6th Sunday Year C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2007

Happy are you when people hate you, drive you out, abuse you and denounce your name as criminal on account of the Son of Man... ... so that rules out being driven by a lust for power – like Stalin, or madness and megalomania – like Hitler, or hatred, or despair – like suicide bombers.

But Jesus went on: Rejoice on that day, and dance for joy. I think that, if I could do that, I truly would dance for joy. But it is not where I am at. To do that I would need to be so free, at peace in myself, secure in my own dignity... particularly, free to love  and to respect the abusers and the haters, whatever they might do. Perhaps it is not a case of either/or – but of growing towards.

Jesus got there – he spoke the truth; he reacted with compassion; he acted with justice.

How do you grow towards that freedom, that peace? I think it is by learning to love... but to learn to love is also the gift of another; it is the gift of God: learning to receive, to believe, to trust that love... to receive it and to give it – at the same time. Both a passive and an active stance.

[Jesus said: Rejoice on that day and dance for joy. Perhaps it is something like a dance: giving and receiving; leading and being led.]

How do people receive and give love? and keep on going further and further into the mystery? Does marriage enable that? Or other lives lived generously in other service? 

One way or the other, it involves a real dying to self.

Something that some find helpful is quiet prayer – time alone, still and in persistent darkness before the mystery that is unconditional love  - and nothing else... dying to self and sort of becoming like God “by osmosis”.

Passionate commitment and fierce detachment at the same time... like Jesus: hated, driven out, abused and denounced. Put to death because passionately committed to people, to truth and to life... a death freely accepted by him because relentlessly detached from self-interest and the unreal.

Beatitudes are not platitudes: they can be hard work... But does anything else ultimately satisfy?