8th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2022

Some people have good memories. Some nations have good memories, long memories. Here in Australia we are more prone to short memories, and many of us have great difficulty in facing up to how we initially engaged with First Peoples, just two centuries ago, when we arrogantly and violently deprived them of their lands.

I gather that many Russians have long memories that go back over ten centuries to when Russia was first converted to Christianity under Vladimir the Great. In fact, many Russians still see their land as sacred, and themselves as specially chosen by God. They see their Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, as the key Patriarchate of Orthodoxy, and a constituent factor of their historical identity — of who they are. They have a keen respect and reverence for what they see as the divinely favoured soul of Russia.

I was surprised to read, just in the last couple of days, that President Vladimir Putin shares that historical sense of the specialness of Russia, of the sacredness of its lands and of the centrality of Russian Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, historically, Ukraine was a significant part of the original Russia; and the city of Kyiv, the capital of present-day Ukraine, was Russia’s original capital. He seems to be haunted by the fact that, over the last two or three decades, Ukraine has become not only politically independent of Russia but increasingly attracted to Western Europe, and that even its current Patriarchate status has become independent of Moscow.

It looks like he may have the dream of reversing the trend — though it sounds that he may be oblivious to the Christian soul of Orthodoxy. Threatening another nation’s sovereignty is not Christian, nor are indiscriminate shelling and bombing.

We need to be careful, however, in how we pass judgment, and how we respond to the present crisis. In the Gospels of the last two weekends, Jesus insisted that we “love our enemies”. He wasn’t joking! Today’s Gospel warned that “disciples are not superior to their teacher”, Jesus. No one knows more about our human hearts than he does. We have had enough of “one blind person guiding another”. There may be “a splinter in our brother’s eye”, but that does not mean that there is not a corresponding problem with ourselves.

I am really pleased that, with few exceptions, leaders in the West have refrained from threats of armed retaliation. Pope Francis has persistently asked for diplomacy, not for armed violence. If we haven’t learnt from him, and more pertinently from Jesus, I hope that we are beginning to learn from the hard experience of recent fruitless warfare on so many fronts. I do remember that, some years ago, the Catholic University in Ballarat offered students the option to choose “Peace Studies” — the subject deserves serious thought.

Jesus remarked that good people “draw what is good from the store of goodness” in their hearts, just as bad people “draw what is bad from their store of badness”. We have no monopoly, however, on either goodness or badness — we have both! None of us is yet “a fully trained disciple”. We are all still in training. Since, as Jesus said, people’s “words flow out of what fills their hearts”, we know what such training involves — we need to become ever more familiar with our “hearts”. Given the power of current Western culture, that means, I believe, spending significant time in prayer with Jesus.