Fr Frank Brennan's Homily: 2nd Sunday of Lent, 2025

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent

16 March 2025

Reading: Genesis 15:5-12. 17-18; Psalm 26; Philippians 3:17 – 4:1; Luke 9:28-36

In today’s first reading from Genesis we hear that ‘the Lord made a Covenant with Abram in these terms: “To your descendants I give this land, from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River.”’ We live at a time when these sacred words from scripture fuel antipathy and violence from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River. On the other side of the conflict we hear people chanting: ‘From the river to the sea’. We have to admit that religious fundamentalism often fuels violence and injustice. A literalist reading of scripture can lead us into error and moral hazard.

Sharing land, and sharing country, is a profound challenge in many parts of the world.

Even here in Australia, we are still working through the terms of a just settlement in the wake of nineteenth century colonisation.

Just this week, the High Court of Australia has applied the principles in the 1992 Mabo judgment to the claim by the Gumatj clan in Arnhem Land against the Commonwealth of Australia. As with Mabo and Wik, there will be a lot of argy bargy about compensation and threats to people’s backyards, but at the end of the day, the judges were simply enunciating the principle of equality. In this week’s case, they said that even in the Northern Territory, citizens were entitled to the payment of just compensation if the Commonwealth interfered with their property rights.

Why? Because the Constitution approved by our forebears at the end of the nineteenth century provides that the Commonwealth (unlike the States) can acquire property only on the payment of just compensation. Just compensation from the Commonwealth is a constitutional guarantee. Just compensation from the States is a matter for the discretion of the state parliaments. The great settlement in Mabo was posited on the proposition that native title survived the assertion of British sovereignty and that it could be extinguished only by legal action of the sovereign.

Prior to 1975 when the Commonwealth Parliament passed the Racial Discrimination Act, the state as sovereign could abolish native title without payment of compensation whenever it vested title in other persons such as my forebears when they migrated from Ireland to Australia in the 1860s. Unlike the state governments, the Commonwealth once established as sovereign could not acquire any property (including native title) except on payment of just compensation.

In this week’s judgment, the High Court of Australia returned to ‘the fundamental consideration which impelled the formulation of the common law rule of recognition explained in Mabo’.

They said that was ‘to bring the common law into conformity with “the values of justice and human rights (especially equality before the law) which are aspirations of the contemporary Australian legal system”.’[1]

Four of the judges of our present High Court went on to say:

As was stated in Mabo, to continue adherence to the common law’s enlarged notion of terra nullius (that the prior occupation of indigenous inhabitants of a colony could be ignored if those inhabitants were perceived to be “without laws, without a sovereign and primitive in their social organization”) so that “the Crown acquired absolute beneficial ownership of land” on the acquisition of sovereignty would have “destroy[ed] the equality of all Australian citizens before the law” and perpetuated injustice based on an historical fiction. In the present case, to adopt the conditional common law rule of recognition of native title rights and interests would destroy that equality and perpetuate its own form of injustice.[2]

Rejecting the Commonwealth’s submissions, these four judges put the matter starkly: ‘Native title recognised at common law could, and could only, be extinguished “by a valid exercise of sovereign power inconsistent with the continued enjoyment … of native title”.’[3] The Commonwealth could only ever extinguish native title on payment of compensation.

Meanwhile from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River, we hear renewed calls for a two state solution. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s 57-year continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal. By 11 votes to 4, the International Court expressed the opinion ‘that the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible’.[4]

Our Australian Government has told the United Nations General Assembly that we support an ‘unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-state solution. Because it is the only way out of this terrible cycle of violence.’[5] Tragically no party to the conflict has agreed in principle to a two state solution, let alone to any process for determining scenarios for an outcome. Is it too much to hope that Australia, as an honest broker with citizens sympathetic to both sides of the conflict, might play a constructive role in proposing realistic scenarios for an outcome should the parties to the conflict ever agree to come to the table of negotiation with a commitment to a two state solution?

How do we Christians retain hope in the face of such intractable violence and injustice throwing up such complexity in search of a solution?

In today’s gospel, we hear Luke’s account of the Transfiguration where Peter, James and John are invited up the mountain to join Jesus in prayer. Peter had already made his profession of faith when Jesus had asked the disciples, ‘Who do the crowds say I am?’ They had answered: ‘Elijah or one of the prophets returned from the dead’. Jesus then pressed them: ‘But you, who do you say I am?’ Peter proclaimed: ‘The Christ of God’. Jesus gave them strict orders not to tell anyone anything about this. Peter, James and John had already been witnesses to the healing of the synagogue official’s daughter. Jesus gave them and the child’s parents an order not to tell anyone what had happened.

Up the mountain, Peter, James and John have a vision of Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the law and the prophets. Moses and Elijah appearing in glory were speaking of Jesus’ passing which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem. Scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson tells us that ‘The term exodos here can only be taken as a deliberate allusion to Moses, and therefore to Jesus as the prophet like Moses. In this case, the “passing over” includes the entire movement of the Prophet’s death, resurrection, and ascension, which enables Jesus to bestow the Spirit on his followers.’^[6]

It was only when looking back after Jesus’ death and resurrection that Peter, James and John were free to break their silence. In hindsight, all these mysterious happenings fell into place.

After the resurrection appearances, Luke has Jesus tell the disciples: ‘This is what I meant when I said, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms, has to be fulfilled.’ He opened their minds to the scriptures and said to them, ‘So you see how it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that, in his name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses to this. And now I am sending down to you what the Father has promised.’ (Luke 24:44-49).

Repentance for the forgiveness of sins preached to all the nations – including those nations which are party to the most intractable and unjust of conflicts; and beginning from Jerusalem – beginning from the most contested place on God’s earth.

Let’s pray: