Today, Saint Mel’s Cathedral welcomes her diocesan family and many who have come from Mullingar and all around the Diocese of Meath and indeed from all over Ireland and beyond, to celebrate this special day in the life of Father Paul Connell and all the people of God in the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois.
Paul, today as the twin spires of the Cathedral of Christ the King diminish in your rear-view mirror, we want to assure you of a hundred thousand welcomes in this sacred place. We hope that you will grow to be happy here in your new home. You will notice on the chair, the cathedra from where you will teach and lead, the words from John’s gospel, uttered first to Peter in a moment of second calling, ‘Feed my sheep.’ Today, through the laying on of hands in a gesture of being called again by the same Lord, hear those words, ‘Feed my sheep.’ Just as He, so you now, Be a Shepherd!
The gospel text that the Church gives us on this 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time reminds us that Jesus’ ministry begins in His heart, or more literally in His guts. His message is of compassion. The word used for ‘compassion’ literally means to be moved in one’s bowels. It is a physical feeling with, suffering with the other. As the Compassion of God, Jesus’ destiny will ultimately be the cross – ‘no greater love than this …’ Echoes here of the day of your priestly ordination when the Rite challenged you to ‘model your life on the mystery of the Lord’s cross.’ That is essentially the call to compassion, that gravity pulling downward to the one who is most in need.
Matthew’s Jesus feels sorry for the lost, the harassed and dejected. Much more than mere pity, His asking for labourers for the harvest is a cry from His heart of compassion, that others in His footsteps might be His compassionate presence and feed the sheep, all the lost and wounded of our divided world.
The dejection of which the gospel speaks is more accurately a sense of being torn asunder, divided. What divides us is demonic. We demonize the one on the other side of the divide – and the Church is not immune here! There are many lines that divide us: lines of ideology, lines of gender and gender identity, lines of race, lines dividing rich from poor and many others. Lines everywhere. Compassion seeks to dissolve the lines and call us back to our common humanity, the reality of who we are in the flesh, the flesh that God saw as good enough to become in Jesus.
Summoned by name, the twelve are sent to the ones Jesus noticed as harassed and dejected, the ones like sheep without a shepherd – the lost sheep of the House of Israel. These twelve would now be living signs of His compassion for the whole of Israel, all her twelve tribes. And His message is what they’ll bring with them: ‘As you go, proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’
Remember, this is exactly how Jesus emerged from the desert to begin His public ministry. Matthew tells us: ‘He began His preaching with the message, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’ Earlier, this had been the exact same message of John the Baptist. There is continuity between John, Jesus and now the twelve. ‘The kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’ Strange though, the apostles’ charge doesn’t include the challenge of repentance. Maybe it is presumed.
Repentance is much more than giving up our oul’ sins. The gospel word for it is metanoia. From the Greek words ‘meta’ meaning ‘beyond’ and ‘nous’ meaning ‘mind’, the challenge of metanoia – which is often translated as conversion – is really to think beyond, change the mind to think big.
The idea of the Kingdom requires some big thinking and big living. Kingdom-thinking is to think outside the box, beyond. It is to think in line with the beatitudes, to see beyond the apparent curse and see blessing. To live poverty in spirit and in the knowledge of blessed possession of heaven. To mourn in assured comfort. To hunger and thirst and yet have whetted appetite for justice satisfied. To live and experience mercy. To live purity of heart and see God. To live peace in the midst of trial. The preaching of the Kingdom promises happiness in unexpected places. Repentance might be simply to change the direction in which we look for happiness, the Kingdom.
As you join in succession now to the apostles, help us to think big – big enough to comprehend the reality of God’s reign among us and help us all to walk and work together – for the sake of the message and its credibility if for no other reason. Chances are that if Simon the Zealot had met Matthew the tax-gatherer anywhere else than in the company of Jesus, he would have stuck a dagger in him. It is a tremendous truth that people who don’t exactly pull, as they say, can learn to love each other when they both love Jesus Christ. Too often religion is seen as divisive. It is meant to be, and in the presence of the living Jesus it was, a means of bringing people together.
Without Christ we run the danger of being sundered from each other. Walking together – this is the challenge of Synodality, the way we are called to live and preach the kingdom of God today, how God’s Spirit is calling us to be Church. It is always better when we are together.
We have begun walking that challenging path here in Ardagh and Clonmacnois. For a number of years we have tiptoed along the Synodal Pathway, praying in our Assembly Prayer that we would reflect the face of the Good Shepherd, to bring back the stray, look for the lost and bandage the wounded of our world; that we would build a Church of solidarity with the haunted faces of refugees, the wounded of war, and the voiceless victims of injustice in every land, and that we would be united as a family of lay and religious, young and old, women and men with you our bishop to guide us, and that together we would all reflect God the Father’s dream of a Church as a “Mother Hen” who gathers all under the wings of shelter and protection.
Identifying our pastoral priorities going forward as outreach to young people, families and formation of people for mission, we are like the Twelve of today’s gospel trying to model our lives on Jesus and so like Him reach outward to heal, raise, cleanse, and cast out. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those of unclean spirit, cast out demons. Jesus gave authority to the Twelve – and empowered them, and in His strength they went out.
Just as there is a line of continuity from John the Baptist to Jesus, to the twelve, the task is ours today, with you Bishop Paul walking with us and leading us. This is what we are about, this is what living our baptism authentically is, this is what the Church is about, what the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois is about. As it was for Finian and the Twelve Apostles of Ireland who studied under him and among them Saint Ciaran of Clonmacnois, and as it was for Mel and his Church at Ardagh, ours still is the task of bearing witness to our faith by everything we say and do, so enabling the Reign of God break into our broken world today. In being a leaven in the world by our witness we do bring healing to the sick, we do bring life, we do cast out demons, becoming midwives to the awesome Mystery.
Paul, you are most welcome among us as Pastor. Feed us and lead us into friendship with Jesus and keep us reminded that ultimately it is His work we are all about – His kingdom, and that in the end it all depends on Him and on His grace working in all of us, in our homes, our schools, our parishes – all of us working and walking together.
Lead us to see the big picture, the kingdom of God among us and beyond us. And though the task is enormous, and though the labourers are indeed few, we remain grounded but open because in the end it is all down to His grace, as the Romero Prayer suggests:
‘It helps now and then to step back and take a long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives include everything. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water the seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing this. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.’
Paul, we promise to work with you. Help each one of us find our voice in the chorus that continues to sing: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand’.