26th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014 

When a young couple front up to get married, there is no way they can anticipate what they are undertaking when they pledge, “I will love you and honour you all the days of my life”. Growing in love leads inevitably to ecstatic experiences of happiness but also at times to excruciating suffering.

It is that ambivalence of love that we celebrate sacramentally at every Eucharist, as  we bring our life experiences of past and present, and say “Yes” to what awaits us in the future. We trust that assertion before Communion,  “Blessed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb”, yet we know, too, that the menu of that supper is “My body given up for you”, and “the cup of my blood poured out for you … for forgiveness”. We are prepared to share both.

Despite the old song, love is more than “Doing what comes naturally”. It involves a constant dying to self – which wonderfully leads to an ever deeper and more joyful lived experience of life. We cannot have one without the other.

In today’s Second Reading, Paul was speaking about precisely that. He put it this way, In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus. The word translated ‘minds’ means more like “every fibre of your being”. He saw that expressed in practice this way, No competition among you, no conceit [no big-noting ourselves]”. He went on say, nobody thinking of their own interests first, but everybody thinking of other people’s interests. That is what married love is in practice - Putting your spouse’s, your children’s, needs before your own. And you do it – and sometimes it is at enormous cost.

Paul saw that sort of love happening not just in the family, but extending beyond that into the Christian community. Baptism, our initiation into the community, is a commitment to belong, along with other strugglers also trying to put on the mind of Christ. And is that not, “I will love you and honour you [all of you!] all the days of my life”?

Jesus saw that commitment to love extending out beyond the community of disciples to the broader community. For him Church is simply where we practise loving, and keep reminding ourselves that love is ultimately what it is all about. Loving is the only way to make the world an exciting place to live in; loving is the only way to joy to the full. He invited us in fact to love our enemies – as the only way ultimately to change our world, to save our world, and to enjoy it.

It is particularly important for us to take this to heart right now. It is hard to “Be alert!”, and at the same time not to over-react or generalise, not to slip into condemnation, not to scapegoat, not to hate. Unhappily so much of our public media, and the general social media, are pushing in the direction of hatred. And hatred, unfortunately, is contagious. In the present climate we need quite consciously, quite deliberately, to choose the way of love. It does not come naturally.

There is no do doubt that St Paul saw love as our only option if our life in Christ means anything to us, if it is important, if it is real, if we share the Spirit in common, if we have, deep within us, what he calls tenderness and sympathy. They change the way we see things – if we let them, if we want them to.

It is too easy, like the son in today’s parable, to say, Certainly, sir! I’ll go into the vineyard, and not go. Too easy to say, “Lord! Lord!”, but not to take seriously what he says to us, not to think better and believe in him. We prefer the ways of comfort and familiarity to the way of love. Yet they do not work in family. They do not work within our Christian community. They will not work, either, in our world.