23rd Sunday Year C - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2016 

What do you make of today’s Gospel? “If people come after me and do not hate their father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and indeed their own life, they cannot be disciples of mine.“ Hardly a sensitive passage to give us for Fathers’ Day! It went on: “Whoever do not carry their cross and follow me cannot be disciples of mine.” Until it eventually concluded: “Whoever do not leave behind all they possess cannot be disciples of mine.” Little wonder that Jesus made few inroads into mainstream Judaism. The surprising thing is that there are so many of us here. 

Today’s Gospel passage raises the question, Where do we habitually hear the Gospel from? From the point of view of the child that we were when we first heard it, and when most of it simply washed over our heads? Or do we hear it now as contemplative adults, after we have experienced something of the potential attractiveness of the Reign of God and found ourselves intrigued by the exciting newsworthiness of the Good News; after, that is, we have begun the process of what most translations unhappily translate as Repent.

If we have begun to look with adult eyes at today’s Gospel, then something disturbs us about this business of hating father, mother, etc., not to the extent that we effectively stop listening, but that we ask ourselves seriously whatever was Jesus driving at. It helps if we learn from somewhere that in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke [so also in the mindset], there was no word equivalent to our English “prefer” – [which Jesus would otherwise have used]. So Jesus was not recommending hatred, but discernment and the sorting out of sometimes conflicting priorities. He was obviously serious about that, because family life in the Eastern Mediterranean was oppressively and suffocatingly patriarchal. The father ruled, undisputed, the life of the extended family, as did the mother within the domestic setting. The whole culture ensured that no one dared question the status quo – family honour was clearly at stake. Jesus, however, was insistent, against prevailing culture, that in his community of disciples members were to see each other as brothers and sisters, and treat each other as equals because of the profound dignity of even the least and the youngest. There was to be no patriarchy, no despotic monarchical domineering, over others’ lives.

Not much has changed over the centuries. So many contemporary families are highly dysfunctional. We are at last admitting that domestic violence is a crushing problem; yet sadly we are still at a loss to know how to counter it effectively. Should we Christians be at the forefront of the campaign?

Most of us are old enough to remember back to the 70s, and the musical “Godspell”. I love the song, “O dear Lord, three things I pray: To see Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly, day by day …”. It is a great prayer for ongoing conversion; and taps clearly into the mind and heart of Jesus. Everything begins with our seeing God ever more clearly, and coming to see our world with the eyes of that loving God. That takes conscious effort. It takes time. It takes silence. It takes pondering. Following on from seeing God, we hope, we pray, that we may love God more dearly. That love tends to happen of itself, provided we agree gradually to let go of our frantic need to control even how we stand before God [as if we could in the slightest way influence God’s infinitely passionate love for us!]. Then, and only then, can we begin truly to follow the way of Christ more nearly. And we might find, perhaps to our surprise, that, as we experience greater and greater inner freedom, we gently come to notice that we are no longer driven by our former addictive possessiveness. In fact, even if Jesus had not recommended it, we might let go, trim down, uninvited.