Feast of the Holy Family
Launch of the 2025 Jubilee Year

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Sunday 29 December, 2024
St Mary's Cathedral, Perth

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As I mentioned at the beginning of Mass this morning we are being invited, as 2024 comes to a close and we begin a new year in just a few days time, to focus the eyes of our faith on the Holy Family of Nazareth, whose feast we celebrate today and also, in a particular way, on the Jubilee Year of Hope which Pope Francis inaugurated just a few days ago in Rome and which he has asked all the world’s bishops to inaugurate in their own cathedrals on this particular day.

The tradition of celebrating a jubilee year reaches back to the year 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII decreed that a jubilee year would be celebrated once every hundred years in order to help Christians focus on the extraordinary depth and limitless reach of God’s mercy and compassion for his people. Very quickly it was decided that such a precious celebration should occur more often and jubilees then occurred once every 50 years. Then, in the 15th century, it became the practice to celebrate such jubilees once every 25 years, and this is still the practice in the Church today. Francis has maintained this tradition but has also announced a special jubilee year from time to time, outside the 25-year schedule.

In fact in 2015, to highlight the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Francis announced a special Jubilee Year of Mercy, in which he invited the whole Church to turn its gaze to Jesus, and to see in Him the face of God’s mercy, open to everyone and visible to all.

In this Jubilee Year of Hope in 2025, Francis is inviting us all to reflect on the link between hope and mercy. The theme which Francis offers us for this year is one which ties together the pope’s deep conviction of the unfailing, merciful love of God, and the way in which this merciful love accompanies us on our journey through life. It is a love which, the more we embrace it and accept it, provides a solid foundation upon which to build our lives, and an assurance that, unless we deliberately and wilfully turn our backs on that love, the power of God‘s grace can strengthen us in our struggles, heal us of our brokenness, and bring us the peace of forgiveness when our hearts and spirits are tormented by our sinfulness. It is this fidelity of God which is the source of our hope.

We have just celebrated the feast of Christmas, and renewed our faith that in Jesus, God steps into our human story as one of us. One of the beautiful prayers of the Christmas liturgy puts it this way: in the mystery of the Word made flesh, a new light of your glory, O  God, has shone upon the eyes of our mind; we recognise in Jesus God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see. What this means, of course, is that in every word Jesus speaks, in every miracle He performs, and in every encounter He has with people, the deepest truth of who God is, is made known to us. God’s determination, if we dare to use that word, to forgive at any cost is shown in the words of Jesus on the Cross: “Father, forgive them for they do not realise what they are doing”. God’s readiness to bring healing and wholeness to broken lives is made clear in the response of Jesus to the leper who comes to Him with the words, “Lord, if you want to you can heal me”.  “Of course I want to,” says Jesus speaking from His heart, “be healed”. God’s passion to save everyone is seen in the tears which flow down Jesus's face as He looks on Jerusalem and says, again from the heart, “How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing”.

These tears of Jesus remind us that there is only one thing which can prevent God’s compassionate love and mercy from filling our hearts and our lives with peace and freedom: and that one thing is the hardness of heart which closes us in on ourselves and leads us to push God out of our lives. The promise of God, the compassionate mercy and forgiveness of God, and the boundless patience of God in the face of our weakness and sinfulness, are precious gifts which God never ceases to offer to us. We have only one thing which we need to do: we must be willing to say yes. This is captured very beautifully in some words of Jesus from the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. “Behold,” he says, “I am standing at your door knocking. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him and he will dine with me”.

Perhaps these words, better than any other I could offer this morning, sum up the promise, the hope, and the challenge of the Jubilee Year which we begin today: the Lord Jesus stands at the door of our lives and of our hearts, holding in His hands the gifts of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and healing. We need to be attentive, for He may be only knocking gently, and we may struggle to hear Him over the busy noisiness of our lives. We need to be courageous, for there may be within us a suspicion that if we let Him in He may ask more of us than we think we want to give. But perhaps, most of all, we need to be hopeful, for as Saint Paul reminds us, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord (Rom 8:38-39).

Let us as a Christian community, in this Jubilee Year of Hope, support each other in every way so that the Lord will not, as he did for the people of Jerusalem, weep over us because we were not willing to open the doors of our lives to Him.