HOMILY FOR NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (C)

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. Doctors tell us that many of us have too little sleep. There is an irony in this given that in Scripture, sleeping is a metaphor for something negative – namely not being present to someone else, being complacent, unprepared, drifting and unsure.

Take for example Peter, James and John who fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane. They were not present to the Lord at the hour he needed their support which prompted him to say: ‘Could you not watch with me one hour?’ Similarly in the Gospel today, Jesus speaks of his return and the happiness of those ‘the master finds awake when he comes’. To be awake is to stand ready and prepared ‘because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect’. So, what then is the Lord asking of us and his Church in this Gospel?

Jesus urges his followers to be attentive, committed, focused, ready and awake. What the Lord is asking of us is that we be clear about who we are – attentive to his voice in our conscience and guidance from his Word; committed to the sacraments; conscious of our daily calling to be witnesses to his love, mercy and truth; to be intentional disciples and missionaries with a clear understanding of who we are and what we are about in these new and challenging times in modern Ireland. The days of cultural Christianity and cultural Catholicism are coming to an end. There is a new Apostolic age upon us that needs a new cohort of Christians who are Christians by conviction and not just convention.

In these times of plurality of cultures and traditions, I believe that we as the Irish Church need to be clearer about our mission, more focused on our aims and more attentive to our inner spirit. We need to become more intentional about how we attract and form disciples of Christ, sustain them in that commitment and train them to become missionaries who want to share a message too powerful and beautiful to keep for ourselves.

It is so easy to drift, to fall asleep, to drift along and to lose the basics of our Christian identity. It is so easy to be distracted, to go with the flow and to be carried along by the rising tide of secularism that leaves little room for God. Even within the Church itself, this complacency can set in and cause terrible damage. Drifting along, making assumptions, poor leadership and a lack of desire to evangelise has lead to the distinctive colours of Catholic Christianity being dulled and her prophetic edge being blunted.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes this drifting and sleeping as being violated by a thief in the night where something precious is stolen from us, namely our identity, vocation and even our soul.

Today’s Gospel also contains the promise of the Second Coming of Christ – something that we don’t talk about enough or think about either. We believe that Christ historically came on earth, that he died and rose from the dead and is still with us in Spirit but that he will come again in the future; ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again’. When that will be we don’t know. What we do know is that he asks us to be ready, faithful and focused. Are you ready? Am I? And if not, why not?