3rd Sunday Year A
See Commentary on Matthew 4:12-23 in Matthew 4:12-17 & Matthew 4:18-25
Homily 1 – 2005
With today’s Gospel passage Jesus gets launched. He moved from Nazareth to Capharnaum and began to interact with people and to foment change. His move was nourished by his holding in tension two important truths: the truth of reality and the truth of faith.
The truth of reality: he saw the poverty, hunger, slavery, injustice and oppression of others. He moved beyond ignorance, beyond denial. He allowed himself to stand in solidarity with those who suffered; he felt their pain. That was one pole.
The other was the truth of faith: he believed that things could be different, he shared the dream of numerous prophets before him: poverty, hunger, injustice, oppression were not inevitable, indeed the Kingdom of God is close at hand.
He used the image of Kingdom, because that was the only social ordering that Jews had experienced. He was referring to a new social order. Matthew called it the Kingdom of heaven, (not because it had something otherworldly, something to do with the next life, after death), but because the pious Jew was reluctant to use the name of God. Effectively he was proclaiming that God’s social order was accessible, possible, indeed, close at hand.
But to move from the truth of reality to the truth of faith called for a method, a practical way of approach. Jesus called for repentance for a start. He called for change, for openness to change, for action in line with the two truths of reality and faith. His method involved a number of factors: we notice two of them in today’s short passage.
His first one was to make clear his convictions: to preach the message. His second action was to form a network, to call together a group of key leaders: Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. There is nothing mysterious about Jesus’ approach: many of you are familiar with it yourselves. It is the basis of the approach of the St Vincent de Paul Society. It is the approach of the Rural Australians for Refugees. There are lots of other examples.
Where do we stand in the light of Jesus’ call? We begin by depthing our appreciation of the truth of reality, we begin to become sensitive to the way our world really is. We become increasingly aware of the need to become better informed: What is the truth? And we leave ourselves open to feel the pain, the oppression, and our own indignation, our own rage.
A little example: the media have made the world aware of the plight of people devastated by the recent tsunami; they have shown us vivid images and kept them before our eyes: a quarter of a million wiped out, numerous others with their families, their homes, their livelihoods devastated. We stood in solidarity, and we responded financially. Does this exhaust the truth of reality? With a little more reflection we could open our eyes, for example, to another similar dimension of the reality: they are not the only ones in our world suffering; each day, for example, 25,000 children under the age of five die each day. That means that, since the tsunami struck on Boxing Day, three times as many children have died of hunger as people were killed in the tsunami. How many mothers, fathers, have been devastated by their deaths?
We don’t stay simply, however, with the truth of reality. We seek to make a difference because we know in our hearts that this is not God’s will (and if we read our scriptures, we come to see it with even greater clarity). We know that God wants a social order, a kingdom, where everyone is respected – with all that that means. Jesus even goes so far as to say loved. God has a dream for his kingdom.
But we also know nothing will change in our world unless we work to bring about change. We recognise our own smallness; we feel our relative lack of power, but we are not insignificant. We can begin to change ourselves: we can stop being part of the problem. And, as Jesus did in today’s Gospel, we can seek to network with others who share our sense of contradiction.
We resist the temptation to trivialise: to restrict Jesus’ call to repent, and to focus in a self-absorbed way on our own miserable, often irrelevant, failings. Like the disciples we allow ourselves to hear his call with enthusiasm, each in our own way, with our gifts, our insights, our opportunities, our availability of time, each in our own little, but not insignificant, corner of the woods.
Homily 2 – 2008
Peter and Andrew left their nets at once and followed Jesus. James and John, at once, leaving their nets and their father, … followed him. It was the beginning of a unique apprenticeship. Initially they observed. Then they worked alongside him. In time, they were sent out on a brief mission without him. They reflected together frequently, Jesus trying to ensure that they had got onto what he was on about. He wanted them to learn to rely on each other, to relate to each other and to communicate, without hidden agendas and without power plays.
In calling them to follow him Jesus did not mean that they were to be clones of himself. “Following him” meant something much deeper. First of all, he tried to share with them his own starting point.
After his baptism, Jesus had been anointed by God’s Spirit, that is: immersed in, soaked in, and overwhelmed by his experience of God’s love for him. (That is what the Spirit is: God’s love made accessible.) That on-going, beautifully intimate, sense of God’s closeness and of God’s love became the source not only of Jesus’ strength and single-mindedness, but also of his profound insight into what God essentially is and how God essentially relates to creation: God loves creatures. On this insight, Jesus based his own profound respect for every other person. He saw his mission to the world to be an extension of his own experience of his loving God. As John the Baptist had put it a little earlier in the narrative, Jesus would baptise the world with the Holy Spirit of God.
Jesus sought to introduce the apostles Peter and Andrew, James and John, to the experience of the Spirit, of God’s overwhelming love, by means of his own deep love for them – he made God’s love three-dimensional. In initiating them into God’s personal love for them – by giving them a concrete taste of it – he wanted them to share his own insight into the way things are with God.
Following from that, he wanted them to respect each other and every human person who crossed their paths – becoming thereby their neighbour. He showed them how he reached conclusions: exercising a genuine freedom in his respect for the Torah, working from what he took to be its spirit rather than from a lazy adherence to the letter of the law. He hoped that, like himself, they would begin to discern how to live accordingly – loving even enemies, forgiving, bringing in from the edges all those usually excluded by a narrow and frightened society.
Their wholehearted “yes” to Jesus’ invitation to follow him led them along paths they never dreamt of. They were sometimes slow learners, and got the wrong message or no message at all. They were tempted to give up, and under pressure they momentarily disowned him.
But, consistent as always, he forgave, and they persisted. It’s a lovely story. And in its own way, it is our story, too.
Homily 3 – 2011
Over the past few years, we have had our share of natural disasters: the prolonged drought, with its extreme temperatures and the destructive fires of Black Saturday, two years ago; the recent Queensland floods, and our own more local, less dramatic, floods and landslides here in Victoria. Is God up to something? punishing, perhaps, our heedless, sinful world?
Taking his cue from Isaiah (as we heard in the First Reading), Matthew, in today’s Gospel, introduced Jesus’ public ministry in this way: 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. As we look back over the two thousand years since Jesus came among us, we might ask: In what sense has he been the great light, the light dawning in the land and shadow of death? Does he shed any light on what’s going on currently in our world?
Over the next few weeks, the Gospel Readings will dip into Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Towards the end of that Sermon, Jesus said something relevant to our experience of droughts and floods. On droughts: Speaking of the Father in heaven, he said: he causes his sun to shine on bad as well as good. And on floods: he causes his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike.
Natural phenomena, according to Jesus, seem to be neither divine punishments nor divine rewards. Perhaps Jesus is a bit like that Father: going around curing all kinds of diseases and sickness – presumably, of sinners and non-sinners alike. For him, the healings were secondary: they were signs illustrating other more wonderful possibilities of the Kingdom.
Remember his encounter with the paralytic, let down through a roof by four friends? Son, your sins are forgiven! Healing the man’s paralysis seemed almost incidental – a second-thought – to illustrate something more wonderful: that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins. Then there were the ten lepers – all cured, but only one, the one who saw the point of it all and got carried away praising God, heard the assurance: Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.
I am not sure whether God gets involved in the practical things that happen to us – pulling strings, as it were, or unpredictably granting exemptions to the normal flow of cause and effect. I believe that God wants our every life experience to be signs – reminders of God’s presence, certainly, but particularly, invitations to take hold of the empowering help that God constantly offers us, to grow through whatever happens and to become, ever more fully, truly human. God wants our world of beautiful things and puzzling events to be sacramental: the world is charged with the grandeur of God.
I think that the Good News of the Kingdom is this: God is there in life, whatever is happening; and the God who is present there in life is the God of life, life that grows more and more beautiful, more and more intense, as we learn to take hold of the help God offers and grow in love and thus become authentically human.
With Jesus, light has dawned. But for us to discover that, we need to heed the invitation: Repent! Stand on our heads! See things differently! Change! Learn to love – to live respectfully, to live simply, to live compassionately!
Remember the last of the Beatitudes, the puzzling one. Blessed are you when your world is falling apart, [or, in Jesus’ words], when people criticize you, persecute you, libel you? Rejoice and be glad, he said. What possibility! What incredible freedom!
Is that what he was on about when he said: Follow me! “Let’s become friends. Get to know me. Get to know yourself. Notice yourself changing!”
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!
Homily 5 - 2020
At this early stage in his Gospel, Matthew was still setting the scene for his readers. He had shown Jesus down at the Jordan with John the Baptist, taking on himself, as it were, the sin of the world, in the hope of taking away the sin of the world. After Jesus’ baptism, Matthew next described in picturesque language a remarkable transformation within Jesus. He pictured God’s Spirit descending on Jesus and remaining within him, and a voice revealing to him from the heavens. “You are my son, the beloved”.
To sum up his personal idea of what Jesus would accomplish during his brief public life, Matthew used the words of an ancient prophet, Isaiah, to help him, “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”. Then at last, for the first time in this Gospel, we had Jesus proclaim personally his sense of the truth he wanted to share, “The kingdom of heaven is close at hand”.
Jesus’ proclamation triggered in my mind words from the wonderful address that Martin Luther King Jnr gave at the climax of that mind-blowing march to Washington of thousands of mainly black Americans in mid-summer, 1963. It was then that King transfixed his audience with the repeated refrain, “I have a dream…” - a dream in fact of freedom for his people, and an emphatic affirmation of their human dignity.
With Jesus, it was more like, “I have had a vision”, than King’s future-oriented “I have a dream”. Jesus’ vision was of people’s now reality, and its source was the irrepressible love of God. And, as far as Matthew was concerned, what Jesus was saying was relevant, not just to Jesus’ own Jewish listeners, but to all humanity, dwelling as they were “in the land and shadow of death”.
Jesus would himself be their “light”, and the light he would provide to the whole world would reflect the wonder and beauty of God who is love. The delightful thing about true love, God’s love, is that it is necessarily unconditional. In a context of inevitable sin and imperfection, God’s love is equally and necessarily forgiving, unconditionally and totally so. Being utterly loved will be the eventual experienced reality in the “Kingdom of heaven”, but already it is “at hand” for everybody, there for the taking, and almost too good!
However, that can sound like ‘pie in the sky when we die’. What about now? Most people are either quite ignorant that they are loved by none less than God, or for myriad reasons they fail to engage with the reality of it all. As well, and this is the sad thing, their experience of life in this world, on this side of the grave, seems to be of mutual hostility rather than mutual loving. As Isaiah put it, they are living “in darkness” and in “the land and shadow of death”.
That is why Jesus entreated people to “Repent”. Ultimately, it is an invitation to open our eyes, to clean out our ears and, most especially, to open our hearts. We need to touch into the power of the vision that energised Jesus down at the Jordan. We could do with more of Martin Luther King’s dreaming. The energy sustaining our world is love. Loving is inherently attractive. We need to be convinced enough of its beauty to give it a whole-hearted go. Let ourselves be loved by God first, believe it, trust it, do our best to experience it, be open to experiencing it. Love doesn’t need to be reciprocated to still be good news. Even when one-way, it can be delightful.
Repenting requires our noticing ourselves, letting go of first reactions [that are so often hostile], and only then responding from the love that we thoughtfully and consciously choose.
“The Kingdom of heaven is close at hand”. God really does love us!
Homily 6 - 2023
At the end of today’s Second Reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul made a highly significant distinction. He pointed out the crucial difference between what he called “preaching the Good News” of Jesus’ crucifixion, and simply knowing or talking about it or “expressing” it “philosophically”. It is the difference between what the Church refers to as evangelisation or as catechesis — the difference between conveying the “Good News” dimensions of the crucifixion or simply “expressing” or explaining the reality or the meaning of it clearly. At the end of today’s homily we shall all stand and recite the Creed. Creeds or catechisms deal with an event like crucifixion in what Paul was referring to as “the terms of philosophy”. Evangelising tries to evoke the beauty or the wonder or the profound personal impact of Jesus’ crucifixion. Catechesis or “philosophy” aims for clarity or accuracy or orthodoxy. Evangelising speaks to the heart; “terms of philosophy” or orthodoxy speak to the head. [Recently I have been wondering where I would place a homily].
For thinking adults both are necessary. The evangelising needs to come first, aiming to engage people emotionally. It prioritises what Paul called the “Good News” dimension. Without it, even the clearest catechesis or teaching is likely to be greeted with the objection: “It’s boring!” or “So what?”
Actually the Greek original of what Paul wrote shows some sympathy for the bored teen-ager’s reaction. What today’s translation had to say about the “terms of philosophy” being unable to “express” the crucifixion may be better translated by saying they simply “empty the crucifixion” of its primary personal impact.
Today’s Gospel passage said of Jesus himself, “He went round the whole of Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people”. Jesus started his mission by engaging people’s interest. He “proclaimed” the “Good News” firstly by his own exuberance and obvious commitment. He told them how God loved them — personally. His curing of the people’s “diseases and sicknesses” not only symbolised and illustrated the potentially wonderful aspects of the coming kingdom — they got people excited and aroused an emotional response from them.
Later he would take things further by instructing them carefully. He made clear how the practical shaping of God’s kingdom in the world would require their deliberate cooperation. He did not conceal the probable personal costs of the “close at hand” kingdom. All that later development was catechesis.
What Paul saw happening to the Corinthians is so relevant to the Church of today. There in Corinth the new converts were polarising on the basis of which leader they barracked for — Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas [Peter]. Some sophisticates even trumped the rest by insisting that they were barracking for Christ! Paul insisted that they were in fact “parcelling out” the crucified Christ — without a qualm. Fighting with each other was emptying out the radical impact of the Christ they claimed to love, the crucified Christ who was killed precisely because of his personal insistence on the need of all true disciples to learn to love and respect each other. Their behaviour denied the very essence of the Church — a community of brothers and sisters in Christ.
They would recover their identity as brothers and sisters in Christ only by getting truly in touch once more with the loving heart of Christ who personally loved each of them.
Given the negative pressures of our fallen nature, we, too, in today’s Church need constantly to re-evangelise ourselves and each other. We do that, I believe, by regular personal contact with Jesus in prayer. Prayer alone is the indispensable means to turn knowledge about Jesus and God his Father into a genuine and effective friendship with them. It is never too late to begin. Who knows where it might lead?