Silver Anniversary of Ordination of Fr Shaju John and Fr Joy Kunnassery – 25th Sunday of Year C – Asquith
For a long time, it has been the social rule in Australia that the topics of religion and politics are not to be raised in polite conversation. In Australia, particularly, when religious leaders start talking about political or economic matters many of us start feeling uneasy, if not even embarrassed. We have concerns about naivety, or anxieties about appeals drawn from a sectarian past, or fears about ecclesiastical interference in affairs that are rightly independent of the structure of the Church. Even if the voice is allowed, often enough the statements are relegated to be ‘motherhood’ and quaint, and really without a great deal of consequence.
However, I think the Word which comes to us in today’s gospel warns us against this kind of splitting in our thinking. It declares, “no servant can be the slave of two masters.” It calls, therefore, for a certain integrity in our choices and behaviours. It impels us to have a single point of reference in our life which might inform all our dealings, many of which at first might not seem to be spiritual, or with particular religious significance, at all. The text speaks of money. Yet, I think money, in this context, might be regarded as all that which is symbolic of our ordinary world of social, economic and political affairs. What the text is, at root, trying to express is that we cannot believe in God on the one hand, and act in the ordinary affairs of the world as if we had no belief. Christian discipleship doesn’t allow that type of splitting. We have to find a point of integration – and this unifying dynamic is to be found in our sense of the Kingdom of God. The notion of the Kingdom of God was at the centre of Jesus’ entire ministry. This Kingdom is not simply a spiritual reality. It is also a social one. It is not simply about another world. It is also about this one. The Kingdom of God, as termed by Jesus, is firstly a social project which imagines a new order of relationships between us. It seeks to create a social life which is characterised by community, reconciliation, and inclusion where each of us lives for the other, by the other, with the other. It is what guides all our choices so that we can create a society that reflects God’s dream for us and by which we can grow together in the most human way possible.
This project is not simply a remote aspiration. It is known as we strive to bring about actual communities – living communities of faith which bear the life of Risen Christ to us. These communities come into being as we come together “to re-read the Scriptures with Christ in mind, repeat his gestures in memory of him especially at the Eucharist, and live fellowship in lives of care for one another.”[1] This is the heart of the life of each of our parishes, the parish of Kur-ring-gai Chase. Our own Parish gives the Kingdom of God its face in the world. This is the most remarkable call and responsibility. However, it is not a grand panorama but rather an intensely human mosaic. As one writer would put it
“It is in the pews of the parish that we see the ardent, waiting, and unsure huddled together by the call of mystery, men and women living out the drama and ordinariness of their relationship with God. It is in the parish that we discern the weight of burdens as well as the innermost desires brought to prayer and the consolation of silence and celebration. It is in the parish that we find families growing and changing week to week, learning how to be with one another and with God, the courageous seeking forgiveness and healing in the bareness of their humanity, no longer a secret to themselves. It is in the parish that we find the young couple discerning their way forward through love, hope, decision, even contradiction, and the elderly couple remembering, valuing, and celebrating a lifetime of living. We gather ourselves with those giving thanks for fulfilled hopes and unexpected providence, those seeking the comfort of meaning at times of deepest darkness, and those anticipating and longing to be touched by the friendship of God. All this takes place in the parish, whether it be a community overflowing with activity and conversation, or an utterly unglamorous scenario, bare of obvious intensity.”[2]
And just as our Parish is the face of the Kingdom of God through all these different activities and hopes, so too our parish community has its face. This face is in the presence of the ordained minister entrusted to care for us and to help us realise our vocation. This was central to St Pope John Paul II’s understanding of the ordained priesthood. He understood that the community as a whole was priestly – we are a community of worship made up of consecrated persons ‑ people who have become, by their baptismal immersion into the mystery of Christ made priestly, who by their coming together in worship and service give form to the body and life of the Risen Lord.[3] And it is the ordained ministry that has the responsibility to empower all this to occur. It is called the ‘ministerial priesthood’ because of it is precisely at the service of enabling a community to become what it is called to be. It is to promote the exercise of the common priesthood of the entire people of God and to empower the community of ministries that ensue in the common priesthood. As John Paul II taught, “Indeed the ministerial priesthood does not of itself signify a greater degree of holiness with regard to the common priesthood of the faithful; through it, Christ gives to priests, in the Spirit, a particular gift so that they can help the People of God to exercise faithfully and fully the common priesthood which it has received.”[4]
This morning we give thanks to God for the unique and personal way that Fr Shaju and Fr Joy do this for our own community, and the way in which they have sought to do so in different circumstances over the last 25 years. To this task they bring their rich history and culture, their own gifts and yes, even their own questions and struggles. We thank them for the remarkably generous way in which they have given their lives to us here so that we can become a community of faith-filled life – a community which reflects the values of the Kingdom of God and a community from which we draw the strength and courage to live out those values in the world.
And this brings us to the challenge of our Gospel text this day. We live under the one Master. Our lives and responsibilities, our functions and contributions, are different but it is the one Word which directs all our lives. Together we strive to be faithful to this Word of Love. Together let us allow this Word to echo deep within our hearts so that our lives, both as ministers and as a community, may be more deeply shaped by it. May it be the Word which guides not just some of our actions but all of them. Then, indeed, without any contradiction we become the face of the community, the face of the Kingdom, the face of the Lord himself.
[1] See Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, translated by P. Madigan and M. Beaumont, (Collegeville, MN: Pueblo, 1995).
[2] Daniel Ang, “The Catholic Parish.” Unpublished Paper.
[3] John Paul II, “Laity Share in the Priesthood of Christ,” General Audience Address 15 December, 1993, L’Osservatore Romano 51/52, (22/29 December, 1993), 9; John Paul II, “Lettera ai Sacerdoti in Occasione del Giovedi’ Santo 1989,” n.1, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_12031989_priests_it.html, accessed 30 March 2010.
[4] John Paul II, Pastores dabo vobis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Formation of Priests in the Present Circumstances (25 March 1992), n. 17.
