27th Sunday Year C
See Commentary on Luke 17:5-10 in Luke 17:1-10
Homily 1 - 2007
As a world community, we don’t seem to have learnt much over the last two and a half millennia. 650 years before Christ, Habakkuk lamented to God: Why do you set injustice before me, why do you look on where there is tyranny? Outrage and violence, this is all I see, all is contention, and discord flourishes. A lot of people in the world today could make the same cry. Closer to home, the situation is not so drastic. Perhaps, in some ways, some have never had it so good.
Yet, as individuals, from time to time, the wrestle with God continues. “Why? Why me? And after all the effort I have made to be good!” The puzzled questioning often arises spontaneously… in the minds of people diagnosed with terminal illness, as well as of those who love them. Apparently, the insistence of the questioning passes with time, but only because other agendas take centre stage. For many the question remains unanswered.
Today we observe International Hospice Care Day. A number of the families of those who were recipients of the gracious caring - and the carers themselves - have joined us for our celebration.
I think that it is important that we respect the deep questions of those confronted with suffering and death – whether it’s their own, or that of those they love or care for. The response Habakkuk received sounds perhaps a bit simplistic: The upright man will live by his faithfulness. (By faithfulness, he meant people’s capacity to trust the inherent goodness of God.)
The same need for faith, for trusting God, surfaced in the Gospel reading: The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.”
In his letter to the Romans, St Paul wrote: God makes all thing work together for the good of those who love him..”. A wonderful English mystic of the chaotic fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich, wrote: All will be well; all will be well; all manner of thing will be well. That’s OK.But how do you know? More importantly: How can you be at peace with that?
The conclusion is certainly not obvious. But the insight seems to come with growth in maturity, or with a developing intimacy with God. Habakkuk came to recognise it. Paul seems to have learnt it. Julian, the mystic, seemed wonderfully at peace with it. And I would be inclined to think that a lot of you have learnt it, too, perhaps almost without noticing it.
In my limited experience of people dying, most of the ones I have known have finished up dying peacefully. Sometimes their peace may simply have been due to their loss of energy.
Others see the grace of God at work. In my observation, one important factor is the presence around them of those who love them. The experience of being loved, of being respected, of being treated as important, is mysteriously comforting and reassuring, and a real source of acceptance and peace.
We have been so blessed of recent years that the whole Hospice Care project has come into being. We can be grateful not just for its existence but for its quality: its professionalism, and especially the courteous tenderness of the carers. Their service and respect have enabled so many to find peace in themselves, to say “yes” to their own dignity, and to find courage to surrender to the gentle Mystery awaiting them beyond death.
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!
Homily 3 - 2013
There are some groups of Catholics who consistently annoy me with their attitudes and their actions. I struggle to accept them. I fail to listen to them respectfully or thoughtfully. I am aware of my prejudice, up to a point, even if unable to move beyond it. I am beginning to think and hope that perhaps today’s Gospel has dislodged something somewhere in me, somewhere like my heart.
By itself, I found today’s passage difficult to put together. It makes more sense when I put it in context. Luke had assembled a collection of sayings of Jesus that are relevant to life within the Christian community. Jesus knew that, when we rub shoulders, it is no surprise that we get splinters. He was warning against, but seemed to accept the inevitability, that we easily stir each other up, and thereby get sucked further and further into mutual opposition. He was telling us to be mature enough to get over comparing ourselves to each other, rather, to hold each other to account, and particularly to be ready to forgive – and to keep on being open to forgiveness.
That was where today’s Gospel took up: “Lord, increase our faith”. Like us, the disciples struggled with forgiveness and openness. Their request was like hand-balling things back to Jesus. A bit like, ‘If you want me to be different, then you make me’. It was a sort of cop-out. Jesus did not buy into their game. Instead he answered, “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.”
That is a cryptic answer, if ever there was one! What did it mean? What was he saying? Perhaps, Think the unthinkable! Believe the impossible! A well-known Irish poet died about six weeks ago, Seamus Heaney. In one of his poems he wrote, “So hope for a great sea-change/On the far side of revenge./Believe that a farther shore/?Is reachable from here”. In another, pushing the point further, he wrote, “Walk on air against your better judgement”.
I think he has caught Jesus’ meaning and expressed it beautifully. If I cannot forgive, it is not so much a failure of the will as a failure of the imagination. I am stuck within my narrow horizons. I cannot imagine me being different. Consequently, I lack hope; and, without hope, I lack the will.
Yet, forgiveness is tricky. Real forgiveness is the act of a free person. It calls for maturity. Sometimes, the challenge with forgiveness [or acceptance, or respect, or openness] is the challenge firstly to find freedom, in some cases, to grow up. Without freedom, insistence on forgiveness serves only to imprison some people in their co-dependence, or depression, or sullen, unrecognised resentments. Help them to become their own persons first, and only then think of forgiveness or its equivalents.
Failure of the imagination! I believe that Jesus is saying to me, “Learn to think the unthinkable. But begin!!” The grain of mustard seed may be infinitesimal, but it can grow; and once it gets going, it is hard to stop it.
Begin at the start, not at the end. Believe the impossible. Look around! Broaden the horizon. “Walk on air against your better judgement.” See others, the ones who seem to have succeeded. Be inspired by them. Jesus was, after all, talking from experience.
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.
Homily 5-2019
I was talking to someone yesterday who did not like the “feeling” of today’s Gospel passage. I half agreed. But I found that it can be understood better after some ‘second thoughts’.
The apostles recognized their need for greater faith. We often think of faith in a vague, generalized sense, which asks little of us. We perhaps see it as merely, or primarily, the intellectual acceptance of the fact that Jesus is God. We probably all pass with honours on that criterion. With Jesus, and perhaps the apostles, too, faith was much more engaging than that.
Jesus was talking about the practical faith in the things of which he spoke with passion, the kind of faith that ignites our hope: that God can make the Kingdom come; that structures of injustice and oppression can be changed; that the goods of the world can be shared equitably. Without faith in those possibilities, we do nothing; and the world does not change. But if we had genuine faith in such things, as Jesus did, we would become involved in them. We would devote our energies to them. Life would become more risky; but when faith is motivated by love, we may be prepared to take risks. In that case, the request of the disciples might well become our prayer: “Increase our faith!”
The next paragraph of today’s passage about the servant expected to get the master’s evening meal was not a parable about the kingdom, much less about God’s attitude to us. It simply described a common situation taken from life in the Roman Empire – with which Luke’s readers, if not Jesus’ contemporaries, were quite familiar and would have accepted as usual and even acceptable. They would have expected nothing else. The story was an illustration making an obvious point.
In that case, what might it have been illustrating? Is there a moral to the story? I am not sure. Perhaps, the final bit of today’s passage may be what gives it some clarity. It turned the emphasis away from the servant's master and trained it onto the servants: “When you have done all you have been told to do, say, ‘We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty’.” Do we go along easily with the fact that we are “merely servants” of each other, voluntarily “servants” of each other? Certainly, Jesus saw himself in that light. Remember how he said of himself, “The Son of Man did come not to be served, but to serve; and to give his life as a ransom for all”. In freely becoming followers of this Jesus, do we not say the same thing of ourselves? Is that not what loving means?
When we become disciples, do we expect to be honoured and looked up to? Or do we come on board, expecting to get our hands dirty, perhaps even to wear ourselves out in the service of the world, particularly the world’s poor, defenceless and marginalized?
In a way, this brings us back to where we started today’s reflection, and ties the various pieces together. As Catholics, as disciples of Jesus, do we direct our attention and energies to cooperating with God in making the Kingdom take shape in our contemporary world? Do we think about, worry about, and do what we can to change structures of injustice and oppression wherever we see them? Do we work for the goal of sharing our nation’s common-wealth equitably? Or do we sit on our hands and leave all that sort of thing to others?
Do we believe that Jesus might be inviting us, hand in hand with God, to “say to some mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you”? Or do we need to sit down first, quietly meditate, and then pray, “Lord, increase our faith”?
Homily 6-2022
In today’s First Reading the prophet Habakkuk seems to have just about hit rock bottom. He was close to despair. He knew he was not the only one. As prophet, he but did not know how to react, what to say.
His situation was this: a bit like Ukraine facing up to the Russian bear clamouring on its border. The small kingdom of Judah was under pressure from the military giant, Assyria. Judah had allied with Egypt, but Egypt was not really interested in helping. What is more, their own Jewish leaders could not agree on what to do. Habakkuk cried out to God in desperation. God’s answer: “The upright man will live by his faithfulness”. God didn’t say that God would save Judah from the Assyrians. God left that open. All God guaranteed was that the upright ones would still somehow find space to breathe, to live, and perhaps even to flourish if they would only trust God
I feel like Habakkuk myself sometimes. After Covid, will we find our churches filling up again? Are we facing further decline? Will there be a return to the “good old days”, even finishing up stronger than before? Might God simply have been telling Habakkuk, and now telling us, something like, “Leave outcomes to me. The way to come alive is the uncomplicated way of faithfulness”.
The message of today’s Gospel can lend itself to a similar conclusion. “Increase our faith!” the apostles pleaded. Jesus seemed to back away from a direct response. Perhaps, Jesus cannot believe for us. Our faith is essentially up to ourselves, a necessarily free choice on our part. But Jesus did say, “If you do have faith, you could perhaps expect the most unlikely outcomes from your faith — uproot a mulberry tree and somehow transplant it in the sea.” However, that may not have been what they had quite expected!”
Luke then had Jesus tell a story reflecting very closely the cultural situation of slavery, and the strict “honour code” that guided his culture, both of which seem so different from our ways of interacting. There was a great social divide between slaves and their masters. Masters made their own decisions; masters took their own initiatives. That was not slaves’ business, not slaves’ duty; that was in no way expected of them. Masters didn’t deal with slaves as they did with their social equals.
What might have been the point of Jesus’ story in relation to the general question of faith raised by the apostles? I wonder if Jesus was saying something like, “Leave the big picture to God — that is God’s responsibility; leave outcomes to God — that is not your responsibility.” Our situation is something like that of the slaves, “We are merely servants; we [can do] no more than our duty”.
If so, what is our duty in our current Church, in our current world? I think it is precisely that we have faith, that we believe. But let us get faith clear. Faith in Jesus is not a question of accurate catechism answers, of being orthodox. It is about relating; it is about trusting Jesus, trusting his priorities, his way of living. The wonderful thing is that, while difficult enough, it is not complicated. Jesus had summed up his mission quite early on by proclaiming, “The kingdom of God is close at hand. It is good news. Let go of your ingrained attitudes and former ways of seeing things; believe the good news.” He followed that up almost immediately by connecting it inseparably with the invitation, “Follow me”. Believing is relating, relating personally to Jesus, getting familiar enough with him as to trust his values and his priorities; and wanting to observe them. Jesus cannot relate to himself; relationships are essentially two-way.
We do not need to know what the Church will be like twelve months from now, or five years, or ten years. That is up to God. What God is assuring us of now is what he told Habakkuk two and a half thousand years ago, “The upright will live by their faithfulness”. Regular contact with the heart of Jesus is enough to put the quiet smile on our face, a sparkle in our eye and a spring in our step. We need no more.
Stand by for surprises!