15th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2022

I find today’s Second Scriptural Reading a providential selection, providing a great context to reflect on the past week’s concluding session of the Plenary Council.

The passage began with a consideration of the mystery of whom it called the Christ, “the image of the unseen God”, the one whom John’s Gospel referred to as the Word, the one through whom the First Person of the Trinity began the super-gradual eternal process of self-revelation. As the Reading stated, “Before anything was created, he existed”. Indeed, the Christ was the one “through whom all things were created” — everything, visible and invisible.

It is through the visible creation, through our world, through our universe, that we can first grasp something of the mystery of God the Creator — through the power we see manifested there, through what seem to us like infinite space and time, through the beauty of the natural world.

This is the world which, as today’s Reading stated, was created, not only through the Christ but “for him”. It is there for the glory of God. It is there also for us humans. As the Book of Genesis expressed so poetically, the natural environment is there not only to sustain us, but also that we might “cultivate and tend it”. Just as our whole existence is dependent on our natural world, so is our natural world dependent on us.

Among the big issues discussed by the Plenary Council this past week was the pressing question of the accelerating human-induced destruction of the world’s environments: oceans being slowly choked with plastic and waste materials, rivers polluted with toxic wastes from unchecked mining and uncontrolled run-off from former forests, the atmosphere inexorably warming due to carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels for power generation, transport, etc.. The world has evolved to the stage where it has now become possible for us humans to destroy it — not only by nuclear armaments but by carelessly doing nothing and continuing to neglect our environment. The issue has become urgent. To fail to drastically change our current life-styles has become seriously irresponsible. It is not just a scientific or political problem. It has reached the stage of being seriously sinful. Hence the Council’s prioritisation of the matter.

Today’s Second Reading went even further. Amazingly, the Christ became human — as Jesus. In doing so, Jesus revealed to us, even more wonderfully than through our created world, the mystery of God and of humanity. Of him the passage said, “the Church is his body…”. But that too was to be the destiny of all humanity — a humanity that had in the meantime become a sin-scarred, violent, sinful humanity. A major purpose of the Christ’s becoming human in Jesus was because God “wanted all perfection to be found in him”. More than that, God wanted “all things to be reconciled through him and for him”.

It seems to me that we have become so used to this sin-scarred, violent, sinful human behaviour on our part that we take it for granted. Unfortunately, we in Australia face a classic example of violent dispossession and continuing exclusion and oppression of our own First Nations people. Years back, Pope John Paul II urged us to address the big questions of reconciliation and integration between First Nations people who have lived here for over 60,000 years, and the rest of us who have migrated here from a vast variety of countries and nations within only the last two or three hundred years —and taken the land for ourselves. To some extent, sadly, his message fell largely on deaf ears. We here in Australia rightly lament the current violent invasion of Ukraine; but we fail to recognise our own sin. I feel so glad that the Council made this issue the first one to be discussed last Monday.

The task we face now is to develop our personal moral sensitivity. It won’t just happen. We need to take seriously and to implement, somehow, Jesus’ call to on-going conversion. I will be interested to learn how the Plenary Council suggests we do it.