21st Sunday in Ordinary Time 2021
Often enough our literary artists, our writers, offer invaluable social observations. They have the gift of intuiting the deeper currents and the mood in the nation long before many others. The Australian novelist, Tim Winton is a fine example of this. Some time ago, Tim Winton observed that his great passion for the Australian landscape, which is shared by many of us, may have, however, an underlying anxiety attached to it.
He remarks how the Australian landscape was such a shock to the first Europeans who arrived here:
“How they loathed it for failing to be Europe. How infuriated they were at its ‘perversity’, its odd weather and backward running rivers and kooky animals. How disappointed they were time and again. Witness the names: Bitter Creek, Useless Loop, Mount Misery. A ‘fresh’ continent, the great south land was ‘discovered’ at last, but what collective disappointments, what confounding of expectations must have ensued for the English to be only able to imagine the future of their new possession as a dumping ground for the Victorian underclass. It strikes me as stranger still that after being horrified by the place for so long, people had warmed to it by the end of last century, devised a whole mythology in song and ballad and gone all nationalistic over it. Suddenly, they felt they had the hang of terra australis. How much of our enthusiasm for landscape masks the anxieties still with us? Did we love it for itself or simply because it’s supposedly ours?”
For Tim Winton and others one of the distinctive characteristics of the Australian landscape is the way that it resists being tamed, resists being domesticated. Its vast presence looms behind us as we cringe to the coast. “It will be centuries/Before many men are truly at home in this country,” wrote the poet Les Murray.
Beyond our indigenous people, we are at root a nation of immigrant people for whom the question of home runs deep. Often enough home is not here. It is an Indonesian city, a Dublin street, a Filipino province. We know many stories of how people have left somewhere else to risk making a home in this place.
Where is home? Where is our home? My home? What defines home for me? Where is the place that I feel most deeply connected? From where do I most fully draw life? These are the questions of immigrants. And not just immigrants, but all of us in some way.
They are also our questions as followers of Jesus. For to believe in the Gospel is in a sense to become an immigrant – an immigrant of the heart and the spirit – and to confront the difficult question about where our real home might be. When Jesus asks his disciples will they leave him as have many others, he is asking the question of where will they make their ‘home.’ When Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go?’ he is affirming that the message of Jesus alone answers the deepest and truest hunger for ‘home’.
In Jesus we have found our home. The one, however, who makes their home in Jesus also takes on themselves a certain exile, a certain restlessness. I think this may be so in two ways,
Firstly, like the great Australian landscape, the Gospel, that place to which we have come home, resists domestication and taming. It keeps confronting us as a question, coaxing us, goading us to think in new ways. And therefore we are never allowed the luxury of fully feeling settled. We become pilgrims, never quite satisfied that the end has yet been reached.
This home, secondly, sets us up often enough as a kind of wanderer never fully satisfied with what there simply is around us. Just as we might struggle with being at home in the landscape here in Australia, as Christians we now also struggle with being ‘at home’ in society, generally. Often we do not feel quite ‘at home.’ Our values, our attitudes, our perspectives on life are different from many we live with. Our manners set us apart, and often make us look somewhat strange, outdated, irrelevant.
We have come home only to find ourselves on a journey, a way of living that marks our life as followers of Jesus who keeps moving ahead of us.
