3rd Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

What a great little Gospel! First of all, Matthew gave a short fragment of history, Hearing that John had been arrested, Jesus went back to Galilee, and leaving Nazareth he went and settled in Capernaum. So Jesus had not been in Galilee for a while. Where had he been? Matthew did not tell us – though Jesus had clearly not been with John. Anyhow, Matthew had Jesus now in Galilee, but he did not stay in Nazareth [where everybody knew him since he was a child, and probably thought they had him all summed up]. Instead, he moved over to the bigger lakeside town of Capernaum where no one knew him.

Matthew then described the effect of the budding ministry of Jesus by quoting a few lines from the prophet Isaiah. The people that lived in darkness has seen a great light; on those who dwell in the land and shadow of death a light has dawned. Effectively he said that Jesus “turned on the light”.

Then, in a few concise words, Matthew summed up the message of Jesus, Jesus began his preaching with the message, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand’. Matthew was always the devout Jew and, out of profound reverence, was reluctant to mention the word God – so he would constantly speak of the kingdom of Heaven, never of the kingdom of God. But it was God’s kingdom that he, and Jesus, were talking about. Over the centuries the problem has been that we have tended to think that Jesus was talking about heaven. He wasn’t. The kingdom of heaven was very much about how God meant things to happen here on earth.

The rest of the Gospel makes clear enough what Jesus meant when he proclaimed that the kingdom of heaven was close at hand. He meant simply that “God loves you all”. That was his message in four words. Wouldn’t the world be different if the Church preached the same simple message, “God loves you all”. I do not think the world hears us preaching that message at all. Is that the Church’s fault, or the world’s fault? Sadly, I think it could be the fault of both.

Is that what you have heard the Church preaching? Is that your spontaneous sense of God? I wonder if it is mine. Later in the Gospel, Matthew will have Jesus quote from Isaiah, “…their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and be converted and healed by me.” I think that was what Jesus was getting at when he prefaced his wonderful assurance that the kingdom of heaven was close at hand with the simple invitation, ‘Repent!’ In the Greek language in which Matthew wrote, the word translated as Repent could better be translated with Isaiah’s ‘understand with your heart’, or simply ‘Change your way of thinking!’

That can happen to us all, if we allow ourselves to mature across life. The simple insight. ‘God loves me’, can mean more and more as I let life touch me. Even holding together a loving God and the world's evil is really the problem of understanding love and freedom. A child’s understanding of love is necessarily of conditional love. Adolescents see it as merited. It takes a few years of married life, or some equivalent, to discover slowly that love can be totally unconditional. And to recognize that change, we need to ponder deeply. There is a profound, life-changing difference between knowing we are loved, and can love, conditionally, and knowing we are loved, and can love, unconditionally. Yet none of us ultimately understands love completely. In some ways it changes everything. On those who dwell in the shadow of death, light has dawned!