25th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

We don’t know the original context in which Jesus told today’s story.  Matthew has chosen to use it in the section of his Gospel where he is making a series of points relating to the tensions and temptations that had arisen in his own community.  There were Jewish members in his community who felt resentful, because God in his goodness was calling the Gentiles also to salvation and they were cashing in too easily.  Similar tensions can arise, in different but connected ways, in any Christian community.

There was a time in my life when sometimes I wished I weren’t a well-instructed, well-socialised, Catholic boy but rather an ignorant and lucky other who could, with an easy conscience, do a lot of things I wished I could do but felt prevented by my fear of sin.  Later, as a priest, when presiding at the funerals of Catholics whose lives, by the usual Catholic criteria, had hardly been full-on, I could feel a sense of unfairness in handing them over to God whom I knew to be hopelessly merciful and forgiving.  They could have their cake and eat it! and I couldn’t!  It didn’t seem fair!  I was not observant enough then to see that moments of fun, pleasure, power, victory, acquisition (or whatever), if they are at the price of integrity, do not contribute to an experience of true joy and enduring happiness.  In his poem The Four Quartets, the poet TS Eliot wrote caustically of “.. the strained time-ridden faces distracted from distraction by distraction, filled with fancies and empty of meaning … in this twittering world.” 

How do I see it now?  Well, my feelings still have a life of their own, and my perfectionist personality doesn’t help, but my reflection goes something like this: If I don’t like having to behave the way I try to, and do it only from a fear of sin, of breaking some commandment, of offending God, then I am not free.  I am missing out on the freedom of the disciple of Jesus.  I am missing out on the core experience of the Kingdom.  To do anything simply because of threat of punishment or some external reward: to stick at a job I don’t like simply because the pay is good; to live uprightly and keep the commandments because I’m scared of hell (or of God) leaves me at an infantile level of moral development.

So my instinctive resentment becomes invitation to look more closely at myself - in fact, to grow up and to mature.  The challenge is to go inward, to get in touch with my deeper self where God is, where God’s Spirit is at work giving life, to discover my heart, to discover my openness and attraction to true value - the consequence of my being made in the image of God, and my mysterious connection with Christ through baptism.  Whatever about the surface desires with their strength and their potential addictiveness, the wishful thinking, the siren voices of our really unhappy culture, if I look hard enough, I can tune in to what truly resonates with the truest, deepest me, and the values that are in harmony with who I truly am.  (Though to do this I may need the help of a wise person and the wealth of our Christian tradition.)

When I choose to act from my inner truth, my genuine conscience, (irrespective of how difficult it may sometimes be), then I am free; and only in freedom can I find true happiness.  Jesus came to free us from both a life addicted to surface desires, without values of my own, as well as the service of God simply from the fear of punishment or the hope of heaven.  However we handle the overwhelming encounter with infinite love in the next life, Jesus wants the Kingdom experience to begin for us now.

So the resentment I sometimes feel towards the God who may seem too forgiving (too good for his own good!), can be a call to look again at why I do what I do, and to discover the true me, to grow, to find the inner harmony, subtle perhaps but real, that is the essence of the Kingdom experience offered to us all by Jesus.