11th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3-2021

Some of you may be wondering, worrying, what the [little] community here will be like when things settle down again after the pandemic. Even before Covid, things were changing — though this may prove to be something of a watershed moment.

I wonder if Jesus may still be telling us something today through his parables that is relevant to our situation. One of the beaut things about parables, of course, is that they always seem to carry more than one message. They can speak differently to each one us here this evening/morning. What you hear, I don’t hear; or what I hear, you don’t hear. They can certainly keep on saying new things to me that had not struck me previously.

One of the things that strikes me today is Jesus’ comment in the first parable that “the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear”. What he did not say was that sometimes the land produces nothing. The farmer has little or no control over the land. There will be rich spots and there will be less productive spots, and a few useless spots.

It occurred to me that the culture we live in, even the family we grew up in, or the particular things that have happened within the community in the past and the people who have made it up, are a bit like the land the crop is sown in.

Each of you here this evening/morning will be affected differently by each other: by who is here and who isn’t; by what I say. Jesus reacts to us differently, too. As Mark said of Jesus: “He spoke to [the crowd], so far as they were capable of understanding it”. To some he deliberately communicated more than he did to others: “He explained everything to his disciples when they were alone”.

I wonder if that speaks to the different expressions of commitment of different Catholics. We evaluate things differently, and most of us do so quite unconsciously. Some of us see attendance at Church most important. Others think how we live our lives out of Church is more significant. Some of us think both are crucial. Some think, perhaps, that neither are.

Different life experiences have affected us. Some off us have been hurt. Some of us are sensitive; some of us aren’t. If we brought in the issue of our motivations — why we evaluate things the way we do — we would find we differ even more. Do we do some things because we think we should? Or because we always have? Or because they really have meaning for us?

We cannot judge others - even when we disagree with their choices.

As I look back over the Gospels, I find it interesting to notice the number of different ways in which people expressed their acceptance of Jesus and of his Message. There was the core group of the Twelve. There were other disciples who regularly moved about with him, though possibly keeping in reach of home. There were groups who followed him when they were not working.
There were those at whose homes he ate, or even stayed, when he passed their way. There was the owner of the room in Jerusalem where he and the Twelve shared their Last Supper. There were even Nicodemus, the Pharisee, and Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, one of the Sanhedrin, who buried Jesus' dead body in his own tomb.

Jesus accepted them all.

Our mission is simply to attract others as best we can, by showing them how our faith contributes to our personal joy, peace and gratefulness.

We drop a few seeds wherever we can.