Homily for the 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 March 2025
Ecclesiasticus 27:4-7; Psalm 91; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45
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Today’s readings are full of common sense. A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit. You don’t pick figs from thorns, nor grapes from brambles.
In a shaken sieve the rubbish is left behind, so too the defects of a person appear in his talk.
The kiln tests the work of the potter, the test of a person is in her conversation.
The orchard where the tree grows is judged on the quality of its fruit, similarly a person’s words betray what he feels.
These are both consoling and slightly unreal words at the end of a fortnight when we’ve had the elected leader of the United States brazenly telling the Ukrainian president, ‘You don’t have the cards right now’, while claiming that Ukraine started the war with Russia, that Zelenskyy not Putin is the corrupt aggressor, and that Ukraine, not Russia, should pay compensation for the assistance provided by the United States.
Whether it’s Ukraine or Gaza, we are being told that the old international order has broken down. It’s time to try something new, regardless of how wrong it might be. So much of our world is being turned upside down.
The fortnight started with Mr Trump’s Vice President J D Vance telling the Munich Security Conference:
“I come here today not just with an observation but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that. In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree.”[1]
Jesus asks: ‘Can one blind man guide another? Surely both will fall into a pit?’ Neither Mr Trump nor Mr Vance will guide us to a better world. We are all in mortal danger.
But as ever, Jesus turns the focus back on us and what we might be able to do in the predicament we find ourselves. Language has become so demeaned, trust so trashed, and clarity of vision so impaired because we are all part of a culture and a world where anything goes. What are we to do?
The Scottish-American philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre published a book After Virtue in 1981. A third edition of the book was published in 2007. At the conclusion of the book, MacIntyre reflects on ‘the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages’ in 476AD and on moves that were made to arrest the decline, including the beginning of monasticism under the rule of Benedict in the 6th century AD. He saw some parallels with our modern western world. He wrote: ‘A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.’[2]
Reflecting on the ‘moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world’, MacIntyre concluded:
“And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”
Jesus puts the challenge starkly and simply: ‘Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own? How can you say to your brother, “Brother, let me take out the splinter that is in your eye,” when you cannot see the plank in your own? Hypocrite! Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take out the splinter that is in your brother’s eye.’
Each of us is called to speak truthfully, whatever the circumstances. Each of us is called to speak truth to power. Each of us is called to build and maintain community within which the moral life can be sustained. Each of us is called to do what little we can to put right whatever is disordered in our own lives and in our own society so that we might join the psalmist proclaiming: ‘Planted in the house of the Lord we will flourish in the courts of our God, still bearing fruit when we are old, still full of sap, still green, to proclaim that the Lord is just. In the Lord, our rock, there is no wrong.’ God help us and God help Ukraine.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is serving as part of a Jesuit team of priests working within a new configuration of the Toowong, St Lucia and Indooroopilly parishes in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. Frank Brennan SJ is Adjunct Professor of the Thomas More Law School at ACU and is a former CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA). Fr Frank’s latest book is An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: Considering a Constitutional Bridge, Garratt Publishing, 2023 and his new book is ‘Lessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum’ (Connor Court, 2024).
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/18/vance-speech-munich-full-text-read-transcript-europe/
[2] Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd edition, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, 263.
