3rd Sunday Advent A - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2019

Ten days time and it is Christmas when we shall celebrate that God not only loves us and our world but became one of us and lived among us. Then, seven days after Christmas will be New Years Day, and a brand new year will stretch before us. Before we preview the year that lies ahead, it may be well for us to first review the year that is winding up. And what better context for both than today’s readings where Isaiah looked ahead and Jesus looked back; and each tried to put into words his sense of the wonderful mystery that is salvation. And salvation is mystery – not puzzle, but truth too rich to ever exhaust; and too personal, too immediate, too experiential, for generalisations.

Both resorted to metaphor. Isaiah was the more poetic of the two: “The lame shall leap like a deer, the tongues of the dumb sing for joy… They will come to Zion shouting for joy, everlasting joy on their faces..” Jesus was more prosaic: “The blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed… and the dead are raised to life and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor..”.

We tend to think of salvation as what we shall experience after we die. But Jesus wanted it to be our “now” experience as well. He taught us to pray to God, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Can we catch glimpses of salvation as we review the year that is fast coming to an end? It has been a tough year as we have been incessantly reminded of the reality of mainly past sexual abuse and our Church’s abysmal failures to face it and to deal with it appropriately. My sense is that those of us who continue to gather for Eucharist each week have grown in faith and, I hope, in our personal closeness to Jesus and trust in him. We would not be here if we had not.

Jesus’ deeds listed in today’s Gospel passage referred to real events, but those events were not salvation. They were “metaphors in three dimensions” of the deeper mystery. They refer to our experiences.

In relation to sexual abuse, we have become the ones no longer “blind”. In various ways we have begun to understand more why things could have happened as they did. We are less in denial and have become wiser.

We are the “lame” who “walk”. Ours were the “trembling knees” that Isaiah spoke of, the ones who have heard the gentle invitation from our God: “Courage! Do not be afraid!” We may not quite be “leaping like a deer”, as Isaiah imaged the saved – but we have chosen to walk courageously into the future. Sadly, there have been those who have walked away. Some have lost faith in Jesus; some in the Church; some are bewildered. Though they may have walked away from the Church, or even from Jesus, Jesus will never walk away from them.

"Lepers are cleansed.” Leprosy was a contagious disease, within community. One of the things we as Church have come to see is the power of the culture to distort our attitudes, what we notice, what we take for granted. Clericalism has corrupted us, and disempowered us. Clericalism is not a failure just of clerics – most good laity are also infected by it. But we are in the process of becoming aware of its power; and one of our hopes for the coming Plenary Council is that we find ways to expose it and to counter it. In the meantime we are increasingly recognizing our dignity, accepting responsibility and demanding accountability.

“The dead are raised to life”. Again, that’s us. In the midst of all that has happened, and still is, we are changing. We are becoming more alive – confident, wiser, aware, compassionate, contemplative.

Jesus was right when he said, “Happy is the one who does not lose faith in me” – even if quietly subdued and not yet “singing and shouting for joy”.