4th Sunday

Year C

4th Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 4:21-30 in Luke 4:14-30

Homily 1 - 2007

In today’s Gospel Luke gives a mightily telescoped account of what happened in Nazareth. Why did the mood turn sour, from original approval to hostility to their eventual effort to lynch Jesus? It seems to have been offended honour, small-town provincialism, perhaps the tall-poppy syndrome: This is Joseph’s son surely? Who does he think he is?

With Jeremiah in today’s First Reading things were a bit different. It was what he had to say that was the problem. He didn’t preach the message they wanted to hear.

What happened to Jesus and what happened to Jeremiah both highlight how hard it can be to recognise and to hear the truth, especially when the truth is unfamiliar, unwanted, or calls for growth and change. I’ll listen more readily to the person I like. I’ll read more easily the article that I agree with, and that confirm me in the judgments I have already made. Not so bad in themselves, but the converse can be dangerous: I don’t listen to the person I don’t like; and I don’t read those things that challenge my prejudices.

Some of the Mass readings during the week centred on Jesus’ parables, leading Mark to comment: they see and see again, but do not perceive; hear and hear again, but not understand; otherwise they might be converted and be forgiven.

Each Saturday the Age newspaper lists the week’s 10-best sellers in the book market: what people are buying and presumably reading. In the non-fiction list this week four were about food, two about keeping clean – your clothes or your house, and on a revisit of the 1914-18 War in Europe. Of the other three, one was by Richard Dawkins, an English biologist, ridiculing the whole idea of believing in God. The change from week to week is often minimal. Over quite a long period about a year ago, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code was at the top of the list.

Four about food, and two about keeping clean in a world where millions struggle to find food and lack decent houses to keep clean; one revisiting a war fought in Europe ninety year ago while real people today in real time are being slaughtered in Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and elsewhere.

What’s going on?

With regard to Richard Dawkins's book on atheism and to Dan Brown and his Da Vinci Code, are people seeking truth? or might some be hoping to find justification for what they want to be true? I think that what we want to believe is more powerful than the reasons we give to support what we believe.

In today’s Second Reading, St Paul made the insightful comment: love delights in the truth. Love .. it removes the rigidity, the fear; it loosens us up. The capacity to love unconditionally enables us to see and to accept what is. The converse is more worrying: lack of love can close me to the truth, even when unconscious and indeliberate – insecurity, pride, hostility, fear.

It seems that there is no substitute for learning to grow in love. If we can love anyone, we can hear anyone. If we are ready to pay the price of love, we are ready to hear anything: good starting points to hear and to discern the truth.

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul had prayed: that your love for each other may increase, improving your knowledge and deepening your perception, so that you can always recognise what is best. There is nothing else like love to help us to know, to perceive and to recognise truth.

Homily 2 - 2016

On Monday evening I watched on TV the Australian of the Year awards. I am so glad I did. It gave me a wonderful buzz to see so many good people lined up and to learn of their outstanding kindness, generosity, skill, determination and so on in their service of other people. I had not heard of any of them before; and I imagine that not many of them had previously attracted much or any attention from the media. Whatever about the media, it seems they give us what we want; and apparently what fascinates us and gains our attention is generally the bad news, trawled from anywhere and everywhere – provided it is spectacular enough.

We talked about the awards briefly at Mass on the next morning, Australia Day. One of those present made the point that there are so many good people doing so many good things, even locally, here in Hamilton – so many people volunteering their time and energies in the service of others. Local media are better, perhaps, at reporting the good news, but I fear that the national media must have the stronger influence on the nation’s mood.

St Paul seems to have got carried away in tonight’s Second Reading. So often it became the reading of choice at weddings, though in Paul’s mind, what he had to say applied to everyone. His message is a great one as we slowly gear ourselves up to enjoy this Year of Mercy as suggested by Pope Francis. And yet, beautiful and all as it is, I am not sure that we are convinced of what Paul said.

The whole reflection deserves our careful attention – especially the adverbs “always” and “never”. Let me read the middle paragraph again; and remember Paul was not writing specifically to husbands and wives, but to everyone and in relation to everyone. “Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.”

In practice, I am highly selective. Does it matter? Perhaps that depends on what I am seeking. Do I really want happiness? Or am I content to put up with less? What do I really desire? Do I ever really give myself space and time to notice and clearly identify my deepest longings?

Yet, even if we decide to give Paul’s message a try, we find it impossible to live consistently. Fascinatingly, the impossible can become possible – if we allow everything to start with God, the creative energy within our world. We know that God is love. So let us read Paul again, this time substituting the word “love” with “God”. “You, God, are always patient and kind; You, God, are never jealous; You, God, are never boastful or conceited; You, God are never rude or selfish; You, God, do not take offence, and are not resentful. You, God, take no pleasure in other people’s sins but delight in the truth; You, God, are always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.”

We struggle to believe that, because as children we got the message that in the end God will judge us. “Good bye” then to love. When all is said and done, judgment trumps love! But if God is love, then God is not true to God’s own justice if God does not love. God’s justice requires that God consistently love. Or, put another way, God has already judged the world, us, and God’s justice declares “Guilty!” But there is more. Since God’s justice means that God must always love, God’s justice then declares, “ … but forgiven!” We are both, guilty and forgiven. That presents no particular problem to love. You do it yourself to those you love.

Homily 3 - 2019

Judging from his statement, “No prophet is ever accepted in his own country”, Jesus obviously saw himself as a prophet. He may have been more than a prophet, but at least he was one. He never referred to himself as a priest; and only reluctantly as a king, though he went on cryptically to add, “not of this world”. Fascinating that, over the centuries, the Church has honoured Jesus as priest and king, but rarely, if ever, as prophet!

Priests and kings are establishment figures, pillars of the institution, which in turn see themselves as champions of tradition, law and order – and prepared to exercise coercive power. In Israel, priests and kings were officially and ritually anointed for their roles by fellow members of the establishment. Prophets, on the other hand, were metaphorically anointed by God. As we heard last Sunday, Jesus said of himself, quoting the much loved prophet Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord … has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor.”

Prophets, at least those anointed by the Lord, were critics of the establishment. They were concerned mainly with the present, constantly calling people, especially kings and priests, back to conversion. As we heard in today’s First Reading, Jeremiah understood that God had appointed him, and given him the task “to confront all in this land; the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests and the country people [or, as other translations prefer, ‘the people of the land’].”

Like Jeremiah and Isaiah, Jesus clearly saw his role, as we heard last week, “to bring good news to the poor ... to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour”. Good news for the poor was bad news for the powerful and for the wealthy whose interests were to keep the poor poor. “To proclaim new sight to the blind” meant conscientising people to see through to what is really going on in society, to be in touch with reality, alert to what is truly significant, to focus on the basics, on those things Paul was writing about in today’s Second Reading, mercy and love, rather than rules and sanctions, the practicalities of loving rather than vaguely avoiding sin.

What the Church needs most today perhaps is more prophets than more priests and the power that the institution used to have. Why are people deserting? I think that it is not just the sexual abuse revelations. That has provided the occasion – but the dropping numbers had begun before that. The cause may be more that people find that Church is boring or irrelevant; and it is boring and irrelevant, I think, because we have failed to prioritise love and particularly God’s unashamed bias towards the downtrodden and poor. Three cheers at least for St Vinnies, though the advocacy work of the society is not well known. There will always be pushback from the powerful, the well-off and the comfortable. As God said to Jeremiah, “Stand up and tell them all I command you … They will fight against you but shall not overcome you”.

Over the years, we as Church have also concentrated so much on the details of what we believe. Learning the Catechism was the big deal. But nothing like the catechism figured in what Jesus proclaimed. He focused on the non-negotiability of loving and how to do it. Paul got the message. As we heard today, “If I speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing.” Is it high time that we learnt, as disciples of the merciful, non-violent Jesus, the concrete skills, for example, of restorative justice, reconciliation and other non-violent action for justice? Is it time to introduce into our school curricula, and make time for, such subjects as peace studies?

Many of you pray for an increase in priests. How many of us pray that God will raise up prophets from among us, especially in these times of bewildering cultural, religious and social change?

Homily 4 - 2022

What, would you say, was the problem with the people of Nazareth? the people of Jesus’ own hometown? What annoyed them so much that they even tried to lynch him, to throw him over a nearby cliff?

Jesus’ diagnosis seemed to indicate it had something to do with their unstated attitude: “We have heard all that happened in Capernaum. Do the same here in your own countryside.” In other words, “Work your miracles here for us!” “Make life easy for us!” “We should be ‘number-1’!”

Do you remember last Sunday’s Gospel? Jesus had shared his sense of mission, his vision, his hope of what needed to be done: “to bring good news to the poor…, to set the downtrodden free…, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.” That meant, when you think of it, a social renewal. It would involve a radical change of perspective for everyone, including those from his own hometown. It would mean, first of all, that they would need to become aware of “the poor”, “the downtrodden”. Who were they? why were they poor? who was treading them down? More than just being aware of them, they would need to care about what society was doing to the downtrodden, become aware of their own taking oppression for granted. They would need to do what they could.

Has Covid been a “wake up call” to us? Is Jesus saying to us, “Isaiah’s text…”, which he had been quoting, “… is being fulfilled today even as you listen.”

With the first shock of the virus, many of us had become alert to how much we depend on the value of the work of so many people whose work we simply took for granted: the health workers, the teachers, the cleaners, the transport drivers, the supermarket check-out operators, the fruit-pickers… The list goes on. We have depended on their readiness to face the risks of being exposed to easier infection. Governments, at first, had noticed their value - and even begun to take more care for them.

The ones who have been “blind” and in need of “new sight” have, in many cases, been ourselves. I hope we are beginning to appreciate better that we are, after all, organised as a “common-wealth”. Our ancestors agreed, some time in the past, to care for each other and to share the common wealth equitably. Early on, it had been a struggle. Over time, we began to leave it increasingly to the “market” to sort out how our common “wealth” would be divided. Others have joined in working out how “the cake should be divided”: those with influence, those already wealthy, the powerful. And we have tended to take it all for granted, as long as there has been enough “for me”.

Are we realising now that a good way to care for ourselves is to care for everyone? that a good way to ensure that we don’t fall through the safety-net, particularly as we grow older, is to ensure that nobody falls through the safety-net now, indeed is to “love our neighbour as ourselves”?