11th Sunday

Year C

11th Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 7:36-8:3 in Luke 7:36-50 & Luke 8:1-3

Homily 1 -2007

It seems that Hamas and Fatah seem intent on killing each other in the Gaza Strip. And when not fighting with each other, they are engaged with Israel in the same sterile cycle of attack and counter-attack, that seems to do little else other than deepen mutual hatred. Chaos reigns in the refugee camps in Lebanon. And the same mindless violence, only Sunnis and Shiites this time, continues in Iraq. It hurts to hear it, to see it on the television screens. Ultimately, they are our brothers and sisters. How will it end?

Perhaps the world has always been like this – if not actually, at least potentially. It’s our world – in need of redemption. It’s our world - that has been redeemed. It’s our world – for us to change, not alone, but hand in hand with the risen Christ.

Where do we start? I think there is only one answer: with ourselves: to take up God’s offer of conversion. Can we do anything more? other than to invite, to attract, to seek to enlighten and to convince others to start similarly with themselves. Armed intervention - the use of force, of power - can rearrange the deck-chairs. But the world needs more than that. It needs changed hearts.

I find today’s Gospel relevant to all this. It’s a real challenge to conventional wisdom, to what we might call common sense.

When I was a child, if I got into an argument and hurt someone, the teacher (or mum or dad) would sometimes intervene and determine who was guilty and who was innocent. If I was guilty, I was told to say sorry. After I had said sorry, the other one was asked to forgive me, and then we would shake hands (usually reluctantly). That approach burned deep into the psyche – but not just into mine. It seems the appropriate way to re-establish communication and to achieve reconciliation. The guilty one first says sorry; and the offended one then forgives. Such is the conventional wisdom.

But Jesus says that that is not his sense of God. That is not how God deals with being offended, with sin. God reverses the order. God – the offended one – makes the first move. God offers forgiveness. It’s God’s offer of forgiveness that allows, that empowers, genuine sorrow on the part of the sinner. Only when faced with the unconditional love and forgiveness of God does the sinner move from a situation of self-interest to genuine love.

The fear of hell, the loss of heaven, can motivate a very deep regret and remorse – but regret or remorse are not sorrow. They are focussed on self, not on God – conditional on the strength of the fear that drives them. Ultimately they encourage an unconscious feeling of resentment. They might motivate a change of behaviour. They do not come from or lead to a change of heart.

In the story today, the woman had moved from a situation of real sin (Jesus did not deny or avoid that; he spoke of her many sins)... she had moved from there to a situation where she loved much. What gave her the motivation, the energy, to move?

She had experienced God’s unconditional forgiveness, God’s unconditional love. As Jesus said: Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she would not have shown such great love.

Jesus calls us to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate – unconditionally compassionate, the ones to take the initiative. It’s interesting. I can think of nowhere in the Gospels where Jesus tells us to say we are sorry. But again and again he tells us to forgive, and even includes it in the only prayer he taught us: forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Why his emphasis on forgiving, rather than on being sorry? Both are necessary – but what makes true, and effective, sorrow possible is the experience of gratuitous forgiveness. The opposite is not the case.

Obviously so much more could be said about forgiveness. It involves much more than we usually realise. Even understanding what it is is far from obvious. And it doesn’t always work. But it is the way of God – thank God!

Homily 2 - 2010

Jesus understood the woman in today’s Gospel to be a sinner - he referred clearly to her many sins. The general assumption is that she was a prostitute, though the text doesn’t explicitly state what sort of sinner she was. For the sake of our reflection, let’s assume that she was a prostitute. If she was making a living out her occupation, she obviously had no shortage of men as clients. Isn’t it interesting how the social stigma associated with prostitution focuses always on the women and ignores the more numerous men who demand their services.

I have read that, in our current world, the greatest segment of the world’s capital is absorbed by the international arms industry. Second place is taken by the drug trade. In third place is people-trafficking – mainly prostitution. I find that a sad commentary. The arms industry highlights humanity’s profound inability to trust; the drug trade our need to escape a haunting emptiness; and prostitution the inability of so many to find or sustain satisfying interpersonal relationships.

Perhaps, in the end, prostitution illustrates most clearly the problem at the base of it all. Both the fear and the lack of trust that fuel the arms industry and the profound sense of personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness that drive people to drugs arise from the breakdown (or absence) of the ability of people to encounter others at any genuine, deep, I-thou-level.

Jesus lived and died for a world where people would love - where people would deliberately, freely and whole-heartedly choose to love. Using the imagery current in the culture of his day, he called it the Kingdom. But he didn’t just lay it on us. You can’t simply command love. You can only invite. But even that is not enough. Love needs to be empowered. It can be empowered only by someone else’s love. (Not that it’s a tit-for-tat transaction: you love me, so I’ll love you.) Another’s love is creative:it transforms us; it enables us to grow; it opens us out to transcend our normal limitations.

The catch is that the other’s love is a limited love. It sets us free – a bit. It enables us to grow – a bit; but what it empowers in us will inevitably be a limited love on our part. We will still hold back, unwilling and unable to give to the other all that I am just as I am; and, even if we get close to that, we will give ourselves only to one or to a few. Our outreach will be selective. Unless …

Unless the love that sets us free to love is itself totally unconditional and totally non-selective. We believers see that as the love of God, given human shape in the love of the crucified Christ – who, as Paul put it in today’s Second Reading, loved me and sacrificed himself for my sake.

Perhaps, others can mediate God’s love to us – they can be the channels of a love greater than their own. I think we can also access it directly through the process that we call prayer. One way or the other, we can find ourselves slowly, hesitantly, but increasingly able to love with ever growing trust in an ever-widening circle that reaches out toward the infinite.

As today’s Gospel story showed us, the woman who had let herself be loved and forgiven by God, in and through Jesus, had discovered herself able and wanting to show what Jesus called such great love. Again, as Jesus had maintained, her faith in love and forgiveness had saved her.

If our tortured world is to have any hope of being saved from itself, if swords are to be turned into ploughshares, if true happiness is to replace desperate escapism, if people, particularly women, are to be no longer exploited, we need to choose the way of love. And we begin by discovering and trusting God’s prior love for us.

Homily 3 - 2013

There are fascinating undercurrents in today’s Gospel story. I would like to think aloud with you about one that, for some reason or other, strikes me more clearly today. Jesus compares the Pharisee and the woman with the reputation.

As they are presented in the Gospels, Pharisees were professionals on matters of law – not just knowing the laws but also keeping them - very much the law-abiding, upright citizens so often extolled in the Psalms. Simon the Pharisee of today’s story would have been no exception. But he obviously lacked something – obvious, at least, to Jesus, though probably not obvious [or appreciated] by himself.

He had gone out of his way to invite Jesus to share a meal with himself and a few of his Pharisee friends. Yet, we could wonder why. He invited Jesus, but showed him none of the customary courtesies expected for every guest – no welcoming embrace, no washing his feet, no refreshing oil to soothe his sun-dried skin. He no doubt had some purpose in inviting Jesus, but it was clearly not deeper relationship or friendship.

The woman with the reputation, on the other hand, was no expert in the law nor, apparently, scrupulously observant of it. But she was very much into relationship, and in no way inhibited in expressing it extravagantly – she trusted, she respected, she responded.

What is important for me is Jesus’ assessment of the two. His clear preference is relationship.

Behaviour has relevance to the extent that it expresses relationship and respect that reaches out in trust to personal engagement. Jesus made that quite explicit with his comment to her: Your faith has saved you. And it is the same for us. We are saved from sin, from self-absorption, from the world’s competitiveness and violence and exclusion to the extent that we have faith. And the faith in question, the faith that saves, is not assent to ideology any more than it is observance of law, but trust in Jesus and in everything that he was on about, and reaching out to him in love. Certainly saving faith has a practical component – but doing the right thing for any reason other than the expression of love is irrelevant. That was where the Pharisees missed the point. The Kingdom of God consists in relationship. Sanctifying grace is relationship. The Holy Spirit is the energy of relationship.

Paul was exploring the same thing in today’s Second Reading, when he wrote: … what makes people righteous is not obedience to the Law but faith in Jesus Christ – and not mere 100% for Catechism but … faith in the Son of God who loved me and even sacrificed himself for my sake. What matters for Paul is relationship. Again, he wrote: I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me… Incredible relationship!

This week we mark the World Day for Refugees. The whole question of Australia’s response to refugees makes me so sad, so ashamed. Refugees are persons – like us - so many of them fleeing for their lives, leaving family, abandoning home; many of them deeply traumatised; hoping for the freedoms we so blithely expect and take for granted. Much public discourse seems to choose to overlook the basic reality that they are persons – desperate persons in need. There are hundreds of thousands of them presently in our world; and their numbers are growing, as they flee from armed conflicts made possible by the profusion of weapons, most of which are manufactured and sold by Western nations.

They are not just a problem – though their existence does present a problem. They are not just a nuisance disturbing our “business as usual”. They are, firstly, people in dire need. And to respond to their needs will mean adjustments for us and have its price.

What was Jesus getting at …? this Jesus whom you and I are trying so hard to get ever closer to. What was he getting at when he said: I was a stranger and you made me welcome ? He meant something. Political answers are complex; but surely the underlying motivation of the whole debate needs to spring from a clear sense of human dignity and personal engagement and to be conducted in an atmosphere of profound respect.

As Jesus showed in today’s story, salvation is a factor of relationship. And our sharing of the one bread and the one cup will symbolise precisely that, and invite us to join in.

Homily 4 - 2016

At breakfast this morning, Paddy mentioned that it was worth listening to the eulogy given at Mohammed Ali’s funeral by his wife, Lonnie. I couldn‘t find it on my computer, so I listened instead to Bill Clinton’s. And I am glad I did. Clinton mentioned that, although Ali was, like all of us, a flawed man, he was more importantly a man of faith, and a man whose faith was such that it made him free, and was deep enough for him to live with the consequences of what he believed, to be his true self. I thought that was great.

In the Gospel today, Luke presents us with a woman who was also, like Ali, like all of us, a flawed woman. But she was free, wonderfully free, free to be her self. She was free to love, really to love this time. And the source of her love, of her freedom, was, again like Ali, her faith in God. Somehow, she saw or sensed in Jesus the God who was good, gentle, the God who cared, who accepted her; and given her situation, the God who had obviously forgiven her – unasked and unconditionally. Something happened to her, within her. Her faith in God, who had suddenly become real, had set her free to be herself. Oblivious to whatever others thought, she felt herself free to express her pent-up love, with extraordinary flamboyance, the only way she knew.

I am grateful to Bill Clinton for alerting me to Ali’s freedom. It is something I yearn for. I thank Luke for his picture of the forgiven woman, and precisely through his reticence, for his invitation to me to wonder about the process of conversion that had happened in the deepest recesses of her heart. I want to touch into her striking conversion.

Both people illustrate that character flaws do not get in the way of love once our faith is such that we can perceive God’s unfazed acceptance of us just as we are. In the woman’s case, that insight into God became clear through the three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood Jesus. In my case, I think it has been nurtured through the succession of three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood people who have accepted and loved me across my life, with all my flaws. It is still a work in progress. Yet I have noticed that the more I feel certain of God's unconditional forgiveness and easy acceptance of me as I am, the more I feel uncomfortable, nevertheless, with my own sinfulness, particularly my instinctive hostility to others; and want to be free of it. A reasonable effort over the years showed little success.

Here, I turned to St Paul – whom I also admire. Like him, I want to know Christ, to really know Christ. Personally, I do not find it enough to know Christ from the outside, as it were. It is not enough to know about him, nor would it would be enough to see him, even face-to-face. I want to know him from the inside, to discover his love for me by somehow sharing his experience of loving others – loving anyone and everyone, until I can love myself with his love. What gives me heart, and hope, is what Paul wrote of himself in today’s Second Reading: “I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me.” The catch is that he prefaced his remark with another, “I have been crucified with Christ.” Here he was obviously speaking metaphorically – but even metaphorical possibilities seem a bit daunting.