14th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

In the chapter of the Gospel immediately preceding today’s passage, Luke had Jesus sending out the Twelve on mission. This time, it’s seventy-two – six times as many!

Luke puts this passage into his Gospel particularly for the sake of his own community. No way could they see themselves as the Twelve, but they could identify with the more non-descript seventy-two. As we listen today to Jesus talking to the seventy-two, we can hear him talking to us. We’re not the Twelve; we’re not the hierarchy; but we are more numerous seventy-two.

What strikes me as I reflect on today’s Gospel is the way it starts, and the way it ends.

Jesus begins his advice with the observation: The harvest is rich. He ends it with his instruction to the seventy-two to proclaim: The kingdom of God is very near to you. 

Why it strikes me is because it invites me.

As I look out at my world – a very different world from the one into which I was ordained 50+ years ago – I can be tempted at times to lament the way that the world has changed, and to be disheartened by what I see to have gone wrong with it.

Perhaps that is not the way that Jesus sees it: The harvest is rich … The kingdom of God is very near to you. Jesus’ way is an invitation to look differently, to look more deeply. What’s wrong with me that I sometimes don’t see? I need the eyes of Jesus – a sharper sensitivity to goodness, a greater sense of wonder, and a more ready response of appreciation and of gratitude. I would love to keep growing that way.

It’s not the whole story, of course. There are wolves out there – and he sends us out into the midst of them. In confronting them, we are to be not tigers, but lambs. Which means that, when we engage with the world’s injustice, we face opposition or conflict without violence and with respect for human dignity, even of opponents. That is hard… but it’s easier in our neck of the woods where the wolves are, thankfully, not lethal!

What does Jesus want us to do in this ambiguous world? in this glorious mixture of good and bad? Well, he’s clear enough (or should we say vague enough?). Let your first words be “Peace to this house!” and then, “Cure those in it who are sick.”

In our world, whatever about physical sickness, is there anyone who does not carry emotional wounds of some kind or other? – those often unrecognised wounds that lead some to quiet despair, and others to destructiveness and violence, and the rest to somewhere in-between.

How do we cure the world’s sickness? Remember that these weren’t the Twelve, these were the indefinite seventy-two. Jesus is not speaking here to Pope or bishops, or even us priests, but to all of us in one way or another. He makes it clear that we don’t need to have much – no purse, no haversack, no sandals, no PhD, no special oratorical skill, no sacramental ordination. We can bring only ourselves, and that’s enough. But for us to proclaim: Peace to this house! we need to be people of peace. And people of real inner peace are the most effective bearers of genuine peace and reconciliation.

I believe that for us to be people of peace, true reconcilers – wherever we are – we need to be closely in tune with Jesus. I don’t think that we are much use as labourers in the harvest unless we’re people of prayer, people who really pray – not experts, but prepared to have a go and to hang in. And I think that one of the spin-offs of such prayer is that our inner vision grows stronger – we see ever more clearly the richness in the harvest and the breath-taking nearness of the kingdom of God.

Today, as Aboriginal people around Australia celebrate NAIDOC Week, it is particularly appropriate for us to be reminded of our commission to be apostles of reconciliation and to know that Jesus empowers us to be precisely that.