13th Sunday Year C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2013

Nelson Mandela is nearing death. 

The world is a better place because of who he became.  [Unfortunately, the spirit that animated him has not animated some of his successors, I gather – and South Africa is the worse off for that.]  From early in his life, Mandela worked consistently for justice for his fellow black South Africans.  He was imprisoned for twenty-seven years, at times in solitary confinement.  During that time he grew – wonderfully.  He came to recognise more and more clearly that violence is not overcome by violence.  He continued to resist the evil of Apartheid, but on his release from prison, chose the way of dialogue and cooperation, and of reconciliation –  reconciliation based on the public telling of the truth, the admission of guilt by those responsible, and the free choice to forgive by those offended against.  Further blood-baths have been generally avoided.

All this I find relevant to today’s Gospel.  Jesus and his companions were not welcomed by the Samaritan village.  The villagers’ attitude was simply one expression of deep and sometimes violent, both-ways, centuries-old Jewish/Samaritan distrust and dislike.

The disciples James and John were fresh from their mountain-top experience of Jesus’ Transfiguration and their vision of Elijah.  They were eager to do to the Samaritans what Elijah had done on one occasion, centuries beforehand, to men who had dishonoured him:  – Call down fire to burn them up.  Violence in response to violence.  Jesus sharply rebuked them.  Hadn’t they absorbed his mind and message as revealed in his Sermon of the Mount?

Jesus’ consistent, considered response to the world’s endemic, often taken-for-granted, violence was love.  Pacifism, but not passivism.  Rather, active resistance to injustice – but clearly without counter-violence.  By and large, people struggle to hold the two together – active resistance to evil, engaged in non-violently.  Our inability to do so betrays a profound failure of imagination.  Non-violent, active resistance often does not work, of course – at least that is the fear.  But violent resistance to violence has an even worse track record.

Then we have Jesus’ confronting words to three ”would-be” disciples.  They are his words to us, too, and to all disciples. 

To the first of those three he stated: The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.  What is that about? Jesus is saying that his way – the way of determined non-violent love – can involve sometimes frightening vulnerability.  He was heading for Jerusalem, after all, where he would be lifted up – literally lifted up by his enemies on to a cross.  Yet, he resolutely set his face for Jerusalem, because he also trusted that, eventually, whenever that might be, he would be lifted up from death by his Father to new and risen life.

Then there was the second “would-be” disciple – Let me first go and bury my father.  Surely reasonable; not only reasonable but required by the Jewish Law.

Jesus said: No.  If you really want to join this project of changing the world into something approaching the Kingdom of God, faithfulness to the former ways is not good enough.  This Kingdom project is serious.  It calls for conversion and change, for total commitment.  Being a disciple is not a question of feeling warm and fuzzy.

And then the third one.  Once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.  What we commit to as disciples is something new, unimagined, unfamiliar to say the least, and demanding, costly.  Yet, really, it is the world’s only hope.  “Business as usual” has not worked, cannot work.  Looking back over our shoulders and yearning for the “good old days” is not for true disciples.

Do we trust the uncompromising way of Jesus? the way of consistent love, respect  and commitment – not passivism, but the way of active resistance to all forms of violence, in total vulnerability, surrendering all the ways of counter-violence? Do we believe him? Do we want to believe him?