Australia Day - Third Week in Ordinary Time
St Mary's Cathedral
Jonah, 3:5-10; 1 Cor 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
26 Jan 2003
Today we celebrate Australia Day in unusual circumstances because of bushfires, drought and the threat of war. We know each of these three grim visitors, but it is more unusual when they come together.
We should use this occasion, this national day to identify what we value in our society and then re-commit ourselves to strengthening these virtues.
The Christian tradition and the Catholic presence have made an important contribution to Australian history and to defining the Australian way of life. We Christians have to continue to explain what we stand for, practise what we preach and defend those values in public life. We should also keep up our prayers for rain!
The gospel message of today has a couple of parts, the first being Our Lord's central call "to repent and believe."
We have heard this many times before. Please God all of us can claim that we are trying hard already on both these fronts.
If any of us has an area of life which he has fenced off from Jesus' call and claims, then we should pray for the strength to go further and clean up the matter through forgiveness in God's love.
No doubt the call to believe is a provocation to those who have decided not to answer this challenge in any way at all. Please God not one of us is in that condition.
The second part of the gospel today has the call of Simon (later to be called Peter - the rockman, the foundation of the Church) and his brother Andrew, and the two Sons of thunder James and John (the ones who had the ambitious mother who asked Jesus for the top two positions in his Kingdom for her boys!)
It is important to remember that Jesus' call is not just about morality, about trying to be good. It is also a call to faith and belief, to find meaning in Christ's answers to the purpose and problems of life. Today especially we cannot take our faith for granted, because so many voices shout or whisper to us that Christ is mistaken, or old fashioned or setting too high a standard.
No one was ever able to grow up in a good Catholic family and continue as an adult Catholic, happily and sincerely, on automatic pilot. People born and baptized Catholics have always had to decide to remain so. This is certainly true today. Everyone has to turn again, convert towards Christ at some stage; or perhaps many times.
God has a plan for each of us and we are called to answer, first of all by repenting of our sins and believing in Him as Son of God.
The reaction of many is to say that there are too many people throughout the world's history for God to cope.
I remember hearing a parishioner explain this point about Heaven, saying there would be too many of us for God to look after each one, so that heaven's happiness would come from the company of our friends. And those in hell would suffer because they would be with their friends.
The parishioner was partly wrong about Heaven because God will be the central cause of our happiness there, even though it is consoling to imagine heaven being with our loved ones.
But God does know and love each of us, certainly His followers, but all others as well. Modern computers, the product of human intelligence, able to handle millions of pieces of information in a flash, give us some insight into the intelligence and love of God Almighty.
Once we move beyond the general call to repent and believe, it can be difficult to recognize what in particular God wants us to do. So the Church today has taken up the refrain from the Old Testament psalm "Lord, teach me your ways".
But we have the commandments, the virtues and vices, the beatitudes, the official teachings of the Church, the Catholic Catechism, to outline the parameters of our choices. And we must always start following our Christian duties with those closest to us.
Where does the second reading today fit in i.e: from Paul's first letter to the Christians of Corinth? It is disconcerting. Time is growing short. Those with wives should live as though they had none. So too those who mourn, those enjoying life, those who are buyers and those involved with the world are told to look elsewhere. This world is passing away.
This is a list of provocations, hyperbole, to remind us that spiritual values must be at the top of our list: love, both of God and people; faith and hope; and to remind us that this life is not all there is as we must answer to God to enter eternal life.
Nineveh repented and was saved. May we have the insight to repent and believe and the strength to follow these decisions.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
