Celebrating Disciples of All Nations

20^th Sunday of Year C (Luke 12: 49-53)

17 August 2019
Fr David Ranson
Diocesan Administrator

In an interview, the winner of the Miles Franklin Prize for literature this year, the aboriginal writer, Melissa Lucashenko quoted the philosopher, Rosa Luxemburg: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”[1]  Luxemburg is a Marxist thinker, but I think this declaration is to be something quite true. The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening. It reminded me of a wonderful sentence in Pope Francis’ recent exhortation to the Youth of our Church when he declared, “I ask you to be revolutionaries, I ask you to swim against the tide; yes, I am asking you to rebel against this culture that sees everything as temporary and that ultimately believes you are incapable of responsibility, incapable of true love.”[2]

If we are to be revolutionaries then we must be prepared to see things as they are, and not to be afraid to speak out what we see. Nearly 50 years ago, the famous Scripture scholar, Walter Brueggemann defined the prophet as the one who could articulate the grief of the people that is denied its recognition by the dominant consciousness. Reflecting on the great prophets of the Old Testament, Brueggemann recognised that a society can live in a passive state of grief seduced by the lie that everything is fine.[3] The prophet is the one who rouses the society from their slumber, awakens them to see things as they are, and to take action to change. This is the vocation of Jeremiah the liturgy shares with us in the First Reading.  Jeremiah knew that in war the first victim is truth. He did not go along with the propaganda of the rulers which was designed to promote the inhabitants’ morale, to keep them feeling good.  He said it as he saw it.  That truth was disturbing and bad for morale.  And so, he was considered a traitor and treated as such.

Yet, his fire is the passion of Jesus as proclaimed in the Gospel we have heard. It is our responsibility.

To have a passion for the truth. This is no easy vocation. It makes our presence uncomfortable, disturbing. It sets us apart. It is extraordinary that over the centuries the passionate reality of compassion, at the very heart of the Gospel, has become confused with a type of timidity. However, the original word for compassion in Greek means a strange combination of rage and empathy:  it’s a feeling that galvanises us into action; it literally means “to have one’s bowels churn”! It is a gut feeling which moves us to action. True compassion leads us to speak out about injustice; it leads us to protest.  It cannot remain silent in the face of evil.  It does not just take pity on those who are suffering, but revolts at the causes of that suffering and seeks to change those causes. It does not simply lead us to comfort the disturbed.  It also leads us to disturb the comfortable.

True compassion never sacrifices truth but speaks it out loud and clear. From the Christian perspective truth and compassion are two sides of the one coin. We cannot have compassion without truth, just as we cannot have truth without compassion. Only the two taken together break a numbness created by indifference.  It is the kind of compassion needed today to conquer what Pope Francis calls, “the globalisation of indifference.”[4]  This is the indifference to the concerns of the world that would have us withdraw into ourselves, into a preoccupation with our own immediate worries. At worst, then, our faith becomes a private, personal matter rather than a public, social force which it must also be for it to be legitimate. We always have to question ourselves when the exercise of our faith has rendered us less involved in the state of the world rather than more involved.

No, Christian faith is public, not private; it is something shared, not simply interior. And because of this it is not something independent of culture. Culture gives public form to our faith. We can come to God in no other way than through our culture, for we can come to understanding of our experience only through our culture which forms the very way we think. Our culture gives us the many customs of song, dance, clothing through which we express our faith. But much more importantly, our culture gives us the language by which we think. And even more significantly, it provides us with what we call those “triggers of transcendence” those experiences particular to our own culture by which we glimpse the invitation into something more than what is merely before us. What speaks to me of God can be quite different for an Australian, than for a Korean, than for a Vietnamese, than for a Filipino. This diversity weaves into a marvellous kaleidoscope of the way in which the life of God inbreaks into human experience.

And just as we cannot remain locked up in our own personal interiority, how important it is for cultures, themselves, not to become cocooned. In the wonderful project of inter-culturality we celebrate how diversity and unity need not be in opposition. This is what we celebrate this evening in our annual diocesan event: one God, many languages; one Faith, many cultures; one song; many choirs.

In so doing, our sense of community deepens and develops. It is this experience of being in community by which we are resourced to become those passionate prophets for truth the Gospel impels us to be. We cannot take up the fire of the Gospel alone, as individuals. The Gospel does not imagine this. We do so as the community the Gospel has called into being. It is our being in community – enriched and woven together by such diverse threads of cultural difference – that provides us with the source of our nourishment, our accountability, our purpose and direction. Faith without community is not possibility; community is faith’s hearth. The crisis of faith is in direct consequence to the crisis in community. If we wish to build faith, then we must build community.

And the community that emerges is one ready to be different, not swallowed up and dissolved into populist sentiment: a community that is prepared to speak the truth, and yes, even to be revolutionary so that the dream of God for a fully human world might be realised.