Homilies and Addresses 2007
6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Celebrated By Archbishop Denis Hart
at St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne
on Sunday, 11th February, 2007 at 11.00am

Introduction

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today the Church challenges us to live in God’s presence and to follow the way of the Beatitudes, which leads us through daily life and suffering to the glory of God’s presence and our ultimate destiny.

He has promised to remain forever with those who do what is right.

As we call to mind our sins, let us ask him to make us more constantly aware of his saving presence.

Homily

On first reading we may think that that Gospel is not for us.  Surely, Jesus was talking to poor people about life in the rough, about people on the edges of life! 

Let us look more closely.  Those who are poor, who hunger and who weep, people who are hated, driven out, abused and called criminal – these are the ones to whom Jesus promises blessedness

In the rough and tumble of life many of us can suffer adversity, often unknown to others.  That is why Jesus helps us to see beyond that adversity because through that adversity we are invited to see the kingdom of heaven, which has become now clearer.

This Gospel takes up what was promised to the chosen people since Abraham and we are directed, not merely to possessing a territory or to earthly possessions here and now, but to the kingdom of heaven.

More than this, through our suffering and challenge and weeping, we are made one with the passion of Christ and rise with him to new life.  They show us the actions and attitudes that are really the actions of Christ’s followers, despite present challenges, to see the glimmer of hope and light and to offer it to the world.

Too often these days, as Catholics, we ignore sin.  We want the world and Christ without a cross, then there is no need for repentance and acknowledging our weakness.  How untrue and unreal this is!  We know deep down that we are broken and fail and we struggle, but we must get up again and we must hope for Saint Luke’s promise that the poor will possess the kingdom, the hungry will be satisfied, those who weep shall laugh, because of the great reward in heaven.

Dear brothers and sisters, today the Lord invites us to humbly acknowledge our frailty and sin, our sufferings and burdens, but also to take hold of a rich hope which is eternal and imperishable by admitting that we are sinners, by receiving forgiveness, by knowing that when we struggle we can turn to Christ as our light and our only hope.

The twentieth century writer, Paul Tillich, had these words to say:  “Jesus praises the poor insofar as they live in two worlds – the present world and the world to come – and he threatens the rich insofar as they live in one world alone.  We live in two orders.  The coming order is always coming, shaking this order, fighting with it, conquering it and conquered by it.  The coming order is always at hand.  No one can ever say it is here, it is there, one can never grasp it, but one can be grasped by it.  And whenever one is grasped by it he is rich even if he be poor in this order.  Only through the paradox of the Beatitudes can we begin to understand our own life and the life of our world.”

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.