13th Sunday Year C
See Commentary on Luke 9:51-63 in Luke 9:51-56 & Luke 9:57-62
Homily 1 - 2007
I am going to start off today in an area of which I have no direct experience and where I could well get out of my depth - the world that most of you inhabit, the world of husbands and wives, of parents and children.
You were just husband and wife for a while and then the first child came along. Did that enormous love you had for your own child mean that suddenly you had less love for each other? And if a second child came along, did that mean that you had less love for your first? You certainly would have had less time for each other, and less energy – physical and emotional. Your feelings for each other may have changed, too. But I would hope that your love for each other, if anything, became even deeper; or, if it didn’t, it could have.
Time and energy are limited. In sharing them with others, you have less time and energy for each one. But love can be shared between both without in any way becoming less.
There is a problem, of course. Our love is never pure love. It’s mixed up with other things - that sometimes have the effect of its feeling stronger . But it’s not. Adolescent love can feel quite overwhelming. But even the best love will, almost inevitably, be mixed with need: “I need you. I can’t live without you.”
It can sound great – and lots of songs sing about it – but really it’s not love. It’s need, and its focus is not you but me. You trigger it off, but it’s my need that you meet. Strong, passionate, but not – essentially - love. It might put the sparkle in the eye and the spring in the step, and it feels great. But its effect can be dependence, not freedom.
It still has so much to learn. It can be something beautiful, but its real beauty, its stability, and its reliability, depend on the presence, and the growth, of real love. Real love offers. Real love gives. Real love also accepts, but real love sits lightly with needs.
What is all this about? Well, it sets up a couple of things: Loving God and loving a partner or a child need never be in real competition. The time I can give to each, and the energy I can find for them are limited – but with 24 hours in each day and 7 days in each week and 4 weeks in each month, there is usually more than enough time and energy for both.
We may find, though, that our needs may get in the way of our love. Your need for your child to like you may get in the way of your loving your spouse. Your need for your spouse, or your child, to like you may get in the way of your loving God. Truly loving both may call for tough love, for one or both... and we might be too insecure yet for tough love. But we can grow. True love requires freedom - and time.
In the Gospel today, Jesus challenged three potential disciples to decide between love or need. There should have been no problem for the last two - loving both Jesus and their parents. But things were apparently such that they couldn’t meet their own insecure needs (with the time and energy they required) and answer the call of Jesus at the same time.
With us, the problem presents differently. The way we love Jesus - the way that we answer his call - is precisely by loving others. There isn’t any conflict between loving him and loving others.
Where the problem lies is working out whether our relationships, and the time and energy that we give to others, are given out of love or out of need – whether they flow from our freedom or from our needs and insecurities.. It is up to our own consciences to show us what is operating – loving responsibility or unfree need. And sometimes, it’s hard to know for sure.
Homily 2 - 2010
Tonight’s Gospel shows a determined Jesus: Jesus resolutely took the road for Jerusalem. He takes on his destiny; and he knows its likely outcome. He is a man with a mission – deeply conscious of being sent by his Father; and, at the same time, equally convinced of and totally dedicated to the “why” of his response.
Both he and the Father shared the one vision, inspired by the one love. He knew the God-given dignity of every person. He respected the God-given dignity of every person. He was fully aware that most people had little sense of their own dignity and worth and, what was equally appalling, little sense of and respect for the dignity and worth of others.
He lived in a world, not unlike our world, where the other was spontaneously seen, not as brother or sister, but as threat, rival or competitor; and where relationships were governed not by care and compassion but by power, by calculation and by violence.
Just check out even the two disciples, James and John: Do you want us to call down fire from heaven to burn them up.
The world could be otherwise. Jesus longed for it to be otherwise – Don’t we all!! I suspect that our being here tonight expresses in some way our own equivalent of the enthusiasm of the men on the road –already on the road of discipleship – of the one who said: I will follow you wherever you go .. though, perhaps, sometimes more like the one who added: Lord. I will follow you, but …
Jesus knew he couldn’t take on the world alone. He also knew, only too clearly, that precisely given the way the world was, given its chronic failure to of recognise human dignity and human possibility, and given its propensity for violence, any effort to call people to change – to genuine change, indeed, to the radical change of heart needed – would be resisted. It would cost him his life – literally.
And for us, disciples also on the road, our own commitment to the way of consistent, and relentless respect and love for our own dignity and for others, does mean continuing, ever deepening, death to the self-made self – the ego, until the true self, Christed at our baptism, can burst free and blossom.
I think that, for most of us, Jesus’ call of: Follow me .. your duty is to go and spread the news of the kingdom of God does not mean doing more. For most of you, your lives are already full, perhaps, for some, toofull.
One way or the other, you’re constantly in contact with family, neighbours, friends, work mates and so on. Spreading the good news of the kingdom of God may mean no more than being present to them, consistently respecting them – especially the ones who differ from you – guided by your sense of Jesus’ values and of Jesus’ approach to life.
And for that? That is where your prayer comes in, your quiet reflection on what you’re doing, your deliberate chewing over the Gospel passages that you hear here in Church week after week or read day after day at home.
May we all go forth from this Mass tonight, empowered and resolute, to spread the news of the kingdom of God.
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?
Homily 4 - 2019
Today’s Gospel passage from Luke’s Gospel brings us to a decisive moment in Jesus’ public life. Before this, he was outlining the dream – the possibilities to be gained if people would choose to listen to his teaching about the merciful God, to think through the practicalities of their relationships with God and each other, and to live together in mutual respect and genuine love. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, people slowly began to resist his message, to hold back from any need to change. Some began to follow him and get to know him better, some actively to contest and challenge him – particularly those already in positions of influence and power. He came to a different insight into the nature of his task. Opposition would harden; inevitably he would suffer. But he continued to trust in the God who captivated and fascinated him. As Luke rather euphemistically wrote: “As the time drew near for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely took the road for Jerusalem.”
Straightaway he encountered resistance. The inhabitants of a Samaritan village where he hoped to lodge the night with his disciples “would not receive him”. The instinctive reaction of James and John was to meet violence with violence. Consistent as ever, Jesus “turned and rebuked them, and they went off to another village”. What would it take for them to hear his message – that to follow his way would mean, counter-intuitively, to meet violence with love?
Right at the start of his reflection on this new phase of discipleship, Luke then chose to make clear to his readers [and eventually to us!] what genuine following of Jesus necessarily entails. He used three similar incidents. Through the first, he immediately laid the cards on the table: “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”. We have heard the passage before, but hearing it today perhaps challenges us to ask ourselves how far are we prepared to go into an unknown future with him? How close, really, do we choose to draw to him? To go the whole way with the experience of discipleship? or to keep our options open and calculate? Do we feel sufficiently drawn to Jesus to allow ourselves to move beyond admiration and even worship to relationship and friendship – whatever the cost?
The second incident would have made clearer sense to Jesus’ [and even Luke’s] contemporaries than to us. It supposed a culture that made a big thing of respecting one’s parents, ostentatiously so – and the imperative to never thereby lose face. Jesus was insisting that to prioritise genuinely following him would inevitably involve counter-culture decisions, and sometimes counter-cultural life-styles. Were followers then prepared to go that far? Are we prepared even to consider going that far? The appeal of remaining in the comfort-zone is tempting.
The third incident, quite similar to the previous one, elicited a further different but significant observation from Jesus. “Once the hand is laid on the plough, no one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”. Jesus knew that following him would lead disciples into unfamiliar situations where many would feel insecure. It would mean leaving behind all sense of being in control, and learning instead to trust life, to trust their own judgment, indeed to trust God, and discover how to feel comfortable even in uncertainty. Their temptation would be to “look back”, to not change, to hang on tenaciously to the tried traditions of the past. But, as Jesus would remind them elsewhere, “New wine – new wine-skins!”
A case in point: Will we commit sufficiently to the process of the up-coming Plenary Council to trust the outcomes of the common discernment, and be prepared to embrace them, whatever changes they may ask from us?
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.