15th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

A hundred-fold!  What was Jesus talking about?  We would like to think it could be the difference God might make to our lives as individuals, as societies, as the world at large.  Isaiah went on about the Word of God going out from the mouth of God into the world and not returning empty without doing what it was sent to do.  It would be lovely if only we could be convinced it were true!

What did Jesus mean – the hundred-fold?  Well, that is what parables were for: They were told to get people hooked, and then leave them hanging, in the hope that by tantalising them, they might stir their inertia, get them wondering, searching through their experience and examining their ways of giving meaning to their lives – perhaps blowing them apart in the process.  Jesus hoped that his parables might lead people to look ever deeper for a more adequate insight into life and a more nuanced and committed response to it.

As Jesus talked about the Kingdom - what could be - the problem he faced was largely inertia (though for those with a stake in the power politics of the day inertia gave way to opposition, fierce opposition).  People enjoyed the entertainment, the spectacle of healings and exorcisms, the way he talked, but on the way back home the majority really couldn’t hold back a yawn.

Perhaps a little bit like last week...  Thousands turned out for the spectacular entertainment of the Live8.  The occasion for the concerts, the meeting of the G8 summit, has not engaged proportionate notice.  The tragic deaths of fifty people from terrorist explosions in London’s transport system has somehow crowded out the m media’s concern for the 60,000 deaths of innocent people each day on average - most of them from hunger and other poverty related diseases: 60,000 today. 60,000 yesterday, 60,000 tomorrow. until the number inexorably grows to nearly 10 million by the end of the year - the pattern relentlessly continuing day-in-day-out until the world changes and responds differently.

The world could be different: God is bursting to grant the hundred-fold, but it seems that a lot of the ones enjoying it don’t want to share it.  Why?  not from hatred, but from indifference.  They’re tired of hearing about poverty.  Since they can’t bring about the solution easily, many easily move into denial and unconsciously seek to distract themselves: Give us the celebrities! titillate us with the scandals! let’s concentrate on the Games!

What did Isaiah say – the same Isaiah who stood in awe before the power of the Word of God?  You will listen, and listen again, but not understand, see and see again, but not perceive.  For the heart of this nation has grown coarse, 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 be healed by me.

By both his actions and his teaching, Jesus showed people how the hundred-fold could be theirs – there for the taking!  But it would mean conversion on people’s part – a journey for each of them into their depths, searching, noticing, listening to the voice of God’s Spirit whispering there and setting free on the world their need to love.

So Jesus spoke in parables, hoping to get them wondering, thinking, noting, wishing that thus the penny might drop, and in the words again of Isaiah, they might understand with their hearts and be converted and be healed by God.  But people lost interest, and their power-brokers crucified him. So much for truth, so much for the hundred-fold!

And here we are today!  All of us somehow hooked, perplexed by what is going on in our world, sometimes by our own reactions, getting our occasional flashes of insight, stumbling yet persevering, yet to see the hundred-fold, hoping we still believe its possibility, perhaps even on occasion getting a sniff of the 30-fold, even if not quite yet the 60-fold.

The vision is so important; it is the power in the vision that gives us courage to engage.  We are all equally sons and daughters of the one God, the only God there is.  Even if some may terrorize our lives, to us they will always be brother and sister.  No one is threat, at least to our spirit, that can always resist being drawn into hatred or violence.  So let’s keep hanging in! restless, hoping the apparently impossible, open still to wonder, wanting to go deeper, thirsting for wisdom – people of prayer, people who believe Jesus.