27th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

I lived in Melbourne until I was five years old, just a block away from a suburban railway station. We had cousins who lived on the other side of the railway line, not too far away. And we would visit them often enough. Near the railway line was a sign: Trespassers Prosecuted. I had to ask my big sister to read the sign and then tell me what it meant.

I think that that message summed up my unconscious sense of God at that time: Trespassers Prosecuted. When I went to school, I learnt the Ten Commandments. As they stand, the Ten Commandments could be handled fairly safely by seven or eight year olds. (Except, perhaps, for the Fourth one: Honour your father and your mother, the others hardly applied.) The catch was that the nuns and the brothers teased out the Ten Commandments to about one hundred and ten commandments. As I grew up to be a teen-ager, morality became as dangerous as walking through a paddock of land-mines.

If I had been game enough to face it, I might have discovered that I was scared of God, even that I resented God. But that only made me try twice as hard. At times, I had the feeling that generally I wasn’t too bad; in fact, after all I’d done, God sort of owed it to me to be good to me. But in all this, the centre of the world was me. And God? Well, God was the one who would reward me for all my effort to be good, or, who should reward me, anyhow. Perhaps OK for kids – but hardly for adults.

Is Christian life mainly rules and regulations, teachings you’ve got to know and believe, law and order … and, lurking behind them all, Trespassers Prosecuted? Hardly much of a life.

Hardly Good News, unless the ice-cream at the end is the good news – the possibility of heaven – if I pass the test. Surely there is more to life than that? Certainly, that is not what Jesus is about.

No wonder, perhaps, some disciples said: Lord, increase our faith. There’s got to be more, surely. As Jesus said, with even a bit of faith, we could try the impossible, we could dream the improbable, we could say to the mulberry tree: Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey us.

Increase our faith! Open our eyes! Help us to make that reckless jump from the head to the heart. We’ve heard it all. It’s all there in our head. But the faith that gives life is heart stuff. We know that God is love. We’ve heard it a thousand times. Someone complained to me once, years ago: “Stop talking about ‘God is love’. People need to hear more about the Ten Commandments”. The gulf that separates the head from the heart.

If God is love, then life is a love affair – a love affair between consenting adults. Trespassers Prosecuted might be alright to keep some level of social harmony, and even some level of personal and social safety. But, if that’s what it is all about, God help us! God is love. God loves. Lovers are not on about Trespassers Prosecuted. Love is more wonderful than that. Lovers will do more than the Ten Commandments, but with a wonderful willingness and freedom – without thinking.

Increase our faith! Even just a little real faith, and I’ll never stop saying “Thank you!” God owes me nothing. God has given me everything – everything that matters – because that is the way God is.It is all gift. I can dream the impossible. And the wonder of it is that, on the night when he was arrested, Jesus sat his disciples down, put a towel around his middle, and washed their feet.

He served them. Madness! But he did it! What a God! Lord, increase our faith!