12th Sunday Year C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2013

There so many rich pickings, stimulating thoughts, attractive flashes in today’s Readings! The one I have eventually settled on is Jesus’ comment at the end of today’s Gospel passage: Those who want to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will find them.  Just before that, as we heard, Jesus had spoken about taking up our crosses every day.  Well, crucifixion kills you; so, if he says to take up the cross every day, and to lose my life for his sake, he is obviously speaking metaphorically.

I have tended to take losing my life for his sake every day as the price to pay for saving my life for eternity.  If that is the case, though the ultimate end is no doubt Good News, it can make life in the meantime pretty grim.  I wonder if that is what Jesus was on about.  I wonder if losing my life every day for his sake can become Good News now.

When I think about what I really seek, I think, perhaps, it is a ready capacity for inner peace - a now experience of inner peace – deep down, whatever might be going on at the surface.  There was an English Jesuit priest whose poems I simply love, Gerald Manley Hopkins.  One morning, early, he caught sight of a falcon high in the sky … as he described it, riding the rolling level underneath him steady air… 

The rolling level underneath him steady air.  I long for a “rolling level underneath me steady” inner peace.  I think Jesus knew it; and I think its source was his readiness and capacity to love anyone.

For me, I find loving some people particularly difficult – not so much the ones around me, thank God, but ones I see on the television, hear on the radio, come across on the Internet – ones whose attitudes, ideas, policies, I disagree with strongly, sometimes with a passion: politicians, theologians, Cardinals, radio shock-jocks, etc.  They disturb my inner peace; and I let them.  Sometimes I almost pat myself on the back for reacting as I do.

The last thing I do is love them.  I don’t even respect them.  I let their ideas and their attitudes hide from me their basic human dignity – always, a God-given dignity – even if hidden from themselves or hidden by themselves, or unseen by me in my blindness.

When I think about it, I do believe that Jesus loves them – even if on occasion he strongly disagrees with them.  Perhaps I even hope that he loves them.  If he manages that, it gives me confidence that he can love me too, with my betrayals, my blindness, my fixated self-interest.

To love those I instinctually dislike for me means dying to my self - to my self-assurance, to my self-righteousness, to my taking for granted that I am the centre of the world.  Yet, I also know that loving them is the only way to touch into that “rolling level underneath me steady” inner peace – the only way to experience salvation, already, this side of the grave.

How? Well, in his Sermon on the Mount, after recommending that we love our enemies, Jesus then suggested praying for them.  Before condemning them, before criticising them, first, pray for them.  And keep at it.  And see what happens.

Here we are now at Eucharist, remembering, celebrating Jesus’ shedding his blood literally for us … and for the many – for the many even who were crucifying him.  And he invites us to join with him – to think like him, to love like him, to respect everyone, simply because they are [as Paul said in the Second Reading] children of God, our brothers and sisters.  And he slowly transforms us, and promises life!