Fr. Alan's homily for Sunday July 23rd 2006

"No more fear or terror" says Jeremiah. I wonder how you'd feel about that living in Beirut or Haifa at the moment.

Once again the issues of unsolved human displacement, politics and religion have combined to wreak havoc and suffering in the Middle East. The innocent suffer. God is mocked by this.

The emotion predicated of God in the Scriptures today is compassion. Saint Mark says that Jesus had pity, compassion on the multitude because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

Perhaps the problem today is not the absence of a shepherd, but too many shepherds leading their flocks against each other. We should remember the words of Jeremiah: Woe to the shepherds who allow my flock to be destroyed. God is mocked by this.

Jews, Christians and Muslims invoke God as compassionate and merciful. Saint Paul speaks of Christ as The peace between us, the one who brings Jew and Gentile together. Compassion, peace, reconciliation therefore have to be the Christian agenda.

Christ is The peace between us. However, that peace is not achieved peacefully, but by an act of violent death. In his own person he killed the hostility. That peace is achieved only through the cross.

The Christian imperative to peace is not just an ethical preference. It rests on the conviction expressed by Saint Paul that the death of Jesus is the violent act to end all violence, or, to put it in traditional language, the true sacrifice which ends all sacrifices.

The Christian imperative to peace is founded upon the Eucharist, for that is where we are offering the Body which is given up for you, the Blood poured out for all - that "sacrifice to end all sacrifices". Now, today, here, we are offering the victim by whose sacrifice you have chosen to be at peace with us.

However, this tragedy raises serious questions for Jews, Christians and Muslims. They are theological issues which have a direct bearing on peace, our peace too, as the London July bombings showed last year.

Each tradition claims to have an exclusive "take" on the Transcendent. Exclusives cannot all be right. What credible God would reveal Godself in ways that contradict one another? For that matter, what credible God would commend the death of those who do not believe?

Here are crucial and unavoidable questions about the name and the nature of God. Here, some will argue, is the Achilles' Heel of religions that rest on a claim to divine revelation. Where revelations conflict, what of the Revealer? What of God?

The temptation for religions, at least those with which we are familiar, is to think that they've got it right, everything sewn up. And as for other people who disagree, they must be wrong.

It's not only religion, either. We are told that we live in a multi-cultural society. Why then are we so divided? Why are young Asians murdered in Preston? Why did Stephen Lawrence die?

Christian practice begins, not in pronouncing anathemas against others, but on listening to the one and only Teacher, Christ. Call no one on earth your teacher He said, for you have only one teacher, the Christ.

Respect for others who differ from us and the expectation that they too will respect us; the social intellectual and cultural conditions that will permit that. That is the way that leads to peace.

Let's go back to the victim through whose sacrifice you have chosen to be at peace with us, Christ offering his Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Our vocation to peace begins at the Altar.

For us at least, it is not acceptable to celebrate the Eucharist and not seek to be makers of peace. It is inviting Judgement to eat the bread and drink the cup and then pursue any other path but that of securing peace.