27th Sunday Year C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2013

There are some groups of Catholics who consistently annoy me with their attitudes and their actions.  I struggle to accept them.  I fail to listen to them respectfully or thoughtfully.  I am aware of my prejudice, up to a point, even if unable to move beyond it.  I am beginning to think and hope that perhaps today’s Gospel has dislodged something somewhere in me, somewhere like my heart.

By itself, I found today’s passage difficult to put together.  It makes more sense when I put it in context.  Luke had assembled a collection of sayings of Jesus that are relevant to life within the Christian community.  Jesus knew that, when we rub shoulders, it is no surprise that we get splinters.  He was warning against, but seemed to accept the inevitability, that we easily stir each other up, and thereby get sucked further and further into mutual opposition.  He was telling us to be mature enough to get over comparing ourselves to each other, rather, to hold each other to account, and particularly to be ready to forgive – and to keep on being open to forgiveness.

That was where today’s Gospel took up: “Lord, increase our faith”.  Like us, the disciples struggled with forgiveness and openness.  Their request was like hand-balling things back to Jesus.  A bit like, ‘If you want me to be different, then you make me’.  It was a sort of cop-out.  Jesus did not buy into their game.  Instead he answered, “Were your faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.”

That is a cryptic answer, if ever there was one!  What did it mean?  What was he saying?  Perhaps, Think the unthinkable! Believe the impossible!  A well-known Irish poet died about six weeks ago, Seamus Heaney.  In one of his poems he wrote, “So hope for a great sea-change/On the far side of revenge./Believe that a farther shore/?Is reachable from here”.  In another, pushing the point further, he wrote, “Walk on air against your better judgement”.

I think he has caught Jesus’ meaning and expressed it beautifully.  If I cannot forgive, it is not so much a failure of the will as a failure of the imagination.  I am stuck within my narrow horizons.  I cannot imagine me being different.  Consequently, I lack hope; and, without hope, I lack the will.

Yet, forgiveness is tricky.  Real forgiveness is the act of a free person.  It calls for maturity.  Sometimes, the challenge with forgiveness [or acceptance, or respect, or openness] is the challenge firstly to find freedom, in some cases, to grow up.  Without freedom, insistence on forgiveness serves only to imprison some people in their co-dependence, or depression, or sullen, unrecognised resentments.  Help them to become their own persons first, and only then think of forgiveness or its equivalents.

Failure of the imagination!  I believe that Jesus is saying to me, “Learn to think the unthinkable.  But begin!!”  The grain of mustard seed may be infinitesimal, but it can grow; and once it gets going, it is hard to stop it.

Begin at the start, not at the end.  Believe the impossible.  Look around! Broaden the horizon.  “Walk on air against your better judgement.”  See others, the ones who seem to have succeeded.  Be inspired by them.  Jesus was, after all, talking from experience.