33rd Sunday Year C

See Commentary on Luke 21:5-19 in Luke 21:1-24


Homily 1 - 2010

In today’s Responsorial Psalm, the psalmist rejoiced because The Lord comes, comes to rule the earth. He will rule the world with justice. God – the just judge.

In the First Reading, the Hebrew prophet Malachi expressed his sense of the justice of God: The day is coming now, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and the evil-doers will be like stubble. The day that is coming is going to burn them up, says the Lord of hosts … But for those who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will shine out with healing in its rays.

According to Malachi, God’s justice means punishment for evil-doers, and reward for those who fear God’s name. Israel was obviously still on its long journey across the centuries into the heart of God.Gradually, its sense of God was becoming less and less distorted, closer and closer to the truth.But the sense of God as punisher of the evil and rewarder of the good was still an adolescent sense of God.

Jesus gave us a quite different insight into God and God’s justice. God loves the world, this world of good and bad people, this world of sinners. It was God’s love for us all, sinners and saints, that was the reason why God sent his Son. God’s justice is not about condemnation or punishment.

As the Gospel of John puts it: God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. The thrust of God’s justice is not to punish, but to call to conversion, and to enable that conversion, precisely by loving us. Nor is the thrust of God’s justice to reward, either. Reward is about earning. That’s too miserable a sense of God! God’s love is not earned. It cannot be earned. It doesn’t need to be earned –because God loves us gratuitously, unconditionally, infinitely – precisely, as St Paul wrote, while we were still sinners.

We reward ourselves with heaven; we punish ourselves with hell. Heaven and hell are the lived experience of our choices to allow ourselves to be drawn into the mystery of love or to close ourselves off from the mystery of love of God, of others, and of our true selves – undistracted, forever.

There is suffering in the world; but it is not God’s doing. Much of it is caused directly or indirectly by us. Today’s Gospel makes it clear: as long as people choose not to listen to Jesus and to reject Jesus’ way of life, there will be wars and revolutions – nation will fight against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And at the more personal level, men will seize you and persecute you … some of you will be put to death. There’s suffering alright – but so much is our doing.

Certainly, there are also earthquakes and plagues and famines that are not our doing – but they are not God’s punishment, either (even if we find it impossible to sort out everything about the mystery of suffering in the world).

Jesus turned common sense upside down. His response to the world’s violence, and to evil oppressors, was to allow himself to be their victim – not, as Malachi imagined, to burn them up … leaving them neither root nor stalk. The world is the way it is because people choose to counter violence with violence, and so often, in their self-righteous crusade against evil, even to claim that God is “on their side” (as though God is not on everyone’s side).Jesus chose the way of the victim, and challenged his followers to do the same: your endurance will win you your lives. 

The last of the Beatitudes always haunts me: Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right, and, as if that is not enough, Jesus added: Rejoice and be glad – for your reward will be great in heaven – (not God rewarding, but our rewarding of ourselves for choosing to accept and to be caught up in God’s unearnable and infinite energy of love).


Homily 2 - 2016

Donald Trump surprised the pundits. Something interesting seems to be happening within the Western democracies in reaction against business as usual. There was Brexit in the United Kingdom, the rise in popularity of the more nationalistic parties in Europe. Our own election saw the return to the political scene of Pauline Hanson. 

Where has the Church been in all this? Certainly, bishops have spoken and written about various issues and the values supporting them. Perhaps even, some of bishops have used whatever power they may have had to bring about change or confirm the status quo, especially on issues in any way connected with sexual matters. I wonder if, in the process, they may have neglected the more difficult task of trying to bring about personal conversion, enlightenment and growth. 

As I reflect on the Gospel, it appears to me that Jesus did not direct his energies to imposing changes through political pressure, even though he was distraught at the depth of oppression and poverty suffered by the majority of the people, and anxious to relieve it. Jesus’ way was the way of radical personal conversion. It was the way of solidarity and cooperation, the way that insisted on both love and on truth as the goals of society and the means to achieve those goals. His way was highly unpopular with both Zealots and Sadducees, and not very successful with the ordinary people. But Jesus stuck to his vision, and would not change, despite apparent failure and even death.  

Today’s Gospel is up front about the impact of Jesus’ way of Love, “You will be betrayed … and some of you will be put to death. You will be hated by all on account of my name”. Earlier in the narrative, he had supposed a similar response, when teaching how to respond to hostility, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who treat you badly…”.   

We do not risk the danger of being killed for our faith. But we do face groups within our culture hostile to many of the values of Jesus’ vision for the Kingdom of God. Our mission is to call them to the values of the Kingdom for their own good and that of the whole community. The catch is, when people oppose us, we tend in turn to react in a hostile manner towards them. We would like, if we had the power, to compel conformity to what we regard as human and moral values. We lament when governments legislate against what we see as important moral issues.

My sense is that that would not have been Jesus’ way. Jesus called for radical personal conversion, not imposed conformity, and saw the Church’s mission as leading the world to conversion. That has proved to be a truly difficult task. We call to conversion by invitation, by attraction, by the way of imitation. Like Paul, our approach needs to be, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ”- daunting as that may be. We show the truth by living it, not simply proclaiming it. Pope Francis is a good role model. We need to show the world the beauty and sense of our values if we want people to adopt them. And people will be open to see to the extent that we respect them and take them seriously, however much we disagree with them. And while this does not rule out a degree of assertiveness, it does rule out every form of violence or coercion.

I think that that is one reason why Jesus insisted that we love our enemies and those who hate us, why he insisted that we pray for them. We pray for them to keep our own approach in perspective. We pray so that we do not approach them with hostility, judgmentally. We pray to ensure that our approach is compassionate and genuinely caring and respectful. In all this, in order to persevere, it helps to have the support of like-minded believers.


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.


 

Homily C - 33 

Last Tuesday evening we had a total eclipse of the moon. I did not see it myself, though I looked for it. I must have been in the wrong place or looking for it at the wrong time — or it might have been concealed by the cloud-bank along the horizon to the East.

In Jesus’ time, events such as eclipses tended to terrify ordinary people who had no scientific knowledge of astronomy. Many of them believed the sun, the moon and the stars to be controlled by supernatural powers, by good or bad angels or the like. They had little or no knowledge of the causes of plagues or of famines or of earthquakes, and most people believed them too to be controlled by malign or arbitrary supernatural powers.

Wars, too, were quite beyond their control, and were decided by kings and emperors, over whom they had little or no influence. Ordinary citizens certainly did not elect them. In Jesus’ day, the Roman Emperor was even regarded by some as a god.

Not unexpectedly, their ignorance often led them to read unusual events, especially destructive ones, as supernatural signs of the displeasure of the angels or demons or of gods or of God. They were inclined to read them as warnings — but weren’t sure of what.

Most of the very early Christians expected Jesus to return soon to the world in his role as the Son of Man. By the time that the Gospels were written, Jesus had still not shown up. People were restless. So the Gospel writers made a point of recording the few comments Jesus had made before his death in relation to his Second Coming. Essentially those comments were to the effect that there will be no signs of his return. Life would go on as usual, with all the usual things happening as they always did — plagues, famines, earthquakes, revolutions and wars.

Disciples’ task was to do what was in their power to make the world, and particularly human society, more amenable; and to accept responsibility for what they could do to change the world for the good. Jesus’ vision, his moral message, for what he called the Kingdom was essentially for life this side of the grave. The afterlife could be left in the hands of God whom he identified as Father, a radically merciful Father.

Jesus’ message for life meanwhile in the Kingdom was that we learn to love one another — everyone. That message in its own way was quite revolutionary. It still is. So revolutionary that during the twenty centuries since the time of Jesus, most Christians seem not to have taken much notice of it. But Jesus seriously meant it, and insisted on it. He knew that it would rattle people, particularly those who pride themselves on their power and sense of superiority and entitlement. He freely accepted the virtual inevitability of his insistence being rejected or ignored. They killed him, and did so with quite fierce cruelty. He specifically warned his disciples to be ready to accept a similar response to their faithfulness to him — as we heard today, “You will be betrayed, even by parents and brothers, relations and friends; and some of you will be put to death.”

Is it worth it then? We are so used to meeting disagreement with hostility, even violence. It seems the only sensible, even responsible approach. Might our attitudes slowly change if we seriously searched for, learnt and put into practice peaceable and effective alternatives to resolve differences respectfully in the myriad ordinary interactions of life? There are alternatives to “win/lose”.

Pope Francis is doing his best to encourage us in the Church to do just that. He calls it synodality; and it begins with listening to the other, stating our own mind clearly and non-aggressively, and searching for what we can both agree to. The sting is that we prioritise “we” over “me”. The ideal context in which to practise may be in the family.