29th Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 18:1-8

Homily 1 - 2007

When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth. Jesus’ rhetorical questions disturbs me. Will he find any faith on earth. Do any of us really believe him? I find it easy enough to think of lots of ideas, attitudes and actions that show, whatever people may say, that they really don’t believe Jesus, don’t trust him, won’t take him seriously.

Love your enemies, he said. How many really think that is the way to go in today’s world – consistently? Whatever you neglected to do to the least of these, you neglected to do to me… 

Neither do I condemn you… We can’t even say that to ourselves.

It seems so easy to point the finger at others. Everyone is so vulnerable. Since that’s the case, what are my own blind spots? You can see them better than I can. It’s easy to get discouraged. As if you didn’t realise it, there is an election campaign under way. I tend to get disillusioned by the politicians. What matters to them? a relentless commitment to the common good? or what their minders tell them will win votes? Then, thinking of the voters deepens the disillusionment. What matters to the voters? The common good?Or what suits them? Justice in a global world of desperate inequality and oppression? Or Australia’s national interest? Who takes Jesus seriously?

In a situation where we are tempted to lose heart, Jesus urged us to pray. He taught us to pray: Your kingdom come; Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive each one who is in debt to us… Can we honestly pray that? Is that what we really want to pray for? And if we do pray that honestly, if it is what we really want, as we look at our world, how do we not get overcome by disappointment and disillusionment?

Today’s Gospel showed Jesus concerned precisely about that. He showed Jesus telling a parable urging his disciples to pray continually, and never to lose heart. It was a story about the perseverance of a powerless woman who, particularly in the culture of her day, faced what was a totally hopeless situation.

Perhaps persevering prayer is the only way not to lose heart. Pray continually, Pray the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray. Where did he learn it from? From his Father. Pray the prayer often enough, and we come eventually to see that what we are seeking is precisely what God seeks, and that God wants us to seek. Our hearts begin to beat in time.

Will not God see justice done to his chosen… even when he delays? Why the delay? Because God respects our freedom: my freedom, your freedom, the freedom of every Australian politician and citizen. It is not the kingdom if people are not free. But, if we keep close to God, if we keep praying continually, we shall come to share God’s intense longing for the kingdom.

At the same time, it will begin to dawn on us that, if others are to learn to be concerned, too, for justice, then it is up to us to help them – by sharing how we see things, by education, by showing by example, by attracting others by the attractiveness of our love. We could add also: by learning from others, by letting ourselves be challenged, by being open always to further insight and growth, by finding ourselves impressed and attracted by the good, the truthful, the beautiful, wherever, and by whomever, it is expressed.

We come to see that our praying, of itself, is not enough. Our praying leads us into doing. Contemplation and action are inseparably intertwined.

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 …

Homily 3 - 2013

I find Jesus’ pointed question at the end of today’s Gospel quite challenging .. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?’  Did Jesus really think it quite possible, even likely, that no one would have faith when the present era comes to an end – whenever that might be.  His question leads me to wonder: How would we measure up now?

I like to think of myself as a believer.  Perhaps it is a question of “believe what?”  At times I wonder if I really believe Jesus? Or have I redefined and domesticated him, and believe really in my construct of Jesus?  According to the Gospels, Jesus burnt up a lot of energy proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  He did not just call people to it.  He said the “Kingdom of God was close at hand”.  Is that vision still operative?

What was his vision, his sense, of God’s Kingdom?  Basically his was a vision of a transformed world – where people would have a clear sense of their dignity and of the equal dignity of everyone; recognising that dignity as sourced from God’s unconditional love for the world and unconditional readiness always to forgive.  In line with that vision, Jesus saw people – individuals, communities, nations – interacting in partnership, not competitiveness or rivalry; and so in justice, love and compassion.  It would be a world without violence, a world of genuine peace.

Do I believe such a world is likely? or possible?  That translates to: Do I believe the message that Jesus preached? And ultimately, that boils down to: Do I believe Jesus? – Or did he get it all wrong?  If I really believed him, and hoped for what he hoped, I ask myself if I would be much more focussed than I in fact am on working passionately to build the world he dreamed of.  My life is quite comfortable, thank you!  There might be five million traumatised refugees in the world – but I am not one of them, and do not lose sleep over them.  There might be millions of people in our world who still go to bed hungry each night; but doing something about that is just too hard, too complex.  Closer to home, there are the homeless I don’t see, the victims of abuse of various kinds that I read about, the still disadvantaged indigenous people.

The Gospel today asked the rhetorical question: “Will God not see justice done…?”.  There is no doubt about God’s commitment – but God’s Kingdom depends on everyone’s active cooperation with the grace of God.  There are some people, thank God, working with God for a just world – magnificent, generous people.  But the rest of us, the rest of us believers?  Have we “lost heart”?

 “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  Jesus saw the real danger of our losing heart.  So he told us: “Pray continually!”  To pray for what?  He told us that too: “Father, your Kingdom come. Your will be done on earth …”.  If we were to pray that continually, we could come eventually to mean it and to pray it with passion – perhaps with a similar passion to that of the widow in today’s quaint parable.

Today is World Mission Sunday.  It is a good day to get under way once more, committing ourselves to shaping the Kingdom; and helping, in the many ways open to us, all those others around the world doing their bit to make God’s Kingdom a reality; and learning, all the while, to make our prayer: “Father, Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth …”, until it becomes a fire burning within us.

Homily 4 - 2016

Let us forget about today’s story for a moment, and focus firstly on Jesus’ concern in telling it. Luke tells us right at the start that Jesus was anxious that the disciples “never lose heart”, and at the end of the story, shows Jesus worrying if, “when the Son of Man comes, … he [will] find any faith on earth”. Because of this fear, Jesus cautioned his disciples “to pray continually”. So the point of today’s story is to highlight and commend the persistence of the widow. The story is not about God – other than to declare how radically different God is from any “unjust judge”.

We also need to remember that, when Jesus spoke of praying, he had in mind the prayer he had taught his disciples not long beforehand, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done – on earth…”. Jesus knew that that prayer would create problems.

How would they make sense of the fact that the prayer he taught does not seem to work – any more for them then, as for us now? Our world seems to be becoming less and less like God’s kingdom and people less and less interested in seeking and doing God’s will. Take just one example. In the face of no less than 65 million refugees currently fleeing war, hunger and persecution, nations seem to have increasingly tightened their borders and people hardened their hearts. Pope Francis, in the face of the current refugee crisis, consistently laments that we, the comfortable and well-off, have forgotten how to weep. We have closed our eyes and turned our backs, wishing like children that the problem would magically dissolve in smoke.

Was Jesus kidding his disciples, and us, or was he simply wrong, when he said that “God [would] see justice done, and done speedily”? Do we just pray more, perhaps include the problem in the Prayers of the Faithful at Mass, and handball it back to God? What would we really achieve, even if we were to “pray continually”? It is very easy to think it all too hard, and, in our heart of hearts to fear that prayer usually doesn’t work. As Jesus warned, we “lose heart”, we even lose “faith”.

Let us look more closely at prayer. There is prayer that hopes to change God. And there is prayer that hopes to change ourselves.  If we think that prayer really changes God, we need to look again at what we think God is like. I would hope that we pray continually so that God might help to change us. But since we are fashioned in God’s own image, God has profound respect for human dignity and for human freedom. So any change that will happen in us will necessarily be a work of cooperation, God and us together.

Back again to prayer. There is prayer that rarely seems to change us, and there is prayer that is more likely to change us. Personally, I am not a great fan of saying prayers, particularly prayers composed by others, even if they were saints. If I use prayers composed by others, I do not so much say them as reflect on them, chew over them, give them time to become my own. My preference, however, is to sit in silence and to try to switch off my mind, to stop thinking. I say nothing, other than have a brief phrase running in the background to help me gently get back to stillness after I have wandered off following some distraction once again. I never quite succeed, but the experience of failure turns out to be surprisingly important.

A spin-off of this prayer is that practitioners begin to notice the presence of God everywhere, in most unexpected places and most unlikely people, even in those we do not like and whose actions we habitually condemn. God is at work in our world if only we can loosen up and see. Wherever there is love, even the most imperfect love, there is God. God's kingdom is coming!

Homily 5 - 2019 

We are only too familiar with the “unjust judge” type. Under pressure he changed what he had been doing, but there was no change of heart on his part. Either way, he acted purely out of self-interest. That is not justice. It reminds me of how politicians act only too often. They can change their policies or their tactics, not from considerations of justice but purely in response to opinion polls or public protests — no principles involved, no change of heart, no conversion. At least the widow got what she saw as her just rights. I have been involved in protests myself on occasion, and sometimes persistence worked [though more often it didn’t]. Even when it did work, the suspicion that there had been no real change of heart on the part of the decision-makers still left an unsatisfying taste in the mouth.

Fortunately, Jesus said that things are different with God and us. Personally, I do not believe that persistence on our part changes God’s heart [or even God’s timing] — even though today’s Gospel passage may sound that way. At first sight, the passage in fact is not all that clear: “Will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him … even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them, and done speedily.” Which is it? Does God “delay” or respond “speedily”?

I think that it is important to hear Jesus’ teaching through the lens of what he told us about God elsewhere: that God loves and can only love; that God loves unconditionally; that God’s love has no favourites; God is on everyone’s side.

Why then the seeming “delay” so often on God’s part? That there be true “justice” in our world requires people’s cooperation — anything less just looks like it. Justice is based in freedom. So when we pray that “justice be done to God’s chosen who cry to him”, that is not up to God alone. God is always at work. God’s participation is ‘already’, more than just “speedy”. But justice for everyone is a work in progress, and that progress is measured by humanity’s readiness to cooperate with God. God chooses to respect human freedom — hence the “delay”. Justice will be universal only with the coming of God’s Kingdom. It seems that the timing may be up to us.

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?” Jesus was talking not about intellectual faith, like the things we list in Creeds or in the Catechism, but faith in the sense of trust — trust in his message that “the Kingdom is close”, and that it is “Good News”. We all have heard that before, and sort of believe it, but not with passion. Our prayer, “thy kingdom come” can at times be only half-hearted. We hardly “cry to him day and night”. God’s apparent delay can be a summons to check whether we really yearn for it — and to change accordingly.

If anyone is changed by persistent prayer, it is not God but us. We can start off praying for something definite in our minds, but if we persist over time, even as nothing seems to happen, we may come at times to pray as Jesus did, “Father, not my will but yours be done”. If we look more deeply into ourselves and get to know ourselves better, we may see that what we prayed for was not what we really wanted, but only a possible means to a deeper need that we really wanted. The only thing that will truly satisfy is the experience of the Kingdom.. The more we pray and the better we come to know God, the deeper our trust becomes and the simpler our prayer becomes. Spontaneously we tend to leave the details to God — and relax. It is a great place to be.

Homily 6 -2022

Tonight’s parable presented us with a woman who, given a judge’s resistance to her pleas, could easily have lost hope. In her case, her determination to keep trying was strong enough to prevail over the judge’s initial refusal to listen to her. 
 
Luke seemed to have been uncertain how to use Jesus’ parable -- how to make it relevant to the questions that were being faced by the little Christian community to which he belonged, and for which he was compiling his Gospel. Drawing on the existing treasure of memories of the various teachings of Jesus circulating in the Church, he listed one or two of them, hoping they might speak to one of the big questions that was currently disturbing the community.
 
Almost invariably, the early Christians had presumed that Jesus would “speedily” come back to earth in glory to usher in the Last Day and the Final Judgment of God. His non-appearance began to undermine not just the patience of many of them but their faith as well: as Luke quoted Jesus saying before his death and resurrection, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?”. In response to their wondering, Luke quoted Jesus’ assurance to the effect, “Now will not God see justice done to his chosen … even when he delays to help them? … He will see justice done to them and done speedily”.
 
Through tonight’s Gospel passage, might Jesus have something to say to us? I gather that currently there are a number of parishioners concerned about the Church’s future. Even before Covid, numbers had begun gradually but inexorably dropping. The disturbances of the last couple of Covid years seem only to have aggravated the trend. What is going on?
 
Part of our problem is that many of us seem to have presumed that the Church that we were familiar with, especially as we remembered it a generation or two ago, might at least have continued as it had been and might even grow from strength to strength. It hasn’t! What is our current experience doing to our faith? Are we hoping against hope that God will “see justice done to his chosen … even when he delays to help [us]? … will see justice done speedily?”
 
On Monday this week we celebrated sixty years since the Second Vatican Council was launched. The aim of the Council was to look closely at the Church and to see what needed bringing up to date. The result was a wonderful and inspiring vision. Almost immediately, however the secular culture, especially Western culture, began to change radically. In the confusion, the vision of Vatican II was not grasped clearly, and the Council was hardly implemented. Thank God, currently the Church is embarking on re-discovering the treasures of the Council and seeking to find ways to apply the vision within the changing needs of today.
 
Perhaps our knowledge of the early Church may be sufficient to remind us that God’s interventions cannot be anticipated with any certainty, may even remind us that our God is a God of surprises. We do not need certainties that we can control – we need faith: real faith that brings a different kind of certitude.
 
Better than everything, I believe, is to learn to trust Jesus personally. And to do that, without feeling that we are simply “blowing in the wind’, we need to come to know him intimately. There is no magic wand. But prayer does work its effect, given time and persistence – which is why Jesus stressed the “need to pray continually and never lose heart”.
 
We must not mis-interpret the parable. The unjust judge is in no way a symbol of God. Continuing prayer will not change the mind or heart of God. Continuing prayer, however, will change us.