15th Sunday of the Year C

The wonderful thing about a good story is the almost infinite variety of ways in which it can be interpreted. This is why Jesus, like all great teachers, speaks in parables. Parables are mirrors into which we are invited to gaze until we begin to see a reflection of ourselves. What we see in them will vary from person to person and there is no single interpretation which is the right one over and above all others. There are one or two cases in the Gospel where Jesus apparently explains a parable, but scholars tell us that these explanations were added later by the early church. Jesus himself never explained his parables. Parables are like jokes in this respect. If you need to explain them they are not worth telling. A good parable, like a good joke, speaks for itself.

So what could the parable of the Good Samaritan, be saying to us today? Well, given that we are slap bang in the middle of July and half-way the Kilmarnock Fair, I would like to offer you one particular interpretation of the Good Samaritan. For years now, it has been my habit to offer you around this time a reflection on the place of rest in the christian life and, on the basis of this parable, I would like to do the same now. Its meaning, to paraphrase the first reading, is not beyond our reach. It’s not beyond the heavens or beyond the sea so that someone has to go and bring it back. It’s very near to us. So near, in fact, that each one of us here is every person in that story. It’s not about someone else. You are the man who who fell into the hands of brigands. You are the brigands who beat him up and left him for dead. You are the priest and the Levite who walked by on the other side and, you have the potential, at least, to be the Good Samaritan, the hero of the story. But how can we be all of these people at the same time? Well, let’s look at it again.

Few of us, I would suggest, can avoid forever being mugged by modern living. Life has always had the habit of jumping up and punching us in the face when we least expect it. Sickness and ill-health comes to us all eventually and there is ultimately no way of avoiding them. But the modern world has developed some very sophisticated forms of sickness. The speed of technological change in our lifetime has been truly astonishing, the problem being that we ourselves, locked into the much slower process called evolution, have not been able to keep pace with it. The result is that we are living at a speed we were never designed for and the result is that modern version of the plague we call stress. Its everywhere and no-one is safe from it. It comes in a thousand shapes and forms and, if we are to believe what the medical people tell us, can be a cause of most of the other diseases we suffer from and sooner or later die from. Even the apparently young, fit and healthy can be struck down by it and the road from Jerusalem to Jericho would be littered today with its victims, often left for dead by an economic system which swallows people whole, chews them up and spits them out again without a thought for the ell being of the individual involved. Basically, we are all trying to do do too many things too quickly all at the same time and, not surprisingly, something has to give. And eventually, no matter who we are, it does.
But if we are to change this situation we must recognize that, as well as being the man who was mugged, we are also the brigands who did the mugging. In other words, there is no point in blaming someone else for putting us under all this stress. We do it ourselves. When I was ill two years ago, the most important advice I got was, ‘listen to your body.’ Our bodies are very wise and are constantly telling us what their needs are. So often, however, we just don’t pay any attention. Time and time again we go through red lights, ignoring the body’s requests for rest, for time off, for sleep, for medical attention and so on. Why we do this is very complicated. Partly its that most fundamental of all sins reflected in the book of Genesis; the desire to be like God, a deep rooted tendency in us which deludes us into thinking we can do whatever we want regardless of the limitations which go with being human. And so, in all kinds of ways, we abuse and harm our bodies, demanding of them more than they are able to deliver, until one day we find ourselves lying on that road from Jerusalem to Jericho, bruised and battered in all kinds of ways by our own foolishness. Which brings us to the Good Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan, in this sense, is our capacity to care for ourselves or love ourselves, something which, for a whole series of reasons, most of us are not very good at. And yet, if it is so important today to care for and look after the planet we live on, how much more important must it be to care for our our own bodies, created as we are in the image and likeness of God. And so, as men and women of faith, we are called to resist all those modern pressures which lead to stress. Our consumer-driven society tells us that happiness lies in acquiring more material things. This drive for more and more things fuels an economic system which sucks the very life blood out of human beings today to the detriment of not just our health, but family life and relationships, the things that really matter, and only the Good Samaritan in ourselves, can ultimately save us from this, something that became very real for me yesterday.

As I was writing this homily, the phone rang. It was someone inviting me for lunch. My first reaction was that I couldn’t possibly go. I had all kinds of holy things to do: this homily to prepare, the bulletin and bidding prayers to do and everything to get ready for Mass. I could’t possibly go for lunch. But after putting the phone down I saw very clearly that it was the priest and the Levite in me that had said no to the invitation. And so I let the Good Samaritan decide instead and went. And it was really good.

So my final thought today is: Thank God for innkeepers. I hope to see a lot of them over the next few weeks.


BIDDING PRAYERS

We begin our prayer this week by holding up before God all those people in our society today who are the victims of the stress caused by the rapid pace of modern living. Over and over again we hear people complain of exhaustion. Many simply cannot cope. And so we ask God for the wisdom we need to discern the movement of his Spirit in the midst of all this so that, together, we can learn to live more healthy and balanced lives……………………………Lord hear us

We pray in a particular way for all those people who suffer from mental health problems in our society today. Often they are misunderstood and treated as modern-day lepers, forced to live on the margins of society and shunned by those of us who have no appreciation of the nature and seriousness of their illness. And so we pray for a deeper understanding of what is happening to them and a profound awareness that such illness could strike any of us at any time…………………………....Lord hear us

While we are young and healthy we tend to think that illness is something that happens to others and will never happen to ourselves. When it finally comes and we discover that we are as human as everybody else it can be difficult to cope with. And so we pray for all around us whose health is breaking down or is causing worry and concern, that they will have the inner strength they need to deal with this and all that the passing of the years inevitably brings………………………………...Lord hear us

The parable of the Good Samaritan takes us to the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It is about loving our neighbour as ourselves. These two things go together because, unless we learn to love ourselves, we will not know how to love others. A person who has no sense of his or her own worth will have no sense of the worth of others. And so we pray for a deep sense of what it means to be created in God’s image and likenss, both for ourselves and for every person we meet in the course of our lives…...Lord hear us

The priest and the Levite in the story passed by on the other side, not because they were bad people, but because they were on their way to the temple and would have been made ritually unclean by touching the body of a dead man. Jesus is teaching us here that reaching out to those in need is far more important than religious actions, a lesson many pious church-going people down through the ages have failed to grasp. And so we ask God to help us grasp it now……….……………………..Lord hear us

Many Good Samaritans will have come into our lives over the years. And so we ask God to stir in us today a deep sense of gratitude for them and for the part, small or great, which they have played in our lives. And we pray, too, for the grace to recognize the people around us now for whom we ourselves are called to be Good Samaritans, reaching out to them in their need…………………………...Lord hear us

14th Sunday of the Year C.

I celebrated the thirty eighth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood on Thursday, an annual opportunity to reflect on all that has happened to me since that hot July Saturday in Muirkirk in 1969. As the day itself approached, the main feelings I had were ones of amazement and gratitude; amazement at where the years had gone – a feeling I know many of you are familiar with - and gratitude for the way God has been at work in everything that has happened to me over those years. But there was another feeling, too, which I found difficult to pin down It wasn’t a strong feeling, but it was definitely there, mixed in with the amazement and gratitude. It had an element of sadness and diappointment to it, tiredness even, and as I felt it and reflected on it I knew what it was about. I knew, too, that it had started several days earlier when I had first read today’s second reading in preparation for this week’s homily.

‘It does not matter whether a person is circumcised or not’ I had heard Paul say, ‘What matters is for him ( or her) to become an altogether new creature.’ And even as I typed those words on Friday evening while preparing this homily, I felt the sadness again, a sadness at what I experience as our general failure to accept and take on board the full significance of what St Paul is saying here and so become the new creatures he speaks of. I remembered again those words of my old friend. ‘Ah ken whit yer tryin’ tae dae. Yer tryin’ tae take religion oot ae a Sunday and pit it into the rest of the week, and ah don’t want it.’ And as I pictured him, living not far from here, and heard him, in my imagination, speak those words, I saw very clearly that he had spoken them, not because he did not understand St Paul’s words, but because he did understand them and, like the rest of us, wanted to keep them at a safe distance. He knew that taking religion out of a Sunday and puting it into the rest of the week would have huge long-term implications and he didnae want it. He knew, as we all do deep within ourselves, that taking the Gospel seriously and becoming altogether new creatures would mean radical conversion and change. And, like the rest of us, he was not ready for it. It scared the wits out of him, as it does most of us, and so he preferred to paddle about in the safe, shallow waters of religion, with its superstition and mumbo-jumbo, rather than launch out into the deep waters of faith. And what I was feeling this week along with the amazement and gratitude was sadness and disappointment at this as well as tiredness after thirty eight years of confronting this resistance in myself and others. I realised that my friend’s words had made such a lasting impression on me - why else would I have quoted him so often – not because he was some kind of maverick, the exception to the rule, but because he spoke to one degree or another for each one of us.

I am aware, of course, that this reaction in me is partly because I am just a week away from my summer holidays and ready for a break. But there is more to it than that. Trained in the sixties during the Second Vatican Council I am, as I have explained before, part of a generation of priests who were filled with hope and optimism as a result of those years. I came back to Scotland from Spain in 1969 filled with enthusiasm and convinced we we were on the threshold of a new age in the life of the Church. And, of course, we are. But it is taking longer than we thought it would then. The resistance is deep-rooted, the conservatism hard to break down, the ignorance and superstition widespread and more and more I and my generation – one of whom I had the joy of meeting last Sunday for the first time in over thirty years - are having to face what I have always believed anyway was the vital question at the heart of our ministry. ‘Can we live with the fact that our dreams will be fulfilled fifty years after we are dead?’

But while I still believe that, in the long run, God is doing great things in the world and in the Church, in the short term another possibility has to be faced. In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the seventy two that whenever they enter a town and the people do not welcome them, they are to shake the dust from their feet and move on. Several times in other parts of the Gospel he warns the people of his own day that, if they do not produce fruit, the kingdom will be taken from them and given to others who will produce its fruit. In parable after parable he makes this same point and it is true in every age. There is nothing inevitable about history. Each generation creates its own history. It is what we choose to make it and the danger we have to face is the possibility that, having lived through a time of potentially historic change after Vatican II, our generation will also fail to produce fruit, causing history itself to shake the dust from its feet and move on, offering to future generations as yet unborn the chance to make a better job of things than we have done. And at the heart of the sadness I have felt this week has been the thought that this could well happen.

It’s all to do with the freedom St Paul has been speaking about for the last two weeks in that letter to the Galatians. God is calling us to be altogether new creatures, not to make life difficult for us but so that we may have life and have it to the full. It is precisely by living according to the Gospel that humanity will become all that it is capable of being. But having made us free, God will never force us. And so we have to choose the way of the Gospel rather than what Paul called last week the way of self-indulgence. And this is a life-long process. We do not become the new creatures Paul speaks of overnight. It means conversion on a daily basis. It means letting God into the centre of our lives, taking him out of a Sunday and putting him into the rest of the week.

But there is still time.Thankfully, history has not yet shaken the dust of our time from its feet. We can still do it.


BIDDING PRAYERS



The first reading today was taken from the prophet Isaiah, a man whose confidence in God’s promises is always expressed in lavishly optimistic language and imagery. He speaks today of peace flowing like a river and describes God as a mother carrying her baby at her breast and fondling him on her knee. He must have sounded over the top to many people in his own day time, and yet his prophecies were fulfilled in ways not even he could imagine. And so we pray for some of his vision…….Lord hear us

When Paul says that it does not matter if a person is circumcised or not and that what matters is that we become altogether new creatures, he is speaking of the movement from religion to faith. Christianity means the death of religion and the birth of something radically new for the world. And so we pray for the people of our time that we will be open to this altogether new thing Paul is speaking of…....Lord hear us

In the Gospel today Jesus speaks of how the harvest is rich but the labourers few. He then tells his disciples to ask God, the Lord of the harvest, to send labourers to his harvest. But we are those labourers. Through our baptism, we are called to be the ones who go out into the world proclaiming, by the way we live, the Good News that the kingdom of God is close at hand. And so we ask God to give us the strength we need to do this in the context of our individual lives……………………..Lord hear us

Jesus sends his disciples out like lambs among wolves. They are to carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals, all of which symbolizes the fact that they can only succeed if they put their complete trust in God rather than their own human resources. And so we pray for the Church at this moment in its history, that, in the midst of an often hostile world, we will never lose trust in God or in the power of the Gospel to change people’s hearts in ways that surprise us………….Lord hear us

There is always the danger that we will fail to produce fruit, causing the kingdom to be taken from us and given to others who will produce its fruit. And so we pray for a profound openness to the movement of God in history at this time. We pray, especially, that we will nor betray the Second Vatican Council and all it represents, even although it happened a generation ago now………….Lord hear us

At this time of the year, many people are on holiday. And so we pray for all those who worship here each week but who are currently in other places. We pray that they will, in due course, return to us safe and refreshed and that while they are away they will have the grace they need to enjoy to the full the many gifts of creation, appreciating, not only the beauty of nature, but the culture, history and people of the places they visit.....Lord hear us