8 Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A, Matthew 6:24-34

Have you ever been on a train, or on a bus, and quietly observed the people around you? I call it “people watching”. There is a real skill to it, to look at all that is going on around you, without letting them know that you’re interested in the slightest! Watching people, how they dress, what phone they have, clean-shaven or three day old stubble. Fashion conscious, or not fashion conscious. Confident or not confident. There is something of a tradition of people watching here in Ireland at Sunday Mass. We observe each other, where we sit, what we wear, pious and prayerful or talkative and letting on to be disinterested.

Yet, in our gospel this Sunday we are exhorted to focus first on the coming Kingdom of God. Our worries are very often bound up with what will happen next in our world. We are worried about what will happen for the children of this generation, will they be able to live in the Ireland of the future? Will there be a return to mass poverty? Worries like this can inhabit our mind. They can take over and leave us fretful and worried about the future.

Focusing first on the coming Kingdom of God is a life-long task that each one of us must try to do. Having discovered our faith for ourselves, we then have to make a choice to place God in the first place in our lives. This means entering into a relationship with the Other; the Other that God is and the other that my neighbour is. This is what the commandments are all about – relationship with God, relationship with our neighbour, relationship with my own self.

And we have to love all three. We have to strike a balance between loving God, loving my neighbour and loving myself. We come here to Church as individuals, gathered with our nearest neighbours, to worship God together. That three-fold relationship of love between myself, my God and my neighbour is fed in this gathering.

That is why we say that the Kingdom of God is here and yet still coming to be. When we gather as a community of faith, the principles of the Kingdom of God gain an entrance into our world. We get a small insight of the beauty that awaits us in the coming Kingdom of God.

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”

7 Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A, Matthew 5:38-48 (Children's Homily)

What do you think of when you see a heart? (Hold up the Heart) Maybe you think of St Valentine’s Day, which we celebrated last Monday. Maybe you think of your Mum & Dad, and how much you love them, and how much they love you. Or maybe you think of your brother or sister; or your best friend; or maybe even your teacher in school. It’s easy to love the people who love you, isn’t it?

It’s not just as easy to love people who don’t show us love though. Maybe someone was mean to you in school; maybe they didn’t pick you to play football on their team; or maybe someone made fun of you or called you names. It’s not so easy to love them, is it?

Today, Jesus teaches us a lesson about love. Jesus taught this lesson to the disciples on the side of a hill. The lesson started a few Sundays ago, and it’s nearly finished this Sunday. It’s a long lesson isn’t it? So, what does Jesus teach us about love? (Hold up the Heart again) This Sunday, the lesson that Jesus really wants to teach us is that we have to do our best to love the people that don’t really love us.

You know when you fall out with your Mum or Dad, your Teacher, friend, brother or sister? You know the way that it’s fairly easy to make up with those who love you by saying you’re sorry for what you did wrong?
Well, today, Jesus asks us to love those who don’t love us. He asks us to love those who don’t really like us, and for the A+ grade, Jesus tells us to love those who hate us!

Jesus tells us that love is what God has already shown us, and so we have to try to love everyone as well. And while it isn’t easy to do that, we know that if we try really hard to love everyone, then even those who hate us can one day become our friends.

Maybe we can say a prayer to God to help us to love those who don’t love us:

Father,
it is easy to love those who love us.
Help us to love our enemies
so that they might know
that we are all your children.
We make our prayer through Christ our Lord. Amen.

6 Sunday Ordinary Time, Year A, Matthew 5:17-37

Two years ago, the film ‘2012’ was released. It is a fiction, set in the near future, about cataclysmic end-of-the-world events. Around the time of the film’s release it kicked off a worldwide fascination with the Mayan people, who are said to have predicted the end of the world in December 2012.

Our fascination with the end of the world is endless. Films and books, gurus and religious fanatics of many creeds and persuasions have attempted to convince us of the impending doom that is coming upon us. The ‘end of the world’ is a very profitable industry.

Anybody here who has lost somebody precious to them knows what the end of the world feels like. When a loved one dies, or when a marriage breaks down, or when we ourselves experience a form of nervous breakdown – everything changes. Our world ends. Everything that was important: our job, house, car, salary – it all loses its value in the face of what has just happened to us. In one way we are lost. But, in another way we are found, because in that moment of loss we encounter reality in its purest form. I don’t mean that we have to be sad to be real. What I do mean is that the priorities we have in life – success and status, honour and prestige, lose all their value in the face of loss.

It is the same when we encounter God. We know that we have encountered truth when all of the priorities of our life get turned upside down. When success and status lose their power over us, we know that we have encountered the holy in some way.

It is much like this when a priest hears the call of God in his heart for the first time, calling him to give up everything: success, land, money, wife, for the sake of God’s Kingdom – as the song goes: ‘nothing else matters’.

It is like this when a young couple fall in love for the first time: ‘nothing else matters’.

In a way, we need a ‘nothing else matters’ approach to hear today’s gospel in the way that it was intended. We need to be able to hear it from the point of view of having encountered God. And, when you think about it, if you or I had encountered God, would anything else matter?

This brings us to a subtlety of the spiritual life: and that is our ability to forget the most beautiful encounters we have had with God. It is the same thing that allows us to move on from a painful experience of loss. We gradually forget the pain of loss – and we gradually forget the beautiful spiritual consolations that we have been given.

For the pain of loss, the therapists and counsellors recommend to us to remember the painful experience in order to be genuinely healed. For the beauty of the encounters we have had with the divine, the spiritual directors and accompaniers exhort us to keep a journal, so that we will be able to remember, and give thanks.

Our gospel today appears to be hard-hitting and uncompromising. It appears to make no sense in our time and place. We forget that it did not make sense in Jesus’ time and place either!

This Sunday’s gospel calls us to a deeper reality than the everyday aims and goals of our daily living. It reminds us of the real priorities of life that we encounter in the fleeting moments of love or of loss, of the call of God and the way of truth.

5 Sunday Ordinary Time, 6 February 2011, Matthew 5:13-16

In the summer of 2003, a friend of mine and I travelled to Kenya. It was the second summer holidays that we had from the seminary. My friend was a Christian Brother, and so we organised to stay with the brothers in Nairobi, and from there to go out to explore the city, it's people and eventually to go on safari to other parts of the country.

While we were there, we met a Mercy sister from Dublin called Sr Mary Killeen. Sr Mary was something of a maverick sister, but she had great respect within her own community, among the poor people and the addicts that she worked with, and certainly my friend and I were quite awestruck by her.

Sr Mary was very kind to us, and she organised for us to visit various AIDS outreach services: AIDS Clinics in some of the slum areas, and AIDS orphanages, where orphans of those who had died from AIDS were housed. She gave us an introduction to the ministry she had working with drug addicts; helping them to become artists and craftworkers. Reading from Isaiah today:

"Share your bread with the hungry,

and shelter the homeless poor,

clothe the man you see to be naked

and turn not from your own kin.

Then will your light shine like the dawn ..."

Sr Mary also made a small Suzuki jeep available to us for the last days of our time in Kenya. We were warned not to travel after dark because of the many dangers in Kenya at that time. Of course, as you can imagine, we ended up travelling during the hours of darkness, trying to squeeze the most out of the brief time we had left.

One night travelling back to Nairobi, with a good hour's drive ahead of us, we got a puncture. Stopping the car to change the wheel, I was struck by how dark it was when the lights of the car were turned off.

Dark and quiet.

Almost silent.

It was eerie and quite frightening, especially when we remembered that during that day we had seen Lions, Cheetah, Hippos and Zebra. What if one of these frightening, wild animals were to have stumbled on us, and us standing there, trying to change a wheel in the dark?

Light and dark are curious things. The presence of light can make us feel calm, and the dark can make us distressed. Isn't it strange, that we need the dark to fall asleep?

 

"You are the light of the world."

Research has shown that lighting in urban areas during the hours of darkness corresponds with big drop in crime. On the other hand, light can be used as a form of torture to keep a person from falling asleep in the process known as 'sleep deprivation'.

For us Christians, Jesus is the light of the world. He lights up the dark corners of our lives, and of our society and culture. And, this Sunday, we hear the words on his lips:

"You are the light of the world."

As followers, as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to be light-bearers in our world.

"If you do away with the yoke,

the clenched fist, the wicked word,

if you give your bread to the hungry,

and relief to the oppressed,

your light will rise in the darkness,

and your shadows become like noon."