Our People

Homily for 5th Sunday of Year C

Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, Watson’s Bay, 4 February 2007

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
4/2/2007

It is fashionable today to say that we do not need to kneel anymore. Not merely that those for whom kneeling is difficult or a distraction should not kneel – that’s just common sense – but that kneeling as a posture is somehow degrading. Some churches have pulled out not only the altar-rails with their kneelers, but also the kneelers at the pews and people have even been instructed not to kneel.

The Church, of course, invites us to genuflect, if we conveniently can, as we greet and adore Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament on our way into and out of church. The Church directs us to kneel for the Eucharistic Prayer as we witness that holiest of moments: bread-made-God by God-made-man.

But, some say, this is just demeaning: kneeling is the posture of a supplicant, a beggar, a slave, not a free man or woman, a brother or sister or friend of Christ. It is the posture of the sinner, not the redeemed. True, the Psalms call us to “Come in, let us bow and bend low, let us kneel before the God who made us, for He is our God and we the people of His pasture, the flock that is lead by His hand” (Ps 95:6-7). That’s all very well for people who think of themselves as sheep, we might say, but we are more than that, surely: we are children of God, semi-divine.

It was all very well for Moses to take off his shoes and prostrate himself (Ex 3:1-6; Dt 9:18,25; Num 17:10; 20:6; Acts 7:32-33) and for kings, prophets and people to shield their faces and bow low when they heard God speak (Lev 9:24; Josh 5:14; 7:6; Job 1:20; Judith 6:18; 9:1; Sir 50:17,21; Isa 49:7; Ez 10:1;), and for Solomon to kneel in prayer at the consecration of the altar in his newly-built Temple (1 Kings 8:54; 2 Chr 6:13) and for Daniel to kneel in his room to pray (Dan 6:11), and for the Magi to bow low and pay homage with gifts (Mt 2:11), but God has come close to us now, he’s one of us now, and in this more democratic arrangement he surely does not want us paying homage with our bodies.

The God of the Old Testament might have demanded that every knee bow before him (e.g. 2 Kings 17:36; Pss 22:29; 86:9; 138:2; Isa 45:23; Mic 6:6) and some of this might have survived in the New Testament (e.g. Rom 14:11; Phil 2:10), but this was just a hang-over of pre-Christian religiosity. Of course it took people a while to understand this: the leper knelt before Jesus to ask him to cure his leprosy (Mt 8:2) and another to thank him for the cure (Lk 17:16), the Canaanite women knelt to ask that her daughter be released from a demon (Mt 15:25), the woman with the haemorrhage feel on her knees to ask for healing (Mk 5:33), the Temple official knelt to ask that his daughter be released from death (Mt 9:18), the young man genuflected to ask Jesus’ advice on how to live (Mk 10:17), Stephen knelt in prayer as he was martyred (Acts 7:60) and the apostles often knelt down to pray (Mt 17:6; Lk 5:8; Acts 9:40; 20:36; Eph 3:14). Even Jesus was trapped in these old-fashioned ways, keeling down to pray on that last night in the Garden (Mt 26:39; Lk 22:41). But all this was before more a modern spirituality freed us from such old-fashioned self-diminishing postures…

Well, maybe: bowing and kneeling are clearly only one (or two) ways of the many ways of demonstrating reverence and awe. But the attitude behind them is not one we can afford ever to give up: that is, ‘the sense of sacred’, of awe, of belief, of trusting creatureliness; that desire for God that is written on the human heart by the God who never ceases to draw us to himself. Our dignity rests above all on the fact that we are called to communion with that God.

Throughout history people have expressed their quest in various ways, but so commonly that we may well call man the religious animal, the animal that worships. Not that all searches for God result in the same or the right answer, or that all expressions of this quest are equally worthy, or that everyone pursues the search for God with equal vigour or success: we are easily distracted by care or allured by riches or hypnotised by ideologies or habituated in sin. But what each believer has in common with all other believers and indeed with the angel host is a hunger of which seraphim sang in today’s First Reading (Isa 6:1-8): Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts: heaven and earth are filled with your glory!

Yet how do we respond once we do encounter God? It can be overwhelming to experience something of the sacred, to know something of the divine. We can be ashamed, almost paralysed by God’s bigness and our smallness, his infinity and our finitude, his omnipotence and our powerlessness, his eternity and our mortality, his love and our selfishness, his holiness and our sinfulness. That is precisely Isaiah’s reaction today: “What a wretched state I’m in! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips.”Likewise Simon Peter in today’s Gospel: “Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Despite the deep desire to know God and our fittedness to do so, our response when we do meet him can be to flee. The alternative, the only real alternative, is to believe and worship, heart and soul, mind and body, to fall down on our knees before the King of the Universe and his Son-made-man or bread-made-his-Son.

This does not mean we fall down lifeless: Jesus will not leave us on our knees indefinitely. No: we are cleansed, purged, made new, not by hot coals pressed to our lips, but by experiences of purgation in this life and the next and most especially by the sacraments of cleansing: Baptism, Reconciliation, the Eucharist and Anointing. Then we are helped to our feet by the angels, by Christ himself, by his Church: and on our feet we are given new standing work to do: “Whom shall I send to be our messenger?” asks God the Father: and out pop the words, much to Isaiah’s own astonishment, I’m sure, “Me Lord, send me.” “Whom might I send as fisher of men?” asks God the Son: and before he knew it, sinful, awestruck, agogged Simon is on his feet and leaving his boats behind and following. “Whom might I send to preach the Gospel?” asks God the Holy Spirit: and as much to Saul’s astonishment I’m sure as to his hearers’, the persecutor becomes the preacher.

“Whom might I send in 2007?” ask the Blessed Trinity again: and as we stand to profess our Faith we are giving our response “Send me, Lord, send me.” But if we are to leap to this task it must be from a crouching position, like a professional runner. If we are to profess the Church’s faith in our Creed, it must spring forth from a posture of worship. If we are to live our faith in prayer and action we must live and breathe it first in the obedience of faith: we must kneel before the God who made us!