23rd Sunday Year A - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2017

 In today’s Gospel passage, Matthew has collected a number of remembered, or half-remembered, sayings of Jesus touching on some practical details involved in living together as a community of disciples. What does living as a Christian community ask of each of us? What sort of personal virtues does it suppose?

Of course, any Christian community of disciples is a work in progress. We all struggle to be the sort of person we would like to be and to behave consistently with our personal ideals. We even differ in our levels of understanding of what those ideals might be. Misunderstandings are inevitable – but they need not be irreversible.

As I reflected on today’s passage the other evening, I was struck by some of the suppositions quietly sitting there; and just how difficult it is for me to act from them.

Take the opening comment, for example, “If your brother does something wrong …”. Before going any further, do I, can I, see everyone in the community as my brother or sister? Do I even want to? Jesus just seems to take it for granted that that is how we all view each other. I am inclined to think that, until we do, the rest of his suggestion just might not apply. What right do I have to correct any of my fellow parishioners until I have at least begun to treat them as brothers or sisters? Do I honestly speak with love, genuine love? With respect, compassion and sensitivity?

When Jesus challenges us to treat the persistently errant parishioner as a pagan or tax-collector, what did he mean? How did he model such treatment himself? Have any of us reflected enough on that issue to learn how to respect someone whose ideas or behaviour we do not approve, someone, perhaps, who does not respect us or our beliefs?

I won’t look at Jesus’ second comment about binding and loosing, because I have no idea what on earth they might mean in relation to us generally, especially when the comment figures without any context to give us any hint.

But let’s move on to the third comment and listen to it carefully – the comment about prayers being granted. Do you remember what you prayed for last week in the Prayers of the Faithful? Were your prayers answered? And if not, why not? Didn’t Jesus say they would be? Who might be falling short, him or us?

He started off by saying, “If two of you agree to ask anything at all …”. I wonder if that is our problem. What might “agreeing” involve? If we are not to some degree already brothers and sisters, how could we be said to agree in any meaningful way? We can thoughtlessly say “Yes” to some shared petition, or to some personal request, out of courtesy, or without really giving it a second thought, or without prioritising it in any way. But is there any real meeting of hearts, of shared, deeply felt desires? Might we first need to work hard at becoming real brothers and sisters before we can agree to ask?

My final reflection comes from Jesus’ comment, “Where two or three of you meet together in my name, there am I in your midst”. What on earth does “in my name” entail? The phrase, or its equivalent, occurs a few times in the Gospels. To my knowledge, the meaning is never teased out specifically. Personally, I think I would be praying in the name of Jesus when my prayer reflects his attitudes and expresses the desires of his heart rather than the other way round, trying to get him to think my way and accept my priorities, etc.. Two or more of us would be meeting in his name to the extent that we have absorbed his Spirit, his sense of God, his love for the world, his hopes and desires. Would our prayer, then, be other than “Thy will be done”?