Throughout the year our second reading is usually taken from the Letters of St Paul. These Letters were greatly treasured by the early Christians. However the way they treasured was not about keeping them securely in a safe. On the contrary those small Christian communities shared Paul’s letters with other communities. The Letters would be read, reflected on, applied to life and then resent to another Church so that others could benefit from them as well.
            This Sunday our second Reading takes us to a small Church community in Thessalonica in Greece. We know that St Paul used this large port city as a gate to Greece and in fact to the whole of Europe. It was the gate for evangelizing the Old Continent. However the Apostle didn’t have much time in the city. After three weeks he was expelled from it. Though he was forced to leave the city he left in it a Christian community. The fragile community became well known in the country. In today’s passage we read: “It was with joy of the Holy Spirit that you took to the Gospel, in spite of the great opposition all round you. This made you the great example to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia since it was from you that the word of the Lord started to spread… for the news of your faith in God has spread everywhere.”
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! We could ask ourselves how much the Catholic communities we belong to are a great example to the people of Australia. Are we the communities from which the word of the Lord spreads? Are we the fertile soil where the word of the Lord falls and produces the abundant harvest as we hear it in the parable about the sower? Spreading faith is not a kind of advertising, nor is it the duty of one evangelisation expert. Spreading faith is in our Catholic DNA. The desire to tell the Good News and to show it in our own way of living as the Church indicates the liveliness of our faith.
            As we receive this Word of God from the Second Reading, which the Christians of Thessalonica received first two millennia ago, let us embrace it as the word of the Lord who wants to announce his Good News to the world by faith, hope and charity lived in our local Catholic communities.
            It is a desire of our Blessed Lord so that our brothers and sisters who haven’t given their lives to him yet could hear his Good News from us and to see it lived in our communities. The answer Jesus gave to the Pharisee from today’s Gospel reading is a consolation for us. Jesus said to the Pharisee, and to us, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind… The second resembles it: you must love your neighbour as yourself.” It means that filled with his Holy Spirit we are enabled to love because we have been loved first as St John marvelled in his First Letter. Jesus has infused us with love by his death, Resurrection and Glorification. That’s why in today’s Gospel he refused to be drawn into discussions about some abstract love. A couple of days after that conversation with the Pharisee, Jesus showed love when he entered his Passion and Resurrection. For God love is not abstract, because “God is love.” On the contrary in our contemporary society love has become such a broad abstract that it doesn’t unite people any more. In fact it divides people.
            The small community of Christians in Thessalonica “became servants of the real, living God… waiting for Jesus, his Son.” In our divided world, which is deeply loved by the Lord, we are again called to created communities which can be leaven for the sake of others. We are called to be communities where we love God as God and because of that love we can truly love people as people. We don’t need to put others on the pedestal reserved for God, but we can love God together with them. It is the love which will never end. It is love which is a reflection of heaven not our own desires.

            Do you know how to identify the obverse of our coins here in Australia? That’s very easy. If there is an effigy of Queen Elizabeth II it is the obverse, it is the face of the coin. When our Blessed Lord was challenged by the Pharisees and the Herodians, as we could hear in the Gospel, he pointed out to the effigy of the coin which was used in the Roman Empire. The picture of the Caesar on it meant that it should go to back to the Emperor. However the Good News, which Jesus conveyed through this trap set for him by the leaders, was about giving to God what belongs to God.
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! Do you know how to identify what belongs to God? Let me read to you a sentence taken from Genesis: ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves.’ These words of God, our Father and Creator, together with the answer his only begotten Son gave to the leaders of the Jews reveal the dignity of a human person. A saint of our Church from the early centuries, St John Chrysostom, wrote: ‘Man is more precious in God’s eyes than all other creatures. For him the heavens and the earth exist. God did not spare his own Son for the sake of man. Nor does he ever cease to work until he has made him sit at his right hand.’
The early Christians lived in the society where slavery was widespread. However within 400 years, when Christianity was rather well established in the Roman Empire, slavery was virtually disappearing from the society. I find it very profound that those Christians, most of whom were poor and thus didn’t have slaves, were able to transform the mentality of the society. They did this by sharing with their contemporaries their Christian beliefs about the dignity of every human person. The beliefs were articulated by St Gregory of Nyssa who condemned the whole institution of slavery. St Augustine in the West and St John Chrysostom in the East preached that slavery was a sin. When the problem appeared again in the fifteenth century, with the expansion of colonialism, Pope Eugene IV in 1435 excommunicated Europeans enslaving the people from the Canary Islands. In 1462 Pope Pius II declared that slavery was a mortal sin. A century later, in 1537, Pope Paul II condemned those who turned first Americans into slaves and he demanded that they be freed. If you have watched the 1986 movie The Mission you get a picture how the missionaries tried to stand up to their governments by establishing an independent republic for the Guarani Indians to protect them from slavery. Eventually the missionaries were killed with the people they tried to protect. Historians established that without Christianity slavery would last longer. For example American influential leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had slaves. In fact Jefferson never freed his slaves. Many of influential thinkers of the Enlightenment like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Mirabeau and Burke, who are given as heroes of the modern world, didn’t mind slavery.
‘Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God’ said Jesus in today’s Gospel. My dear fellow believers! Give to God your whole life, not just a fraction of it, so that you can give to your fellow women and men the Good News about how precious they are in the eyes of God. Josemaria Escrivá, our contemporary saint, meditating on this mystery wrote: ‘Human life is holy, because it comes from God. Human lives, therefore, cannot be treated as mere things, or as statistics.’ In our society, as we witness the polemics which attempt to redefine the dignity of a human person, let us treasure the history of our Christians who because of their love for Jesus Christ opposed the leaders of the world who did not see the image of God in some people. That’s why our Church meditating on the passage from the Gospel we have for this Sunday expressed in the Catechism that: ‘The citizen is obliged in conscience not to follow the directives of civil authorities when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel. Refusing obedience to civil authorities, when their demands are contrary to those of an upright conscience, finds its justification in the distinction between serving God and serving the political community. "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." "We must obey God rather than men." (CCC 2242)
‘Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.’

            Joseph Brodsky, a Russian writer who was expelled from his homeland by an atheistic regime which tried to dictate what and how people should think once said: ‘There are worse things than burning books. One of them is not reading them.’ He also said: ‘Man is what he reads.’
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! As Christians we treasure the Bible, we read, meditate and pray it. Although the Sacred Book has such a prominent place in our life and worship we are not a religion of a book. We are the religion of the Word of God. The Blessed Trinity gave us the Word: the only begotten Son of the Father of whom St John in the Gospel spoke as the Word. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ Physics tell us that in the vacuum a voice cannot be heard. If the voice cannot be heard words cannot be heard either. In the vacuum there is just silence. However the Trinity is not the reality of dead silence. There is a dialogue, there is speaking and listening. The communion of the Blessed Persons is the space which allows the loving communication to happen. The reason that we don’t call ourselves a religion of a book is that we have been given a space where the Word of God can resonate. It is the community of the Church; the community of people who gathered in the name of the Lord live his presence, listen to his voice and receive his Body and Blood. Jesus himself said: ‘If two or three are gathered in my name I am there among them.” The Bible itself is a proof for that. The Bible is a testimony of a community which was created as the space for the Lord to speak his life-giving and life-saving Word. In order to truly savour the Word of God we need a community of disciples. It gives as an experience of being spoken to by the Lord himself, not just reading something inspiring of him.
            The responsorial Psalm for today is one of the most loved and treasured pieces of literature. The author who wrote: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; there is nothing I shall want,’ verbalised his experience of being a part of the flock. He gave us this most uplifting Psalm about God because the author followed God with his fellow believers. This Psalm, which speaks so strongly to us and is often chosen for the times when we find ourselves lost and down, came from someone who believed not on his own but in a community.
            If we keep this origin of Psalm 23 in mind we can appreciate the effort of God, pictured as king in the Gospel for this Sunday, who kept sending his prophets and apostles to gather people for a banquet, to create of them a community where they could hear his Word, where they could be transformed, where they could be healed of their sins. God did not send his messengers with copies of the Bible but with an invitation to a community where the living Word could resonate.
            The destruction mentioned in the parable could leave us confused. We can wonder how God could allow something like that happen. Well, Jesus spoke a parable, but it did happen in 70 AD when Roman destroyed Jerusalem. However historians inform us that the majority of Christians did not perish during the annihilation as they left the city at the sight of the approaching army. They did this because in their community they treasured the words of Christ: ‘When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, you must realise that she will soon be laid desolate. Then those in Judea must escape to the mountain, those inside the city must leave it.’ We can imagine those Christians trying to convince others to do the same but their fellow Jews did not believe the words of Christ. They believed that they were safe in the city. The Christians however took to heart Jesus’ prophesy and when they saw the signs they took off. They believed the words of Christ not the big walls and skills of defending army.
            My Dear Friends! I can imagine how broken-hearted they must have been when their relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues refused to believe. In our society we experience something similar. People we love and care about dismiss the Word of God. We however are called to be the space where the Word of God can resonate. We are called to be the community where people can not only read the Bible but they can hear the Lord Jesus speaking his life-giving and life –saving word.
            We are whom we hear.

            As we come to Mass this Sunday let us also bring to this most Holy Sacrifice those who have lost their lives in the recent shooting in Las Vegas, let us remember the injured, those who have been traumatised. Let us also remember their relatives and friends who have been affected because their loved ones have suffered.
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! In situations like this our mind starts going crazy as it tries to make sense of what has happened. It starts searching for answers as more and more questions are produced. I am not going to give you something to make sense of the recent tragedy but I would like to invite you to behold the suffering we have been informed of. However it is not about replaying in your memory the graphic scenes the media have fed us with.  St Paul in our second reading wrote: ‘Fill your minds with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, everything that we love and honour.’ The more we find ourselves at loss, the more we find ourselves confused, the more we find ourselves abandoned the more we are called to turn to the Lord of all consolation. The Saviour who was rejected but has become the keystone in the history of the family of the humankind and in the history of every woman and man created in the likeness of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the Lamb without blemish.
            After hearing the parable about the wicked tenants the Jewish chief priests and leaders were deeply convinced that the owner of the vineyard ‘will bring those wretches to a wretched end.’ However Jesus Christ not only told the parable but lived it as he was the son who in a couple of days was to be seized and threw out of the Holy City of Jerusalem and killed on the Calvary. What his and ours heavenly Father did after it had happened was to condemn the injustice inflicted upon his only begotten Son by raising him to new life on Easter Sunday. The Risen Lord has become the source of life, the wellspring of eternal life.
When Jesus Christ was subjected to suffering and death, which is a part of our human life, he became the precious vine stock into which we are grafted, in this life and for life eternal. In the Gospel he said: ‘I am the true vine you are the branches. Those who remain in me and I in them will bear much fruit.’ Jesus’ Incarnation and death have created the compatibility between divine and human to the extent that what is human – us can we grafted into what is divine – the Lord. It can be grafted, it can blossom; it can bear much fruit which is about giving life according to the example of our Blessed Lord.
My Dear fellow believers! Behold the suffering you have witnessed in recent days. Behold also the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. From beholding these we are assured that injustice has been already condemned by the Resurrection and glorification of the Son of God. Many today feel again like the disciples of Jesus on Good Friday when everything seemed to have been lost. In the darkness of despair of our recent Good Friday there is however the Good News of new life. Today we speak about it in terms of faith and hope but the day will come when we will be talking about it in gratitude and eternal thanksgiving.