3rd Sunday Year A - Homily 3

 Homily 3 – 2011 

Over the past few years, we have had our share of natural disasters: the prolonged drought, with its extreme temperatures and the destructive fires of Black Saturday, two years ago; the recent Queensland floods, and our own more local, less dramatic, floods and landslides here in Victoria.  Is God up to something? punishing, perhaps, our heedless, sinful world?

Taking his cue from Isaiah (as we heard in the First Reading), Matthew, in today’s Gospel, introduced Jesus’ public ministry in this way: The people that lived in darkness has seen a great light.  On those who dwell in the land and shadow of death a light has dawned.  As we look back over the two thousand years since Jesus came among us, we might ask: In what sense has he been the great light, the light dawning in the land and shadow of death? Does he shed any light on what’s going on currently in our world?

Over the next few weeks, the Gospel Readings will dip into Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Towards the end of that Sermon, Jesus said something relevant to our experience of droughts and floods.  On droughts: Speaking of the Father in heaven, he said: he causes his sun to shine on bad as well as good.  And on floods: he causes his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike.

Natural phenomena, according to Jesus, seem to be neither divine punishments nor divine rewards.  Perhaps Jesus is a bit like that Father:  going around curing all kinds of diseases and sickness – presumably, of sinners and non-sinners alike.  For him, the healings were secondary: they were signs illustrating other more wonderful possibilities of the Kingdom.

Remember his encounter with the paralytic, let down through a roof by four friends? Son, your sins are forgiven!  Healing the man’s paralysis seemed almost incidental –  a second-thought – to illustrate something more wonderful: that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins.  Then there were the ten lepers – all cured, but only one, the one who saw the point of it all and got carried away praising God, heard the assurance: Your faith has saved you.  Go in peace.

I am not sure whether God gets involved in the practical things that happen to us – pulling strings, as it were, or unpredictably granting exemptions to the normal flow of cause and effect.  I believe that God wants our every life experience to be signs – reminders of God’s presence, certainly, but particularly, invitations to take hold of the empowering help that God constantly offers us, to grow through whatever happens and to become, ever more fully, truly human.  God wants our world of beautiful things and puzzling events to be sacramental: the world is charged with the grandeur of God.

I think that the Good News of the Kingdom is this: God is there in life, whatever is happening; and the God who is present there in life is the God of life, life that grows more and more beautiful, more and more intense, as we learn to take hold of the help God offers and grow in love and thus become authentically human.

With Jesus, light has dawned. But for us to discover that, we need to heed the invitation: Repent!  Stand on our heads! See things differently! Change! Learn to love – to live respectfully, to live simply, to live compassionately!

Remember the last of the Beatitudes, the puzzling one.  Blessed are you when your world is falling apart, [or, in Jesus’ words], when people criticize you, persecute you, libel you?  Rejoice and be glad, he said.  What possibility! What incredible freedom!

Is that what he was on about when he said: Follow me!  “Let’s become friends.  Get to know me.  Get to know yourself.  Notice yourself changing!”