15th Sunday

15th Sunday Year A

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.

Homily 2 – 2008

A hundred-fold return. That’s something! And it wasn’t even “genetically modified”! Jesus was cryptically referring to human possibilities, human potential – what life could be like. He had already given practical hints – the time he turned water into wine – hundreds of litres… when he fed with a couple of loaves of bread, a few pieces of dried fish, a crowd of 5000 men, along with, probably, a similar number of women, and children as well – and still had scraps left over… when he helped the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to talk, the crippled to walk and the sick to get well.

But they were only hints, signs. They weren’t the real thing – just a hint of possibilities. Jesus dreamt of a world where people cared for each other.. where no one was excluded; where difference was not threat, but enrichment; where wealth and resources were shared. The 100-fold would take shape as everyone related like that.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, where people don’t live like that, won’t live like that… Does our experience of the 100-fold depend on the co-operation of everyone else? If that’s the case, it may never be more than a dream.

What was Jesus’ experience of life? He worked for the Kingdom, and was prepared to die for the Kingdom. Did he experience the Kingdom? Perhaps, depending on how we define it, he didn’t. But, as the Epistle to the Hebrews reflects, Jesus became perfectly human across life, particularly as he freely faced into death.

John’s Gospel has Jesus talk about his joy, earlier in the very night that he was arrested. Jesus hoped that his disciples would experience his joy: that my joy may be in you, and your joy be complete. The joy and peace – the simple joy and peace of being authentically human, which was Jesus’ experience – can gradually become ours as we discover his love for us, say “yes” to it, and allow it gradually to enlighten and empower us. We can love with his love, love even those who see us, and treat us, as their enemies – and everyone else in between.

It’s a wonderful freedom, becoming increasingly aware of how much we instinctively categorise, label, differentiate and distance ourselves from and condemn different people. It’s a wonderful freedom as we find ourselves wanting and able to relate to them differently, realising that God loves them with the same ease, the same love, that God shows toward us. As that happens, it’s God at work in us, through the power of his Spirit, calling for our co-operation, but not our own initiative.

We know the experience only as we are slowly changed – and, if it is not the 100-fold, then at least it’s the 30-, or even the 60-fold. It’s a taste of the Kingdom of heaven, and a step towards its becoming real, not only for ourselves, but, through us, as we learn to receive and to give, for everyone.

Homily 3 – 2011

Carbon is to be given a price, and, one way or the other, we shall all eventually pay the price. People who know a lot more than I do cannot, or will not, reach consensus. I feel quite disempowered. Yet, I know that a lot of people are worried because they fear the possibility that their lives, and the lives of succeeding generations, will be severely affected – and that concerns me.

It is coincidental that St Paul, in today’s Second Reading, refers in some ways to the backdrop against which the present drama is unfolding. Paul takes his cue from the story-line in Genesis about the creation of the world and of humanity, and about the cataclysmic choice of Adam and Eve to cut themselves free from God. Genesis had located humanity fairly in the centre of the whole project of creation, dependent on it and, at the same time, responsible for it. As a result of humanity’s option for sin, the created world, which was there to sustain humanity, became twisted. With suffering you shall get your food from it. It shall yield you brambles and thistles. You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.

St Paul in today’s Reading made the point more directly: … creation was made unable to attain its purpose; but he also observed: … it was not for any fault on the part of creation. Well, who was responsible for the Garden becoming a Wasteland? The translation we have here says: It was made so by God. But the original is more vague – and could have referred directly to Adam and Eve and their option to sin. The point is ultimately the same, however, because, as the Genesis story would have it, God’s action was in response to the sin of Adam and Eve.

In one way or the other, then, human sin is responsible for the mess we make of our world. It is human greed, human ignorance, human injustice, human distrust of others, human unwillingness to share what we have (including our wisdom), human unwillingness to change what we have become used to, that twist and disfigure so much of our world, and are responsible for so much human suffering.

As St Paul wrote: From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, is groaning …, and not only creation, but all of us … we too groan inwardly. Paul’s intention was not to discourage his little Christian community but to give them hope and to keep them focussed. If it is human sin that is ultimately the cause of so much of the world’s suffering, then, as God’s grace overwhelms sin, the world’s mess, too, will be overwhelmed. That is why Paul could write: Creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God.

As humanity learns to face its sin and to name it, and as it becomes willing to change, our world achieves once more its original purpose. But that calls for us to respect our world and our place in it, to respect its limitations and our limitations, to moderate our greed, to cooperate as nations, to share our wisdom and our wealth and to work together. The world’s problems, ultimately, are not just scientific, economic or political, but moral.

In the meantime, politicians will give us what the electorate majority wants. It is too easy to make them the scapegoats for our own unwillingness to act responsibly in justice and in compassion – and to pay the price.

Homily 4 - 2014

At the end of today’s parable Jesus said, Listen, anyone who has ears. Listen! He started it by saying, Imagine… Look! Take a second look! Do we do that? Or do we tend to tune out – heard it all before, know what it means, ho-hum!

You remember how Jesus started off his mission around Galilee? The Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent; and believe the Good News. It’s too familiar. We don’t hear it. The Kingdom of God is close at hand – not way off in the indefinite future. And he says, That is Good News! The catch is the bit in the middle, Repent. At least, that is how the word is usually translated. So really it just sounds like more moralising, good-behaviour stuff; and really, that has not worked. But that does not do justice to his urging. Repent.

To see the closeness of the Kingdom of God as good news, we need to change the ways we instinctively think. Repentance happens with an insight or sense of God or myself or life that is so joyful or so disturbing that “business as usual” is no longer a satisfying option. Only then might behaviour actually change.

God is not what we generally believe. We have constantly to let our sense of God deepen and grow – radically. God’s judgment is not future. It has already happened – and it is no secret. Guilty! We are all guilty. But, knowing that only too well, God says, “Forgiven!” Not: “not guilty”; not: “excused”; not: “extenuating circumstances”; but simply forgiven, outright; and forgiven because loved! Remember the Gospel of a few Sunday’s back, God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, not to condemn the world but to save it. Not save it from himself, but to save us from ourselves, from each other, and from the vicious ways we react to ourselves and interact with each other.

In Jesus’ mind, repenting means firstly being open to let our sense of God change, or be changed – radically. He challenges us to stop defending ourselves against a new vision of the ways things can be, and in fact, from God’s point of view, already are. That is why Jesus says so insistently, Listen. Listen to him. He knows what God is really like. Sit lightly with our former certainties. Imagine …

That is why he spoke in parables – to shoot down our tired expectations, to stimulate our imaginations. Parables are not illustrations. They are not another moralistic version of Aesop’s fables. They are not about good behaviour, but about the different way things are in the Kingdom of God. In no way is it business as usual, but unimaginably good news.

Take today’s over-familiar parable. Who/what is it primarily about? The early Church interpreted it as an allegory about soils, and that interpretation found its way into the Gospel text. That interpretation might encourage people to try harder, but does not lead to unexpected insight. It also sets people up to categorise and pass judgment on others. Rather than about the different soils, might it be more about the one paddock where they all occur? Who or what might that refer to? To complicate things, the punch-line, which is often the point of the story, seems to be about the unbelievable abundance of the seed.

The Gospel refers to the parable as the Parable of the Sower. What if it really is about the Sower, who surely knows his farm, yet sows his seed with uncalculating abandon along the track, on stony areas, among thistles as well as in his good soil? What might that say about God? Imagine! Can you warmly relate to an incorrigibly hopeful God like that? I do.

Why does Jesus leave us up in the air?

Perhaps it might be worthwhile taking time, this time, to listen, to let our imaginations run loose. That is what praying can be, even perhaps, is meant to be – or at least can be at its nourishing best.

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.

Homily 6 - 2020

“ … Then the disciples went up to him and asked, ‘Why do you talk to them in parables?’” Go home and, if you have a copy of Matthew’s Gospel, read what follows. Jesus’ answer seems even more confusing. What was Jesus up to?

A retired teacher I know had a great way with children. She would read a passage from the Gospel, and then ask the class to think quietly and, and after a little while, to respond by finishing a sentence starting with “I wonder …”. She would listen to their responses — and not comment on what they said. She wanted them to keep wondering. The great pioneering scientists were people who wondered, who were not satisfied with the answers accepted among their peers.

The story is told of the young St Thomas Aquinas, the most famous of the Church’s theologians, constantly asking, as a lad, the question, “Who is God?” Another story is told of the young St Teresa of Avila, one of the Church’s most gifted mystics, wandering away from her home as a little girl. When at last found by an anxious father and asked where did she think she was going, her answer was, “I want to see God”.

A friend of mine, a former priest, tells me he has lost his faith. He can no longer hold together the idea of an infinitely good God and the reality of the suffering and death of an innocent child. He challenged me. Do I have an answer, a satisfying answer? Not a satisfying one. Yet. I know God too well to disbelieve. But I don’t have a clearly satisfying, definitive answer, to the suffering of an innocent child — I simply keep wondering.

Over the years my sense of God has grown and deepened noticeably through wondering. I have discovered there is an enormous difference between wondering and doubting — though they can seem at times to be the same thing.

This brings us back to the disciples’ question: “Why do you talk to them in parables?” I wonder …