29th Sunday Year C - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2010

The point of today’s Gospel is clearer when we put it in context. Some Pharisees had challenged Jesus: “Hey, when’s this Kingdom you talk about coming?” Jesus had answered them: It’s already among you! – God’s already at work; God’s enlightening, empowering love is there, on tap.

If only people would cooperate, the world would be wonderfully different. Later he said to the disciples: In an unresponsive world, you’ll do it tough. You’ll long for response, for change, for the eventual, definitive, establishment of a world where people care for each other where the dignity of every individual is respected. As he put it: You’ll long for one of the days of the Son of Man.

He went on to say (as we heard in today's Gospel) that the danger you’ll face as you confront the world’s inertia – its continuing, and sometimes escalating, hostility and superficiality is that you’ll lose heart. Then he gave that beautiful illustration of the widow who refused to take “No” for an answer – her passion for justice! the wonderful depth of her desire!

Jesus believed that the disciples would need passion like that, would need desires as fierce as that.  And according to Jesus, the only way to get it or to keep it was to pray continually – to keep close to God, to keep attuned to God, until eventually our only prayer is Your Kingdom come; your will be done on earth … as they do it in heaven.

We pray until God’s heart becomes our heart, God’s passion our passion, God’s desires our desires. We pray in order to change, or to confirm, our hearts - not to change God’s heart. God is the one who, as Jesus says, will see justice done, and done speedily. God’s enlightening, empowering love has already been set loose on our world: the Kingdom is among you. But we lose heart, we fail to cooperate, to make God’s truth and God’s love our own. Perhaps, even, at times, Jesus felt disheartened: When the Son of man comes will he find any faith on earth? Not airy-fairy faith. Rather: Do we believe in the possibility of the Kingdom? in the presence of the Kingdom among us?

At the present moment, Australia, by and large, is honouring Mary McKillop – her remarkable work for the poor, for rural, and urban, children who needed education, for orphans, for women exploited and oppressed, for aboriginal children. She might even be an inspiration – but the pressure is there to lower the bar a bit and to insist on making her a media celebrity, and, so, beyond our range, and, so, leave our own comfort-zones unchallenged.

We need to remember where she got her passion from, what it was that fanned the fire within her. It’s no great mystery: she knew the Gospel; she knew the need to pray continually and never lose heart. She knew how to pray: Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth until that prayer welled up spontaneously from deep within her.

The point of Mary’s canonisation is not so much that she pray for us but that we be inspired to pray like her, with her, until we find the same passions, the same burning desires for justice – the passions and desires of God – on fire within us. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth …