13th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2022

Not long before the episode in today’s Gospel passage, Jesus had informed his disciples of his coming death by crucifixion that would soon take place in Jerusalem [in Luke’s Gospel, Jerusalem was the city of destiny]. The disciples went into psychological denial. To them, Jesus’ death seemed unthinkable. Of course, even Jesus found the prospect difficult to face. But face it he did!

Today’s passage began: “As the time drew near for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely took the road for Jerusalem.” Jesus would die from love — love sourced from his Father’s heart, but expressed in his resolute determination to live the message of love that he had preached, and to die for the world’s salvation.

Jesus’ vision of a saved world was of a world where people related to themselves and to each other in deliberate respect, care, mutual acceptance and ready forgiveness. He mirrored that lifestyle himself, in all his various relationships and encounters with people, and supremely in the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of his tortured death. He put his vision into words as clearly as he could in his preaching and his conversations. Jesus was a joy-filled man.

Yet the world, we ourselves, so often respond to Jesus’ vision as though he were speaking a foreign language. The brief anecdote involving James and John in today’s Gospel is a perfect illustration — not just the automatic hostility of the Samaritan townspeople to this small band of Jewish pilgrims seeking hospitality, but particularly the violent response to the Samaritans' discourtesy suggested by Jesus’ own disciples.

I am dismayed by the world’s hostility — not just as evidenced in the Ukraine and elsewhere, but in less spectacular, but seemingly universal, attitudes of mutual opposition, contestation, ridiculing, bad-mouthing, one-up-man-ship, fake news, etc.. that fill our TV screens. Do people react with hostility because they are basically unhappy? or are they unhappy because of such habitual hostility? Perhaps there is a bit of “both ways”.

However, in Jesus’ case, I am convinced it was because he deliberately chose to act as he did out of love — a love that took shape in respect, care, acceptance of people and ready forgiveness, that his life was so radically peace-filled and joy-filled, even in the darkening shadow of death. The two nourish each other — the choices to love firstly nourish the mood; and the mood then nourishes the acts to love.

If only we, likewise, would choose to act similarly, our lives, too, would fill with peace and joy. And in such a world, we would begin to taste the salvation that God yearns us to experience now, this side of the grave. Life after death is beyond our comprehension — but we can quietly and confidently leave that in the hands of our wonderful, freely-loving, God. Our immediate task is to save each other in this life —“thy will be done on earth.” And the task is critical.

Yet, in an imperfect, sin-scarred world, there is a price to loving. Jesus knew that, but it did not dent either his inner peace or his joy. Nor did it hold him back from challenging us to pay the price of love. He still calls us to choose his way, to feel its possibilities and to prioritise its urgency. “Follow me!” — he says.