29/11/2025

Saturday Week 34 Ordinary Time

Today Jesus gives a direct warning to his disciples about letting ourselves become held in the embrace of bodily dissipation, deluded by the confusion of drunkenness or enslaved by the material cares of this world.

At that time his disciples were mostly from among the "poor" of Israel although some of the "high and mighty", "rich and powerful" and "learned and clever" were also attracted by his "signs" and stayed to be captivated by his "wisdom". All of this social mixture of followers, however, were expecting him to deliver some sort of New Order  from the political status quo that was the "Pax Roma" in which they reluctantly lived in those days.

Jesus, however, was calling all of the individual souls alive then and now to become holy because he is holy. This is the only way that our Holy Mother the Church could have become what Our Lord had intended when he stated his intention to found her on Peter, at the Gentile shrine of Pan in Northern Galilee.

Today I know that "dissipation" is not confined to the public lives of the "rich and famous". 

It was the scandal of child abuse that first opened my eyes to the lack of integrity in the heart of the Church and that this dishonesty is not, in fact, a new phenomenon but has existed for centuries. I have also always known how "lust" can so easily rule my every waking moment. Personal poverty is not a guarantor of freedom from sin.

Today I also know that 40 years ago I was dragged into the clarity of sobriety by the Love of God working through the shared experience, strength and hopes of the caring strangers of AA and become thus able to strive to respond to Jesus' call to become holy.

But at this very moment, I am still entangled in the things of this world. I am enraged by the failures of the football team that I support. Captivated by the posturings of political commentators and unbelievably devasted by bureaucratic failures that have little importance except in my mind.

When we first became the "Jesus Generation" many of us were sure that the resurrected physical body of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth would soon return from the unseen spiritual heaven of the Father to rule "an everlasting kingdom where all dominions would serve and obey him". Until that time we would be supported by the Paraclete.

Two thousand generations later, we are still the "Jesus Generation",  and nothing has changed. St Paul and the other Apostles and Evangelists formulated Resurrection Faith and John and Mary knew then that it was in mutual care for each other that the will to love of the Father was manifest. 

Peter's Church soon began to ignore "My kingdom is not of this world" and the holiness that can be found within it is the result of individual spiritual effort and adherence to John and Mary's Spiritual Church of Love, "Woman behold your Son, Son behold your mother" rather than to the Institution that was long ago captured  and still remains within the "this" worldliness that is the emptiness of Mammon.