27th Sunday Year A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005 

Jesus’ listeners probably would have had little trouble emotionally identifying with the characters in today’s story.  The landless peasant farmers of Galilee - most of them forced off their lands over recent decades by their wealthy and oppressive absentee landlords - would have instinctively sided with the tenants of the story.  The Jerusalem upper-class, the chief priests and aristocracy - mainly absentee landlords themselves forever dealing with disruptive tenants - would have emotionally related to the story’s landowner.  But parables don’t illustrate: they tease; they start us wondering.

As Matthew used the story, his Christian community would immediately have identified the tenant farmers with the bulk of the Jewish nation, both peasants and landlords, who they believed had rarely listened to the prophets over the centuries and who only fifty or sixty years earlier had crucified Jesus.  The violent destruction of Jerusalem, the temple, and most of the chief priests and aristocrats, by the Roman armies in AD 70  - just a generation before Matthew wrote his gospel - would have justified their conclusion.  The God of the land of Israel had destroyed them.

Yet the Jewish leaders at the time of Jesus would have thought that it was precisely their concern for their nation and its proud tradition that led them to dispose of Jesus, however regrettably.  By far the overwhelming number of the Jewish contemporaries of Matthew’s Christian community would have been quite certain of the justness of their hostile attitude to Christians.  They saw them as traitors to orthodox Judaism, and to God, precisely at a time when unity was crucial if they were not to be absorbed into the paganism of the Roman culture that everywhere swamped them.

Isn’t it fascinating how easy it is to see the mistakes, the injustice, the sin of others?  family conflicts, Mark Latham, Kate Moss, you name it!  Unfortunately the same dynamic is at work in international relations: Muslim terrorists are dismayed at the immorality and godlessness of the Western world, its plans for world domination and the watering down of Islam.  Western leaders see the Islamic fundamentalists as radically evil, blindly heartless, and determined to impose the ways of Islam on the whole world.

We might ask: Whose side is God on? How does Jesus see all this?  I think that Jesus takes for granted the sin on all sides.  His response to the universal, all-pervading sin of the world (including mine and yours) is not to say that it is not there or that it’s all on one side – the other side! He sees us all up to our necks in it ... and he still loves us all – without distinction!  He calls everyone to conversion.  

He insists that the only way we can radically change the world is by radically changing ourselves.  That is where we start.  The next move is to love our opponents, our enemies, the ones out to get us.  And here is where 99 out of 100 get off the tram!  It seems ridiculous!  It seems so obvious that it is not us who need to change.  The others are always so obviously wrong.  It is they who must change.  And the tragic story of mindless judgment and violence repeats itself century after century after century.  So often our fixation on the sin of the others blinds us to our own sin.  We just don’t see it, or if we do, it somehow doesn’t count.  But mostly we simply don’t see it.

So how are we to repent of what we honestly can’t see?  We need to learn to see better.  We need to sharpen our self-knowledge.  And that takes openness, stillness and time.  Not that we want to drown in a sea of guilt or depression.  But sin is ultimately unfreedom, and destructive of genuine peace.  Whatever goes on in the world – the world out there or the world behind our own front door - God wants to help us, to empower us, to free us from our unfreedoms, our unhappiness, our lack of peace.

There will be no peace in our world until there is peace  in our own hearts.  We might add: When there is peace in our own hearts, we can still breathe, smile and live life richly, in the midst of a world that has not yet chosen the path to peace.  Not without risk; not without suffering.  Daniel Berrigan, a peace activist and poet, referred to the situation as:  The breathing space in the iron cage!  Jesus knew joy, he knew peace - not without suffering - in a world hell-bent on destroying him, and on destroying itself.  As we follow the way of Jesus, we can know the same.