Homily from the Parish Priest for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings for Year B: Ezekiel 2:2-5; II Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6

“What makes you stay, what makes you hold onto Christian faith?” is a question constantly posed to Christians I meet on project visits to the Nineveh Plains, the area around Mosul in the Nineveh Plains. A question posed of people whose families were driven out of their homes by terrorism, reduced to a persecuted minority, and now back in their home towns and villages under the spectre of constant threat of violence and much worse. Where Christianity has been decimated, a weakened but vital force for the good. When asked why they want to stay they consistently tell us that through this experience, especially this dark night of the cross when they feel totally powerless, they touch what strength of faith in Christ really means. In abject powerlessness faith in a Christ who has suffered and died for our freedom shows its true power.

It’s a great privilege to meet such strength of faith but I don’t find I need to go to Iraq or a place where Christianity has been under attack to realise how strong faith emerges in the weakest of moments. To lesser degrees perhaps, compared to the violence of the Middle East. But over these last months we have been brought to look at our individual and communal fragility in the face. And in the midst of this I’m aware of so many traumas. The loneliness of bereavement, of relationship break-up we’re hearing of more and more, of those who have been looking after sick relatives and friends and sacrificing their own livelihoods, the young people who have been deprived of social contact and with uncertain futures after missing much of normal school and college. And of course those who are abjectly poor, left behind by polite society on the streets – our homeless service volunteers have seen so much of this. And those finding themselves unable to cope through emotional and mental anguish. Like many in society in caring professions I as a priest often encounter such situations and during the pandemic I’d say I’ve seen more of it than ever even in this area of London, a neighbourhood full of contradictions. And here for me I have to say is where I encounter especially what faith is all about.

At your lowest point, when you are literally running on empty, somehow often the human spirit is given a supernatural gift of strength. It is indeed enlivened by the exercise of charity and the promise of hope passed on by the ministry of those who choose to walk alongside the weakest in our society. It is for me a place where the virtues of hope and charity enliven a faith born out of weakness and allow a cry to God to be shown dignity, to be raised to an experience of new life. For me at the very core of our faith is not so much a conquest over sin and death, not so much the power of a strong God overcoming the opposition of the world to receive him. Rather it is the vulnerable weak God who chose to be one of us, to walk right alongside us in our coldness, our rejection of him, sharing in our lowest point of vulnerability, in our emptiness, in the weakest glimmer of desire for him, who reveals himself to us.

The broken body and the blood poured out for us we celebrate here on this altar and all the altars of the world every Sunday, every day, is our life’s food, our lifeblood, drawing us as a Christian community to respond to his call to love and to hope in all we are and all we do. When we say ‘Amen’ to ‘Corpus Christi’ we say yes, I will respond to that call as I am, in my fragility, my doubt, my honestly saying I am a sinner yet loved by God knowing I in my uniqueness, no one else, is called to some special service to bring his message, his good news, to others, and especially those who need him most.

Maybe this is a moment to evaluate my own calling in life, honestly, as I am, not as I would like to portray myself to others. St Paul knew how to do this. We don’t know what exactly the thorn in his flesh was but we know it was such an important part of who he was as a person of such great faith. For him that realization that in our weakness we discover our strength changed his whole outlook on life and shaped how he discerned and responded to his particular calling to be an apostle. The key here is the reality of the cross at the heart of our lives and our world. The cross unleashes ‘the power of God’, a vital force which promises new life for all, pagans as well as Christians, if they too convert to him. Paul proclaims that Christ died ‘for our transgressions and was raised for our justification’ (Romans 4:25). If Christ had not then been raised, says Paul in his first of two letters to the Corinthians, ‘you are still in your sins’ (1 Corinthians 15:17). The cross takes away our sins as Christ enters into the mystery of our own fallen human condition. But this is not the end.

The cross opens a path from spiritual death to glorious new life. From a recognition in particular of my weakness, and of the need for God’s healing at the heart of our fragile world, he touches the power of Christ in our world. It is through Jesus’ cross, he says in various places in his writings, we become a ‘new creation’. A journey, a pilgrimage, an odyssey, from selfreliance, when we think we can go on living for our own selffulfilment and wealth, to a realization of the urgent call to embrace personal sacrifice for the good of others and the future of our planet. The Eucharist is a weekly, daily reminder of our ultimate reliance wholly on God and his power, which is found precisely where the world would not locate it – in humility, in vulnerability, in weakness, on the peripheries of our society. Where the thorn in our flesh becomes through God’s grace the source and the reason for our knowing the need for redemption, the bursting of our arrogance and independence to see how we are all interconnected through one shared belief, that we are nothing without our creator, our sustainer, our redeemer God.

As we finally begin to emerge from the pandemic may we embrace our uncertainty and fragility as a community of faith gathered as the broken Body of Christ around the altar. As we bring all our prayers and concerns to him may they be laid at his feet. Will people return to church? Will new people come? Will we embrace more through the new technology we’ve learnt to use? What will the Church look like in the future? Will we be smaller but will we see a more representative, less clericalist church, as we prepare to respond to Pope Francis’ call to engage in a synod in every diocese in the world? Uncertainty, the unknown, our fragility. Not distractions because this is real, it is where we are, and in the embrace of them we are called to a strong faith. To respond to Christ’s call to each and every one of us to play our part in rebuilding on the foundations of our faith which are strong not just despite but because we know deep down our fragility and that of our whole human race and planet, and so our common need for the God who is always with us and who shows his face to us especially in the thorns in our mortal flesh.

Fr Dominic Robinson SJ