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Imperfect heroes

The two great saints we celebrated on Thursday (St Peter and St Paul) are regarded as the giants of the Church, as heroes, because they affirmed the foundation (Jesus) on which the Church is built. You can see and hear me give this Homily on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MuNkx_PXg


Yet although I have just described them as heroes, they are both men who had to admit what weak and fallible people they actually were. We know only too well that Peter, who was described by Jesus as “The Rock on which I will build my Church” (Matt 16:12-19), despite all his bluster, his claim that he was prepared to die with Jesus, was just another of the disciples who ran away when the crunch came, and then what is worse, when challenged, swore that he didn’t even know Jesus, and was certainly not his follower.


Paul might seem to be more of a hero, travelling around the Eastern Mediterranean, braving all sorts of things, in order to tell people about Jesus; but he also had to admit that he was much weaker than people might realise. He explained that he had what he called “a thorn in the flesh” – and even though we don’t know what this thorn in the flesh was, it tells us that facing up to his weakness and admitting it to others, and relying instead on the grace and power of God, was the central way in which he proclaimed the Gospel, rather than proclaiming himself. This is what he wrote : Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)


Our three Readings this Sunday all convey the same message to us in different ways. Did you notice in our 1st Reading (2 Kings 4:8-16) that the woman was “a woman of rank”? In other words she had everything she wanted, money, property, servants etc. ; but Elisha’s wise servant Gehazi (Isn’t it nice that we know his name) realises the one thing in her life that is missing – a child. I am intrigued that Elisha needed his servant to tell him this, so he was not as all-wise as one might have expected! There’s the message for us, for you would have thought he would have noticed; but even the great Elisha is imperfect, and so God works to bring joy to this woman through a servant.


So what on earth has this got to do with our Gospel ? (Matt 10:37-42) The obvious link is with the woman’s simple hospitality. She gives Elisha a lot more than “A cup of cold water”; but actually a meal and a room with a bed for the night organised by her servants, was for her, as a woman of rank, quite a small thing in her busy life. And there we might leave it, a message that even the smallest things we do for others are worthwhile in the sight of God; but that leaves out the challenging words from the beginning of the Gospel which seem to imply that we must even neglect our parents if we are to follow Jesus. The answer here I think is to realise that Jesus knows how easily we use excuses to avoid doing those simple small things for others. He knows how easily we might use the needs of our family, our parents or our children, to miss out on these small actions of love – to omit doing them because we are too busy. It reminds me of the Parable Jesus tells of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:15-24) where people give all sorts of reasons for not accepting the Invitation – even that they have just got married – and Jesus tells how the master who had issued the Invitation got angry and said “None of those who were invited shall taste my banquet.”


The passage from St Paul (Romans 6:3-4. 8-11) conveys the same message but in a rather different way. St Paul wants the Christians in Rome to think of themselves in an alternative way, to realise that the conventional ways of behaving are not enough for someone who follows Jesus. He puts it in dramatic language, speaking of dying with Christ, but having said that this happens when we are baptised, he also says that we must “consider ourselves” as dead to sin, in other words we must think of ourselves as being dead to sin every day. Sin here does not mean doing bad things, it means being closed off to God, and in practice this is our tendency to live life in a selfish way, to not notice the many small things – the cup of cold water - that we might do for others.


I was talking to a fellow priest the other day about our attitude to hearing Confessions, and he told me that only once had he refused to give absolution to someone, and that was when someone came to him and said that they had no sins to confess. That has happened to me too, but I usually find that as soon as I remind such a person that sins include things they have failed to do, they have plenty to confess. Strange that people forget that the Confession at the beginning of every Mass includes the vital words “That I have greatly sinned… in what I have failed to do.” We all might think more on that! We need also to think of the very important distinction that I have often made between sins as wrong things I have done, and sin as an imperfect attitude to life and to God. This is why St Paul doesn’t say that we should consider our sins, but that we should consider ourselves as “dead to sin.” Some people ask what is the point of confessing the same sins over and over again, and the answer is that this keeps us alive to our need for God’s grace, rather than relying on our own efforts. Confession is not basically about listing our sins in front of the priest, but about regularly opening ourselves up to God’s goodness and love.


And that takes us back to our two hero saints – St Peter and St Paul – for it reminds us that we do not have to be perfect in order to serve God, because they weren’t. We do not have to be like a hero or heroine from some film in order to be a worthwhile human being, and we need to resist the media, the advertisers, and even some priests when they attempt to set up in our mind a desire for a perfection, whether worldly or spiritual, that we all ought to aim for. So, let’s celebrate Peter and Paul, and all the other saints who were imperfect heroes, doing their best to serve God despite their many failings and imperfections.

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