Homilies

Mass for the 17th Sunday Ordinary Time, Year B

29 Jul 2018
  

HOMILY FOR MASS FOR THE 17TH SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME, YEAR B
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney

The miracle of the loaves and the fishes is the most reported of all Jesus’ miracles: it appears in all four Gospels and in two of them twice! John’s account (Jn 6:1-15) underlines the connection with the mystery of the Eucharist. He says that Jesus ‘took the bread, gave thanks and gave it to all who were sitting ready’ – the same words the other three evangelists and St Paul use for the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper (cf. Mt 26:26; Mk 14:22; Lk 22:1; 1 Cor 11:25). He also records that after they had all received, Jesus directed the apostles reverently to collect up all that remained. The prophesy of the Mass was unmistakable.

But in case we didn’t get it, John includes, almost immediately after this passage, Jesus’ profound teaching about the Eucharist: “I am the bread of life… the living bread come down from heaven… the bread by which you will live forever… this bread that I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world… unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will have no life in you… whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood real drink.” (Jn 6:25-59)

So John foreshadows the Institution of the Eucharist early in his Gospel, as an interpretative key to much that comes after: the calls to the hungry and thirsty to come to Him; the misunder-standings about who He was and attempts to make Him a secular king; His promise to be present to His disciples through thick and thin; the raising of Lazarus as a further pledge of eternal life for all; His self-gift as man and God in the Holy Week of His Passion and Resurrection. It is all there, in premonition, as He multiples and feeds them the bread that would eventually become the Bread of Life, His flesh for the life of the world.

In taking and multiplying bread on the mountain as a sign breath-taking in its scale, and then bread and wine in the cenacle as a sacrament even more breathtaking in its real presence, Jesus was using the simplest of staple foods and drinks. He was taking something ordinary from our natural world and raising it to something extraordinary from the supernatural.

Of course, even the simplest bread and wine are not entirely neutral symbols for us. They bear all the ambiguity of human manufacture, with its mixture of blessing and curse. Bread, the humble food of peasants and presidents, the food before all other foods, is made from that abundance of wheat that grows all over our globe. Yet there are so many without bread: something like 815 million people around the world do not have the food they need; someone dies of hunger-related causes every ten seconds; and, saddest of all, it is often a child.[1] Rather than sharing our ‘bread’ as Jesus did we have trade wars, tariffs and cartels. Stockpiles of wheat are sown back into ground or dumped at sea, and millions of kilos of bread thrown away each day, rather than given to the starving.

Then there is wine, the drink which cheers our hearts, that brings to mind parties and toasts, celebrations and good times. Yet we know alcohol is the source of so much pain and suffering from drunkenness, violence and neglect, in workplace absenteeism, destitution and car accidents, in broken homes and bones and lives. There are more than 2.5 million alcohol-related deaths each year worldwide.[2]

To this gang of confused and betraying disciples at the Last Supper, to this crowd on the mountain who wanted spiritual fireworks and satisfaction of their baser desires, into the chaos of human joys and hopes, pains and fears, harmony and discord, Jesus enters, again and again, in the Eucharist. Under these ambiguous signs of bread and wine He makes himself present, making sense of it all, humanising it, divinizing it: so that nothing human is alien to God. As from all eternity, now from the very middle of the human mess, God the Father sings His great love song that is God the Son. And that Son now charges us, “from now on, do this in memory of me.”

By foreshadowing all this early on in his Gospel, John left himself free to focus on the washing of the disciples’ feet in his account of the Last Supper(Jn 13:1-17). But he ends that account with the same mandate from Jesus, “Now do likewise”. The Eucharistic life is the life that remembers – remembering the greatest ever self-gift, that by God to us in the Incarnation and Cross, now perpetuated in the Holy Sacrifice. The Eucharistic life is the life that transforms – transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, the material into the sacramental, the human into the divine. The Eucharistic life is the life that serves – serving others by giving ourselves, our flesh and blood, our sweat and tears, for the life of the world.

Today’s Dempsey Medal awardees have likewise taken the bread of ordinary life and offered it as memory, for transformation, and in service. Many have served in our parishes or schools as pastoral associates, in liturgical or musical ministry, sacramental programmes, youth ministry, prayer groups, Bible study, parish councils, administration, parish social life, finance or maintenance. Others have reached out to the sick and shut-in, poor and stranger, as Ministers of Holy Communion, through St Vincent de Paul, Legion of Mary, catechetics, university chaplaincy, apologetics, in other works of justice and mercy, and so much more. Others have served the archdiocese in administration, archiving, research and writing. Together they demonstrate the range of ways in which we can do this in memory of Him and now do likewise.

There’s an old story, believed to be of Native American origin, about an old man who tells his grandson that there are two wolves inside each of us. One is all the good things in the world – love, laughter, friendship, kindness, hope, wisdom, and so on. The other wolf is everything bad – hate, pain, anger, despair. These two wolves, the old man tells his grandson, are always fighting, in a constant battle inside us. “Which one will win?”, the young boy asks. “Whichever one you feed”, is the reply.

Feed the hungry, feed my lambs, feed your souls, feed your better nature: Christ calls us today to feed the wolf of love in us, as our medallists have done. Who will answer that call?

 

INTRODUCTION TO MASS FOR 17TH SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME, YEAR B
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney

 

Welcome to St Mary’s Cathedral for today’s Solemn Mass. Today we will celebrate the second annual presentation of the Dempsey Medal for outstanding service in the Archdiocese of Sydney. It is named in memory of James Dempsey, an Irishman transported to Sydney after ‘the troubles’ of 1798 and later pardoned.

As a stonemason he oversaw the building of Sydney’s first bridge, barracks and hospital, all nearby here, and made a major contribution to our first cathedral. The Dempsey home was pivotal for the Catholics of the early colony, especially in the years when there was no priest or Mass: there people recited the Rosary, taught catechism or prayed Vespers. Dempsey also accompanied condemned prisoners to the gallows and prayed with them. When, two hundred years ago a priest – briefly in the colony – was deported, leaving behind a consecrated host, it may have been the Dempsey household in which it was kept and venerated. There is a stained glass of this event below the window of the Empty Tomb on the West wall of the cathedral. Our awards today, on the nomination of priests and people of Sydney, are named in honour of this prominent lay leader. His descendant Mr Dennis Dempsey is also with us.

To everyone present, but especially to our Medal recipients and their relatives and friends, a very warm welcome.

 

[1] http://www.poverty.com/ ; https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-global-hunger

[2] https://www.ncadd.org/blogs/in-the-news/2-5-million-alcohol-related-deaths-worldwide-annually