HOMILY FOR TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME (A)

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. One of the fascinating features of the Gospel texts is that they keep on giving. They are wellsprings of wisdom and truth that never run dry. In his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul talks about the ‘the unfathomable riches of Christ’ (Eph. 3:8). The same is true of his Word. There is always something new to discover that speaks powerfully to the time the Word is proclaimed and heard.

A good example is today’s Gospel for the Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time. It is a pivotal Gospel where Jesus brings his disciples away from familiar Jewish territory and asks them a key question about his identity: ‘Who do you say I am?’ Jesus was not interested in what public opinion was about him. He was more interested to know what his closest followers and friends believed. It was Peter who spoke up and gave the answer that all Christians make their own today: ‘You are the Christ the Son of the living God’.

What struck me from the Gospel is what Jesus says next, when he told Peter that because of that profession of faith, he would be the rock on which his Church would be built and that ‘the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it’.

For years, I always understood this prophesy from the Lord as a defensive one for the Church down the ages. It was something like ‘no matter what happens and how many storms bash the Church, she will endure’. It was a kind of siege perspective that certainly was justified. When we look back in history and see the persecution of the Church by the Roman Empire, its own divisions at the time of the Reformation, more persecutions by National Socialism in Germany and Communism in the last century, the Church has endured. Those regimes who threatened to destroy the Church have not survived. The Church has endured, despite everything.

Yet there is another way of interpreting Jesus’ words that is exciting and calls us, not to be a  defensive Church, but to be a Church on the march, a Church of mission or, in the words of the late Pope Francis, a Church that goes forth to meet the world, engage with it and serve it.

Regarding our faith, perhaps for many of us, we lack the confidence to go public on what many consider a private affair. Perhaps we see our faith as a defensive mechanism to help us cope with the trials that we meet in life. But faith is too powerful to be tamed or limited in these ways. The need to share our faith is too urgent, too necessary and too needed to keep it under a bushel, in the words of another Gospel text. Light doesn’t just repel darkness. It chases it away. Goodness, truth and beauty don’t just repel evil, lies and ugliness. They overpower them.

The key to us having a greater confidence in our faith is not based on confidence in ourselves but the one in WHOM we have faith - Christ Jesus our Lord. For whenever we place our trust again in HIM, He re-builds his Church on the rock that is our faith. Listen again to the late Pope Francis, the successor of Peter who wrote:

‘We have a treasure of life and love which cannot deceive, and a message which cannot mislead or disappoint. It penetrates to the depths of our hearts, sustaining and ennobling us. It is a truth which is never out of date because it reaches that part of us which nothing else can reach. Our infinite sadness can only be cured by an infinite love’ (Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, 265).

So, what might this new attitude to faith look like in the Irish Church today? What might it look like in our parishes and dioceses? Here I imagine the answer.

That each of us and all of us, every day, make our own the words of Peter – that each of us take personal responsibility for our faith and friendship in the Lord Jesus Christ who sets us free from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness. With Christ, joy is constantly born anew as we believe in our hearts: ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’.

That we be convinced again of the Gospels’ inner power to transform and touch lives, cultures and societies. Also, that we be more convinced that we are the carriers of that light and salt to lives we touch and the situations we encounter. That we don’t be afraid to chase darkness, selfishness, lies and injustice wherever we find it: that we don't just tolerate these things but strive to elimate them.

A more confident Church refuses to give up hope, refuses to live a life of mediocrity, refuses to see decline in the Church as inevitable and imagines a bright future that God is already building. It is about believing that every human heart longs for God and will not be content until it finds Him. In the words of St Paul, it is about being ambitious for the higher gifts, which is wanting the very best for us and all God’s people. It is seeing our parishes, not as museums of the past but as communities of living faith and hope where Christ is alive! It is about offering young people Christianity as a beautiful way of life that is filled to the brim with meaning and true joy!

Friends, in 2032, the Irish Church celebrates the 16^th centenary of the arrival of the Christian faith with St Patrick in 432. In 2033, the whole Church will celebrate the 20^th centenary of the death and resurrection of Christ. The celebration of both historic occasions call us, not to be a defensive Church of the past but a courageous community of the present and future with our feet in the ground but yet moving forward, confident that we do indeed ‘have a treasure of life and love’ to share, and that not even the gates of hell will resist it.