26th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 30 September 2024

We have come to the time of football finals. 

For the teams and the supporters they have one thing in mind, and everything else falls in accordingly.  Single mindedness is a quality we often associate with sport.  It’s the very attribute that brings excellence of performance and success.

Some call sport the religion of Australians but of course sport is a very different experience than faith.  In sport we get what we put into it.  Our skill grows in proportion to the amount of dedicated training we apply.  In sport we master a range of techniques and then through the continual exercise of those skills we perfect them and have them in our arsenal to apply at any time.

Faith, however, is not something that simply grows the more we put into it.  It is not in our control.  We receive it and can never presume it.  We never master it.  It beckons us, invites us, goads us.  We are never quite on top of it.  It is far more elusive.

However, like sport faith does call us to be aware of what we are doing, how we are living, and even more – why we are living.  Above all, faith calls us to be aware of where we are going.  It is faith that challenges us to constantly ask where are going.  And, in the light of our answer, faith challenges us to reflect on the usefulness of what we are doing.  Is the way we are living helpful or not helpful to where we wish to go in life?  Are the things that make up our life fully ordered to our end?

If there is anything that is not, the gospel today dramatically calls us to cut them out.

For us as Christians, our focus is the Kingdom of God.  This is where we are going.  This is the standard by which we are called to question the place of everything else in our life.  The Kingdom of God is the new order of relationships with each other and with God, taught us by the story of Jesus, which will be fully realized in the New Life. To what extent are we consciously aware of this as our life focus?  How single minded are we about this end?  Only the conscious awareness of it enables us to begin to question where our energies lay, to recognise even in the smallest opportunities a chance to realise it further.

Just as we are called into a personal awareness of where we are going as individuals, so are we called into social awareness.  The promise of the Kingdom becomes the light by which we question and evaluate the social reality around us.  To what extent do our society’s structures and policies work to promote the value of the Kingdom?  Just as in our own lives, we are called by today’s gospel to cut out, at least to work against, anything which is not directed toward the Kingdom, so are we called to do is in our lives together as a society.

Today is a day to reflect on what is in our life, and what should not be in our life.  Let us not be too afraid of the discipline that faith requires, for the reward for us, and for all, is great indeed.