14th Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 10:1-12,17-20 in Luke 10:1-24


Homily 1 - 2007

Jesus’ major concern was always the crowds, the world out there, the real world of messed up people deeply loved by God the world of which we are part. As Jesus looks at Horsham/Murtoa today/night, his major concern is not us Catholics, but everyone in Horsham. No favourites. We’re all important; all loved deeply.

He would love us all to wake up to the possibilities on offer, to break free from oursense of “business as usual” – from the busyness, the boredom, the pain, the distraction and the non-stop action that seem to fill most lives . We would love us all to wake up to the possibilities of life to the full, (or to what he called in today’s Gospel: the Kingdom of God), to lives empowered by love, and interacting purely on that basis, not self-interest, not promotion, nor “what’s in it for me”, but on the basis of a real concern for each other.

As Jesus remarked in today’s Gospel: The harvest is rich, but there’s a need for labourers, for people ready to share their own hopes and their own deep desires with others. He himself sent out seventy-two to do that – unnamed, perhaps unnoticed, all pretty clueless – just like you and me – just people who believed that things could be different, people who yearned for things to be different – who didn’t have the answers but who had a deep longing for things to change for the better - for their own lives, and for the lives of others to be better – people who wished that peace be the experience of all, themselves included. Whatever house you go into, let your first words be: Peace to this house!

Who are those unnamed, unnoticed people whom Jesus would love to send to help peace reign and deepen in Horsham? That’s where the Church comes in. That’s what it’s for.

So that’s also where we come in. When we were baptised, we were anointed on the forehead with chrism to highlight the fact that, through our christening, the Holy Spirit had anointed and commissioned us as priests, prophets and kings with Christ, the Anointed One. We live out our prophetic commissioning as we try to lead others to join with us in exploring the practical consequences of living in a world created and sustained by a God who is sheer love.

What do we need to fulfil our role? Not much. We’ll be like lambs among wolves, in fact, so no particular poweror giftedness or resources: no purse, no backpack, no reeboks – just a deep longing that people find peace: Let your first words be: Peace to this house. No great theological knowledge, either, just the sense that, when open to God and to God’s way of love, things can be better. The Kingdom of God is very near you. We won’t win them all; but we do what we can - be persons who genuinely care: Cure those in it who are sick.

We come here together each week to celebrate Eucharist. It’s a great learning experience. Lambs among wolves sometimes finish up as lambs of sacrifice. (We can probably all relate to that: we’ve all hadour own share as wolves in tearing other lambs to pieces. We’re not squeaky clean.) But if we genuinely seek to live in love and to encourage others to live accordingly, there will probably be a few wolves around ready to make sacrificial lambs of us.

That is what happened to Christ. That’s one of the things that we remember each week. We also remember that no one could talk him out of his determination to live in love - whatever the cost. But more importantly, we remember that Christ, the totally innocent sacrificial lamb, was raised on the third day. His approach was right after all.

We come along consistently each week to remember all that - in the hope that gradually we’ll get the same unshakeable conviction.


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.


Homily 3 - 2013

I was watching TV footage of the demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Egypt on Friday night – shouting, waving fists, eyes burning with anger, perhaps hatred.  Us! – Them! We’re right! – You’re wrong! Totally convinced.  Shouting past each other; no one listening.  At least, it is not as bad as Syria.  They have gone well beyond shouting there to shooting, shelling and bombing – obliterating each other.

Violence is not inevitable, but it is the easy response, the constant temptation.  Nelson Mandela in South Africa is drawing closer and closer to death.  South Africa could well have gone the way of bloodshed years ago had it not been for him.  Wonderfully, he steered his nation along the path of reconciliation.

Here in Australia we are facing in to one or two months of electioneering.  Same dynamic! Us – them. We’re right! You’re wrong! Goodies and baddies! Slogans and sound-bites.  No one listening to the other side.  Sadly, something similar can happen even in families.  It can happen in the Church.  Have we lost the skill of listening?

There are some wonderful gems in today’s Gospel where Jesus gives advice on setting up God’s Kingdom in today’s world.  Disciples abroad in the world, as lambs among wolves – deliberately! The way of vulnerability, not the way of power.  The message: Peace be to this house.  Not just a casual Hello, but Peace be with you.  Why greet people that way? unless it truly is what we yearn to be the experience of everyone we meet.  And if it is not exactly what we might say, at least is it where we are coming from?

I am not sure it was where Jesus’ disciples were coming from.  They seem to have liked the power trip: Lord, even the devils submit to us when we use your name.  It is a heady feeling – having persons submit to you.  I sometimes think it is the way that some people read the Church.  “If we only had the numbers, we would have them all conform to what we teach is right”.  But we don’t have the numbers; and of recent years we have lost much of the respect that we once might have had.  Is that a bad thing? a good thing? or irrelevant?

Peace to this house! Peace be with you! We can hardly mean it if we do not appreciate it, experience it and cherish it ourselves.  Where does such peace come from? As Jesus said, Not from the power you might have, but from the fact that your names are written in heaven.  Your names are written in heaven – or, as Isaiah had reported God as saying some centuries beforehand, I have carved you on the palm of my hand.  God loves us.  That’s enough! Not peace through the barrel of a gun, but peace simply from being loved, knowing it, and believing it.

Jesus was saying all we heard in today’s Gospel as he was on his way to Jerusalem – the power centre of those priests and aristocrats determined to get rid of him.  He knew what was in store for him.  He chose the way of vulnerability – a lamb among wolves, if ever there was one.  He accepted the price of every choice to love.  Where did he get the courage? Certainly not from the fact that devils submitted to him, but from the fact that his name, too, was written in heaven.  He knew that he was loved.  He was at peace.  He was free to say exactly what he needed to say.

They killed him.  But when he rose on the third day, his first words to his startled disciples were simply: Peace be with you.  He couldn’t help but say it.  He was so full of it.  That is what we are celebrating here this morning as, together, we gather round for Eucharist.


 Homily 4 - 2019

Last year the planning group for next year’s Plenary Council asked us all to think about and to answer a leading question: What is God asking of the Australian Church today? About a month ago the group issued its first lot of feedback, condensing our answers, grouping them under six major themes and using about sixteen different words to describe those themes. If only we can be the kind of Church we say we want to be, things look wonderful for the future.

Intriguingly, today’s Gospel passage provides a great setting to consider those themes and even the words that we used. Jesus sent disciples out with a job to forget about self-centredly saving their souls, and to focus outwards on others. God saves. People simply need to accept and cooperate; and to do that, it helps if they know that God is essentially a saving God, a loving, merciful God. As long as people are scared of God, they tend, naturally, to keep their distance.

The disciples’ message was to be simple, as we heard in the Gospel, “Let your first words be, ‘Peace to this house!’ Cure those in the house who are sick, and say ‘The kingdom of God is very near to you’.”

So, the Church is sent; it has a mission; and its message is good news. That is what we said we want our Church in Australia to be: missionary and evangelizing. Accordingly, we also said we want our Church to be healing and merciful, and ourselves to be joyful and hope-filled - showing our world what God is like.

Jesus also instructed his disciples, “Carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals…Stay in the same house…Eat what is set before you”. ‘Travel light’ seems to be his message. The Church need not be on about power. Outcomes are up to God. Instead, Jesus told them, “I am sending you out like lambs among wolves”. Apparently, vulnerability is intrinsic to the message. Two more of the words we chose to describe our Church of the future were humble and servant.

On this issue, history is not on our side. The Church over the centuries has been very prone to siding with the powerful, prepared even to force conformity on others. I am glad that, as we look to our Church of the future, we recognized the need always to be “Open to conversion, Renewal and Reform”.

I particularly like Jesus’ recommendation, “Whenever you enter a town and they do not make you welcome .. say, ‘We wipe off the very dust of your town that clings to our feet, and leave it with you’. Yet be sure of this, ‘The kingdom of God is very near’.”

Not surprisingly, since the disciples were sent out “like sheep among wolves”, Jesus warned them to expect at times a hostile response to their message. But his advice to them was beautiful: don’t let a trace of that hostility stick to you; wipe off every speck of dust. Don’t carry any of it in your own hearts. Instead, he said, reassure them, whatever their attitude to God, that they could never stop God loving them. “The kingdom of God is very near!”

A thought about Jesus’ enigmatic decision, “He sent them out in pairs”. I wonder why. It seems to have been important. In this case, might the medium be the message, a subtle illustration of the kingdom, an embodiment of the significance of togetherness? The lone-ranger disciple is an anomaly. God’s kingdom is about relationship – a movement away from self-centredness to the way of love. Significantly, when thinking about what kind of Church, along with the other words we mentioned, we also listed inclusive, participatory and synodal.

Finally, let us not forget Jesus’ recommendation, “Ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers in his harvest”. This was not prayer for priests, nor for an elite laity, but expressed the earnest desire that all disciples become alert, energetic, committed lay apostles working together, accompanying and supporting each other. We shall be that, as we said, provided we are truly prayerful and eucharistic.


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?