19th Sunday Year B
Ephesians 4:30 – 5:2
In Melbourne, in Carlton’s Lygon Street, come across the usual run of urban resources: the restaurants, the supermarket, the butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers. And if you did this some time late in 2003, you might have noticed, on the narrow divider in the middle of Lygon Street, a very simple fountain, which, several days running, had fresh flowers in its bowl.
The fountain is a memorial to Dinny O’Hearn, who was not only a local ‘identity’ or celebrity, but one of the dearest people I have ever known. He was to have been married at Newman College on a particular date, but as things turned out he was buried a couple of days later, from the chapel there. Many people, men and women, loved him, and certainly I am one of them: and the flowers, draped over the bowl of the fountain in the midst of the swirling traffic, were in effect flags of the victory of love. Dinny might be dead, but the love which he prompted was not, and is not.
And why am I talking in this way? It is all on account of what St Paul has to say in his letter to the Christians at Ephesus, on this 19th Sunday of the church’s year. Paul is bringing the game up to those men and women, and I suppose children too. He challenges them not to bear grudges, not to bad-mouth one another, not to lapse into spite: and he tells them, in effect, to gear themselves to be forgiving. And he brackets this no-doubt good advice by referring to the Holy Spirit of loving, and to Jesus, the expert in loving.
Paul would not have written or spoken in this way unless it was called for. He knew that the demon of resentment, the demon of begrudging and out-manoeuvring, the demon of sledging and slagging-off, can find a voice in anyone’s heart. In the end, you see, there are no glamorous sins; there are only seedy ones—lazy ones and greedy ones and bullying ones. They are, so to speak, the lice in our lives, the vermin: and they crop up with tedious frequency, requiring a patient recognition on our own part, and the blessed patience of the Holy Spirit, who is adept at identifying them, and then, gradually, at freeing us of them.
So what happened to Dinny O’Hearn and his fountain in my little tale? The fact is that while Dinny was a charmer, and sometimes an enchanter, he was also someone with the great gift of aggression. If you were to go and look at the door of his house you would have seen that the door-knocker was a lion’s head. And that is as it should be.
Dinny was nuggety, and buccaneering, and fearless. Great good, in my view, came of this. He pressed on, among many sluggish and stupid and pompous individuals, and came to the aid of people in need, whose need was for somebody leonine, somebody with a lion’s mouth, if help was to be secured. I still come across people who were his beneficiaries. But he could not have been such good news unless the lion’s head, the lion’s mouth, had been matched by the fountain’s flowers. Without love, fierceness has no legitimacy.
And that is the challenge, the summons, for each of us to try to meet today. When St Paul calls his hearers back from showing their teeth at one another, and indeed when he appeals to them to be forgiving, he speaks as someone who knows what he is talking about. All the evidence suggests that he was not, instinctively, a sweetheart; I would certainly not have liked to get into a slanging match with Paul on a bad day.
And, after all, on the whole we do not lean into anger and hostility for no reason at all. Injustices, whether to ourselves or to others, do abound: every day is show-time for honesty and generosity and justice; but any day can also bring a bad show. The lion in our hearts can always, feasibly and plausibly, be stirred by this. If we want to be snarling and snapping, any day will present occasion enough.
But what should give us pause, whatever we may think of Paul, is the example of Christ our Lord. Paul does say, at the end of today’s passage, ‘follow Christ by loving as he loved you, giving himself up in our place.’ Anyone who doubts that Jesus could have the mouth of a lion must have been reading the gospels in an extremely selective way. He was fiercely, and prophetically, and in an intensely Jewish way, a hater of injustice, a defender of the deprived, and an indicter of those who benefited from them.
And yet, and yet … In the end he died on behalf of all without exception, and he prayed for all without exception. When he said, ‘Father, forgive them: they don’t know what they are doing’, who, realistically, can suppose that anyone was excluded from that prayer?
Each of us is the hearer of a charge given us by Paul, but given in the name of Christ. It is a very good thing indeed that we should be passionate on behalf of justice and liberty and creativity and community in our world: if we have the look of lions in their regard, so be it, and God bless us. But if we are not also bringing flowers to the fountain of compassion, all that trenchancy, all that boldness, will after all be diverted to the cause of the raging one whom we call the Devil. God is the Strong One: but he is strongest of all in his sweetness.
[Dennis Joseph (‘Dinny’) O`Hearn 14 March 1937–15 July 1993. An Irish-Australian author and literary critic with a long association with Melbourne University. He was a tireless promoter of Australian literature and the original presenter of The Book Show (SBS, 1986-1997). In 1994, the Australian Centre inaugurated the Dinny O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship.]
Peter Steele sj died 27 June 2012, but he continues to live on in his words. We are honoured to continue to draw upon his Sunday homilies.
