Homily from the Parish Priest for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings for Year B: Job 38:1-11; II Corinthians 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41
A number of years ago, in a different country, I was stopped one afternoon by an elderly gentleman who started speaking in moderately aggressive tones – I started to get quite worried – his problem was something I’d said in a homily about God working through our weakness. “I never knew God wanted us to be weak” he said. This was getting the Gospel message all wrong. We need to be strong. To be weak must be bad; to be strong must be good. I hadn’t actually said weakness was good but I had said that for St Paul an important message to take away was that God works through our weakness and that our vulnerability, our utter reliance on God to work through this, was, and is, our strength.
This episode I remember set me off wondering, thinking, praying, on what I’d always been formed to treasure as a gift from God, my vulnerability, through which I can empathise with others, maybe offer advice, share in struggles to overcome weakness. Had I, and had my formators, got it wrong? Should we expose weakness for what it is – not from God? And should I debunk all this talk of vulnerability as central to the life of the Christian disciple as a pathetic excuse for my failings?
Well, obviously we don’t want to choose to be weak. But I do think St Paul is teaching us we do need to be aware of it and aware of how it can help us to mature as Christians.
But why? Why indeed was this such an important theme in St Paul? For me his faith in Christ crucified, the central core of our Christian faith, that Jesus Christ died on the cross, that he humbled, emptied himself for us and in so doing fulfilled God’s plan for the universe, for our salvation, for our fulfillment, for our full human flourishing, is the key. Jesus allowed himself to become weak in order that he might enter into our world and be right alongside us, always close to us, fully experiencing what human life, this strange pilgrimage on earth, is all about. Amid all of the turbulence of life, the instability we have experienced this last year, the ongoing uncertainty about whether we will ever be free of the threat of sickness, death, division and disunity in our world, all will make sense as he draws us into his loving embrace. The faith of the Christian propels us further than not just praying for our needs, just putting our hope in him. We do not pray to a distant God - rather we are “in him” who has been through it all because he is fully human, experiencing the joys, the sorrows, the darkness, the light of what it is to be human. He is right there next to us as we are, not as we pretend to be. That is what it is to be “in Christ”. To look at Christ on the cross and hear him say to us he will carry us and provide for us however we think we have strayed from him, whatever our fears, however we might feel abandoned by or misunderstood by the Church, who looks on us lovingly and reminds us that in the final reckoning when this earthly pilgrimage is over, we will see him as he gazes on us and consoles us for what we are, God’s beautiful creation made in his image. 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 Jesus on the cross who chose to be one of us.
St Ignatius of Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, invites us regularly to imagine ourselves speaking to Jesus and to his mother Mary. You might remember that, just at the beginning of the pandemic, Pope Francis led us, in a wet and desolate St Peter’s Square, in a meditation which placed us as humanity in the same boat as the disciples and Jesus, the story we hear from St Mark’s Gospel today. “The storm [of this current time]”, said the Holy Father, “exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities. It shows us how we have allowed to become dull and feeble the very things that nourish, sustain and strengthen our lives and our communities. The tempest lays bare all our prepackaged ideas and forgetfulness of what nourishes our people’s souls; all those attempts that anesthetize us with ways of thinking and acting that supposedly “save” us, but instead prove incapable of putting us in touch with our roots and keeping alive the memory of those who have gone before us. We deprive ourselves of the antibodies we need to confront adversity… Greedy for profit, we let ourselves get caught up in things, and lured away by haste. We did not stop at your reproach to us, we were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world, nor did we listen to the cry of the poor or of our ailing planet. We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick. Now that we are in a stormy sea, we implore you: “Wake up, Lord!”. “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” Lord, you are calling to us, calling us to faith. Which is not so much believing that you exist, but coming to you and trusting in you”.
The Holy Father is urging us to listen to the groaning of creation, to turn our backs on false strengths and egos which camouflage who we really are, in a word to be converted, to turn our weak hearts to face him on his cross suspended on this world crying out to know his care, his unconditional love, his peace. “Faith”, says Francis, “begins when we realise we are in need of salvation. We are not self-sufficient; by ourselves we flounder: we need the Lord, like ancient navigators needed the stars. Let us invite Jesus into the boats of our lives. Let us hand over our fears to him so that he can conquer them. Like the disciples, we will experience that with him on board there will be no shipwreck. Because this is God’s strength: turning to the good everything that happens to us, even the bad things. He brings serenity into our storms, because with God life never dies”.
This coming week how can I be more honest with myself and with the Lord? It’s far from easy in the midst of a culture of denial of our vulnerability, be it brushing aside the pandemic and what it might be teaching us as a society, just going back to the same old normal, or failing to recognize the epidemic of mental and emotional illness we will be left with. As Catholics do we reach out to the most vulnerable and those on the margins – those migrants who after June 30th will find themselves without access to basic human needs, to those many who through the economic downturn are newly poor, and do we promote the beauty of human life in all its fragility, being reminded on this Day for Life of just how discriminating we are against human life when it seems in its fragility not to matter so much, be it through our stand on abortion or voluntary euthanasia or racial justice.
Where is Jesus in my life? One answer from the meditation on the Gospel, might be is he is next to us now, on the cushion, sleeping, and ready to be awakened. What does it really mean to me to summon him to awake, to be, as St Paul puts it, “in Christ”, to live out my baptism and to not just receive but to live out the eucharist, to go in peace to glorify the Lord with my life? He is with us, to accompany us on our journey and to lead us. May he be with us and in us this week.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ