27th Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2020

What strikes me from today’s Gospel passage is Jesus’ comment, “… the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce fruit”. Jesus was speaking to the “chief priests and the elders of the people”. It was a striking comment. The temple worship and the priesthood had been a determining part of the Jewish tradition and even self-understanding for almost a thousand years. It had been set up by God. For the relatively brief period of the Babylonian exile, there was no temple. But the priesthood continued, even if the priests were unable to conduct public worship. After the exile, many Jews returned to their homeland. A new temple was built and the priests resumed their accustomed priestly roles.

Over the centuries, many of the prophets were highly critical of priests and kings. They accused them of being more interested in power and wealth, while neglecting their primary task of motivating the people to centre their lives on God, to care lovingly for each other, and to be a force for good to the surrounding world.

By the time Matthew was writing his Gospel, the restored Jerusalem temple had been utterly destroyed by the Roman Empire. The priesthood had lost its purpose and disappeared. Jesus’ comment proved prophetic. But Judaism as a religion did not disappear, even if its organisation became radically altered. Without a priesthood, religious worship was preserved largely in the homes of the ordinary people, and teaching and organisation retracted to the synagogues under the care of Pharisees at first, and later of rabbis. None of these were priests. Since priesthood has utterly disappeared, Judaism is essentially a family based religion — and still continues after two thousand years.

I often wonder what is happening in our Church. We have become used to our familiar structures of leadership, and the ways we worship — that slowly but constantly took new shapes as cultures changed over the centuries. We have taken their current shapes for granted. Yet events over the last few decades seem to be moving us inexorably in the direction of changes we have not planned. Might God’s Spirit be slowly guiding us towards greater simplicity, a less or even non-clerical Church, a re-empowered, responsible and energetic laity? Are we beginning to set free at last the largely unrecognised and untapped potential of women? Who knows?