24th Sunday Year C - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2022

My heart tends to drop when I hear today’s Gospel Reading. I have probably preached on these three parables more times than you have listened to them, but I expect that you too may have the feeling that there is not much left that you have not already heard or thought about before.

As I reflect, I am beginning to think that just explaining the cultural background and sharing what I thought Jesus was meaning may perhaps have quite missed the point that Jesus himself was hoping to get across by means of his parables. The audiences of his time would have had no need for the cultural background to be explained. They might, however, still have scratched their heads trying to work out what he was trying to convey — because his parables sought quite deliberately to catch his audience’s attention; but then he gave the stories a curious twist that puzzled them. His hope was that people would continue to think about the stories and especially their unexpectedly surprising endings.

He left them wondering. Sadly, probably all the homilies you have heard [at least from me] were aimed to stop you wondering.

Jesus, I believe, knew that he could not talk to and listen to the individual and different life experiences of all his listeners. Yet he wanted his message to speak to the uniqueness of their lives. He also knew that each one had a different capacity to make sense of the truth that he wanted to convey. I don’t think that he worried whether they all understood exactly what he said or applied what he was saying in the same way, so long as they took in his message in a way that meant something to them, and led to some meaningful improvement in their sense of God or particular lifestyle. Jesus left the details to the work of the Holy Spirit.

How might all this apply to us? I am coming to think that I have not made the most of Jesus’ parables over my life. I have kept my concerns too general. For each of us, his message was not for us in general; his message is all for me in all my individuality — in the here-and-now-ness of my life.

Take for example today’s first parable. What do we call it for a start? Who is it about? Is it about the shepherd or about the sheep? Was the shepherd smart? or was the sheep smart? Or were both smart? or neither? Do I feel spontaneously like identifying with either?

As I look back over the past couple of days, or the past week, could the story highlight anything that has been going on in my life? Would Jesus like to get any message through to me, the here-and-now me? If I were to ponder the story in a few more weeks or months time, and look back over a quite different week, seeking deliberately to ask the Holy Spirit to help me see, I might find Jesus using the story to throw a quite different and unconnected light on what might be going on in my life then.

I do think that that may have been how Jesus hoped his parables would work. If nothing else, the regular practice could help me to come to know Jesus better, to recognise more clearly his interest in my life and his relevance to me. He could become more a real person in my life. Since we are all different from each other, they give him the chance to get through to each of us personally. The messages each of us may hear may be quite different one from the other. But that is appropriate. As long as I can hear him speak to me! That is how he wants it to be.