Sunday Homily, Word of God | paddybanville's Blog

Twenty-seventh Sunday

Luke 17:5-10

What are we to make of that?

Two things.

Even though the apostles ask Jesus to increase their faith they’re still over-estimating the size of the faith that they do have. They think they have faith but Jesus raises the bar, he raises the standard; “were your faith the size of a mustard seed you could say to this tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you.” Jesus is telling them that their faith is not even the size of a mustard seed!

In the second piece they’re over estimating their goodness. So Jesus tells the story of the servant who having worked hard all day in the fields is then expected to make himself tidy, lay his master’s supper and wait on him before he eats himself… and he is then required to say; no big deal, I’m merely a servant. Again he’s raising the standard… it feels like injustice.

All this means:

If we stroll up to Heaven thinking that we’ve both faith and goodness “to beat the band” we’ll be in trouble because God’s standard is so much higher.

If we approach Heaven humbly, relying on Gods mercy rather than our sense of our faith and goodness – which is almost always inflated and an expression of the human ego – we’ll have a much better chance of gaining entry.

Twenty-fourth Sunday

Luke 15:4-7

Once again Jesus uses something very simple – an everyday thing – to teach us about eternity.

An animal – a sheep 🐑 – is lost.

The lost sheep 🐑 – wherever she’s got to, that place where she’s lost is actually the road to Hell. Until that sheep is found by the shepherd she’s in grave danger. The shepherd knows that unless he gets to the sheep quickly she’ll be killed by a wolf 🐺, a predator. She won’t last long, so it’s time sensitive. So there’s real concern, a sense of urgency. If the sheep is killed there’s no undoing it, it’s final, a finality that means Hell, eternal loss, it’s an irretrievable loss.

And that’s precisely why there’s so much joy when the sheep is found in time, before tragedy strikes.

So in the simplest of terms, using a shepherd and a sheep that’s got separated from the shepherd, Jesus teaches us about God, about the nature of God and affirms not just the existence of Heaven, but the existence of Hell too.