14th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 6 - 2022

The Final Session of the Plenary Council gets under way this afternoon in Sydney, and is due to wind up next Saturday. All we can do at this stage is pray that the delegates remain open to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Not only is it all we can do — it is all we need do. Let us not underestimate either the importance of our prayer or its powerful and mysterious effects.

Whatever the Council’s outcome, our personal mission will remain what it has always been. We heard in today’s Gospel passage what that response requires of us. Today’s message was not so much a message for the community’s leaders as for everybody. Jesus had already sent the Twelve out on their mission. Today’s message concerns all of us disciples of Jesus — symbolised by the number seventy-two.

Jesus sent out the seventy-two in pairs. He wanted them to bear tangible witness to the peace and harmony among themselves. Their unity was to proclaim to all the possibility and desirability, even the beauty, of peace in their own lives.

Like them, our mission is to light up our world, or even better, to lighten up our world. It is summed up wonderfully in the short, four-word, phrase, “Peace to this house!”, that Jesus wants our foundational greeting to be to everyone we meet.

Without peace at work in us, indeed, unless we are obviously peace-filled people ourselves, our wishing others peace will be heard simply as words, simply hot air. That requires that we be truly converted disciples, that we are well on in our growth into mature, loving persons. Maturing takes time and practice. But without it, a would-be disciple would be nothing but “a gong booming or a cymbal clashing” — as St Paul so clearly insisted in his first Epistle to the Corinthians.

What is so significant about “peace”? I think that peace is the essential experience of salvation. Salvation is rooted in, built on, peace-filled relationships [or inter-relationships]. Sin, on the other hand, is “broken relationships”. In wishing “Peace to this house”, Jesus was obviously not thinking of the dwellings where people lived, but of the people in the dwellings and the quality of their inter-relationships.

Jesus went on to remind his disciples that they were not to approach their mission of fostering and strengthening God’s Kingdom as a win/lose competition. In offering others what they could out of respect and care for them, out of a desire to open them to a happier way of living, they were to do so not for their own satisfaction but from gratuitous love, leaving others perfectly free to reach their own decisions. They were to travel lightly, to carry no grudges: “We wipe off the very dust of your town … and leave it with you”, sad for their sakes and for what they are missing out on, but assuring them that “the kingdom of God” still remains “very near.”

In our present situation, many of us feel saddened that people seem to be abandoning their Christian faith. We need not be angry with them, but gently and calmly do our best to let them know that they remain always welcome should they ever return.

I do a certain amount of soul-searching these days, asking myself if, and how much, my heart is really in my prayer whenever I pray the “Lord’s Prayer”. Do I really want God’s Kingdom to “come on earth”? Is it the real priority of my life?