33rd Sunday Year C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2019

By the time that Luke put together his Gospel, fifty or sixty years after Jesus, the city of Jerusalem had already been destroyed, and with it its magnificent temple, the focal point of Jewish identity and public worship. For Luke’s Jewish contemporaries, the loss of the temple had occasioned profound change. Priesthood became irrelevant and disappeared, and religious leadership was taken over by laypeople – particularly by a rejuvenated Pharisee movement. Jews in the Holy Land were decimated by the conquering Roman armies; and the Jewish settlements scattered around the Roman Empire were left to respond as best they could to the momentous challenge simply to survive, to keep the faith from disappearing and to help the Jewish faithful to maintain their identity and their integrity. Their method was to keep themselves strictly separate, with clear boundaries, and tightly knit, prioritising conformity and crushing internal differences.

By this time, the original Christian believers had had time to adjust to changing times. Those out in the Roman Empire had already been expelled from the numerous Jewish synagogues in the major population centres, and together with the increasing number of non-Jewish converts to the new religion, had begun to establish their own identity and to shape themselves and their groupings for the long haul into an unknown future. Jesus had left them with a beautiful vision and a clear way of life – but had said very little about a future structure.

For his followers, structure was to be secondary to mission – as it had been in his own life. Their focus was to saturate their world with the Good News of God’s Kingdom. As he had done, they too were to stress the mercy of God and God’s closeness, and to replace the unredeemed world’s ways of hostility, control, competitiveness and violence with his way of care, love and forgiveness.

Yet Jesus had also recognized that life lived according to his priorities would bring his followers into conflict with others like the Pharisees, as well as with the Roman authorities concerned with political unity through religious uniformity. He foresaw that his personal experience of problems with authority, and of humiliation, rejection and persecution, would likely be a common and expected experience for his followers too.

We believers in the Western world are currently experiencing humiliation and rejection, due in our case not to our faithfulness to Jesus but to our inertia, and sadly, even to our betrayal of his way. We feel tension arising not just from those outside our ranks but also between each other within the ranks.

Personally I wonder if our current turmoil is calling us to tune in closely once more to Jesus, to build up again a genuine one-to-one, loving, and lively relationship with him, and personally to rediscover his concern, not so much for us as Church, but for God’s Kingdom in the world. The Church is necessary, certainly, but only to the extent that it supports us in our mission to the world – so much else that we argue about can be merely exhausting distraction.

We are unclear what to do. Our responses to date to the Plenary Council preparations have shown that we in the Australian Church want a Church that is open to conversion, renewal and reform. The organisers suggest that we be more precise, and invite us to discern together as parish just where the Spirit may be leading us. We are invited this weekend to contribute our local ideas and wisdom, arising from our personal experience and prayer. Perhaps we can be encouraged by what Jesus reassuringly reminded us in tonight’s Gospel passage, “I myself shall give you an eloquence and a wisdom”; and, as we engage with the task, be heartened by his promise, “Your endurance will win you your lives”.

Now is not the first time that the Church has survived a perplexing challenge.