Author: Simon Sleeman

Fr. Cuthbert Brennan: Most of us don’t enjoy difficult conversations. Most of us would rather avoid them. We hope the problem will disappear. Or we tell someone else instead of the person  concerned. 

Yet today’s Gospel begins with a very simple assumption. 

If we live closely with other people, sooner or later we will hurt one another. And notice that Jesus doesn’t begin with punishment. He begins with relationship. Go and speak to your brother or sister. 

The goal isn’t to win. The goal is to restore. That’s at the heart of this morning’s  gospel. 

Perhaps the hardest three words in the English language are: 

“Can we talk?” 

Many of you have only recently returned to school. All of us here live in a  community of  

some form or another. It’s not difficult to imagine what the subjects of tension in community  

might be.  

Can we talk about……..deodorant? Can we talk about why you’re always late? Can  we talk about why you can’t fill the dishwasher correctly? Can we talk about what  you said about me? 

“Can we talk?” 

Usually it means we’ve done something wrong. Or someone is hurt. Or an awkward  conversation is coming. Most of us would rather avoid it. 

Yet the Christian life isn’t about avoiding those conversations. 

It’s about learning how to have them well.

Jesus isn’t interested in winning arguments. 

He’s interested in restoring relationships. 

God so loved the world that God said “Can we talk?” Through the prophets he  called his people back to himself. Again and again he said to humanity “Can we  talk?” Then finally in Jesus God came face to face with us and asked, “Can we talk?” God came among us in humility and compassion and kindness. But true to form we  got angry, we got defensive and we got violent. God knows all about the cost of  saying “Can we talk?”1 

Jesus is saying that being a member of the church means you have a responsibility. It  is not simply a place where we gather to worship. It is the place where we learn a  new way of being human. Here we slowly discover how to see one another as God  sees us, and to respond to one another as Christ has first responded to us. If your  sheep gets lost you don’t look for an hour and call it quits. You get out there and  find that sheep. And we know from the Gospel of Matthew how Jesus treated  Gentiles and tax collectors.  

Here we learn how to tell the truth without destroying one another, how to forgive  without pretending that wounds don’t matter, and how to seek reconciliation rather  than victory. We practise here what we hope to live everywhere else. If we can learn  

to speak about the little hurts, the small misunderstandings, then perhaps we are  already learning how to build a good marriage, a good community, a good school.  

We often quote the words, 

“Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” as if Jesus were  talking about prayer meetings. Jesus is present, really present where two or three are  

1 Revd Dr Sam Wells, Can we talk?, A sermon preached in Duke University Chapel September 7th, 2008

gathered in the Divine Name, presumably this includes the two who cannot listen to  each other. Even there, perhaps especially there, Jesus is present.  

Christ is reminding us that he is present not only when we pray beautifully together, but when we struggle to tell one another the truth with love. 

His presence changes everything. 

It changes how we speak. 

It changes how we listen. 

It changes how we forgive. 

It changes how we tell the truth. 

Because when Christ is present, 

the goal is no longer to win. 

It is to restore. 

Perhaps sometime this week each of us will find ourselves in a difficult conversation. Before we speak… 

before we defend ourselves… 

before we walk away… 

perhaps we might remember one simple truth. 

Christ is already present. 

He is already in the room.

Abbot Christopher Dillon: “The way you think is not God’s way but man’s.” Just hear that again, “not God’s way, but man’s”; how else could Peter, as a man, have thought? The critical lesson that is being presented here by Jesus is seriously problematic, particularly in our man-centred, scientific, success-oriented culture. Mankind has made and continues to make exponential progress, or advance, in every field of life, however we think of “progress” and “advance”. But no matter how far we get, Jesus reminds us, whatever else they may be, our goals of progress and success are not in line with God’s way of thinking. Logically, then, when we turn our minds to the things of God and to prayer, are we to suspend our way of thinking, however that may be possible?

For the Jewish prophet, Jeremiah, way back in the 600s B.C., this conflict brought him insult and derision from his people, when he tried to deliver what he understood to be God’s message. The pathos in his words, as a man who was known as a gentle man of peace, is palpable. Six hundred years later, St Paul seems to be saying something similar, when he writes to the Jews in Rome, “Do not model yourselves on the behaviour of the world around you, but let your behaviour change, modelled by your new mind.” What are we to make of it all? 

The world around us is wracked by the struggle for power and control, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or America; and it offers us some sense of what man’s way of thinking can lead to and it is clearly does not make for a happy environment. After the horrors of two world wars, the great powers appear to be bent on promoting more of the same, which, perhaps, re-affirms the point that Jesus’ words are making. If this is really what man’s way of thinking leads to, then we might just be persuaded to examine God’s alternative way of thinking which Jesus is proposing, when he says, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let his renounce himself, and take up his cross and follow me. Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.” It all seems to hang on that phrase, “for my sake”, for Jesus’ sake, which is what the martyrs of Christian history gave their lives for. This is the “new mind” of which Paul is writing. 

In contemporary terms, we would call this standing up for Christian principles, which is exactly what Pope Leo seems to mean when he speaks of the primacy of valuing the dignity of every human being, a dignity which the Pope relates intimately to respect for the environment. In a way, it means being courageous enough to stand up and be counted, when it matters; to maintain a determined and persistent support for truth and goodness, particularly when the general trend is pushing the other way. That is, indeed, a cross which can be heavy and costly, as the prophet, Jeremiah attested for us, just now; and it is the cross every day, until the Son of Man comes in the glory of his Father to relieve and reward you.

There is a challenge here, then, for each of us to address, and that is to consider what “this new mind”, as St Paul puts it, is saying to us, so that we discern ‘what it is that God wants, what is the perfect thing to do.” 

All of you who have just come back here to school should keep that in mind, as you work your way through the year. The success that you are pursuing here is not just about exams; it is about each of you as a person; it is about discovering that ‘new mind”, coming to know what is the perfect thing to do, now and every day. And that is true for every one of the rest of us, along with you.

Fr. Fintan Lyons: The gospel passage we have heard has, at its centre, the exchanges between Jesus and Peter, about who Jesus is, and then who Peter is to become. It’s easy to do what we tend to do, move quickly through the text to its centre paying little attention to the first words: ‘Now when Jesus  came into the district of Caesarea Philippi…’. 

The sequence of events in Matthew’s account indicates that Jesus and the disciples travelled some distance northward by boat after the miraculous feeding of a crowd, before undertaking a trek across towards the Golan heights to reach the district of Caesarea Philippi, far north of the sea of Galilee, the furthest north Jesus ever went. Afterwards, he would turn south towards Jerusalem, and speak on the way about his forthcoming passion and death there. The significance of where they had  arrived can be missed.

They were in the ‘district of Caesarea Philippi’ – it doesn’t say they entered the city, which was the exemplar of Roman power, built over the ruins of Greek and earlier pagan cultic sites, the principal building being the Temple of Augustus, the divinised Roman Emperor, indicating that the Roman empire was now dominant and there to stay. 

Pope Leo, in his homily at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate with the Cardinals in May last year, said they went into the city with its gleaming marble palaces. He said that in such a setting the question of who Jesus was would be answered by judging him to be a completely insignificant person, at best someone with an unusual and striking way of speaking and acting. Pope Leo went on to talk about how Jesus is seen today. 

More significant, however, in the whole incident is not the city, but the massive bulk of Mount Hermon behind it, with an ancient spring which was one of the sources of the Jordan, emerging from the mouth of a cave said to be the gateway to the underworld. Pagan rites had involved throwing infants as sacrificial victims into its depths to worship the Greek god Pan, half goat, half man. This was the backdrop to the city, and apparently a frightening place associated with demonic, even obscene rites, with no Jewish population in Jesus’ day. Approach to it would violate Jewish purity laws. Why then did he go to this remote place?  Remember his saying earlier in Matthew’s gospel: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’ (Mt 15.25)

We know the answer. It was the appropriate dramatic setting for the dialogue which began ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ He was obviously a real man, but the question was meant to cause his disciples to reflect on what they recognised was his mysterious identity. And Peter seems to have understood, at least partially: ‘You are the Messiah’, the one long  awaited to overthrow the Roman dominance.

Peter was rewarded in a way which he did not, could not, really understand. He was to be the rock on which the new kingdom would be built, but it was to be a spiritual edifice. The gates of the underworld – symbolised by where they were standing – would not prevail against it.

We can speculate about Jesus’s movement and motivation, but the fact is that the unusual location for the enormously important exchange between him and the disciples, and Peter in particular, must be highly significant.

Sadly, that location marked also the beginning of Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem and his prediction of his passion on the way, and Peter’s protest against his prediction, leading to – ‘Get behind me Satan’, showing that Peter had much to learn about Jesus and about his own calling, with stages such as ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man’, ‘I know not the man’,  ‘Lord, you know that I love you’. As it turned out, it was for him the work of a lifetime.

 I believe that for us, knowing Jesus and ourselves – our calling – is also the work of a lifetime.

Fr. John O’Callaghan: Today’s readings concern immigration, immigration into the kingdom of God! The  readings all highlight the porous nature of the borders of that kingdom but also points to a few requirements for entry.

Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities, part of the gentile world and largely avoided by Jesus. And we are told that the woman who approached him was of Canaanite origin. That means she was of the people ousted from those Canaanite lands when the Israelites moved in. They were worshipers of the main rival to Israel’s God, namely Baal, the god who controlled the rain and fertility of the land. She couldn’t have had worse credentials! However she had “great faith”, Christ says, not only in approaching him but also in holding him to what he said about the house-dogs! She had enough faith to recognise that this ‘son of David’ could cure her daughter. St Augustine says that  ‘Every saint has a shady past’, and this woman surely had, but it was not the whole the story. Christ would make the most of the faith she had. 

The prophet Isaiah speaks about such outsiders. His words unambiguously proclaim, in the name of God: “my house will be a house of prayer for all peoples!’ Jewish prophecy had moved beyond religious exclusivism and opened up a universal perspective: it was a harbinger of the salvation offered to all in Christianity. Christianity is not exclusivist, not the privilege only of a specific race or ethnicity. Christians are a motely collection of all types, but they have to have a pass, a passport, like the Canaanite woman. The one which Isaiah identifies is:  ‘to care for justice and act with integrity’. Such basic human values give access to the kingdom. And there are many ‘holy pagans’, perhaps unknown to themselves, working undercover for justice in the most troubled spots of the world today. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be recognised as children of God’. 

Thirdly, Paul’s letter to the Romans echoes the same universal message: God’s purpose, as he writes, is to ‘show mercy to all mankind’. The ‘open borders’ policy was made explicit in Paul’s mission to the gentile world, beyond ‘the pale’ of old Israel. Did he not arrive in Athens and soon praise the Greeks’ recognition of ‘the  unknown God’?  In our own times the philosopher Edith Stein counselled to “Accept nothing as the truth if it lacks love; and accept nothing as love which lacks truth“. These twin values she found united in Christianity and they brought her to baptism and to be revered today as St Benedicta of the Cross. 

So, back to immigration! The borders of the kingdom of God are porous and God’s invitation extends to all. But one must rise to it by at least faith or hope or love. In our society where ultimate hope can be replaced with a superficial, short-term optimism, let us retain the deeper hope that there is meaning in life and it is worth the journey to a kingdom beyond this one. And let us show that friendship and love can endure; that our relationships are called to something more than a transient utility for a more or less selfish purpose. Love is possible. Finally, let us keep alive the faith that makes for a God-centered life, a life has ultimate meaning and can even overcome suffering and death, as we saw in the case of the woman from Tyre. We have no reason to despair, as revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. 

Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman OSB. Elijah bursts onto the Biblical scene without so much as a by your leave. We know nothing of his background or his forbears. We just hear his thunderous voice coming from the 9th Century before the era of Our Lord Jesus Christ. From the harsh silence of the desert, his voice is almost as if heaven itself had broken the silence. With Elijah a line was drawn in the sand. On one side is the living God; on the other everything that has replaced the living God. The scene of our first reading this morning has this prophet holed up in a cave at Mount Horeb. He has just murdered 450 rival prophets and called on his God to reveal himself by scattering thunder and throwing down fire. Elijah is complaining that his enemies have it in for him, that life as a hell-fire preacher is not worth living. The message from the living God, both to him and to us, is clear. Turn down the volume and listen for the silence.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Paul Simon wrote the words of  “The Sound of Silence” when he was 21 years old. He was in the bathroom, where he turned off the lights to better concentrate. “Because, he says, the bathroom had tiles, it was a slight echo-chamber. I’d turn on the tap so that water would run (I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me) and I’d play in the dark. ‘Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again.'” He finished the lyrics on February 19th 1964. 

But ‘the vision that was planted
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

When King Ahaziah asked for a description of the prophet whom he had never met, he was told that Elijah was a hairy man who wore rough clothing made from animal skins, that he had a wild unkempt appearance about him. 

Elijah was certainly an angry person, ranting and raving, basically a rough diamond.  The living God, the God of mercy and compassion,  had to  slow him down, soften him up, and above all, get him to reduce the volume. 

Earthquake, catastrophe, disaster are not the idiom or the media of divine self-revelation. We have to learn the language of stillness and the sound  of silence if we want to communicate with the God who is, who was, and who always will be.  ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ 

God is God and cannot be otherwise. 

God is infinite, eternal, without beginning, without end.

We are the work of God’s hands: we are created, we did have a beginning and we will have an end. 

The strange and wonderful possibility is that God, having created the universe, fell in love with it. God wishes to make us part of God’s livelihood, which means being with God forever and ever. So, we must learn a new language, the one that God speaks. We hold ourselves out to the darkness with complete trust and love. We know that the darkness is not such because God is hiding or withdrawn or playing some game. It is the way God is in relation to the way we are. All our normal ways of loving, of expressing love,  must shrivel. We hold ourselves, as we are, in His presence. We offer our attention to the darkness. We stand still in the humility of our desire. 

This requires that we attune to the difference, acclimatise to the emptiness, adjust to the refinement of this Divine presence, which may register on our radar screens as total blankness [“is dona linn an briseadh seo”]. 

The butterfly lands in the semi-darkness on our thoroughfare; The leaf falls at our feet in the empty forest. Elijah had to learn, between Mount Carmel and Mount Horeb, that the words of a prophet are heard in ‘the sound of silence.’

Fr. Henry O’Shea:

The dripping blood our only drink

The bloody flesh our only food

In spite of which we like to think

That we are sound substantial flesh and blood.

T.S. Eliot

If the crowds gathered all over the world, and particularly in Europe and the United States, in the second week of November, 1918, were agreed on anything, it was on the phrase, ‘Never again!’ This is a natural reaction to the shock of what civilized people did to other civilized people in the first quarter of the twentieth century. 

But now, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century – and several ‘never-agains’ later – we who imagine ourselves to be civilized people have nearly exhausted our capacity for astonishment at the ever-developing inhumanity of modern warfare in whatever form it takes. Too great an exposure to scenes of violence, be that violence, domestic, continental or in video-games accessible to the youngest children – this exposure is blunting our capacity to imagine, our ability, to grasp the reality, the horror, of it all. Too much reality, real or virtual, is bad for my health, or more likely, shrugging out shoulders,  bad for my peace of mind and comfort.

Except, perhaps, when the anaesthetic of the soundbite wears off, when the avalanche of facts and statistics becomes ripped-open-flesh in the face of a person one might have known in a shot-down plane. Except, perhaps, when someone one knows is prevented from returning home because he or she is a Christian, Except, perhaps, when one experiences the trauma of a priest who sees 200 of his parishioners blown up in front of his church. Except, perhaps, when we see the devastation of the neighbouring family who have lost a loved one through suicide, perhaps when we read the annual statistics for abortion every year. 

Then, there are the realities of our own society’s dealings with the most vulnerable – and this in every period of our history. Women, perhaps, unmarried mothers, perhaps, orphans, perhaps, the homeless, perhaps, believing and practising Catholics, perhaps.  

Most awfulnesses remain other peoples’ awfulnesses, remain at a remove, until, or even after, we come into contact with them.

This is one reason for feeling a certain reserve, a certain reticence, about today’s second reading from St Paul to the Romans. It can be too easy, too glib, to proclaim to the distraught, to the traumatized, to say to those who have been or really are put to the test, that theirs are the trials through which we triumph, by the power of him who loved us. 

But, this reticence, or reserve does not make it any less true that, ‘… neither death nor life, no angel, prince…can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord.’  Expect, perhaps ourselves. Except we who claim to believe in him, to love him, to be the only hands he has. 

With his unerring instinct for popular Marxist trivialization and profanation, Berthold Brecht, in his Threepenny Opera makes one of his characters sing, Erst kommt das Fressen dann kommt die Moral or: Grub first, then morality.  Eat your fill – and not just of food – and then you can think about other, even higher, things – poetry, music, even love. For all his mockery and cynicism, Brecht has a point. We all need to eat, we all need a minimum of security to live truly human lives. But, having one point does not mean missing another, missing every other. 

Clearly, the disciples in today’s gospel were not thinking in a Brechtian sense when they came to Jesus with advice about the catering arrangements – or lack of them – for the crowds that had followed him to the lonely place. Remember that Jesus went to that lonely place when he had heard of the swinging party in Herod’s palace, with wine, dancing – think of Salome – and, as the climax of the entertainment – John’s beheading, even if this had been part of the original programme for the evening.  What kind of banquet can there be in a lonely place? The disciples are practical people. 

As usual, Jesus is good for a surprise. The New Testament contains six stories of Jesus feeding the crowds. In every case, Jesus involves the disciples. In every case, Jesus instructs them to organize the crowds and to feed them. In every case, Jesus gives thanks over the loaves and fishes – that is, blesses them – in some cases raising his eyes to heaven, and then tells the disciples to distribute from the resulting abundance. 

The reference in these accounts of feeding to the Eucharist, to the Mass, to what we do at every Mass, is unmistakable. 

Unmistakable, too, is Jesus’ entrusting to his disciples the task, the duty of feeding the crowds. Is it purely by chance that most accounts refer to there being twelve baskets of leftovers from this Eucharistic superabundance, all having eaten as much as they wanted? Twelve baskets, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve tribes of the new Israel, the Church, twelve apostles. Us. 

The first reading from the Prophet Isaiah is one of the classic texts of the kingdom to come. Brecht might mock and, yes, food is mentioned, its importance is not denied – why spend money, the prophet asks, on what is not bread. But what, in the long run is bread? What fails to satisfy? The same Lord who feeds the five thousand says, ‘Pay attention, come to me, listen and your soul will live.’ This me, this I, who am calling, who am promising, is word and bread. 

In all our living, there is a spiral of poetry and prose. Prophecy and promise have to be rooted, have to be made concrete in response and responsibility. Prophecy and promise have to be made real in attentive, fruitful, action. Concrete response and responsibility have to be inspired by the poetry of the everlasting covenant made out of the favours promised to David.

We are called, commissioned to become shockable, to be astonished, astonishable, once more, called, commissioned, to fertilize the prose that we have become with the poetry of a loving, hoping, believing doing. ‘Never again?’

How many say: I would like to see his face, his clothes, his sandals!
Well, here you see it, here you touch it, here you eat it.

He is given to you not just for you to see,
But that you may touch it and receive it within you.

St John Chrysostom

 

Abbot Columba McCann: People sometimes ask me, ‘Why did you want to become a monk?’  They don’t get a straightforward answer!  We could also ask another question:  ‘Why are we all here this morning at Sunday Mass?’  Why are we here?  Go back fifty years, and going to Sunday Mass in Ireland was, for most people, simply part of Irish life, like the GAA and Guinness and having potatoes with your dinner.  That’s not to trivialise the Catholic tradition in Ireland and the real deep faith of many people.  But what I am saying is that being at Sunday Mass is no longer part of ordinary Irish life for most people.  So why are we here?

Each of us would surely give a different answer.  I’m wondering if the following kinds of answers might touch on the reality of why we are here?  We’re here because somehow we get a taste, a hint of the flavour of something that is deeply satisfying, even if sometimes we get bored or distracted at Mass; because here we sometimes get the echo of a voice that is familiar and attractive; because we sense a connection that really matters; because something bubbles up that refreshes us; because, when we are here, something simple and wonderful occasionally dawns on us, or descends on us from out of nowhere; because we get an intuition of something that is actually more satisfying that all the many good things life has to offer; because there is a hint here of what really makes us happy.

Jesus says it’s like treasure buried in a field, or a pearl of great price.

When people ask me why I am a monk, they sometimes raise questions about apparent difficulties:  no money of your own; no bank account; a celibate life; stuck in the same place; stuck with the same people; all that prayer; having to answer to a superior, and so on.  I would say that all those limiting factors are put there simply to help us enjoy the treasure more fully.

Very similar demands, and sometimes far more, are made on people in family life, and also on single people living alone.  The monastery is more like a learning support unit that makes it easier for some of us to see the treasure buried under our noses, if we want to see it.

King Solomon was asked, what do you really want?  He asked God for the wisdom.  He didn’t ask for other gifts like wealth or military success .  Typically, God gave him wisdom, but also gave everything else along with it.

Jesus himself pointed out that if we give priority to the buried treasure, the pearl of great price, then we will also be given everything else we need for life.

So if each of us were asked, ‘Well what would you really like God to give you?’  There may be some very important and very good things we might be asked for:  good health for ourselves and others, an end to financial worries, healing, reconciliation between people who are estranged, and more besides.  But I could decide to aim for something bigger that will not exclude any of that.   I could say, ‘Lord, there are many gifts that you already give.  There are many more that I could ask for.  But I dare to want more than that:  I want the giver himself. I want you!’  As it says in the Book of Psalms, ‘The Lord is my portion and cup, it is he himself who is my prize.’

What do I ask of the Lord?  I could say, ‘I want to live in daily companionship with Jesus Christ .  If I have him, if I am always with him, then I have happiness and everything else in my life will have the best possible outcome. I ask also that the God will help me to let go of anything that gets in the way of that daily companionship with Christ, the pearl of great price.

And what happens at this altar is Jesus’ way of saying, ‘That’s what I really want to give you:  here I am, for you, with you. Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find.  You have knocked on the door: I am opening it for you. Come, let us live our lives together.’  Here is the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price.  It’s here for the asking.  It’s presence is so subtle, so discreet, so humble, that you might overlook it.  But life with Christ is a life of abundance.

Fr. William Fennelly: Today’s readings highlight a virtue that seems under-appreciated in our world: the virtue of patience. Patience seems to be a forgotten virtue. Our society values ambition and action above all else…. Waiting, even for a very short time, has become so unbearable that much of our economy is geared at eliminating “dead time”.’ However, patience along with its inseparable companions self-control, humility, tolerance, generosity and mercy is an essential ingredient of God’s world.

The God we worship, as our first reading teaches, is both loving and patient: a God ‘who cares for every good thing’; a God who is ‘mild in judgement’ and who governs us ‘with great lenience’ (Wisdom 12:13,17). Today’s gospel reading from Matthew also underlines the patience of God. Extending the parable of the sower, in last Sunday’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that when the good seed begins to sprout, weeds (darnel) appear among the wheat, much to the consternation of the servants who would like to root them out immediately. However, the wise farm owner asks them to be patient, and to wait until harvest time. He points out that, if they try to remove the weeds now, they ‘might pull up the wheat with it’ (Mt 13: 29). So, he tells them to let both grow together till the harvest. Then, the reapers can collect the weeds and burn them before gathering the wheat into the barn (cf. Mt 13:30).

The parable depicts a world with which we are all familiar – a world where evil is mingled with good – weeds among the wheat. While the world is still God’s garden, it is not as God intended it to be. God planted only good seed. The Book of Genesis reminds us that, when God had finished the work of creation, he ‘saw all that he had made and indeed it was very good’ (Gen 1:31). The presence of weeds is evidence of an enemy who has sneaked into the garden while the labourers were sleeping and planted bad seed (Mt 13: 25). Thus we have all kinds of evil in the world, from the most banal everyday variety, such as lies, jealousy, deceit, egotism and selfishness, to the most egregious – wars, human trafficking, mindless exploitation of earth’s resources, labour camps and torture chambers.

Today’s gospel is not telling us that we should do nothing about these weeds in God’s beautiful garden. As Edmund Burke reminds us ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing’. There is much we can and must do, but we may not act prematurely to try and eliminate all evil from the world. We must not hasten the final judgement, which belongs to God alone. It is not for us to put ourselves in God’s place, as Joseph reminded his brothers who feared he might seek revenge for what they had done to him (cf. Gen 50: 1519). Unfortunately, history provides many examples of the disastrous outcome of ill-conceived attempts to rid the world of evil. More recently we have seen the tragic consequences of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, more recently, Iran. Even good people rarely get it right when they try to remove the weeds from God’s garden.

The history of the Church, too, has been marred by arrogant efforts to rid the Church of those regarded as propagators of error and confusion, resulting in witch hunts and regular purges that continue right up to our time. I am thinking particularly of those theologians under appreciated by one group only to be later rehabilitated. In his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas Pope Leo apologised for the Church’s silence and wrong-headedness concerning the question of slavery. As we were reminded in our first Reading, the lesson we need to learn from the patient and tolerant manner in which God treats everyone is to always treat one another with kindness and understanding (cf. Wisdom 12:19). This must include those who differ from us or are even hostile to us.

The good news is that we have a master gardener (God) who assures us that all will be sorted out in the end. God’s kingdom grows slowly but surely, as the parables of the Mustard Seed and the Yeast in the Cake illustrate. This assurance should free us from a dangerous preoccupation with getting rid of the weeds in God’s garden, and lead us to focus instead on sowing seeds of the kingdom. We can confidently leave the problem of the weeds to the master gardener and look forward to the day when he will gather the wheat into his barn. I conclude by leaving you with the wise maxim of late nineteenth century writer Scottish writer Ian McLaren:‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle’.

Fr. Jarek Kurek: “Why do you speak to the crowds in parables?” the disciples ask Jesus. In other words: “Why are you so elusive with those who follow you and seem eager to listen?”

It is a fair question. Why does Jesus conceal these things from them instead of speaking plainly?

Yet, if we play the devil’s advocate for a moment, the crowds may appear to listen—but what are they really seeking?

There is a story about two Jewish boys playing hide-and-seek. One of them hid and remained in his hiding place for a long time, convinced that his friend would come looking for him. Eventually, he came out, only to discover that his friend had already gone home without ever searching for him. His hiding had been in vain. The boy ran to his grandfather, the esteemed Rabbi Baruch, crying and complaining about his friend. Upon hearing the story, the old rabbi burst into tears and said, “God, too, says: ‘I hide, but there is no one to look for me.’”

Now imagine yourself standing by the lake among that great multitude, listening to Jesus speak from the boat. Like everyone else, you are drawn to him—to this wonder-worker, this remarkably charismatic preacher. It feels good to be there.

You listen eagerly to his words, yet it seems that the essence of his teaching—the mysteries of the kingdom—is not being given to you. Why is that?

Then comes the decisive moment. Jesus suddenly turns his gaze toward you, and without speaking, he seems to ask: “Why are you here? Are you here just because you have witnessed miracles? Or is there a deeper longing in your heart? Tell me, are you truly seeking God?”

Jesus asks these questions because he knows that the crowd surrounding you will not remain faithful to him. Their short-term expectations, their superficial desires, and their spiritual inconstancy will soon lead them to abandon him and forget the message of the kingdom.

That very fickleness is why Jesus remains reserved and elusive. He is, as it were, both near and hidden. Along with the message he brings, he remains veiled, revealing himself fully only to those who persevere. He does not admit into the inner circle of his disciples those who have not shown themselves worthy—those who lack the perseverance and single-mindedness to seek a deeper understanding of his message.

What, then, must be done? Is it too much to suggest that you must step away from the crowd, with all its questionable mentality, and embark on your own solitary—almost monastic—journey of faith? A journey marked by an earnest pursuit of God, truly Benedictine seeking God? Leaving behind what is familiar is certainly risky. It will bring many challenges. There is no doubt about that. Yet perhaps this is the one thing that is necessary in our own time.

The moment you resolve to make that shift, you show yourself to be a true seeker of God. You demonstrate that you genuinely desire to break through the veil that conceals this deeper understanding, that you truly long to become “one who hears the word of the kingdom and understands it.”

So go and seek. Search for the One who hides. Be steadfast in your search, and you will find him. The mysteries of the kingdom of God will be opened to you, and you will bear fruit—a harvest thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

 

Fr. Senan Furlong: Samuel Pepys is best known for the diary he kept during the 1660s. In it, he recorded not only the major events of his age, such as the Great Fire of London, but also, with remarkable vividness, the texture of everyday life in seventeenth-century England. In his entry for 14 October 1663, he describes visiting a synagogue in London. What he witnessed both surprised and shocked him. Instead of the sober solemnity he expected, he found the synagogue alive with singing, dancing, and rejoicing. Men embraced the Torah scrolls and carried them through the congregation with exuberant joy. Pepys found the whole scene irreverent, even scandalous. What he did not know was that he had arrived on Simchat Torah, the festival marking the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. What looked to Pepys like disorder was, in fact, celebration. All the rejoicing was not directed simply at the scrolls themselves; it was directed towards the God whose love the scrolls proclaimed.

Exuberant joy is perhaps the last thing we associate with the Torah. Yet for the Jewish people, the Torah was never merely a set of laws. It was the sign of God’s covenant with his people. It revealed his wisdom and bore witness to his faithful love. It shaped the people’s identity, sustained their hope, and reminded them that, despite everything, they belonged to God.

This understanding of covenant—of enduring love and belonging to God—forms the background to today’s Gospel. In Jesus’ day, people spoke of taking upon themselves the “yoke of the Torah.” A yoke was a wooden frame placed across the necks of two working animals so they could walk together and share the same load. Properly fitted, it did not make the work disappear, but made the burden lighter and easier to bear. Jesus takes this familiar image and gives it a new and personal meaning: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.” His yoke is light because he bears the burden with us. He is no distant taskmaster, but the Lord who walks beside us. As we learn from him, what once seemed heavy becomes lighter, and we discover the “rest” that he alone can give.

Today’s Gospel is about the Son who reveals the Father. That revelation is given not to the self-sufficient or the proud, but to those humble enough to receive it. The deepest answers we seek to life’s questions are not found in a book, but in a person. Everything we know of the Father comes to us through the Son. To be yoked to Jesus is to learn from him, to become gentle and humble of heart as he is. The “rest” he promises is not freedom from life’s burdens, but the peace that comes from carrying them with him. For he is God’s Wisdom made flesh, and the faithful love celebrated with such joy in the synagogue is the same faithful love we encounter in him.

In a few moments we will be invited to receive the Eucharist. What appears so small carries so much. In this simple gift of bread, Christ gives himself to us. We come with burdens known perhaps only to ourselves. We leave strengthened to take up his yoke once more. And because he walks beside us, our restless hearts begin, at last, to find their “rest.” 

Praise him with timbrel and dance;

praise him with strings and pipes!