, at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 16 November 2025.){kind=link}
This is the edited text of the Homily for the Solemn Mass for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C), at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 16 November 2025.
A flutter on the Melbourne Cup is all very well, but these days you can bet on rather more consequential things. You can get odds on whether China will invade Taiwan by Christmas, or whether there will be a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine by Easter. You can wager on how many tweets Donald Trump will post next week, which company will have the best AI by the end of 2025, or who will be pope after Leo. The rise of these ‘prediction markets’ has been meteoric.
One company, Polymarket, has recorded $US22.5 billion in trades executed on its prediction market platform over the past three years, including serious investment from major financial institutions. Google now displays prediction market odds in its search results, treating crowd-sourced probabilities as seriously as stock prices. What started as an academic exercise has become a major industry: over $US3 billion was bet on the last US presidential race alone. And what was once the province of professional fortune-tellers and spiritual soothsayers has been democratised, as the markets rely on ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ rather than the projections of any single prophet.
The success of prediction markets is in part due to simple greed: some hope to make a quick buck from them. Yet they also tap into the human desire to conquer uncertainty and control the present and the future. We’re not content to wait and see—we want reliable predictions on future weather, stock prices, even romantic adventures, pricing tomorrow’s risks today and letting the algorithms soothe our anxieties.
In today’s Gospel (Lk 21:5-19), Jesus looks at Jerusalem’s magnificent Temple and makes a terrible prediction: “What you are staring at now will soon be all destroyed; not a single stone will be left on another.” A truly bearish forecast! Yet the disciples want more precision from the prediction markets: “Rabbi, when exactly will this happen? How will we know? Please give us the day, time and bus number.”
Christ has no interest in the algorithms and bets. He denies them the specifics they crave. He offers something more important and more unsettling: “Revolutions on earth or in the heavens, wars and rumours of wars, pandemics, climate change, the second coming: you’ll see signs or hear talk of them all. But these are the signs of every age and won’t give you the certainty you seek. Forget calculating the odds. Just be ready and persevere.” Malachi’s prophesy (Mal 3:19-20) is equally challenging: a day of fire and fury is coming, comeuppance for the wicked, healing for the righteous. So get ready!
Modernity is risk averse. It makes its risk assessments and seeks to mitigate them. We don’t just want to forecast the future: we want to control it. But the Jesus thing isn’t about hedging our bets; it’s not about control. It’s about trust, “let go and let God,” God’s will be done.
Which is not to say He makes no predictions about the future. Jesus is clear: there will come good things and bad; a beautiful creation with natural disasters; communities that help and that harm; relationships of life and love or of hate and death; a faith proud to be called Christian but that can also make us targets. It’s a rather bleak prophesy. Yet in the same breath Jesus says, “Don’t be deceived, don’t worry: no hair of your head will be lost; your endurance will save you.”
Faith is precisely such paradox. We are told God’s kingdom has come, and yet is still coming (Mt 6:10; 12:28; Lk 17:20-21). We must lose our life in order to regain it (Lk 9:23-24 etc.). We are radically uncertain about the future yet totally assured about Whose hand it lies in (Rom 8:38-39; 1Pet 5:6-10). All was finished on the cross (Jn 19:30), yet all will yet be made new (Rev 21:5). We know not the hour, yet we work as if it’s any moment now. We work, as Paul counsels (2Thess 3:7-12), not because our deeds can save us, but because in our ordinary actions extraordinary graces can shine. It is in ordinary deeds that we imitate the selfless love of Christ and are conformed to being like Him. It is there that we build up our families, community, Church.
So, as some wrestle with eschatological anxiety, calculating the odds of some apocalypse, Paul tells us to keep calm and carry on. The earliest Christians offer us a great example of what it means to live with such confidence amidst uncertainty. As Jesus had predicted, they faced betrayal at home and persecution outside. Some were imprisoned, tortured, killed. They didn’t know what each day would bring. Yet their witness was marked, not by panic but by trust, not a frantic scramble to secure certainty but fidelity amidst insecurity. They gathered for the Eucharist. They prayed at home. They cared for the needy. They forgave their enemies. They encouraged one another in hope. Their trust was not in the shifting calculations of the empire but in the steadfast promise of Christ.
Our Psalmist speaks today to the 14 new choristers, the first girls to be joining. The psalmist calls them to “sing psalms to the Lord, with the sound of music; with harp, and trumpet, and horn”, for we are confident that “the Lord comes to rule the earth with justice.” (Ps 97(98))
In an age desperate for prediction and control, their music invites us into something much more reliable, into God’s presence, and acclaims Him as “the King, the Lord.” Christ doesn’t ask us to predict the future; He asks us to be faithful in the present. To love the person in front of us and show mercy here and now. To pray today’s prayers and sing today’s hymns. Christian life is more surrender than control, trading the wisdom of the markets for the folly of the cross (1Cor 1:18), wagering your all, not on a calculation but on a person—the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life (Jn 14:6). In Him the future is not anxious-making but peace-giving, not somewhere fearful but somewhere redeemed, not someone unpredictable but Someone completely reliable.