19th Sunday Year C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2019

I was eleven years old, going on twelve, when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The fireball it created was more than five kilometres across. The temperature at its centre was one hundred million degrees. Seventy thousand people were killed immediately or died within hours. The people who were near the centre became nothing. Few of those killed were soldiers. The date was August 6th. On August 9th, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Nagasaki was the one city in Japan with a significant Christian population. By August 15th, the Feast of Mary’s Assumption, the war was ended. As a young lad, I was excited, and thought it all wonderful.

Many years later, as a priest in Warracknabeal, I met an old parishioner who had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese, captured with the fall of Singapore earlier in the war. He was working underground in a coalmine on the outskirts of Nagasaki when the bomb fell. He was unharmed by the explosion. As an old man, he had a wonderful attitude – peaceful, faith-filled and with no obvious bitterness. He was legally blind, but used to walk to Mass by himself every Sunday from his home about a kilometre distant from the church.

I remember another old man, not a parishioner, whom I used to see whenever I visited the hospital in Beaufort, where I was stationed during the early 1970s. He had been a soldier in France during the First World War. In his gruff old way, before I said anything, he would say to me, “Don’t talk to me about God. If you had seen what I had been through, you would never believe in any God.”

Two old men – both had seen terrible suffering. One kept close to God, the other lost faith. How did each picture God? – loved and trusted by one, rejected and denied by the other?

What is God like? Who is God? What is your sense of God? What was Jesus’ sense of God? Does today’s Gospel passage answer questions? Or raise them, and leave the answers hanging?

Is God like the “master” of the first story? Or more like the “master” in the second story? Or is God like both, depending on how we behave? Or like neither? Which master would you prefer God to be like?

Personally, I believe Jesus’ consistent teaching about his Father fits the “master” of the first story, the one who “puts on an apron, sits his slaves down at table, and waits on them”. This is the God who shatters assumptions, and almost seems too good to be true – the God who delights in standing our expectations on their head.

Then what about the “master” in the second story, the one who “cuts off the slave and sends him to the same fate as the unfaithful”, the one who deals out “very many strokes of the lash”? Does this represent the God who rewards and punishes, depending on people’s behaviour – as the story puts it, whether they are “awake when he comes” and “at their employment” or “beating the menservants and the maids, and eating and drinking and getting drunk”?

Does God love us and forgive us unconditionally? or conditionally, depending on our behaviour?

Perhaps our answer will depend on how we hear the second story. Is it about a master who punishes certain behaviours, but punishes judiciously? or is it simply a timely and insightful reflection of life in an unredeemed world where violently abusive behaviour carries its own inbuilt violently abusive outcomes? a bit like Jesus’ comment elsewhere, “Those who live by the sword will perish by the sword”? Violence closes hearts to love – the only too inevitable way of the world, that Hindus and Buddhists have also noted, and in their case refer to as “Karma”.

I believe that the God we come to know depends on the depth of our knowledge of Jesus and the intimacy of our friendship with him.