3rd Sunday Advent A

See commentary on Mathew 11:2-11 in Matthew 11:1-24.


Homily 1 - 2004

It sounds as though the setting of Isaiah’s vision was the situation of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, perhaps precisely around the time that the kingdom of their captors was about to crumble before the advancing armies of Persia. Hope breaks forth, hope for restoration, indeed for a triumphant return home to a soon-to-be-rebuilt Jerusalem. Isaiah’s message is a wonderful insight into the heart of God, a wonderful message of comfort and encouragement.

Yet, as I hear it, there is a discordant note. Isaiah still has more to learn about the heart of God. He is still caught in the bind that the God who is good to us must be devastating to our enemies: God is coming, vengeance is coming, the retribution of God; he is coming to save you. Saving you inevitably means punishing them. In fact, Isaiah will, with time, move beyond this, to a deeper insight into the heart of God, until he eventually sees the foreign nations, Israel’s enemies, recipients, too, of the goodness of God.

I wonder where John the Baptist was in his journey into the heart of God....Last week’s Gospel had John announcing: The Kingdom of God is close at hand.. – Allow yourselves to be radically changed and come on board: Repent. Yet John’s sense of God, the life-giving God, like Isaiah’s, still finds it hard to cope with the reality of human resistance: The axe is laid to the root of the trees so that any tree which fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown on the fire.  His sense of the one who will follow him, Jesus, is of one who will baptise you with fire... whose winnowing fan is in his hand .. and who will burn the chaff in a fire that will never go out.

It seems so natural to categorise people: the productive and the unproductive, the repentant and the chaff, us and them.  It seems so natural to categorise God likewise: rewarding us, rewarding the good, and destroying them, our enemies, burning up the chaff.

Imprisoned by Herod down by the Dead Sea, John faces his demons, He seems to experience a crisis of faith. He sends some disciples to Jesus: you’re not meeting the criteria, you’re not wielding the axe, burning up the chaff. Are you the one who is to come or do we wait for another?

And Jesus repeats to John his own self-definition (to Isaiah, too, for that matter), quoting the very words of Isaiah: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor. There is no violence in the stance of Jesus, simply Good News. The world struggles to see sense in this response of Jesus who refused to control, mitigate, lessen, and keep evil in check by even the least degree of violence - (that indeed does sometimes seems to result in establishing an apparent, even if tenuous, “law and order” for a time: though it’s struggling in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Palestine.)

He named evil, he unmasked it fearlessly, he actively resisted it, he shaped an alternative community, yet his response to violence was not to enlist a greater show of violence but to absorb the world’s violence in his own flesh, and reveal it for what it always and inescapably, is: violence.

It is a difficult path to follow, perhaps impossible without the empowering Spirit of God, but Blessed, indeed, as he said, are those who do not lose faith in me. I find it so hard, in my own defence of what I believe to be true, not to react violently towards those whom I disagree with. My temptation is not to physical violence, but gets expressed in dislike, ridicule, a dismissive attitude, behind the back criticism – effectively for my own purposes making those I dislike the enemy, non-persons.  It seems so instinctive: to meet rejection with rejection, criticism with criticism. In the process my own inner peace is undermined, the calls to grow and to mature are ignored, negativity is doubled, and the Kingdom project gets stalled.


Homily 2 - 2007

If you were God, what might you do? I remember years ago giving a retreat to a group of Year 12 students, and asking them the same question. Their answers were what you might expect from Year 12 students from a Catholic school: put a stop to wars; eliminate poverty and hunger; heal those suffering from disease and sickness. I asked them then, “Why doesn’t God do that? Does God not love this world as much as you do?”

In today’s First Reading Isaiah claims to proclaim God’s intentions for his people, Israel: The eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unsealed, the lame shall leap like the deer and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy … Joy and gladness shall go with them and sorrow and lament be ended.  That was two and a half thousand years ago – If anything, things have got worse.

John the Baptist had looked forward to one coming after him, one stronger than he. Jesus came – but John’s dreams did not eventuate. Mind you, as Matthew tells his story, Jesus could rightly claim: the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor. But Jesus did not forever wipe out blindness, deafness, dumbness, leprosy or paralysis.

In that brief section of his letter that we read today, St James tells his readers to be patient until the Lord’s coming. But why does the Lord not come now? Why do we have to be patient? Why wait? What is holding the Lord up?

Interestingly, as Matthew writes his Gospel, Jesus has come. He came as the suffering, persecuted Son of Man, and, indeed, with power and great glory, at his crucifixion. He came as Judge of the world, the one whose integrity graphically illustrated what was good and what was evil. After his resurrection, he came in a different way. As Matthew said, right at the end of his Gospel: Jesus came and spoke to them. He said, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me… And … know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time. Indeed, the risen Jesus is with us now: I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.

If Jesus, to whom all authority in heaven and earth has already been given, is with us, why doesn’t he make a difference? why doesn’t he do something? Perhaps, the answer might be: In the things that matter, he can’t do anything unless we cooperate – freely. People will experience peace, meaning, fulfilment, only as they freely choose to love. (And does anything short of that really matter?) We in the Western world, with all our wealth, power and scientific knowledge only know peace and happiness to the extent that we love.

For God immediately to eliminate war, disease, relationship breakdowns, poverty and hunger, God would have to override our freedom and make robots of us. But, if God were to override our freedom, we would be unable to love, to grow wise, and to mature. Without freedom, we would be unable to experience deep, human happiness.

Yet, God is not powerless. God is not doing nothing. Jesus, who has returned to be with us always until the end of time, call us to love, inspires us, shows us what love is and what we are capable of being and empowers us precisely to be just that. But we have to learn to notice.

Advent is a good time for us to step back, to stop, to be counter-cultural (if we are determined enough) and to take hold once more of the commitment that God has made to our happiness. Was Isaiah speaking symbolically, perhaps, of our hearts unfolding in love, when he wrote: Let the wilderness and the dry-lands exult, let the wasteland rejoice and bloom, let it bring forth flowers like the jonquil, let it rejoice and sing for joy.


Homily 3 - 2010

John the Baptist had looked forward to the imminent coming of another more powerful than he, who would baptise the world with the Holy Spirit – the power of God at work in the world. Indeed, the more powerful one would baptise the world with the Holy Spirit and with fire. John said of the one coming after him that he would cut down and throw on the fire every tree that does not produce good fruit – and, to change the metaphor, that he would burn the chaff in a fire that would never go out. The language and the imagery were commonplace at the time – what scholars refer to as apocalyptic imagery. Yet, perhaps they tend to express, even if graphically, a fairly general human trait: They deserved it! They got what they asked for! Fair enough! Good riddance! And, to misapply a comment of Jesus: “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword!”

When John had baptised Jesus, he had hoped that Jesus was that more powerful one, the one who would baptise the world with the power of God. But Jesus did not turn out to fit the job description. And John began to wonder, to worry: Are you the one who is to come or have we to wait for another?

Perhaps our question in our day might be: Is the way of Jesus the best that God can manage? Is it the only way to turn the world around? to make life worth living? to save the world? to save us from ourselves? Baptise the world with the Holy Spirit and with fire … What is your sense of God’s Holy Spirit? of God’s power abroad in the world? And what is this fire? Interestingly, Jesus said elsewhere of himself: I have come to cast fire on the earth.

Are you the one who is to come or have we to wait for another? Jesus’ response to John’s question is pretty central to our whole idea of God – of God at work: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor. Interestingly, Jesus never prefaced any of his healings with the question: Do they deserve it? Is it their own fault?

The point of Jesus’ healings was mainly symbolic – symbolic of the greater possibilities of the Kingdom of God – not to phase out the need for hospitals or for doctors or nurses or dentists or whatever. The healings revealed the creative power of God – and the creative power of God was simply the expression of the heart/the essence of God. Truly creative power is love – there is no other.

Jesus baptises, he saturates, the world with the Holy Spirit of God, with the creative power of God, with the creative love of God. The fire that Jesus casts on the earth, and that he deeply yearns to burst into flame, is the fire of love.

The world will experience salvation when the world allows itself to be saturated with love. That was Jesus’ answer to John the Baptist’s question. And his promise to us is clear: Happy are those who do not lose faith in me (and he might have added: who do not lose faith in my way of undeserved love.)

Every Eucharist gives us another opportunity to say a deliberate Yes to Jesus’ way of loving and to affirm our readiness to face the inevitable price of loving. We are slow learners; but we struggle on.


Homily 4 - 2013

I wonder if Jesus’ response to John the Baptist’s question satisfied him? Would it have satisfied you? Why did Jesus choose his healing activity in responding to John? Is the Kingdom of God about physical health and well-being? Is that how Jesus saw it? Thinking about today’s Gospel got me thinking about Jesus’ final line from Isaiah, the good news is proclaimed to the poor, in the light of his earlier Sermon on the Mount, specifically, about the Beatitudes. Blessed are you who are poor; blessed are you who are hungry now; blessed are you who are mourning – [as Luke’s Gospel quotes them.] Is Jesus saying it a good thing to stay that way [or to become like that] – poor, hungry, in mourning? Obviously not.

The coming of God’s Kingdom will result in today’s poor, hungry and mourning being no longer so tomorrow. They, too, are blessed – that is, they will no longer be the marginalised, the discounted, the no-bodies that they were. They are as loved by God as everyone else is. They will possess the land, they will be filled, they will laugh… again. Their blessedness, their change in status, will be the result of the coming of the Kingdom, and, in that sense, a fairly noticeable proof of the presence of the Kingdom and one practical illustration of it. And, statistically at least, with economic and social development comes a lessening of disease and sickness.

Yet, people can be strikingly healthy, citizens of wealthy nations, enjoying high standards of living, yet not particularly fulfilled. So what is the essence of the Kingdom? I think that the middle two beatitudes touch into that: Blessed are the merciful; blessed are the peace-makers [and peace happens to the extent that justice operates]. So mercy and justice constitute the Kingdom – and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount teases that out with its emphasis on forgiveness, unconditional love, non-retaliation, etc.. Look at the effect on the mood of the world of men like Pope Francis and Nelson Mandela. True blessedness, God’s vision of human fulfilment, is a factor of people’s growth as individuals and as society in mercy and justice.

This brings us back to Jesus’ answer to John the Baptist’s question. Jesus’ illustration that he was the one to come, the one to usher in the Kingdom, was not precisely his healing activity as such but his mercy and concern for justice – expressed through his healing ministry. That did not exhaust his contribution to the Kingdom – but it admirably illustrated it.

Interestingly, by living his life guided by, founded on and expressed in mercy and peace-making, Jesus revealed the heart of God – whose rain falls on the just and the unjust, and whose sun shines on the honest and dishonest alike. Jesus’ God is not a God for whom justice consists in appropriate reward and punishment, but for whom justice is the necessary application of mercy and compassion to all divine and human interactions. John the Baptist seems to have assumed that God was concerned with reward and punishment. He spoke of the one to come after him as the one whose winnowing fan is in his hand … and who would gather the wheat into the barn and would burn the chaff in unquenchable fire. Perhaps he was disconcerted by Jesus whose compassion led him to heal indiscriminately worthy and unworthy, with no questions asked. Was John permanently scandalised by Jesus? Or did Jesus’ gentle answer lead to insight and enlightenment?

We look forward to celebrating the birth of Jesus because it marks a decisive moment in actualising God’s vision for redeemed humanity. The divine entered the human in the incredible vulnerability of a defenceless infant. The adult way of mercy and compassion would require a similar vulnerability; and, not surprisingly, would culminate in the crucifixion of the defenceless victim of Calvary. [Nelson Mandela – twenty-seven years in confinement.] We cooperate in the consolidation of God’s Kingdom to the extent that we dedicate our lives to truth, reconciliation and justice, in full awareness of the vulnerability that they entail.


Homily 5 - 2016

John the Baptist’s situation in prison reminds me of that of the Asylum Seekers in detention in Nauru – innocent of any crime but facing an uncertain and dangerous future. Would Herod kill him? Did he have any chance of release? Or would he simply be let rot in prison indefinitely? Like so many in Nauru, John lapsed into depression. In that state he started even to wonder if he had been mistaken in his identifying Jesus as the one who would usher in the reign of God. “Are you the one to come, or have we got to wait for another?” John had, after all, looked forward to a “stronger one”, a vigourous reformer whose “axe” was already “laid to the roots of the tree”, who would “clear his threshing floor” of chaff and burn it – another culture warrior, somewhat like himself.

In some respects, John’s question was the question we all would do well to confront. “How do we recognize God? and how do we identify the signs of the presence of God’s reign”. Jesus’ answer was clear. He immediately proceeded to quote from Isaiah, listing what both Isaiah and he saw as signs of the presence of God’s reign: “the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised to life and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor”. It was not that John was unaware of these things happening. Matthew had mentioned explicitly “John in his prison had heard what Christ was doing.” John’s problem was that he did not recognise those things as signs of the presence of God or of God’s reign.

Matthew had summarized John’s message as “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is close at hand”. Perhaps we could say that John’s repentance [or personal change] had not gone far enough. He had understood repentance/development as the strengthening of the will, as bringing our lives into order by having the will in control of our spontaneous desires and fears, by having a clear knowledge of right and wrong, true and untrue – and thereby clearly establishing our personal boundaries. But the change/transformation that Jesus called for presupposed that and enabled it to go much deeper than that. He called for a different way of seeing – of seeing both life and God. He called for a vision of life that engages with reality through the eyes of love, a vision that can cope with paradox and even apparent contradiction, that is open to nuance, not so much forcing life into clear-cut categories but attuned to ‘more or less’, ‘both/and’ at the same time. Are you, for example, just or wicked, or a mixture of both? a thoroughly and consistently loving person, or one who loves somewhat selectively and not all of the time? Do you see God as just or merciful? A strict God of retributive justice who punishes evil, or a merciful God of restorative justice who heals our weaknesses and redeems us from our evil?

To move from the first level of development to the second level rarely happens before we hit the age of thirty or forty. Even then, it usually requires our falling in love, falling out of love, and finally committing to real love. Often it is occasioned by our being forced to face our inevitable limitations, usually through failure or through suffering. It can also be developed through the regular practice of prayerful contemplation or meditation. Perhaps it is best acquired by the combination of all three.

As it happens, our experience of life changes radically. Gradually we learn to detect the presence of God and the reign of God everywhere, in the most unlikely of places. Mary could see the loving God present even at the foot of the cross as she watched her son dying, perhaps joining with him as he said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” As we learn to open our eyes, we begin to see mercy, goodness, serenity in the most unlikely people, in the most unlikely places.


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”.


Homily 7 - 2022

Today’s First Reading from the collection of prophecies in the Book of Isaiah was probably written about five -hundred-and-fifty years before the birth of Christ. Despite the wonderful faith-insights of Isaiah and his capacity to express his thoughts in beautiful poetic imagery, the thoughtful Jewish world to which he belonged still had needed more time to mature. It would need more reflecting before it could open itself to the message of Jesus and his revelation of the unconditional love proper to the heart of God his Father.

Today's passage outlining Isaiah’s anticipation of God’s imminent liberation of the Chosen People from their humiliating seventy-year-long captivity in Babylon were wonderful. As he put it:

“… the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
the ears of the deaf unsealed,
then the lame shall leap like a deer
and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy…
They will come to Zion shouting for joy,
everlasting joy on their faces..
sorrow and lament will be ended.”

Yet, he still saw no inconsistency in prefacing that comment with:

“Look, your God is coming,
vengeance is coming,
the retribution of God;
he is coming to save you”.

Six centuries later, John the Baptist would say in relation to the coming mission of Jesus:

“Even now, the axe is laid to the roots of the trees, so that any tree which fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown on the fire… The one who follows me is more powerful than I am … His winnowing fan is in his hand; he will clear his threshing-floor and gather his wheat into the barn; but the chaff he will burn in a fire that will never go out”.

Not surprisingly, as we heard in today’s Gospel, John, languishing in Herod’s prison, disappointed and desperate, perhaps even feeling let down by Jesus, felt the need to challenge him. He sent some disciples to ask him: “Are you the one who is to come? or have we to wait for someone else?”

Jesus’ reply loosely quoted the prophecy made centuries earlier by Isaiah:

“Go back and tell John what you hear and see; the blind see again, and the lame walk, lepers are raised to life, and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor.”  It is significant to note what Jesus omitted from Isaiah’s prophecy — no word about “vengeance is coming, the retribution of God”.

Equally significant was Jesus’ pointed comment that he wanted the messengers to convey to John: “… happy is the man who does not lose faith in me”.

So there might be no misunderstanding, Jesus made two final comments about John to his listeners: “… of all the children born of women, a greater than John the Baptist has never been seen”. In Jesus’ mind, John's role to witness personally to him made John more significant than Abraham, than Moses, than Isaiah --  than whoever who had so far lived. And yet, said Jesus, “… the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is”.

What is so special about us? Jesus did not say. Might it be that we have the wonderful benefit of having Jesus reveal to us his intimate knowledge of the heart of his Father... to cherish the memory of his  death on the cross and then his resurrection, and their message of totally gratuitous forgiveness and love.

There is no vengeance, no retribution in the heart of Jesus, nor in the heart of God. Our challenge now is to mature enough to allow our experiences of deep hurt and disappointment; or of truly, deeply personal love; or the patient, continued experience of contemplation to stretch our hearts and to discover and to enjoy our capacity to love unconditionally, to love those who do not deserve it; and, at the same time, quietly to relax into the safe, unquestioning always joyful arms of God.

It we're not so sure, perhaps Christmas will convince us.