HOMILY FOR MONDAY OF THE FIRST WEEK OF ADVENT
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC YOUTH FESTIVAL (ACYF), MELBOURNE, 1 DECEMBER 2025
Doom scrolling. You’ll be familiar with the concept: going through your app of choice and being confronted with a seemingly endless stream of negative and heartbreaking content. Another war breaking out somewhere, another school shooting, another mass murder.
A few days ago the social media was alive with reports of gun-toting men on motorbikes arriving at a Catholic boarding school in Nigeria in the early hours of the morning while the kids were still asleep. 300 of them, some as young as six, along with 12 staff members were forced onto trucks and taken away into the night.[1] While 50 of them have since escaped, the rest are being held for ransom, slavery or forced marriages, in a region where Christians are increasingly being persecuted, churches are regularly burnt down, and many Christians are abducted or killed. News like this is very unsettling, especially for young people hoping for a better world.
It’s not just the violence in the outside world that’s shocking. Digital behaviours are also bleak: vicious arguments erupting in comments sections; slurs and insults you’d never hear in face-to-face life; group chats blowing up with accusations and cancelling people. Spend enough time online, it can seem like conflict is now the default state and that everyone is at each other’s throats. In short: the world is a dumpster fire of hate.
Peace is, of course, among the deepest aspirations in every human heart. We all yearn for it, rest easier when we encounter yet, are filled with anxieties when we don’t. Our Scriptures today speak directly to that yearning. The prophet Isaiah offers a striking vision of what God’s peace actually looks like (Isa 4:2-6). He speaks of a day when the Lord Himself will renew His people—wash away the blood in the streets of Jerusalem, cleanse the hearts of His people of violence, and restore to beauty and glory those weighed down by fear and sorrow. Isaiah imagines God not as a distant power but as a nearby protector, “a canopy and a tent” over us, sheltering us from ‘extreme weather’. It is an image of reality in which the dominant experience is not of conflict, not even of an end to conflict, but the nearness of a God of healing, redemption, safety. In a world where we can feel exposed and vulnerable, Isaiah’s God offers us the shade we need.
Our Psalm today included the heartfelt cry of the Jews from time immemorial: “For the peace of Jerusalem pray: ‘Peace be to your homes! May peace reign in your walls, in your palaces peace!’ For love of my brethren and friends I say: ‘Peace upon you!’” (Ps 121(122)) And the psalm makes it clear this is not just ‘world peace’, something for world leaders, diplomats, generals and beauty queens to figure out: it is something deeply personal. The prayer is for peace in our homes, our hearts, and our relationships: “For love of my relatives and friends I pray, “Shalom. Peace upon you.”
We all know the beautiful prayer attributed to St Francis, “Make me a channel of your peace.” We also pray in other ways for peace. But the greatest of all peace prayers is the Mass. The bishop begins with Christ’s words at the Resurrection, “Peace be with you.” In the Gloria we join the angels in singing at Christ’s Nativity: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.” (cf. Lk 2:14) In the First Eucharistic Prayer we pray “firstly for your holy Catholic Church: be pleased to grant her peace.” Then we pray for ourselves “order our days in your peace”. And we pray that the dead might enjoy “a place of refreshment, light and peace.” Likewise in the Third Eucharistic Prayer we ask that our sacrifice might “advance the peace and salvation of all the world”.
After the Our Father we pray “Deliver us, Lord, from every evil and graciously grant peace in our days”. Then we recall, “Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your apostles, ‘Peace, I leave you, my peace I give you’… graciously grant [your Church] peace and unity in accordance with your will.” The bishop or priest then prays the great Shalom “The peace of the Lord be with you always” and we exchange a sign and words of peace. And if that weren’t enough to prepare peaceful hearts to receive Holy Communion, we sing the Agnus Dei, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: grant us peace.”
That the Mass is like a litany for peace is not just a liturgical stutter or fish filler: it’s a sincere cry from the heart of the Church and from the Sacred Heart Himself. But the Mass is God the Father’s answer: “Here, have all that I can give, receive my own Son, the Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6), the price of peace, peace in our days.” In giving His substance to be incorporated into our own, God does what no hostage negotiator, no U.N. envoy, no teacher, no therapist can do: He changes hearts from within.
In our Gospel today (Mt 8:5-11), the best supporting actor isn’t one of the apostles, religious leaders, or the sick. It’s a Roman centurion. He presumably spoke little or no Hebrew, probably had little respect for Jews and their laws, and would automatically have instilled fear in Jesus’ disciples. But if you were asked at a pub trivia night “What part of the Mass was written by a pagan?” you would know the answer. “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and my servant [my soul] shall be healed”.
Who would have thought that the words of a pagan soldier would still be resounding two thousand years later, all over the world, every day, at the climax of the Mass in Holy Communion? The reason is that his words perfectly express the cry of the human heart. Something is wrong in our world, our relationships, ourselves. We can’t fix it all. But Jesus can. The centurion—a professionally violent man, who instilled fear in those around him—displays the faith, humility and gentleness to “let go and let God”. As we approach Christ in the Eucharist, we do likewise. Faith supplants our fears. We trust. We surrender. And recognising our need and God’s mercy, peace enters our heart.
Yours is the first generation to grow up fully connected globally. You can communicate with someone on the opposite side of the planet in seconds via a small device in your pocket. You can access almost unlimited information and commentary. You can connect with every culture. Hopefully, as digital natives, you won’t buy into the bubbles of bigotry and manufactured outrage of some corners of the social media. Instead, you will use such technologies to get past the artificial barriers between people, and overcome the prejudices that fuel conflicts. Your generation are uniquely placed to be peacemakers for our world.
But here’s the challenge: Christ’s kind of peace is more than just an absence of conflict. It’s not just everyone being chummy in our corner of the social media or of the world. It’s much deeper than that. His kind of Shalom is about an interior transformation that makes you capable of loving as He loves, forgiving as He forgives, serving as He serves. We need the faith, humility and gentleness of that centurion-become-disciple, seeking Christ with every fibre of our being, if we are to receive it.
And so my young friends, whilst you are heirs to a fractured world, you are also heirs of the peace of Christ. Every time you choose understanding over judgment, every time you seek unity rather than division, every time you respond to hate with love, you become living proof that the Prince of Peace is still at work in our world. So join the centurion today at Communion time asking for God’s healing peace. Declare with him “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof”, confident that Christ will “say the word and my soul shall be healed.” If greater peace is going to come to our world, it’s going to come through young hearts like yours, transformed by grace, committed to love, and brave enough to believe that our world, like our souls can be healed.
[1] Alex Smith et al, “Nigeria sees one of worst mass abductions as 315 taken from school,” BBC News 23 November 2025; Rachel Chason et al., “The children were still sleeping when gun-toting men on motorcycles arrived at their school,” Sydney Morning Herald 23 November 2025; “Fifty kidnapped Catholic school students escape captors in Nigeria, more than 250 still being held,” ABC News 24 November 2025