16th Sunday

Year C

16th Sunday Year C

Homily 1 - 2007

Jesus did not tell us to love "everyone". Too often "everyone" means no one. He said to love our neighbour. And when asked: Who do you mean? Who is my neighbour? He didn’t answer directly, but told the well-known story of the Good Samaritan (that we heard last week). The point of the story he left to us to work out, but among other things, it seemed to say: No one is ruled out. Your neighbour is the one in need who happens to cross your path.

Beyond that, it’s up to ourselves, but some people qualifying as neighbours because they cross our paths constantly, are family members, ones we engage with in our work places and in our leisure activities; and, since we belong to a local community, a national community, and a global community, they are the people in need in our local, national and global communities.

Of course, our time, our resources, our abilities and our energies are all limited – so our practical responses will need to be discerned and prioritised. But Jesus’ story seemed to say: No one is ruled out a priori, and Our responses will be factors of their needs and our capacity.

In Luke’s Gospel, the story of the Good Samaritan (which we heard last week) is followed immediately by today’s story, and that is probably not by accident. Perhaps it moves us beyond Who do I reach out to? How do I respond in practice? to address the question of: In what spirit do I respond?

Martha reached out very practically to Jesus who landed on her doorstep – a great good Samaritan: she welcomed him, and she set about feeding him. But then, perhaps, her focus changed: she got absorbed in her need and got resentful of her sister, and she tried to draw Jesus, her guest, into her argument with her sister. That was, to say the least, a failure in courtesy and a breach of hospitality. Mary, on the other hand, wasn’t crash-hot on practical charity, but her attention helped Jesus, her guest, to feel welcome.

Of course, it need not have become an either/or situation: Martha could have kept doing what she was doing and yet remained warmly focussed on her guest. Mary could have kept warmly focussed on Jesus, and still have given Martha a hand.

But, perhaps, the point of the story is: When I help someone in need, whom am I focussing on? on them? or, on me? Am I doing it to meet my need, or to meet the other’s need? Do I reach out because it makes me feel good, or less guilty? because God will be pleased with me? because I try to see Jesus in the person in need? or

Do I reach out to others as the persons they are, simply because they are persons and they have a need - but not just a need - also an inviolable dignity, simply as the persons they are, and that, more than anything else, needs to be taken seriously, and responded to warmly?

Homily 2 - 2016

What was going on at Martha’s place? It seems you could cut the atmosphere with a knife! The sisters would not even talk to each other. Martha would not connect with her sister other than through their guest, Jesus? One of them certainly needed to be in the kitchen - the meal had to be prepared, and prepared well. But they could hardly leave Jesus alone for half an hour or so up in the front room by himself to twiddle his thumbs. Even ordinary hospitality demanded that one of them be there to entertain him. Why could they not have had a quick dialogue as Jesus arrived and agree together who would do what?

Why did Luke tell the story? And why did he include it immediately after last Sunday’s story about the Good Samaritan? I think that one story feeds off the other, clarifying and reinforcing each other.

Last week’s Gospel began with the scribe asking Jesus about the greatest commandment of the Jewish Law, and then his spot-on answer to his own question, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind”. He even added for good measure, “…and your neighbour as yourself”. But he then gave himself away by asking a second question, “And who is my neighbour?”, which, when you think about it, was a question about others, and introduced possibilities of “in-group/out-group”, “us/them”, of limitations and boundaries. Jesus tried to put him right by redefining the question. “Who proved himself a neighbour to the man in need?” This, when you think carefully about it, was a question not about others, but about himself, and about what kind of person he was.

It is important to look more deeply. Is the greatest commandment of the Law, “Love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind” also about who we are and how and to whom we relate, about character and personal orientation? Equally interesting is the question that suggests itself by extension. Is “loving our neighbour” ultimately, also a matter of what kind of persons we are? Might the issue touch on what Jesus was driving at elsewhere when he called people to conversion? when he calls us to conversion?

To give Jesus a meal seemed a charitable thing to do. But might the sisters have given themselves away by their attitudes to each other? Had their previous encounters with Jesus led them yet to deep personal change, to conversion, to having become genuinely loving women, through and through, and not just to an obviously select person like Jesus? What we are dealing with is more than cosmetic change. This is deep, radical change - not just how much, but what kind. It is a question of becoming, of growing. It will permeate all relationships, profoundly changing lives.

For me this then raises the question, How do we change to the extent that we love God with “all” our heart, soul, strength and mind? Perhaps that is what Jesus was driving at when he referred to Mary’s “sitting down at his feet and listening to him” as “the better part”. Maybe because there precisely lies the way to change. Somehow we all need to school ourselves to notice what is going on inside ourselves. We need to become aware of our motivations, our assumptions, our fears and desires, our unnoticed addictions and compulsions, our prejudices and judgments, indeed, “the log in our own eye”. Until we do, we sail along blithely in ignorance. And sadly, we do not grow.

We need regularly to be still, to reflect contemplatively on our lives. Like Mary, the mother of Jesus, we need to treasure experience and ponder it in our hearts. Like Mary, the sister of Martha, let us deliberately choose to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to him – and wait to see what happens over time.

Homily 3 - 2019

In last Sunday’s Gospel story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was encouraging a lawyer to “get out of his head”, to go beyond thinking, talking, even preaching, about love, and instead to prioritise living it in practice. Through his story Jesus sought to indicate the universal outreach of the call to love. No one is to be excluded. Today’s incident with Jesus in the home of Martha invites us to look more closely at some other practicalities of loving.

“Martha welcomed Jesus into her house”. That was wonderful. She then showed him real down-to-earth hospitality by starting to prepare a meal for him. All this was very much love in practice. But before long another agenda came into play that led Martha eventually to behave in a fairly unfortunate way towards Jesus: She awkwardly asked him to intervene and to take sides in her domestic difference with her sister Mary. Rather than quietly approach her sister herself and ask her to help with the preparations, she criticised Jesus instead, “Lord, do you not care that my sister is leaving me to do the serving all by myself? Please tell her to help me.”

What had happened to replace warm hospitality with hostility? I think this is a good question, as it touches into how we experience much of modern living. People today feel busy, under pressure, and this sense of busyness contributes to the floating anger that poisons so much of modern life. Someone once unkindly commented, “People are spending money they cannot afford on things they do not need to look good in the eyes of people they do not particularly respect.” A recipe for resentment! Be that as it may, it is sad that so often hospitality turns into hostility.

Perhaps a solution lies in cultivating the habit of asking ourselves regularly why we are doing what we do. What starts off as an act of love can easily be undermined by other considerations or pressures. In Martha’s case, the real practicalities of her task “distracted” her. As Jesus said, “You worry and fret about so many things”. Perhaps, too, Mary’s non-involvement irked her. [It may not have been the first time!] She had let herself forget that the reason why she was doing all those “many” necessary things was because she really did love Jesus and wanted to please him. Had she not forgotten, she would not have finished up speaking rudely to him.

In the midst of an already busy life, can we cultivate the habit of taking time out to examine what we are doing, how we fill our days, and why we do what we do? The more we learn to ponder, the better hope we have to be in control of our lives. The early Greek philosopher Socrates is supposed to have said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Taking time to ponder could well belong to “the better part” that Mary chose and that Jesus commended. With practice we learn to make sense of the complexities of life.

What was going on, meanwhile, between Mary and Jesus as she sat at his feet listening? Luke doesn’t tell us. But one word that comes to my mind is “encounter” – not just any encounter, but the sort of encounter that stirs the heart, feels “right”, and touches into, perhaps, our deepest human longings. Genuine encounter puts us in touch with our innate human worth. That may have been Mary’s experience. It may also have been Jesus’ experience. Along with service [Martha’s strength], Mary’s deep personal engagement was also an act of love. There can be a time and a place for service and for intimacy. Together they can keep love personal and enriching. Indeed, for friendship to grow, there needs to be a time and a place for both.

There can be more to love than service – necessary as it is.

Homily 4 - 2022

After four years in the making, the Plenary Council Meetings finished their task last weekend. What remains now is, hopefully, for the bishops of Australia to sign their names to the motions, send them to Rome for approbation, and then to begin [or continue] to put the motions into practice.

The first of the major issues considered by the Council revolved around reconciliation between First Nations inhabitants, here over 60,000 years, and the rest who have arrived only in the last two hundred or so years.

Other issues centred around ecological responsibility, including the contested issue of human-induced and highly-dangerous climate change.

For Catholics to accept such issues as thoroughly moral concerns will call for enlightenment and radical conversion — but as children of our Creating God, as brothers and sisters particularly of the poorest and most endangered nations of our world, we need to model to our world a community that takes these problems seriously.

The Council members also looked at what we have learnt, [and, sadly, have still to learn and do], from the shocking exposure of child sexual abuse in the Church. The systemic evil of clericalism needs to change — and we have hardly even begun.

Another issue of deep concern to many, if not most, Catholics was that of the participation of women in decision-making in the Church, and in the general exercise of both power and service. The Council eventually bit the bullet, and reaffirmed the equal dignity of women and men, not only in society in general but also in the Church. It re-affirmed women’s right to participate in the governance of the Church in various practical ways; and has requested that the Australian Bishops formally approach the Pope and ask him to consider seriously the possibility of ordaining women to the Diaconate.

 After many ups and downs, the general feeling from Council members seems to have been that the guidance of God’s Spirit was powerfully tangible — right from the beginning, but particularly so towards the end. What was most important was that participants learnt in a “hands-on” way the effectiveness of the two processes that have come to be called synodality and discernment. Synodality called for a deliberate decision on the part of all present to say what they really believed, and why; and equally to listen carefully to each other. Discernment required them to listen also to God’s Spirit.

People inevitably differ in their ideas and attitudes and in the relative emotional importance they attach to these attitudes. It is normal to feel confident when they sense they belong to a group of seemingly like-minded others. That attitude of belonging is deepened when there is an opposing group of people who do not agree with them — who, they feel, do not belong to “us”. People align along lines of “us” versus “them”; and their primary aim becomes to win the argument at all costs and to impose their views on the unwilling but unsuccessful minority. Polarisation temporarily brings together people who may not in fact share many other ideas and attitudes. It compromises their personal uniqueness and forms a very shaky and short-lived togetherness. It is the way, sadly, that most political decisions are reached and that most people have come to take for granted.

Given that there will almost always be people who disagree with each other, and that polarisation invariably destroys community and cooperation, synodality presents a superior alternative. It presumes a sense of the equal dignity of everyone, based on our common humanity. Rather than seeking to win, is asks the question: “Given our uniqueness and inevitable differences, what can we agree on and act on together without feeling compromised?” For any one individual the outcome is rarely perfect. But it is something that all can accept honestly; and it takes seriously community, belonging and cooperation.