18th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2022

We call our nation the Commonwealth of Australia. When I think of it, I think that’s wonderful. The common-wealth. What is that saying? I think it picks up the fact that the wealth of the country belongs to everyone: the fertile lands, the buried minerals, the native animals, the birds, the fish in our waters.

The experience of centuries has taught us that a good way, perhaps the best way, of releasing the country’s fertility and productivity and making it available to everyone is by a system of public and of private ownership. And that same experience of centuries has also taught us that, given the risk of individuals being carried away by greed and avarice, the distribution of ownership is best overseen and regulated by the country’s government.

Yet the commonwealth remains basically the common wealth. In fact, our Christian faith believes something even more radical, more basic.

You might remember, if you have good memories, the Second Reading three weeks ago. There, the Letter to the Colossians, when speaking of the Christ, made the point that “all things were created through him and for him” — all things … through him … and for him. Today, in the same letter to the Colossians, we even heard, “There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything”. The Prologue to John’s Gospel would make the same point: “Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him”.

How do we know that? It is not obvious. Perhaps we need to be contemplatives — or poets. I love the observation made by a man who was both contemplative and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wrote in one of his poems, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, to the Father, through the features of men’s faces”. Three millennia back, some Hebrew wise men responsible for the Book of Genesis, obviously contemplatives and poets , wrote of God creating the world and everything in it. They pictured us humans, created from the pre-existing earth, placed within this created world to cultivate and tend it. It is a role more basic than ownership — a role that judges ownership. What a difference it would make if we could see ourselves and the rest of the created world in that rich and responsible light.

I have been interested to hear recently some of the discussion connected with the current rise in stress-levels within the community— apparently one effect of the more general fall-out from the quarantining associated with the present pandemic. Some would see greater access to nature as a way to lessen the stress. I relate to that. It is another reason getting me out of bed early most mornings to walk around Lake Hamilton and let myself be saturated with its ever-changing beauty. There is the wonderful added bonus that God is real and hidden in it all.

Is that what was behind [though perhaps a long way behind] Jesus’ comments to and about the rich landowner in today’s Gospel passage? It may at least have contributed some of his motivating energy.

Perhaps, though, closer to the surface of Jesus’ concerns, was his deep conviction that ownership is not just a means of enriching ourselves, but of contributing to the common-wealth and of helping to make everyone ultimately better off.