The is the edited text for the homily for the Mass of ordination to the episcopate of Most Reverend Peter Murphy and installation as 11th bishop of Armidale at the Cathedral of Sts Mary and Joseph, Armidale, Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary of Pompei, 8 May 2025.
Patrick White’s 1955 novel, The Tree of Man, chronicles the lives and fortunes of an Australian family and their society. Stan Parker inherits an untamed patch of bushland, clears it by hand, builds a shack, and woos a girl called Amy. Thereafter come decades of births, deaths and marriages, of isolation and farm routine, of bushfires, floods and the Great War. Meanwhile the wilderness is gradually transformed into encroaching suburbia, and Australian society with it. The exposition of the struggles and learnings of ordinary people makes The Tree of Man a monument to human endurance. For this ‘timeless’ and ‘majestic’ work of art (and others), White was acclaimed Australia’s greatest novelist and is, to date, our only Nobel laureate for literature (1973).
White had a complicated faith. He once called himself a “lapsed Anglican egotist agnostic pantheist occultist existentialist would-be though failed Christian Australian.” But in 1951 he slipped and fell in his garden. He wrote: “I lay where I had fallen, half-blinded by the rain, under a pale sky, cursing through watery lips a God in whom I did not believe. I began laughing, finally, at my own helplessness and hopelessness.” He had only been pretending to himself that he did not believe in God or need Him. All his writing about the beauty and monotony of nature, the struggles and perseverance of men, the centrality of character and relationships, had Christian underpinnings. What he was most interested in, he wrote towards the end of his life, was “the relationship between the blundering human being and God.”
Our first parents were formed from the dust of the earth, fed by nature, and called to keep God’s garden. Their children kept flocks and worked the soil. The Israelites were commonly farming folk, sowing fields, keeping vineyards, and celebrating seasonal festivals. They counted their harvests a divine blessing, were required to share them with the poor, and periodically rested their land and animals. In tonight’s text from Isaiah, that Jesus used programmatically to describe His own ministry, the saved are described as “oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord to display his splendour” (Isa 61:1-3; cf. Lk 4:17-21).
Of course, Jews and Christians were eventually to be found as much in the cities as the farmlands. Yet even in urban settings, the preaching of Jesus and His disciples was pervaded by the rural idyll. Jesus told parables about planting and harvesting crops, tending vineyards and making wine; about grains and bread, olives and oil, fruit and fish; about birds and eggs, sheep, goats and a fatted calf; about salt, honey, herbs and spices; and about enjoying these “fruits of the earth and work of human hands”.
He described Himself as the Good Shepherd, who knows and guards His sheep; and He charged His apostles with being good shepherds also, “fishers of men”, farmers of a great harvest.
Paul followed this lead, telling the elders of Ephesus to “Be on guard for yourselves and your flock… shepherding the Church of God” and securing her from those wolves who distort the truth and lead people astray with false doctrine (Acts 20:28-31). Peter, also, observed that we sheep are inclined to stray, and so need a “shepherd and guardian of your souls”; he exhorted the bishops to be those shepherds, exercising oversight freely, according to God’s will; not for sordid gain, but with eagerness; not lording it over your charges, but being an example for all the flock to follow.” (1Pet 2:21-25; 5:1-4)
In his first Chrism Mass as Bishop of Rome, the late Pope Francis famously said that pastors must have the “smell of the sheep”, a phrase intended not as a comment on clerical hygiene but as a call to pastors to walk amongst their charges, hearing their joys and sorrows, and getting their hands dirty helping them. In his first address to nuncios, Francis asked them to identify candidates for bishop who would be “close to their flock, vigilant regarding dangers, caring and protective, instilling hope and filling hearts with sunlight.”
With such criteria in mind, one of Pope Francis’ last acts was to choose Peter Murphy, a trained field agronomist in a former life, for the office of bishop. To call him the chief “pastor” is not about spaghetti but about shepherding. To say he must now lead the “pastoral” activity of the diocese is not principally about land management but about teaching, sanctifying and governing as Jesus the Good Shepherd would.
Dear Peter, you know well that the Tree of Man experiences different seasons, opportunities, and challenges: times of planting and harvesting aplenty, times of pruning and seeming dormancy. Episcopal ministry can be the same. There will be springtime moments of new beginnings and fresh possibilities, summer seasons of vigorous growth and expansion, autumn times of harvesting fruits and pruning, and winter periods of necessary rest and hidden preparation. Times when families, parishes, schools and vocations are booming; times when shortages or obstacles seem more the order of the day.
But you come to your ministry with tools more powerful than the latest scientific agronomy… With the peace of the Risen Christ and the life-breath of the Holy Spirit, according to tonight’s Gospel (Jn 20:19-23). With the commission and grace to be God’s ambassador, according to our epistle (2Cor 5:14-21). With the Spirit of the Lord anointing you, as our reading from prophecy predicted (Isa 61:1-3). You are charged with proclaiming the Gospel, healing the broken, liberating the trapped, comforting the grieving, and proclaiming jubilees like our present Jubilee Year of Hope. As well, you bring your personal talents and experiences, including graces cultivated and expressed as a parish priest, vocations director, seminary leader, scholar and lecturer, Vatican official, vicar general, cathedral dean, and more…
In a few moments from now, you will make nine promises so grave the rest of us will immediately invoke the help of Christ and the saints in the Litany! Next comes the laying on of hands and a consecration prayer that goes back to the early third century. The Gospel book will be held over your head as a sign that your life and ministry as bishop are under the authority of the Gospel. In the interpretative rites that follow, you will be given, amongst other things, a shepherd’s crook. One of our retired bishops, when he showed his crozier to some primary school kids and asked what it signified, was told by a little girl that it meant he was Little Bo Peep. It does not mean that! But it is a reminder that, unlike Bo Peep, you must lose none of your sheep, but tend, guard, and feed them as Christ would.
Now you must be a farmer of souls for New England and the Barwon. Plant Gospel seeds far and wide, share your own wisdom about “the relationship between blundering human beings and God” and shine sacred “sunlight” on your people’s minds and hearts. Lead the sheep and feed the lambs, assured of the prayers and support of your brother bishops and priests, and of the entire flock of the faithful of Armidale.
