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

Fr Billy Swan

Dear friends. The two readings, the Psalm and the Gospel today are particularly rich, deep and beautiful. But it is the second reading from St Paul’s letter to the Romans that I would like to reflect on today.

First, a few important questions. When you and I come to the Mass, why are we there? What are we there for? Are we there as conscious and active participants or are we there as passive spectators, looking on something that does not really engage us?

I remember as a child my first experience of going to Mass with my mother. I was just a toddler, but I remember her giving me the car keys to play with, to keep me quiet. I remember her saying to me when I was shuffling about – ‘Shhh! Listen to the priest, look up there (pointing to the sanctuary) and watch what is going on!’

The fear I have friends, is that for many of us, our understanding of the Eucharist has not moved far beyond this passive model – we think we are there to simply watch, listen and show up. My fears were confirmed recently by an interview with Marty Whelan who says he no longer goes to Mass as he sees no point in spending half an hour on Sundays listening to a priest. This is a sad admission but one that points to the problem of passivity that needs to be addressed.

An excellent place to start is the second reading today where Paul asks us to: ‘Think of God’s mercy and worship him, I beg you, in a way that is worthy of thinking beings, by offering your living bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God’. Let us pay close attention to these words.

Notice the first thing Paul ask us to do is to think of God’s mercy and worship him. In fact, thinking of God’s mercy leads us to worship him. How so? St Francis of Assisi helps us here. For Francis, the three elements of the life of Christ that moved him to worship were the humility of God’s love revealed at his birth, the emptying out of God’s love with his suffering and death on the cross and how that abundant love continues to be poured out and offered to us in the Eucharist. At the crib, beneath and cross and at the Eucharist, Francis bowed down to worship the God of mercy who revealed himself in the life of Jesus in a way that moved him, humbled him, changed him and satisfied his human longing to worship the greatest good and to adore someone greater than ourselves.

We are called to join St Francis and the saints, on our knees before the God of humble mercy, who lowered himself down, in order to raise us up in saving love. Then comes the next step – to ‘offer our living bodies as a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God’. What Paul is asking of us here, is to consciously see our presence at the Eucharist as a gift of self-offering to God with the whole community. In other words, when I come to the Eucharist, I offer myself, my whole self to God as a sacrifice of love. I offer my week, my life, my soul, my body, everything I have and everything I am, to God the Father, in union with Christ Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, as a sacrifice of love and as a response to His love that comes first. In this way, we become absorbed into the dynamism of the love of the Trinity that is flowing when every Eucharist is celebrated.

Remember in the Old Testament, how every Jew was obliged to bring a gift of sacrifice to the Temple? It was normally an animal. The same tradition and spirituality of the liturgy is still present today, except the offering we now bring is not an animal but ourselves. We are both the giver of the gift and the gift itself.

Providentially, last Wednesday in Rome, the successor of St Peter, Pope Leo XIV, spoke about our call to actively participate in the Eucharist. He affirmed that ‘the faithful cannot and must no longer remain silent and passive. Their physical presence cannot be reconciled with their spiritual absence’. In other words all of us need to be be consciously and actively engaged in the prayer of the liturgy in mind, heart and body.

To conclude. We often hear the objection that ‘Mass is boring’. It is certainly is boring if we see it as merely something to go to, watch and listen as passive spectators. But if we see it as a drama of love that absorbs us into its flow of grace and a prayer in which we offer ourselves in love to the God who loved us first, then participation in the Eucharist can be something beautiful and engaging.

I conclude with the words of St Bernard of Clairvaux who, like St Francis, was captivated by contemplating God’s mercy in a way that led to worship:

‘The lesser He (Christ) has made himself in his humanity, the greater has he shown himself in kindness. The more he humbles himself on my account, the more powerfully he engages my love’.

(Sermon I, Epiphany, 1-2).