27th Sunday Year C - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2016

Increase our faith! What on earth led the apostles to make that plea to Jesus? If we had started today’s reading a paragraph earlier, we would have got a clue. Jesus had just talked about forgiveness within the Christian community. He had told his disciples to forgive whoever hurt them, however they hurt them, even if they kept on offending seven times a day. Perhaps the Apostles had noted their inbuilt natural resistance to what Jesus was suggesting. They were, after all, products of their culture. The world they lived in was little different from today. 

But they were at least in touch with themselves enough to recognise their resistance.  Luke seemed to connect their resistance to their immature faith, because he dipped into the collection of sayings of Jesus preserved in the tradition and inserted one to the effect, Were your faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you. I am not sure what precisely Jesus meant, beyond perhaps the fact that their faith was still quite immature. Perhaps we could call it Stage one faith – that still had a long way to go. 

Luke then added a couple of other sayings gleaned from the tradition, about interactions between servants and masters. Again, I am not quite sure of their relevance to the issue of faith other than to help the disciples recognise the expectations of life within the Christian community, and to psych them up to live accordingly. We can call that stage two faith – willpower, coupled with a touch of rational conviction. Frankly, though, the last line would be quite sad, in my book, if it were to express the attitude of a disciple – We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty. Can genuine mercy and true forgiveness flow purely from a sense of duty?

Increase our faith! There is more. Our believing about Jesus needs to move on to trusting in Jesus, to relationship. Over time, then, we can grow from trusting to entrusting, to surrendering, to self-emptying, until our self-emptied selves can be filled with the loving Trinity. We begin to love with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, thoroughly changed to our core. From being persons who love sometimes, selectively, conditionally, we become loving persons. We cooperate with God in the transformation as we risk relationship with others and deliberately take time to process the experience in meditative contemplation. Pope Francis surprises us so often with how he expresses his love, but no longer surprises us that he loves. He is simply a loving man – in every fibre.

Let us look again at Jesus. At his final meal, in sharp contrast to the master in today’s story, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. At that same meal he told his disciples clearly that he saw them, not as servants but as friends. Our Christian life is the acting out of that love relationship, of that friendship. There is nothing about deserving in his initiative or our response, nothing about merit, nothing about punishment or reward. Simply love, simply joy. 

Not long after that meal together, Jesus was murdered and then raised from the dead. Both before and after his death, he had insisted on forgiving everyone who had colluded in his crucifixion. His first words to his broken disciples after his resurrection were, Peace be with you. He had come back, not as triumphant, victorious Lord, but largely unnoticed, still bearing his wounds. He lives among us as the crucified, risen, forgiving victim. I find something irresistibly attractive, powerful and fascinating about our vulnerable, compassionate God.

Sometimes I wonder if it is only people who, like Jesus, love and love joyfully, who can understand mercy and forgiveness and practise them – and flourish in the process.