15th Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2017

Today’s Gospel ties in well with last week’s. Do you remember Jesus saying last week, “I bless you, Father, for hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to mere children”? This week we have Jesus saying, “I talk to them in parables because they look without seeing and listen without hearing or understanding”. And then he quoted Isaiah, “The heart of this nation has grown hoarse, their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, for fear that they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and be converted and be healed by me”.

Today’s comment was occasioned by the parable he had just told about the hundredfold harvest, [despite a few losses here and there]. To me it is a message of prolific abundance, and fits in with what Jesus does elsewhere where he feeds the crowd of five thousand, and picks up twelve baskets of scraps after his effort. It illustrates the Kingdom of God. What else need we expect from God? God gifts us abundantly, gratuitously. Jesus’ healing miracles, his forgiveness of sin, his casting out demons, exemplify the same thing.

We know all this, but somehow it doesn’t enthuse us; it doesn’t change us. It is not how we habitually approach life. It is not what we instinctively see. Why? Because we have let ourselves become “learned and clever”, such that we no longer see, we no longer hear, we no longer understand – with the consequence that we do not change, we are not converted and we finish up not healed. Why don’t we? In today’s Gospel, Isaiah seemed to think it was due to fear of change. Last week, Jesus was of the opinion that we have forgotten to approach life as we once did as “mere children”.

The little child can be transfixed by a snail, a flower, a tree, the moon, whatever. It can be caught up in the fascination of the real. What happens as we grow older? We learn to define things, categorise them, explain them, measure them – but we move away from them in their fascinating uniqueness and reality. Our heads are full of ideas. And those ideas can block us from really seeing what is real. We look at our world and can no longer see there signs of the Kingdom of God. We no longer are sensitive and responsive to the presence and action there of God. We cannot read the signs of the times. We see what we expect to see, what we think we see, and lose the art of taking time to be sensitive to what is really there. We are too learned and clever by far.

What we need is to learn to see again, as we once did as children – to see without allowing our thinking to conceal the real, to prevent us from understanding with our hearts, from being converted, and being healed.

Learning to see, to hear, to understand without the interference of our incessant thinking, our incessant controlling, is what is often referred to as contemplation, or meditation. Of recent centuries, with a few exceptions, the Church has failed to teach people how to meditate. We have taught you to say prayers, but generally have failed to lead you further – perhaps because we forgot how. To take it on and to persevere with it calls for help. Meditating can be experienced as quite counter-intuitive. It does not come naturally; and what happens is not what people usually expect.

But there is a wonderful ground-swell of interest and practice happening presently in the Church, largely among busy laypeople like yourselves. It began shyly about eighty years ago – people rediscovering the ancient Christian wisdom tradition and together putting it into practice in today’s world: and in the process, being converted and finding healing from the hand of God.

If you are interested, talk to one of the coordinators.