council”. He addressed precisely the issue of maturity. He wrote, "Since the conviction of Cardinal Pell I have been asked why I remain a Catholic. It is an obvious question. The extent of criminal behavior and active cover-up by bishops and religious leaders has been breath-taking. Ordinary Catholics have been played as mugs by the Church leadership. Why stay?”

But then he went on. “My answer is – why not?” So is mine. Without wanting to sound unkind, Cardinal Pell has had, and has now, no effect, no relevance to, my relationship with Jesus, my commitment to you, or my sense of responsibility to the world. And in developing his response, Francis Sullivan made some very thoughtful comments: “The clerical sex abuse scandal … may well cause some to rethink their beliefs and practices, but for me it has been a call to deepen my spiritual practice. To commit to daily meditation and reflection. To draw on the sacramental life of the Church and the richness of scriptural practices like lectio divina. It has been a time to become mature in my faith development, less dependent and literally more adult in my engagement with the institutional Church.”

He went on later to say, “The abuse scandal has clouded the atmosphere for Catholics but not the imperative to seek the Beyond and join with others in pursuing truth, goodness and beauty. I believe the wisdom of the Gospel tradition has much to offer post-modern society… For to be Catholic is to be attentive to how our society becomes more human, more compassionate and creative in prizing the dignity and inherent value of everyone … For me that makes my faith real, practical and important. It compels me to be less self centred and precious. It implores me to move from my comfort zone to places that open my spirit and hopefully my heart. It shows me that God is forever creating and I can participate in that. So, why leave?”

We would all do well to take Jesus’ invitation seriously – to grow up, to become friends, Jesus and I - adult friends, to see life differently, and to change [even those of us who are eighty years old or more]. But how? Perhaps we could follow the example of Francis Sullivan, “... to deepen my spiritual practice. To commit to daily meditation and reflection. To draw on the sacramental life of the Church and the richness of scriptural practices like lectio divina. It has been a time to become mature in my faith development, less dependent and literally more adult in my engagement with the institutional Church.”

And if you don’t know how to respond that way, ask someone, and perhaps even have a go together. That is what Church is, what it is for. And you don’t need a bishop – or even a priest – though all three of us priests here are ready to help if asked.

Homily 6 - 2022

In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus commented firstly on a group of Galilean pilgrims massacred by Roman soldiers as they were offering sacrifice to God in the Jerusalem temple. He then referred to another group accidentally killed when a tower collapsed on them at Siloam in Jerusalem. In both cases, they were killed without warning. Jesus clarified for his listeners that they were not to conclude that it must have been the unlucky victims’ own fault, that they were obviously being punished by God because they were sinners. Jesus did warn them, nevertheless, to read the unexpected as warnings, or as calls. As he observed to his listeners in relation to both events, “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”.
 
By what the translation unhappily translated as “repent”, Jesus intended  something like “be alert to and respond appropriately to the opportunities to grow in love that life constantly offers”.
 
The Gospel than added a short story by Jesus about a farmer’s hopes to bring a fruitless grapevine into profitable production by “digging around it and manuring it”. With a little imagination, we might tease that out further by seeing “digging around it” as involving getting down to the roots and radically disturbing them, and “manuring” as putting up with unwanted aromas and other distasteful effects.
 
I have been reflecting over these past couple of weeks about the invasion of Ukraine and the cruel massacre particularly of helpless women and children. It seems too easy to lay all the blame on Vladimir Putin. He certainly is responsible. But I also hear increasingly loudly Jesus’ comment in today’s Gospel, “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”. It is easy to look down on the primitive Hebrews with their “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” — but Jesus’ response to that was “love your enemies”. He said that two thousand years ago — and he said it in all seriousness; and the Eucharist we celebrate today reminds us that he paid the price of his conviction by giving his own life. Fascinatingly, he believed it was possible for us to do so as well; and our presence here is our “Yes” to that conviction, even if we only half mean it.
 
It is time for humanity to grow up and to leave behind the ways of children. We have reached the stage where, with access to one or two of the thousands of nuclear weapons in existence, a single individual can wipe out the whole human race. But even without nuclear weapons, modern warfare has ensured that by far the majority of casualties have become civilians — and overwhelmingly women and children. Warfare has changed; and human consciences must keep abreast of the new situation. Recent Popes have said that modern warfare has made all wars unjust. Just last week Pope Francis repeated that message ever more clearly.
 
Popes are not enough. We need motivated political leaders with vision, with energy and with courage. But they, in turn, need peoples ready to support their vision.
 
I keep hoping that our world may already be moving in that direction. Citizens in Russia are marching for peace at the risk of God knows what. During the Second World War, as a young boy, just eleven years of age, I was thrilled when the Americans dropped their atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. Now there is world-wide distress at the massacres happening in Ukraine. Might God’s Spirit be empowering us at last to take the next enlightened, determined step in the unstoppable evolution of the Kingdom of God — God’s original dream when God created the world so many millennia ago — a world, no longer of enemies, but of brothers and sisters!
 
God’s joyful, creative Spirit inspires us to “think big”!