Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (2025) - Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP

Shortly after the Second World War, a communist government took over Czechoslovakia, and started cracking down on dissent and religious freedom. My father was one of those students who protested, and it did not take long before he realised he was in danger. In April he wrote a letter to his parents that began: “Dear Dad and Mum, I am not coming home for the holidays this Easter …” And when all the students left for their break, Dad set off too, but took a train in the other direction, and made a daring escape, ending up after two years in Australia, although he spoke no English and knew nobody. It was sixteen years before he saw his father again, and another ten or more years before he saw his mother.  Although he settled in Australia, learned the language, got a good job, married and raised a family, setting up a new home, for forty years my father yearned for the opportunity to go to his real home.

Your own experience of missing home may not be as strong as my father’s was, but almost all of us know that sense of not truly belonging where we are, and the desire to return to the memories and comforts of childhood. Today’s second reading takes that extraordinarily powerful desire and then gives it a 180 degree turn. For people of faith, says the Letter to the Hebrews, home is not the familiar place that you want to go back to: it is the completely unknown place to which you are going. In a very real sense, we do not know what awaits us there, but we believe that it will be the place where we truly belong, more comforting and familiar than even the idealised reminiscences of childhood.

Imagine the power and the freedom that such faith gives you. We accept that there is nowhere on earth, no time in this life, when we truly belong. We are no longer worried by our sense of not fitting in; we are no longer envious of those who seem far more settled than we are. We acknowledge that we are in exile—poor, banished children of Eve. Through faith we know that the return to Eden is not simply not possible, it is in fact not desirable. Our sighs of mourning and weeping in this valley of tears are not because we miss Adam, but because we desire to see the glorious face of Christ. All the energy that we used to invest in putting down roots or going back home we can now apply to our journey ever onwards and ever upwards. For faith gives substance to our hopes and supplies conviction for the existence of promised realities that we have never seen and which we find it hard to imagine.

But it does not stop there. What the letter to the Hebrews does with the word “home” and all our desires for belonging, Jesus in today’s Gospel does with the word “treasure” and all our desires for wealth. The gift of faith opens up a whole new world of desires and ambitions, and in so doing faith passes judgement on the world, a judgement that will be made manifest to all when Christ comes again. Like the Israelites before the Exodus mentioned in the first reading, or like the servants in the household mentioned in the Gospel, we shall have to wait until the rest of the world sees it, but that should not shake our faith now.

Of course, it is easy to say these things in church, and harder to put them into practice on the outside. Our faith does get shaken, so let us go to what we hold firm.

We come to this Mass because our faith has turned around even our desire for bread. We have come to seek, not the food that perishes, but the food that endures to eternal life. And, as the Eucharist is a reminder of Christ’s passion, to receive the Eucharist as the living body of Christ is to profess our faith that Jesus not only died for us, but rose again. God did not spare his own Son, but although the Father did lose his Son, he also got him back in the resurrection.

We believe the resurrection more powerfully and more directly than Abraham did. For the love of God Abraham did not spare his own son, but God’s love for Abraham was even greater. By telling Abraham not to kill his son, God, so to speak, gave Abraham Isaac, back from the dead. Abraham had faith in the resurrection, but in a figurative way.

A little later in the letter to the Hebrews, the writer talks about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all these other Old Testament figures as a great cloud of witnesses who surround us and look on as we run in the race for the prize that lies ahead. These witnesses or spectators can help us in two ways.

We can imitate their faith because we would be ashamed if our faith were any less than theirs. For we have in clear words what they had in parables and shadows.

We can be supported also by their love. They have won the race, they have come to the end of their journey, and are in the sheer bliss of their heavenly homeland. They want us to join them in an embrace of familiar love that surpasses the hugs and greeting that even our parents on earth offer us.

And so it is that at the end of the Mass you are not told to go back home, but you are sent forth, to journey through this world and through this life with your eyes fixed on the next, where you will be lost in praise of your true Father, in the company of the Son, your true brother, in the Spirit of infinite welcome and love, to whom be honour and glory for ever.

Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP is the Regent of Studies and the Chaplain to Monash University, assigned to St Dominic's Priory, Melbourne.