22nd Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

Today’s Gospel really invites us to think – twice! At first glance it looks like what you might expect from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People - even a page from Nicolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Hardly what you would expect Jesus to be on about – an invitation to humility, with a hook!

But Luke gives us a clue to something else: he calls Jesus’ story a parable. There’s a meaning here that leaves us scratching our heads. And if we know Luke well, we might suspect that it has something to do with Jesus’ comment of a few Sundays back: How hard it is for those who are rich to enter the Kingdom of God! or with Luke’s regular addressing of the question: How are the well-off and comfortable to live in community with those who are poor?

What is Jesus on about? - Take the lowest place … - Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind (the unproductive, the unemployable and the socially stigmatised).  Could it be that he is saying: Sit with the oppressed, the drop outs, the persecuted, the victims. Stand for a while in their shoes. See what life looks like from their viewpoint?

The Reading today left out an incident that is part of the story as we find it in the Gospel. Jesus had healed a man who turned up while Jesus and the Pharisees were eating, there, in the house of the leading Pharisee. The catch was that he healed the man on the Sabbath. Before healing the man, Jesus had asked the Pharisees who were enjoying their meal: Is it lawful to cure people on the Sabbath, or not? From their point of view, it was a question they were unwilling to answer. But look at the question from the point of view of the man with the affliction. He would have had no hesitation giving an enthusiastic “Yes!”

Things look different, depending on where you stand … on what side of the railway tracks. If we sat for a while with our Indigenous Australians. If we sat for a while with boat people. If we knew and experienced life as they have experienced it.. If we learnt to stand in their shoes: if we were prepared to be their friends and to hear their story of crushing injustice, we might be different people; we might even have voted differently last week.

If we in the prosperous West could see through the eyes of people in the developing world, then the Millennium Goals, agreed to by the nations of the West, 10 years ago, for education, for health care, for women’s rights, for clean water and adequate food for all people in our world, might not be still so far distant.

If we learnt to see through the eyes of the victim, we might see our society differently; we might see ourselves differently. Victims often see the instinctive hostility, the lack of respect, the simmering violence that those who are hostile, who lack respect or who are prepared even to resort to violence, if advisable, do not notice. Left to ourselves, we can’t notice it. It’s too much part of the air we breathe. We can notice it, or begin to notice it, only when we learn to see life through the eyes of the victim.

When you’re invited to a wedding, take the lowest place…

When you give a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind …

Surprisingly, they will be the ones who help us to become aware of how poor, crippled, lame and blind we are.

But, rather than our being humiliated by the experience, or crippled by the realisation, we will find ourselves becoming free – that wonderful deep, inner freedom that is the experience of the Kingdom: the truth that makes us free, that enables and empowers our growth in love, even now, and our capacity for eternal happiness when the virtuous rise again.