25th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006

As a nation, we love the celebrities – particularly, it seems, when they die. Last week gave us a couple of cases to illustrate the point.  But as we seem to need our celebrities whom we can all love, we also seem to need our scapegoats whom we can hate. Make them larger than life, or lower than scum, and we don’t have to take a look at ourselves – very convenient!

A fascinating thing is that God loves us all - the celebrities, the scapegoats, and those of us who are neither. How come? Well, it says something about the infinite freedom of God, about love, and about the radical dignity - and fragility - of all of us.  God sees our virtue, and our sin, and God also sees the unique reflection that each of us is of God’s own infinite beauty and wonder. And what counts with God is neither our sin, nor our virtue, but our radical beauty.

In Jesus’ world, right at the bottom of the pecking order was the child (particularly the child who would later grow into a woman). Jesus’ attitude was to explode all cultural pecking orders, all focus on the irrelevant - all media ratings - and to encourage us to move towards the freedom, the vision and the choice for love that are God’s – to discover the God-given dignity of every person, including ourselves, and to live from there.

That was the basis of what Jesus was on about in today’s Gospel: his bringing a little child into the centre, and putting his arms around him or her, and telling his audience of disciples that, unless they were happy to accept that really they were without clout, (and didn’t need to have it anyway, and were wasting their time trying to get it), they would miss out on the Kingdom experience of freedom, wonder and “at-homeness” with all.

That was also the basis of his consistent reaching out to the marginalised, the despised, the sinners, the powerless, the leaderless and the oppressed. All the beneficiaries of his miracle cures came under one or other of those categories.  And a lot of people didn’t like him for that. They didn’t appreciate his stance, indeed, they saw him as a dangerous threat to society, to established values - to traditional Jewish values (as we might say today, to Aussie values).

Jesus’ stance is the basis of the Church’s stance for Social Justice. Concern for Social Justice springs straight from the heart of God.  This year on the annual Social Justice Sunday, the Church invites us to tune in again to what Pope John Paul said, twenty years ago when he was out here in Australia, about the place of Aboriginal culture and of Aboriginal people within the broader Australian scene.

To find solutions to problems can often present problems. But to seek actively and insistently for solutions is, for the Catholic, not negotiable. That active, insistent search is a factor of our own closeness to the heart of God. And the search needs to be made not from a sense of superiority or benevolence, but from a sense of equal dignity. That means that the search needs to be a shared search. It is not a question of doing things for Aboriginal people - as though they were not smart or motivated enough to do things for themselves - but of being prepared to do things with them.

Given their state of chronic dispossession, and their being so far behind the eight-ball, it not simply a case, either, of their being given equal treatment. It is not a level playing field. Government needs to make a preferential option in their favour.  It is quite saddening, when re-reading what the Pope had to say twenty years ago, that so little progress has been made. We were better at cheering the Pope than listening to him.