Our People

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2006

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
14/5/2006

This past week we witnessed a wonderful parable of the Resurrection: Brant Webb and Todd Russell, at one time given up for dead, buried for days underground, rose triumphant from their tomb. As we saw them throw out their arms when they reached safety on the surface, it was as if they were victors over death and the tomb. It was as if they showed us what Christ did that day he overcame our last enemy, Death. And as we saw their families and their fellow miners throwing their arms around them – and Aussie miners are not renowned for their hugging, they are not sensitive new age guys, not even soccer players – we had perhaps a parable of Heaven, as the saints receive those who have passed through death into new life, with warmth and intimacy.

Much has been said and might be said about the meaning of the Beaconsfield rescue, but this much is clear: these men did not raise themselves from their tomb; they were completely helpless, relying totally upon God and their fellow miners to get them out safely. This said something very powerful and very important about dependence and inter-dependence in a world and a contemporary Australian culture that so values independence.

In fact, the modern liberal society glorifies personal autonomy, going it alone, doing one’s own thing, no-one telling us what to do, each person choosing their own values and life-plans, following their own conscience wherever it takes them. Which is all very well, but the problem is: not everyone is as free and independent and rational as that presumes. Think of children: when they are very young they certainly need people to look after them; some would say that continues well into their teens, twenties and beyond! So do the disabled and mentally ill, and those trapped, like the miners, in various situations in life of compromised freedom. If we push the autonomy thing too hard, it leaves the many people who are relatively powerless very much out in cold.

The fact is: all of us experience a loss of independence in various ways at various times in our lives. It might be sudden financial dependence upon others, or the dependence that sickness or frailty in old age or depression brings. If anything were calculated to bring home to us our dependence upon others, it is those times of vulnerability in every life. But even when we are at our strongest, many of most important things in life can only be attained with the help of others and in their company. That is also true for finding our values and goals in life. Autonomy is all very well, but we need to know how to exercise freedom from childhood onwards. We need others as rôle-models, teachers, advisers and supporters, to keep us focused and motivated and directed at things other than just our own narrow, selfish interests or passing tastes and fads.

Important as autonomy is, it only makes sense within a network of relationships such as family, work-place, local community, church and nation, a supportive community that gives us room to be our selves and pursue our own projects, whilst also allowing for common projects in pursuit of our common good. Put baldly, independence requires inter-dependence and individuality needs community.

Whilst the importance of relationships and community in making us good and happy people is only now being painfully rediscovered after a generation or so of “Me-Generation” focus upon the autonomy of individuals, Christians have always known importance of these things. Christ didn’t enter world as a loner to live the life of a loner. He was a person of the Blessed Trinity, a communitarian God. He was the Word spoken by the Father; He in turn spoke his words not on his own account but the Father’s. He might be the True Vine, but as the Gospel tells us today, his Father is the vinedresser.

Christ entered the created universe as a baby, dependent upon a family, needing and ready to learn from others. He was not forever asserting his independence but always living in obedience to the will of his Father-God and the needs of others. When Jesus began his mission, the first thing he did was attach to himself a band of companion-followers. He insisted to them that they couldn’t go it alone, that they needed each other, they needed Him, they needed God the Father. So he remind us this morning: “As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, but must remain part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.”

When Jesus commands his disciples to be good and true and loving, he makes it clear as does the second reading this morning, that this requires not that they invent their own values and call these conscience and so do whatever they please, but that they keep his commandments, put on his mind and by conversion make God’s ways theirs. They should make God’s commandments their conscience. So John reminds his early Christian community this morning: “whatever your conscience seems to say, the important thing is that you obey God’s dictates – only by this can we be certain that we are children of the Truth and be able to quieten our conscience.”

Whatever the values of contemporary culture, no Christian can rightly make an idol of the self, of their own will, of their autonomy. No, our goal is to be well grafted into Christ and so into his life, death and eternal destiny, into his grace and power, into his Gospel and Church. That is how God the Vinedresser prunes our wills, changes our minds, informs our conscience, and redirects our course. Indeed far from being a goal in the Christian vision of things, autonomy is, in a sense, a disaster; it is being a vine cut off from the trunk, a body part unconnected to rest of the organism, a compass with no North. If we want to be truly alive, truly free and truly fruitful, we must be grafted to a trunk and surrender to a vinedresser.

In our Opening Prayer this morning, we asked God to give us true freedom. It is a paradoxical Christian insight that only by letting go of lives in the service of others, as Christ did, as in a sense those miners and their rescuers did, that we gain our life back anew in the Resurrection. So too, it is only by laying down our liberty in obedience that we gain the freedom of the children of God to do great things. The Easter story and the Beaconsfield parable are stories of the victory not only of life over death but also of true life over atomism and selfish will.

“Take O Lord my liberty,” prayed St Ignatius Loyola, “take O Lord my memory, take O Lord my understanding, take O Lord my will. All I ask in return is your love and your grace: with these I will be satisfied!”