22nd Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 14:1, 7-14 in Luke 14:1-6 & Luke 14:7-15

Homily 1 - 2007

Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. That was a very Jewish way of putting things. Jesus meant: God will humble, and God will exalt. But out of their sense of the holiness of God, Jews generally preferred not to use God’s name directly, and substituted the passive voice instead:will be humbled, will be exalted.

In the prayer that Luke put on the lips of Mary on the occasion of her visiting Elizabeth, Luke showed Mary voicing the same sentiments as Jesus: He pulls down the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly.

How does all this fit in with our Australian values? We would like to think that we’re really egalitarian: champions of the “fair go” for everyone. Yet, we do love our heroes and our heroines. We seem to need them. The English have/had their Princess Diana. We don’t go for royalty so much – we have our sporting heroes (and, sometimes, sporting heroines).  And we expect them, of course, to be role-models. Role-models for what? They are people with exceptional sporting talent - and then we spend enormous amounts of money on them, training them, keeping them fit, the best of coaches… But they haven’t necessarily got much between the ears. They mightn’t have learnt much wisdom. For some, their whole upbringing may have been quite dysfunctional.

And the media makes them role-models, and the public goes along with it.  Then, having exalted them and put them on their pedestals, the media, and people generally, seem to love nothing more than being able to humble them when, not unexpectedly, fame goes to the heads of some, and they fail to live up to the expectations put on them as role-models.  What does all this say about us? not about them, but about us? This need for heroes? and, then, this covert joy in their humiliation?

Jesus’ stories today were not moral lessons, like Aesop’s fables, illustrating how we should behave. Luke calls them parables. They were meant to tease us, to stimulate our imaginations. So, life is not about winning honour for ourselves: My friend, move up higher. Nor is life about the pay-off in the next life: Repayment will be made to you when the virtuous rise again.

But if not honour, or pay-off in eternity, what is life about? Ultimately, it’s about opening our eyes in wonder to the fact that, already, we are loved madly by God – everyone is loved madly by God.  Get hold of that, and everything else is distraction: who is the greatest? how am I going? what’s in it for me? will God pat me on the head, at least when I die, and say: “Good boy, John!” God wants us to see ourselves through God’s eyes – loved! God wants us to see our world through God’s eyes – loved!

But, it doesn’t come easily. Surprisingly, we’re frightened, and, perhaps, with reason.  To believe it is to become different, to change. It is to no longer be in control. It feels like dying – to ourselves. But it still fascinates us. It resonates with our deepest selves.  God made us that way. God wants us to let it be so. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world if we could all see that we’re all madly loved? Then, who’d need heroes, fallen or otherwise – except, perhaps, the kids and those adults who have still to grow up?

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.

Homily 3 - 2013

Last Wednesday was the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech: “I have a dream” – a dream of respect and fairness for all – a dream to be achieved through the power of truth.

I could not help remembering it against the background of this pre-election period leading up to next Saturday.  It has been a time singularly short on inspiring dreams or life-giving visions – not setting free the goodness in the hearts of people but encouraging a sort of feeding-frenzy of self- and sectional interest [and their extension in national interest]; and pandering to our baseless fears and latent hostilities.  I feel so disillusioned and angry with the electoral process; and can see no short-term response that makes sense.

Then I looked at today’s Gospel.  My first reaction was not good.  So I thought: What is it really saying? What might be the inspiring vision there?  Jesus’ story about the places at the wedding feast was apparently a folk-story circulating in the cultural memory of the time.  It was not about humility, but a shot at the honour-obsessed Pharisees seeking to exalt themselves by means of a smart trick.  Luke tips us off by telling us it could well serve as a “parable” – to entice us beyond the obvious to look more deeply.  Perhaps, it is a veiled send-up of everyone’s pretensions and of the extent to which people will go to be noticed.  God exalts the truly humble, but not the pretend-humble.  But the folk-story says nothing about true humility or how to develop it.  So Luke adds a second teaching of Jesus that really shatters the complacent status quo and truly challenges not just his audience of Pharisees but ourselves as well.

Jesus had a dream – a dream of a world without oppression or violence or extremes of wealth and poverty or endemic sickness.  He dreamt of a world where people related with respect and mutual sensitivity, with active care and compassion, without fear or hostility.  Let us look more closely at what Jesus said: When you give a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind – those in the lowest place.  He mentioned first the poor … and then added the crippled, the lame, the blind.  In his world people with obvious physical disabilities were categorised as sinners, as ritually impure; and consequently excluded from even going near certain areas of the Temple.  Perhaps today Jesus would refer, not to the poor, etcetera, but to the unemployed and homeless, the unemployable, those consigned by society to the margins, labelled and often excluded.

Drawing on the imagery of the folk-story already mentioned, he is perhaps suggesting that true humility may be learnt by association with those already in the lowest places; or at least by learning to look at life, at our political and religious institutions, at our laws and social set-up, from the place of the lowest; to see with their eyes, to get inside their skins and to stand in their shoes.  Things we take for granted can look surprisingly different when seen from the lower rungs of the social scale.  Ask an asylum seeker what it’s like to be seeking asylum.

To be truly humble, do I need to side with the victim – honestly?  Do I need to become vulnerable, perhaps to run the risk of being exploited or marginalised?  That was the way that Jesus himself went.  The Gospel said that that was the way to be truly exalted; and added that repayment would be made when the virtuous rise again.  But do we need to wait for resurrection?  Can we already experience an expanding freedom, a growing joy and a deeper peace as, slowly, we learn to stand in the shoes of the lowest? as we stand with them in their aspirations to respect, notice and acceptance?

How might that affect the way we vote?

 Homily 4 - 2016

I want to talk first to you two young lads, Archie and Heath. Today you will join with us for the first time as we all receive together at Communion the broken Body of Christ and the Blood he shed for us and for the whole world. 

Have you noticed how often in the Gospels, especially in St Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is either having a meal, going to a meal or coming from a meal? Today he was having a meal.

The reason why there seems to be so much emphasis on meals is because Jesus wants to teach us something about the meal we share at Communion, and also how we put into practice in our lives what we celebrate in Communion. The things that were happening in the meal in today’s Gospel all led up to that final line when Jesus said, “When you have a party, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind”. In Jesus’ day, that meant, “At Eucharist everyone is welcome whatever other people may think about them. You are always welcome whatever other people may think of you.” 

If that is what we celebrate at Communion, then how do you put that into practice in your lives – at home, at school, at sport? I think that it might mean that at home, you try to get on thoughtfully with your brothers and sisters; that at school you make especially certain that no one gets left out, or laughed at, or bullied; that at sport you keep remembering that it is always a game and not a fight, doing your best to enjoy it and trying to bring everyone into the game. Fancy Communion reminding us about that!

What might it mean for us adults? Who are the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind in our time and our world, the people who are excluded and kept on the margins? And why worry about them? It is easy for us to deplore the way our world is. God was worried about it, too. That is why God sent the Son – to save us from the destructive ways we behave towards ourselves and towards each other. Simply wanting the world to change, however, won’t change it. But we can change ourselves – or allow God to change us; and as we change, the world changes.

Surprisingly, the one we most dislike, are most dissatisfied with, constantly frown at, is often ourself. That is why we so easily get caught up in doing our best to at least look good as far as others are concerned. It can become so addictive that we do not even notice it. That was the bind that the guests in today’s story were all caught in – they needed to look good, to look better than others. It is precisely what drives the advertising industry and our modern economy - and we all get trapped in it.

When we know that God loves us, even that others love us, the pressure that we put on ourselves to look good can ease off. It all starts with God’s loving us – unconditionally, unreservedly. That is the Good News of the Gospel. However, God’s love is usually mediated through experiencing human love, typically within the family. The trouble is that we often go through life without ever reflecting on the wonder of it all; we never get really to know ourselves. Still, life goes on. If we hesitantly learn to love others, and ourselves, we sense ever more clearly that all real love is unconditional, even if we cannot consistently manage it.

We begin to see with the eyes of God. [That is what Jesus meant when he called us to Repent.] We resonate with where he was coming from. We appreciate why he taught what he did. We find ourselves wanting to live his way. Like him, we recognise the dignity of everyone and seek to treat them accordingly – the real and the [more numerous] metaphorical poor, crippled, lame and blind. 

Homily 5 - 2019 

I felt uneasy about both of Jesus’ stories that Luke records for us this Sunday. The first one about taking the “lowest place” sounds, at first, like helpful advice about the value of the virtue of humility. But it has me scratching my head. Think about it a bit more and all it is really is devious advice about how to fool people enough to be “honoured” by them – if the trick works. Was Jesus pulling our leg? I think he was. And perhaps even Luke realised it – though I am not sure. He prefaced Jesus’ intervention by calling the story a “parable”. So it may not be a straight story. There could be more to it than meets the eye. Jesus wants us to think more deeply.

I remember my first-ever parish priest. He used to wisely warn against what he called, “humility with a hook” – doing something that looked humble in order precisely to be honoured. Rather than an exercise in humility, it was something motivated by pride, by the desire, the need, to be thought well of by others. Even the conclusion that Luke added to Jesus’ story can be somewhat suspect, “All those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted”– presumably by God. I wonder! Can we sometimes try to be super-smart and so trick God into honouring us? The motivation of self-imposed acts of humility can be very suspect. What matters is not to look humble but to be humble. The best training ground for that is to be humiliated by others, particularly when the finger-pointing is justified.

The current persistent public fall-out from the sexual abuse tragedy is a case in point. It can provide the Church with the opportunity to grow in humility – though I wonder at times how well we are doing so. Public humiliation can even be dangerous. It can lead some sadly to walk away. It can lead others into psychological denial. It may have the effect simply of making us sullenly lick our wounds and hope for a chance, some time in the future, triumphantly to humiliate our accusers.

Humility grows best as we learn to accept that we are loved, loved unconditionally, with our real strengths and many failings – by precious friends, if we are lucky enough to have them, and perhaps, especially, by God. A great model is Mary who, though a pregnant but unmarried young woman with an unlikely story, in a village presumably of gossipers, still “exulted in God” who, she could say in the one breath, “looked on his servant in her lowliness” and at the same time "did great things for her”.

Today’s second story, likewise a parable, presumably has more to it than meets the eye. Your guess what that is is as good as mine. What has me scratching my head is the reference to “repayment… when the virtuous will rise again”. My former parish priest did not mention it, but I wonder if, like “humility with a hook”, there can also be “generosity with a hook”? When Jesus loved “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind”, he loved them for themselves. He loved them because he saw them in their true dignity. He did not love them for “repayment”.

There is something of God in everyone; and it is not separate from but part of our human reality. Jesus wants us to recognise that – to learn to see it in ourselves, to learn to see it in others, and to love the beauty, the dignity of every human person. Obviously it is gift. It has to be. But as we let God love us, as we accept God’s love, the insight gradually grows. We don’t use people, as it were, to get sweet with God. We learn to love them for themselves with a love that flows freely from us. God already loves us. “Repayment” is an irrelevance.

Homily 6 - 2022

I was reading this weekend’s edition of the Hamilton Spectator. There were two headlined accounts of quite horrific domestic violence. I noticed the articles this time particularly because today is the Church’s annual Social Justice Sunday; and the theme focussed on this year is precisely Domestic Violence. I suppose I could have picked up any of the usual editions of the paper, and would have found similar accounts of domestic violence. Sadly, domestic violence seems to be quite common — yet I cannot remember having ever spoken about it in my homilies.

I have come across instances of domestic violence occasionally over the years in my common pastoral ministry. It does happen in Catholic families, though, no doubt for a number of reasons, most victims are reluctant to speak about it. In my limited experience the victims have mainly been women, and the violence I have heard about has been mainly sexual violence and occasionally physical. I do remember having been told about a sad instance of on-going psychological violence inflicted by a woman against her partner and children — though it is not so common.

Sadly, misunderstanding some of the Church’s teachings can contribute to the continuing of violent relationships.

The Church’s strongly perceived negative attitude to divorce can be a problem. However, no one is morally obliged to remain in a physically or emotionally violent relationship.

A related problem can stem from the Church’s teaching about forgiveness. Forgiveness is complex — but it certainly does not require that any victim remain in a dangerous, or potentially dangerous, relationship.

Some religious groupings, and some cultures, believe that the Scriptures teach what they call “male headship”. The truth is that human persons, male and female, are of equal dignity because they are equally loved by God.

Some violent partners can be cunningly manipulative. The can make the innocent party feel responsible for causing or provoking their violence.

In all of these situations, there are often other considerations complicating decisions: financial insecurity, worry about the effects on children, fear that resistance may provoke even greater violence, the non-availability of secure shelter, social disapproval, and so on.

Innocent victims generally need help and support of some kind. Fortunately, our Catholic Church is aware of the need to make available such professional assistance. Many years ago now, many dioceses set up professionally competent bodies such as Centacare or CatholicCare. I can remember that in our own diocese of Ballarat back in the late ‘seventies, the bishop established what was then called the Catholic Family Service. We could equally expect that priests and Catholic School teachers could be helpful as reliable points of first contact and referral.

To assist our reflection on issues of domestic violence and to alert us to what is available, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference has commissioned a short statement entitled:
Respect: Confronting Violence and Abuse. It takes less than an hour to read thoughtfully, and it is well worth the effort. A copy of the statement is easily available on the web.