The Homily
by Mark Searle
Assembly Vol 7:2, November 1980
"The homily ... is to be highly esteemed as part of the liturgy itself" (SC, no. 52)
The homily, as part of the liturgy itself, is integral to our common worship. It is an act of the priestly office of Jesus Christ, part of the sacrum commercium between God and his people in Jesus Christ, through the empowering and uniting Spirit of holiness. It is no mere interlude for instruction, no occasion for a speculative monologue, but an act of worship shared by the speaker and the hearers, an act of magnifying the Lord, of recounting his marvelous deeds in the assembly of his faithful, an act of remembering the God remembers his people.
It partakes of the nature of sacrament. It is the word which, conjoined to the elements of human life and history -- all the rich elements of birth and death, joy and pain, hope and despair, faith and faithlessness -- makes manifest the sacramentality of all existence. It is a word of consecration spoken over the human species for the transubstantiation of our lives into the life of God in Jesus Christ. Through that original Word made flesh, the flesh of human affairs is made incarnate and eloquent of God's saving presence. The homily is the angel's declaration of God-with-us, a declaration taken to hear and enacted in the sacramental liturgy that follows.
Recently, a prominent Catholic writer vented his frustration at the way the homily is so generally abused, at the way it has become an interruption of prayer, an intrusion into the celebration of the mysteries. His solution was to move it to the end of Mass, making it an option for those who wished to stay and hear it, and letting the Mass speak for itself. This is a solution of despair, though it is a despair that can easily be sympathized with. The solution, however, is not to relegate the pious platitudes, the clerical self-indulgence, the moralizing exhortations to the positions of a miserable afterword, but to do away with them altogether and to make the homily what it is meant to be, "highly esteemed as part of the liturgy itself."
The main problem with the homily, according to this same writer, is the psychological distance that divides the pulpit from the pews, the world of the clergy from the "real" world of the congregation. Again, while not wishing to appear to endorse sweeping generalizations of this kind, there is sufficient truth in the accusation for it not to be dismissed lightly. Present structures in the Church do little to help priests overcome this gap, to share the ordinary life experiences of the ordinary man and woman. And reports about the attitudes prevalent among seminarians indicate that this a problem that is not soon to disappear.
Rather than simply wringing our hands about the state of homiletics, or indulging in easy negativity, we dedicate this issue of Assembly to all those who are charged in the Church with the proclamation of the Word of God; in gratitude to those who have given and continue to give us the Word of life; in encouragement of all those who, while charged to preach, know themselves to be seekers after the Word; and as a stimulus to those preachers who do not know there is a problem.
