24th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2021

Over the years, whenever I have prayed over the final part of today’s Gospel passage from St Mark, or whenever I have preached about it, I have thought about it in terms of its advice to us as individuals. Over the last few days, I have been wondering how it might also be pertinent to us as the collective community we form. In that case, we would need to change the wording somewhat — but I can imagine Jesus giving the same message to us as Church: “If you want to be my Church, renounce control of your image and reputation; take up your cross and follow me. If you think primarily of yourself and your image, you will lose them. Rather, forget about image; forget about how things used to be. Take my example and message seriously, and follow them for my sake, enlightened by my Gospel message, and you will become what I have always hoped you would be.”

We have been getting smaller, losing numbers, irrelevant at best to most of society, “on the nose” at worst, or somewhere between. People have changed, and are still changing. We approach authority differently now, whether in families or in society as a whole. Public protests are common. People do not do things simply because commanded, or because they always have. In many ways we are more captive to the social media.

How might we as Church come to terms with all that? I remember years back when I was a young priest stationed in Ballarat. I used to drive out to Creswick each Friday afternoon to hear the Confessions of the nuns who worked out there in the Catholic Primary School. Around this time of the year, I used to marvel at the clumps of daffodils growing beside the road, just over the fence but otherwise in the middle of nowhere. They dated from the gold-mining years, planted in the gardens of miners’ cottages no longer in existence. For years no one would have taken the least care of them — but faithfully, each springtime, they would burst into flower, burst back into life. The memory of them speaks to me still — wonderful examples of dying and rising: Christ's Church is irrepressible.

The present experience of being Church perhaps can free us up — free us to concentrate on reaching out enthusiastically, and helping our world: not preaching or teaching from some unreal moral high-ground, instead simply reaching out in love, patchily perhaps and even not too successfully, but reaching out to share with whoever might be interested our personal experience of being disciples of Jesus.

Questions of whether we are better than others or worse are irrelevant. More pertinent might be whether we are more peaceful, more fulfilled, whether we see life as meaningful and worth living, even whether deep down we are more joy-filled.

There is no need as Church for us to be defensive. People can think of us as they like. That is up to them. To be defensive is to view ourselves as too important. God is the source of any life-giving influence we have. Jesus, I think, calls us into Church, so that we can deliberately, freely, work together to support each other in our weakness without losing heart. He invites us to celebrate life sacramentally, to celebrate jn symbol our vision of God’s unconditional love in Eucharist, and in a rediscovered Reconciliation — where he assures us he is also present, with us, because he simply wants to be, because he likes us.

What does it matter if we become bigger, smaller, or stay the same? But Jesus did warn us that inner peace, meaning and joy may come with suffering. Wonderfully, they can co-exist. Even those who treat us as enemies can’t stop us treating them with respect, care and, perhaps, courage.