Homily from Father Provincial for the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings for Year A: Proverbs 31:10-31; I Thessalonians 5:1-6; Matthew 25:14-30

This Wednesday marked an important centenary in the life of our nation, the burial in Westminster Abbey of the remains of an unknown British soldier from the battlefields of the Fist World War. Together with the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior has become the poignant focus of our remembering of the millions who died in the conflicts of the bloody twentieth century. But plans for the memorial were made rapidly in a few short weeks back in 1920, the aim being to meet the immediate need of helping a bruised nation to come to terms with the massive human losses incurred by war and a cruel pandemic. The British State could not countenance the cost of bringing back all the hundreds of thousands of war dead for burial on English soil. But it was prepared to surround a single coffin with sufficient pageantry and prayer that it might have a cathartic effect on the populace. And the reason this burial was so fruitful was that each of the many hundreds of widows who begged to take part in the ceremony of committal – and they were all enabled to do so – could with some reason imagine that it was their husband or their beloved son whose remains had been accorded the honour of joining the illustrious Britons who lie buried in that vessel of national memory.  

Consigning human remains to the ground is a powerful symbolic gesture. It is above all the physical enactment of letting go. To that extent it signifies the finitude of our human faculties in the face of that one sure limit that is death. We are and we feel totally helpless in the face of the death of those we have come to love.  

But for those who have faith, it need not be a letting-go into the void. Rather it can express a handing over to the life-giving power of God. Those early parables of the Kingdom in the Gospel show us that power at work in the germination of underground seeds, a process that requires no effort on our part and which unfolds faithfully without our knowledge or understanding. And when Jesus Himself comes to be buried in a tomb, a grain of seed falling to the ground and dying, that hidden, underground place is where we mount our vigil of prayer, taking in the fullness of what we have lost and contemplating God’s own presence to our human mortality, that place becomes the locus of a new life, a witness to a miraculous, unbounded generativity at work which startles and unsettles us before lodging in us a deeper consolation. 

The tomb is the space of two contemplations: of loss and of rebirth. They are intimately connected. There is not one without the other. Which is why the work of every November is so important. To be present to those who have gone before us. To grant them the hospitality of our remembering. To add the still living flames of our love for them to the purging fires of God’s mercy. 

There is another way of burying too, though, which is not good. Tuesday saw the release of two reports, one in Rome, another here in London, about abuse within our Church. They make for painful reading, to say the least. Each of them exposes a culture of clericalism, a disregard for the suffering of young and vulnerable people and a betrayal of the Gospel message of inalienable human dignity which the Church exists to preach. Men who should have known better buried things that should never be buried – a covering up of predatory behaviour, even of criminality. But the worst was the burial of survivor-victims themselves in tombs of disbelief, of silence and ultimately of despair. We are not called to let go of the suffering of our neighbour, even into the Father’s tender care. We are to take responsibility. That is the daunting mission of the Gospel. The servant in today’s parable digs a hole in the ground to keep his treasure safe because he fears to take responsibility for its growth. In a similar way, clerics buried the scandal of abuse because they were scared to take responsibility for it and to face the far-reaching implications of abuse in our Church. Money and truth are things that ought never to be buried. 

But look again with that dual regard of November. How strange, how unexpected, that this most unpromising of burials is now being made fruitful by God’s life-giving Spirit. The tomb in which so many victim-survivors were denied the oxygen of recognition, of publicity and of justice has itself become a place of new life. God’s Spirit has brooded within it, giving strength to those who went unbelieved, nagging at consciences which would not be extinguished, stirring the protests of an outraged laity who had no notion of the culture of clericalism, of greed and corruption which besets the Church in so many parts of the world. And that Spirit will see this movement of liberation through to completion, enabling us to take responsibility for one another as we must. 

The work of November remains that patient contemplation of the tomb. That generous presence to those the spirit of the world would have us forget. This month, we open the tent of our remembrance to receive our departed loved ones, yes, and the war dead too. But alongside them we also welcome the little ones who have been and are still crushed and trampled upon by Herod and Caiaphas: the refugees, the indigenous peoples; the Uighurs and others persecuted peoples; and all those, women, children and men whose lives are made a misery by atrocities of exploitation.  

Sitting with them in the tomb, we discover them as our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, our sisters and brothers, our kith and kin, and our own narrow path to rebirth. 

Fr Damian Howard SJ