6th Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 6:20-26 in Luke 6:17-26


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? 


Homily 2 - 2019

There is no doubt that Jesus was consistent towards the underdog. Luke had first introduced Jesus’ mission by choosing to describe Jesus' encounter with his fellow villagers at Nazareth. There Jesus had applied to himself the verse from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord … has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim liberty to captives, and the Lord’s Year of Favour”.

Jesus himself, of course, would have been no doubt well schooled by his mother. Luke had presented the still pregnant Mary proclaiming how God had looked upon his lowly handmaid and had done great things for her; and how she had exulted in that same God who had pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly, had filled the hungry with good things and the rich sent empty away, and who, ever mindful of his mercy, had finally come to the help of Israel his servant.

Now, as he proceeded to introduce his outline of Jesus’ teaching, Luke had Jesus begin with the confronting Beatitudes, “How happy are you who are poor; yours is the kingdom of God. Happy you who are hungry now; you shall be satisfied. Happy you who weep now; you shall laugh”.

In predicting radical change for the poor, what was Jesus up to? Well, your guess is as good as mine. However, it strikes me that Jesus’ first interest was to place hope in the hearts of his hearers. Upwards of ninety percent of Jesus’ rural audience would have been poor, regularly going to bed at night hungry, and having plenty to weep about. For them to take any steps themselves to better their lot, they needed firstly to be given hope. They needed to find room within their constricted possibilities to make the most of what was at least already there. They needed to know their innate dignity as human persons, loved unconditionally and intensely by God their Father. They needed consistently to care for each other, to interact with attention and compassion, to avoid violence in their relationships, perhaps even to mature to the stage where they might begin to organise and, with all their limitations, to stand tall together non-violently to challenge and to conscientise their unjust oppressors.

Nearly all Jesus’ teaching was little more than teasing out the consequences of people mutually loving in a myriad variety of circumstances. Yet it worries me that, in the Church, we in today’s more developed world seem to have lost something of that priority of constantly infusing society with the spirit of mutually caring, of warmly welcoming, of being alert and responsive to those in particular need – the homeless, the disabled and the unwell, and the elderly. We need to remind ourselves and others that taxation is a necessary way to share the burden together and to provide the material infrastructure we need to function smoothly. When people do get into trouble [and so often, it seems, it is the mentally disabled and socially disadvantaged who do], it strikes me as so unimaginative that the best we can come up with is longer and harsher penalties, and ever more gaols. We are mesmerised by what we call justice, but in reality is little more than vengeance and punishment; and we are so slow even to investigate and experiment with, much less generally adopt, other approaches such as restorative justice that aim both to rehabilitate offenders and to give victims satisfactory closure.

As conscious and vigilant disciples of Jesus, there is so much we could contribute to the welfare of our common-wealth. But to do so effectively, we need to be shot through with the vision and commitment of Jesus [and Mary]. We begin by respecting ourselves. As well, we need to be convinced of the dignity of every human person, and choose, and learn how, to love them responsibly. As a faith community, can we find practical ways to alert and to support each other in our common mission?


Homily 3 - 2022

It would be a pity if we put today’s Gospel into the “too hard basket” yet again — as we have probably done with it when we have heard it before. I have been thinking about it this past week and deciding whether to take it seriously this time, at last, and give it the attention it deserves.

You may have noticed that Luke prefaced Jesus’ sermon by clarifying that Jesus was talking to “his disciples” — not to ‘those others out there’. Today’s message is for me, for us, not for those who are not his disciples.

He began: “How happy are you who are poor”, and balanced it with its companion, “Alas for you who are rich”. What was Jesus talking about?

Poverty is different from hunger. It is more an on-going condition, but rarely fatal. And there is no obvious dividing line between the poor and the rich. Poverty and wealth seem to be elastic states of life and usually define themselves in relation to each other. And there are poor who very much want to be rich, and perhaps are angry that they aren’t. Yet nuns and monks take a vow of poverty as a kind of stepping-stone to something — and don’t seek to be rich.

How on earth does poverty constitute the experience of God’s Kingdom “now”? … and Jesus was talking about now, since his comment was, “Yours is the kingdom of God” — not “will be”. What ever did he have in mind? Could he have been talking about an enviable inner experience of some kind, indeed, of happiness now? I think he was. But if he was, poverty is not inevitably satisfying. I think its blessedness, its happiness, is a factor of how we approach poverty.

I think that Jesus was talking about the maturity that is able to be content with enough, with what is already ours, that is in touch with our true human dignity and is able to appreciate and to savour it, that shares a friendship with God, the God who loves us and is the source of our dignity — a maturity that is sensitive to the beauty of the world and the people around us. These things cannot be bought; nor do they need to be — they are already there, and they cannot be taken from us. All we need to do in order to be nourished and thrilled by them is to open our eyes and our ears, and especially our hearts, and, like the olympic athletes currently filling our TV screens, to practise regularly.

What about Jesus’ “Alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now”? It is no secret that so many of the wealthy, especially the super-rich whom we are more likely to hear about, are not happy people. Would you say that the royal family seems to be a happy family? or Gina Reinhart with her yacht and her iron-ore mines and her cattle stations? But even ourselves and our neighbours [remember, Jesus was talking to “his disciples”], can we get drawn, if only to some extent, into the rat race, mesmerised by the advertising industry: and, if we are honest and stop kidding ourselves, find ourselves sometimes restless and unsatisfied, no matter what the other so-called “consolations” may be like?

We haven’t reflected on the “hungry”, those “mourning” [for whatever reason], and those experiencing public “criticism” or contempt. I simply invite you to reflect how real and mutually supportive is your little Christian community here? Don’t you look after each other, care for each other, support each other pretty well, such that no one needs to fall between the cracks?

There is plenty of homework there to keep us all pondering for the week — and beyond.