17th SUNDAY (C) 28 July 2013

Fr. Tom Richie 

Click here to download Chinese translation of the homily here (在此下載中文翻譯錄音)

One of my very early memories is my mother praying with me the prayer to my guardian angel before I went to sleep. Prayer is a vital part of our lives if we claim to be Christians or even people who believe in God. Usually when we are little we learn prayers and we form an idea about God. But sometimes God is used to threaten us with punishment if we are bad children. Some develop their idea of God as a fearsome authority figure. The way we pray flows from the way we see God. For some their prayers are a ritual they need to fulfil in order to keep safe or get what they want.

In the gospel today the Disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray just as John the Baptist has taught his disciples to pray. In this Gospel Jesus teaches them the prayer that we call “the Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father” and then we have several other teachings of Jesus about pray that have been collected together. I am sure we can learn something here to help us pray. I think the most important thing we learn is the way that Jesus begins. He doesn’t say “O, all powerful Lord”, or “Great God”. He says when you pray say “father”. Actually that is not right. We have even made it sound more formal than it should be. What Jesus actually says is in Hebrew “Abba”, which is more like “Papa”, or “Dad”. And this is not the only place where he uses this way of addressing God. Jesus is not telling us that prayer is about getting the right words for prayers. What Jesus is telling is that to begin we have to have the right relationship with God. To pray is about entering into a relationship, or making ourselves aware of our relationship with God as our loving father.

When we want to communicate with people we must first be aware of our relationship with them as our co-worker, as a shop assistant, as our child, our wife, a beggar, our boss. Our communication will follow on from our relationship. We will not be using a set formula of words. When we are thinking of God Jesus say think of him as “Abba”, Dad, or Papa. How the Hebrew people described God’s attitude to his people was to say he was rich in “racham” a Hebrew word meaning  “compassionate love”.  The word is related to the Hebrew word for womb and it means the tender compassion that a mother or father has for the child that they have borne. When we begin to pray Jesus is reminding us that we are responding to the God who loves us in this tender way and we can think of him as having the qualities of loving father and mother.

Jesus tells us that we then remind ourselves that we want everything to be in his hands, our life, the whole world, “your kingdom come”. We can ask for our needs “give us bread”, we remember that we do wrong “forgive us as we forgive”, and we need to be protected from temptation and evil, ”deliver us from evil”.

The story of Jesus about asking the man in bed to get bread is not telling us that it is very difficult to get God to hear us, but to say that if an unwilling man will answer our request how much more easily will we be heard by our loving father. If we do not give up on trust in him he will not give up on us. He will answer our prayers but not always in the way that we expect. I think that many times what we ask for could turn out to be like the stone or the snake or the scorpion for us if we were to really get it: Like praying for success and riches, or to punish someone else. God will always listen to our prayers and he will answer them but in a way which often changes us to see things in another way. He helps us to bear the pain, the sadness, the loss, the humiliation. He changes our hearts to take away the hardness, to see the good in others, to forgive and to have the courage to ask for forgiveness. If we really give our heart to God in prayer it will bring joy and peace.

16th SUNDAY (C) 21 July 2013

Click here to download Chinese translation of the homily here (在此下載中文翻譯錄音)

Fr. Gerard Kelly

You probably remember that last week we heard the gospel parable of the Good Samaritan.  Jesus told this parable in response to a question from a lawyer about the meaning of love of God and love of neighbour.  The lawyer had asked, “Who is my neighbour?”  Jesus didn’t give a direct answer, but told a parable and then asked the lawyer which of the three characters had acted like a neighbour.  The lawyer recognised that it was the Samaritan, and Jesus told him to go and do likewise.  In other words, Jesus shifted the focus away from a theoretical discussion about neighbours and placed it squarely on the way we act.

Now, the gospel incident we have heard today comes immediately after the parable of the Good Samaritan.  We may well wonder how the two connect.  In fact, we could imagine Martha replying to Jesus: here I am doing my best to make things right for my neighbour – I am doing something – and my sister Mary is sitting there doing nothing.  When we hear it like that, I am sure that our instincts are to feel sorry for Martha.

But let’s look at Martha and see what is going on.  In some ways she is the perfect model of many people in our generation.  How often have any of us said that we are very busy or that there are too many things to do and not enough time to do them?  The word “multi-tasking” is so common today that it seems to describe the way we live.  For many of us, if we are not busy we begin to feel guilty.  More than that, we can easily describe other people as lazy if they look as though they are idle.  It is probably fair to say that most people today are more like Martha than Mary.  And in fact, we tend to look down on the Marys of this world.

So what is the gospel telling us?  That we should stop doing all the things that we do?  That we should become lazy?  I don’t think so.  We need to remember the context.  This gospel comes after the parable of the Good Samaritan.  It can’t be telling us that we should do nothing.  I think the way we need to interpret it is to ask how it might help us to learn the best way to act in loving our neighbour.

It struck me that the central question last week’s parable put to us was about the basic instinct out of which we act.  When we are forced to act spontaneously, what will we do?  The Samaritan saw a man, battered and bruised, lying on the side of the road and knew that he had to act to help him.  This was in contrast to the other two people – the priest and the Levite – who walked by on the other side because the Law would not allow them to come into contact with blood.  The Samaritan acted out of a deep instinct of care for other people – even if they were different.  The parable was really pointing to us the problem of indifference: that we can become so focused on ourselves, or even social custom, that we ignore what is happening around us.  Just last week Pope Francis, on a visit to the Island of Lampedusa, referred to the “globalisation of indifference”.  Lampedusa is probably the Italian equivalent of our Christmas Island. It is where thousands of refugees, fleeing persecution in Northern Africa, arrive to seek asylum in Italy.  The pope quoted the parable of the Good Samaritan. 

The problem of indifference is ultimately a problem that goes to our basic instincts.  In the parable, the priest and Levite had poor instinct when faced with human tragedy.  They were so preoccupied with the Law that they were blind to the fundamental commandment to love their neighbour.  At times our instincts can be more shaped by politics, economics, technology or a range of other doctrines, rather than by the love of God.

And this brings us back to Martha and Mary.  The incident points out to us that love of neighbour cannot be separated from love of God.  Martha was so busy doing everything that she had no time to sit like Mary at the feet of Jesus.  It is there at the feet of Jesus, that she would hear a word of love.  It is there at the feet of Jesus that she would experience the love of Jesus washing over her and giving her new energy to go about her tasks.  At the feet of Jesus her attention would be turned for a little while away from herself and on to him.  All of this goes toward shaping her basic instinct.  The more time she spends with him, the more she will be energised to do the tasks that are before her.

It would be wrong to read this incident of Martha and Mary as forcing us to make a choice between either one or the other.  In fact, the church has always struggled to keep both instincts alive.  We need Marthas as well as Marys.  Perhaps it is better if we see them as two faces of the one person.  We each need to wear both faces.  What we learn today is that only by taking time to be with God can we gain that energy that we need to love like God loves.  It is not a question of spending all our time in prayer so that the world passes us by – just as it is not a question of being so preoccupied with the world that we have not time for God or for others.  A balance is needed.  When we have that balance it will show itself in our fundamental instinct that comes into play in a variety of situations we face.