Homilies on St Paul

Homily for XV Sunday of Ordinary Time 13 July 2008 As we are in the Year of St Paul, I’ve set myself the task of preaching, wherever possible, in the coming months not on the Gospel, but the Epistle, so that we can follow the Holy Father’s desire to reflect more deeply on the thought of St Paul. Today’s second reading is taken from the Letter that Paul wrote to the Romans, which is the most complicated of all his writings and contains many of his favourite themes. One reason, incidentally, that it is so long and complex, is that, unlike all the other letters he wrote, Paul is not writing to people he knows, to his own converts- the Christian community in Rome, although it did contain some people he had met over the years on his travels, was unknown to him and he had not been their founder, the one who had converted them. And so he is at great pains to introduce himself and his teaching very carefully- he wants both to make a good impression on them and to make himself clear, without any misunderstandings. One of Paul’s favourite themes is the contrast between Adam, the first man, who disobeyed God and brought about the ruin of the easy relationship between humanity and God, and Jesus, the new Adam or the second Adam, as he sometimes calls him, who by his life of complete obedience put right that relationship once and for all- what do we say, using Paul’s own words, on Good Friday?- “he became obedient unto death, even death on a cross”. Adam’s great sin, you remember, was the determination he had to make himself like God, making himself the judge of what is good and what is evil, the one decision God had told him was not his to make and on which the happiness of Adam and Eve depended in the idyllic state of total peace with God that we call the Garden of Eden. The snake said to Eve in the Garden, that if she and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, “your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”. Whereas, Jesus, as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Philippians, did the complete opposite: “though he was in the form of God (he) did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men”. Now as you know the sin of Adam had enormous consequences, and ever since those days of innocence in the Garden, we have found having a relationship with God a difficult thing to sustain- our human nature keeps getting in the way, letting us down- you remember that elsewhere in Romans Paul is so frank about his own failings, typical of us all- “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” and so on. And in Paul’s eyes, not just mankind went adrift because of Adam’s Fall, but in some way so did the whole of God’s creation. You remember that when God created the world the idea was that Adam should look after it properly, on God’s behalf as it were, and that creation would be one harmonious whole, like a cultivated and well tended garden. But somehow, as far as Paul can see- and he was living many centuries before man had the kind of technology he has now to inflict permanent damage on the environment- man, because of his fallen human nature, is no longer able to be a reliable steward of the created world, and hence the world around us is as much in need of salvation as we are. For only when man is back in his right relation with God, only when he has stopped playing God but once again allowed God to be centre-stage, is there any hope either for the human race or for the world which it is supposed to be taking care of. The world, the climate, the environment, these are all going to be a mess, reflecting inevitably the mess human beings are in with God. All that is what lies behind what Paul is trying to say here, why “the whole creation is eagerly waiting”- the world, which is supposed to be a beautiful garden, is “unable to attain its purpose” and like us human beings wants to be freed from all the consequences of sin to be once again on an even keel. We too are “unable to attain (our) purpose” until we put ourselves right with God, we too will always be a bit askew until we align with Our Lord Jesus, for only then will we be set free from all the human failings that constantly hold us back. No wonder we groan! St Paul says “the entire creation…has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” and “we too groan inwardly.” Last week there was a lot of groaning on the centre court at Wimbledon, as Federer and Nadal slogged it out. (there, I’ve done it, I’ve mentioned sport in a sermon!) Those groans of theirs were not the groans of self pity but the groans of effort, of self encouragement, as those two finely matched young men tried to find within themselves ever deeper resources of energy and skill, of determination. They were really pushing themselves, weren’t they. That is what St Paul is talking about here- I think- that constant effort that we must push ourselves to keep on making, to maintain that friendship with God, what Paul calls “the Life of the Spirit” that has been made possible for us by the life of obedience and the death of obedience of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, we know that without you we cannot attain our purpose or fulfil our destiny to become the sons and daughters of God who as St Paul says “enjoy the freedom and glory ofas the children of God”. Come to us today at this Mass, come to each one of us, and fulfil our desire for your friendship “as we too groan inwardly for our bodies to be set free”. Amen.

Homily for XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time 10 August 2008

As we have entered now into the Pauline Year, the year dedicated by the Holy Father to St Paul, I would like to share with you some thoughts, not on today’s Gospel, but on today’s Epistle, which is an extract from Paul’s famous letter to the Romans- a community, you remember, which he had not founded and people he was at pains to explain himself thoroughly to. Much of the Letter before today’s extract is taken up with a great theme of St Paul, which is, that within the Christian Church we are all one, we are all equal, we are all have the same status, whoever we are – a view which he sums up in a famous verse in his letter to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.
St Paul says that it just doesn’t matter what our racial background is, because the really important thing is, not these details like colour of skin or country of origin which do show our differences, but what hides our differences, what unites us- our common humanity. And all humanity has been created by God and destined by God to be in a special relationship with him, not just the Jews. OK, St Paul says, the Jews had a head start, they had the revelation of God that we know as the Old Testament, the Word of God in the Psalms and the Prophets, but the rest of you have no excuse- anyone can come to knowledge of God, whether you have the Bible or not. How? Well, St Paul says, use your eyes! We can come to an understanding of God from just looking at the world around us, the wonders of nature if you like- there must be a God behind all this. St Paul says at the start of this letter in Chapter 1 “ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made”. I was reading the other day a homily of St Basil, that great monk of the fourth century in what is now Turkey, in which he says “Look at a bee- even a small thing like a bee is enough to convince you of the existence of God; look how it is made, how the sting fits into its tiny shaft!” He says “even the smallest objects in the world are an invitation to faith”. That is what St Paul is saying too- the evidence for God is all around you if you think about what you see. The other reason why we have no excuse whoever we are to ignore God, is the fact that we are all born with a conscience, a sense of what is right and wrong- St Paul says of the gentiles “they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness”. Cardinal Newman once described our conscience as “the voice of God within”, and our conscience is certainly that, the place where we hear, if only we will listen, the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This is what St Paul means when he says in today’s passage “my conscience in union with the Holy Spirit”.
Having gone on about all this at length, here in the ninth chapter of his Letter, St Paul decides that he needs to explain about the Jews a bit more fully. This is something he feels he needs to do because the early church communities that met in Rome had had to start with a lot of Jewish members, but the Emperor Claudius had thrown all the Jews out of Rome, so the churches ended up being just full of Gentiles- but by the time Paul is writing this, the ban on Jews living in Rome had ended, and the Jewish Christians were coming back- and feeling unwanted in their old church because now they were no longer in the majority and in their absence things had moved on. Familiar to some of us, that feeling? Look how St Saviour’s has changed- I’ve only known it in recent years, but I imagine there was once a time when the congregation was all white, nearly all Irish perhaps, and then maybe there was a time when the congregation was indeed mixed, but only people of certain backgrounds ever did anything like read or run anything. Was it once like that? So anyway these Jewish Christians felt their noses a bit put out when they turned up again, things weren’t as they used to be and they didn’t feel at home any more. To them, St Paul, anxious as ever to deal fairly with everyone and not to upset anyone if he can help it, devotes three whole chapters, 9-11, to reminding them of their great heritage as part of the Chosen People, the ones to whom God spoke first- the people dear Pope John Paul II used to call “our elder brothers”. “The promises were made to them” he says “and from their flesh and blood came Christ”.
Poor St Paul- he can’t get over the fact that the Jewish people, with all these advantages, have by and large overwhelmingly rejected Jesus and his claim to be the Messiah and as a result he says “my sorrow is so great, my mental anguish so endless”. Whereas, of course, the Gentiles, the rest of us, with only our consciences and our discerning of God’s nature from our observation of the world he has created, have been the ones who have accepted Our Lord Jesus and his message. The Acts of the Apostles, a book which tells us much about St Paul, ends with a sermon he actually gave once he finally got to Rome, and got to meet these people he wrote this Letter to. He spent ages there arguing with Jews, as St Luke says “trying to convince them about Jesus” with only partial success. As they were getting up to walk out, Paul says “You shall indeed hear but never understand, you shall indeed see but never perceive” and he ends “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles- they will listen”. They will listen- and this is how the Book of Acts finishes- they will listen. That’s us, we are the Gentiles, from all the nations of the earth here today –are our eyes open and do we understand what we see, are our ears open and do we understand what we hear? O dear Jesus, your salvation has indeed been sent to us, and from our hearts we assure you: we will listen. Amen.