1st Sunday Advent C

See Commentary on (Luke 21:25-28, 34-36) in Luke 21:1-24 & Luke 21:25-38

Homily 1 - 2006 

Carbon dioxide is changing the balance of the upper atmosphere, leading to climate change and global warming.  We know that our Western life style contributes to it all, but struggle to face the need to change and pay the price,

Terrorism and counter-terrorism intensify ethnic and religious hatreds.  Fear stalks the world,and is used to justify the whittling away of hard-won freedoms, the abuse of human rights by torture and imprisonment, a contraction of hospitality and a coarsening of hearts.

The AIDS  epidemic marches on; and whole peoples slowly starve to death.

How did Jesus put it two thousand years ago?

There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars.. nations in agony, bewildered, in fear as they await what menaces the world...

Obviously the experience is not new.

Even six centuries before Christ, as we read in today’s First Reading, Jeremiah – locked away at the time as a prisoner of conscience - irrepressibly hoped for integrity in the national capital, and yearned for a leader who would value honesty and integrity.

The temptation, of course, is to accept that it’s all too hard (You can’t do anything), to let national leaders do what they want, and, instead, to get caught up in and distracted by what we can control: what we eat, what we drink, where we live, and what we wear – our games and circuses.

As Jesus put it: Unless we watch, our hearts will become coarsened by food, sex and the cares of life.

Yet Jesus also said to his disciples: In the face of all that is happening in our world, stand erect, hold your heads high! your liberation is near at hand! Pray at all times for strength to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.

Is something else happening? what Jesus called The Son of Man coming with power and great glory?

If so, is it not noticeable yet because the Son of Man will come only at the end? Or is it already happening, but less noticeably - gradually, in the midst of ordinary things?

I believe that it is indeed occurring - not so much in  the national capitals and the corridors of power - but through the lives of ordinary people. It’s a now, more than an end of the world, reality.

What might the glory of the Son of Man, that Jesus spoke about, refer to? The glory of God – the revelation within the world of God’s beauty and transforming power - is the human person fully alive.  And human persons become fully alive as they learn to grow and to interrelate in love in the midst of an otherwise disheartening and often corrupting world.

Again and again, I come across people who are maturing in love, depthing at great cost, and sometimes in the midst of acute pain, their capacity for unshakeable, hope-filled, unconditional love.  At times I stand in awe at their strength, their courage and their freedom to die to so much – and to become beautifully alive in the process.

They stand erect, hold their heads high.  They experience liberation.  Empowered by God, they embody the glory of God.  Through them, Christ, the exemplar of mature humanity, becomes ever more incarnate in the world.

The Son of Man is indeed coming in power and great glory.  We simply need to stay awake in order to perceive him.  As we pray at all times, we learn to see reality. We find the strength not just to survive but to stand with confidence, side by side, with Christ as he comes inexorably into our hurting and wounded world.

This is our dignity; it is our destiny; it is our mission as disciples of Christ.

Homily 2 - 2009

This season of Advent raises the question: Where are we heading? Not so much: Where am I heading? but: Where are we heading? Where is our world heading? Do we as human persons, have any control over where our world is heading? And, following on from that, Have we any moral responsibility for where our world might be heading?

Climate change has been on the agenda this past week, and the eyes of the media have been trained on Canberra. And here we are, gathered in our little church in beautiful Dunkeld. Do the two worlds meet?

In our First Reading today we listened to Jeremiah. He lived during a period of social breakdown and of political and religious corruption. He had lost faith in the current leadership, and all hope of reform. He looked desperately to God, and, somehow, he hoped that, in the future, the leadership would change, and that a virtuous Branch might grow for David; that, in Jerusalem, the seat of government – the seat of power, a new approach, a new spirit, might come, summed up in a new motto, a new vision statement: The Lord our integrity.

Can you imagine the mood of Canberra, the vision statement guiding all our political decision-making: The Lord our integrity? God, God’s values, God’s ways, God’s approach, guiding what our parliament earnestly and explicitly aim for and how they seek to go about it?

Today’s Gospel has a similar sort of message to the First Reading. The language was a bit florid, but was “par for the course” in much of the literature of the time. The basic point was that the world might be in a mess: nations in agony, clamour of ocean (in the Jewish mind, the ocean was  symbol of chaos), the powers of heaven shaken. But, that’s not the whole story. It might be business as usual; but what would matter is how people would respond in the light of it all.

Jesus referred to himself as the Son of Man; (though, for some reason or other, we never seem to call him that ourselves.) It’s a powerful image. It was first used in the Book of Daniel, where it was a cryptic reference to those faithful Jews who were persecuted and executed by a ruler intent on totally breaking down that faithfulness. Daniel saw their stance for integrity constituting the criterion by which everyone else, including their persecutors, would be judged.

Jesus applied the image to himself because he saw his stance for integrity in a world that had lost its way, where might was right; where oppression was endemic; and corruption and compromise were the order of the day … his stance for integrity, despite the cost … would nevertheless be the criterion by which people could really judge what is right, where true life can be found, what responsibility calls for, and what true human growth and development involve.

Democracy is good, but there’s a catch. Unlike Jeremiah, we have a vote, and our voices contribute to public opinion. We can’t just blame the leadership – we’re all responsible for the direction our nation takes. Justice and mercy at the micro-level are indispensable – those everyday interactions we have with those who are part of our little world. 

But, as Paul wrote in today’s Second Reading: May the Lord make you love one another and the whole human race as much as we love you. Let us listen to that again: Love one another and the whole human race:

As Pope Benedict wrote recently: Love at the macro-level takes shape in justice and mercy in the arena of national and international policies. And we all share responsibility for them – we are implicated, like it or not.

Climate change is on the national agenda at the present moment, shaping up as a matter of justice at the national and the international level. Those likely to be most affected by it are the poorest of the developing world and the generations that follow ours.

Most scientists believe that human choices contribute to the fact and pace of change; some don’t. We are not scientists. But we have a responsibility to contribute to the decisions facing the world leaders. The Son of Man won’t necessarily judge by outcomes; but will judge by the degree of responsibility we exercise: The Lord our integrity.

Motivated by the mercy, justice and love that informed the heart of Jesus, may we be able to stand erect, hold our heads high … with confidence before the Son of Man.

Homily 3 - 2012 

Advent is as good a time as any to wrestle with the questions: Where is the world heading? What sense do we make of it all? How are we going?

As we look at our world, we certainly can wonder and what's going on.  Is anyone controlling it? Governments? Global corporations? The banks?  Still, despite the efforts of some, 870 million people around the world go to bed hungry each night, and are in no position themselves to do anything about it.  Can anyone?  And if they can, are they interested in trying?  Dreadful wars as well – people being massacred, mostly innocent civilians, others growing rich through the weapons they sell and new opportunities that open up.

Look at the Church, coming under relentless scrutiny, and not shaping up well.  How many victims, their lives destroyed?  Many country parishes are struggling; and city ones facing different problems.  And God knows what is going on in many families.

What sense do we make of it? Can any sense be made of it? It is that sort of issue that the Gospel today is doing its best to come to terms with – though its reflections seem to make anything but sense to most of us.  The language and the imagery seem "way out", unfamiliar, to say the least – though, around the time of Jesus, that sort of literature had been common enough in Jewish circles for a couple of centuries.  Ostensibly, it talks about the future; but, for those in the know, it is more about different but simultaneous levels of reality.

At the level of actual history, life can be experienced as chaos – described in the then familiar imagery of signs in the skies and storm-tossed oceans and surging waves.  It is simply saying that life can indeed seem to be tumultuous.  But that is not the whole story.  Something else is going on – but that something is known only by faith.

The redeeming Christ is, in fact, powerfully at work; and through, or despite, everything else that is happening, those who are sensitive to his presence and operation can experience a wonderful sense of being free – free from all constraints that might otherwise inhibit their true human growth and their personal sense of inner peace.  Or, as the Gospel confidently put it: Whatever is going on in their lives, whatever is going on in the world around them, they manage to stand tall, heads held high, and feel themselves free from fear and sterile worry.  They are not in denial, nor overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, but freed, not to solve the world's problems, but to address them compassionately while living authentically.

However, that outcome is a factor of being sensitive to the presence and the action of Christ – in their own lives and in the lives of many of the people around them.  That sensitivity does not come naturally.  It has to be cultivated.  That can present problems in a world that never seems to slow down, and that powerfully and professionally is determined to distract people with all sorts of ultimately appealing attractions and unfulfilling promises.

The answer offered by today's Gospel is precisely to slow down and to be a "wake-up" to the unsatisfying, deadening and addictive consumerism that pervades our Western culture - particularly so during these weeks leading up to Christmas.  For all the hype, for all the expenditure, how many people will be happier, wiser people when Christmas has passed?

The Gospel is pretty clear.   But to grow in sensitivity to the deeper realities of life, we really do need to spend time and effort to pray – deliberately and consistently. 

Homily 4 - 2015

Stay awake! Security! How safe can you get? The threat of terrorism seems to be growing. Can anyone ever be really safe? For my own interest, I went googling yesterday. About three thousand people were killed in the “9/11” destruction of the Twin Towers. That same year in little Australia seventeen hundred people were killed on Australian roads. [Last year there were twelve hundred.] In the United States each year there is an average of about twelve thousand murders  – four times the count of “9/11”.  Can anyone ever be really safe? And do we need to be? After all, the danger of dying somehow or other, for all of us, is 100 percent. 

To cheer up his little Christian community facing possible persecution, certainly living in a constantly dangerous and threatening world, Luke quoted Jesus’ saying, “Stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand.” Perhaps it is hard to be convinced. It is true that “The Son of Man is coming in a cloud with power and great glory”; and he comes to pronounce judgment – but for him, to judge is to see our brokenness, to look at us with understanding and delicate compassion, and to choose deliberately to forgive and to love us into ever further life and freedom. The broad sweep of judgment has been made, and has only to be tailored uniquely to each of us. It need not be feared but looked forward to with hope.

We can become too offhand, of course, and live oblivious to what life is all about. As the Gospel put it, our “hearts can become coarsened with … the cares of life, etc.”. We can miss out on, even forget about, living life truly to the full. That we be loved by God is not enough unless we choose to accept that love and allow ourselves to be actively caught up into it. It all starts with God loving us. That is why Paul wrote to his Christian community in Thessalonica, “May the Lord be generous in increasing your love and make you love one another.” He insisted on that because we need to cooperate with God – or nothing happens to us.

There is another point that Paul was quite alert to – the importance of the example that we give to each other. We know the difficulty of encountering someone who acts aggressively towards us. We have to deliberately control ourselves to stop fighting back with them. Someone else’s attitude triggers the similar response in us. We instinctively mimic others. Fortunately, the dynamic also acts in reverse. Someone else’s kindness triggers a parallel response of kindness in us.

When he was first with the Thessalonian community, Paul helped them to grow as loving persons by firstly loving them; and they could remember that. It was not pride that led him to write, “Love one another … as much as we love you”, or, “Progress more in the kind of life that you are meant to live … as you learnt from us”. We need those positive interactions with each other if we are to grow in love.  We shall not succeed otherwise. And only to the extent that we grow in love, do we experience life more fully. That is essentially what Church is about. Church is a community of disciples wanting to grow in their capacity to love, and to live life – and helping each other to do it. 

We need to be alert to what is going on inside us. We need to be in touch with ourselves, and, as far as possible, with the God whom we believe first loves us, the God from whom it all starts. That is why Jesus implored his hearers, “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength … to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.” Get to know him – and the rest follows of itself.

Homily 5 -2018

If you feel you have heard today’s gospel before, you’re right. Only two weeks ago we had a passage from Mark’s Gospel corresponding in part to today’s first paragraph from Luke. Both, in their colorful ways, described a world where everything seemed to be falling apart. And both spoke of people’s common reaction being one of bewilderment and fear.

For those of us still coming to Church, that Gospel scenario sounds pretty familiar. So many good Catholics are worried by what is happening to the Church. Has it got a future? Will there be anyone still coming to Mass in ten or twenty years? How can it survive with so many of its leaders – priests and bishops – mired in the tragic saga of sexual abuse with its various causes and consequences, with women still being excluded from positions of real decision-making in the Church, in a world that, at least to many, seems to be presenting a greater and greater challenge to the Church’s values and way of life.

I find it fascinating to reflect on the deliberate response that both Gospel passages encouraged disciples then, and us today, to adopt – not fear, but its opposite: “Stand erect, hold your heads high”, not in desperation or defiance, but in joyful expectation and peaceful confidence. How come?

Today’s Gospel gives an amazingly reassuring answer that is quite surprising, and even counter-intuitive. It maintains that, however people interpret current events and trends, what is really happening is that, as it poetically expressed it, “the Son of Man is coming in a cloud with power and great glory”. The Gospel speaks of this coming of the Son of Man as sudden, but the intensity conveyed by the word sudden refers to urgency rather than to speed. Elsewhere the Gospel makes it clear that the Son of Man’s presence in our world is happening already. [Matthew’s Gospel concludes with the magisterial statement, “I am with you always, till the end of time”.] What the passage does not say, but that Jesus had repeatedly stated earlier, and clearly presupposed here, is that really to see what is even now truly happening, we need ‘eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand’.

Sadly, in the face of the current crisis facing the Church, many people seem to be more inclined to move into either fear or into psychological avoidance and denial than to make the continued effort to convert. As the Gospel warned, our hearts can be too easily bewildered or frightened on the one hand or “coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness” or even simply with “the cares of life”, on the other.

In order that we find “the strength to survive all that is going to happen and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man”, Jesus insisted on two things: that we “stay awake at all times” and that we “pray”.

To the extent that we “stay awake”, that we learn to keep our eyes open and our hearts attuned, we shall come personally to experience that “our liberation is near at hand”. The whole context would seem to indicate liberation from the common cultural mindset with its consequent behaviours, and the blindness and worldview they result from.

When Jesus talked of prayer, I think he meant more than simply “praying for..”. He meant the kind of prayer that changes our lives, and the ways we think and act. Our recent Catholic culture has done very little to expose people to the wonderful ways of praying that were common in an earlier period – the kind of prayer that does not rely on words so much but rather engages our minds and hearts, the kind of prayer that Mary prayed, the prayer that finds God in stillness and seeming emptiness and absence, and that learns the presence and the ways of God more through silence and quiet reflection than an abundance of words.

Homily 6 - 2021 

Today’s Gospel passage can sound, at least on first hearing, somewhat contradictory. But is it? Jesus was talking about the end times [whenever they are, whatever they are!]. Quoting from a passage in the Book of Daniel, he spoke of “the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”. What would that be like?

On the one hand, he seemed to speak threateningly: of “nations on earth in agony”, “bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves”, people “dying of fear”. But then, on the other hand, he insisted, “your liberation is near at hand”, so “stand erect, hold your heads high” and “stand with confidence before the Son of Man”.

With some effort, we can see, however, that there is no contradiction. As far as the natural happenings are concerned, that is pretty much “business as usual” and always has been. As we sit here right now, safe and sound, there are no doubt at the same time some places on earth where there are fires, and somewhere else where there are floods; some places where there is drought and famine, others where there is a glut of foodstuffs. Right now. That is the way that our world is.

Jesus’ point seems to have been, however, that what ultimately matters is not just what is happening to people around them, but how they interpret it, and how they respond to it all.

Here faith comes in. Jesus invited his hearers to cultivate and sharpen their inner attention to what is happening beneath the surface, as it were, as history unfolds. He saw that as nothing less than his own risen presence and action, unseen and unsuspected, in our world across history— which he referred to as “the Son of Man coming with power” [the “glory” bit is irrelevant].

Are we frightened of his power? Last week we celebrated the feast of the “Christ the King”. Jesus made quite clear that his kind of regal power was vastly different from usual human expectations of power. Jesus’ power is the power of loving, of caring, or respecting — everyone, anyone — extended even to enemies. Genuine love is a creative power, an expression of God’s creative power. It is the kind of power that enables people to change positively, to grow.

It is no secret. Mature friends [even if genuine friends are scarce] love each other that way; husbands and wives so often do. That kind of power [and it is all around us] sets people free. It empowers them to respond constructively to whatever is happening in the world, and to become [and to feel] more alive in the process.

Are you frightened of Christ? I’m not. We have been friends as long as I can remember. With Jesus a key player in our lives, we can spontaneously “stand erect”, “stand with confidence”, and “hold our heads high”.

In these up-setting Covid days, it could be well worth our while to let today’s Gospel quietly run around in our heads and hearts.