18th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Isaiah 55:1-3; Romans 8:35.37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

The fourteenth chapter of Matthew's gospel from which today's reading is taken is crammed full of issues and tensions and disturbing events not to mention the avalanche of complex human needs by which Jesus is assailed, and which, moment by moment, pile up over his head and threaten to entirely bury him.

Herod Antipas, a man enslaved by lust and human respect deals treacherously with John the Baptist and has him executed for speaking the truth. John, the precursor to the Messiah, humbly offers his life for the truth he was sent to speak.

Would Jesus have grieved more over the heroic death of his beloved John than over the craven betrayal of Herod? His heart would have been broken for both men and deep anguish would have penetrated into his soul.

Today we would be encouraged to take 'compassionate leave' from work and perhaps some weeks of counselling to help us cope.

Jesus, too, feels the need to withdraw, the call to prayer, and heads by boat to 'a lonely place' where he could be alone with his disciples but the people thwart his plans. Instead of rest and healing he finds 'a large crowd'.

Could you imagine reading: Jesus instructed the Twelve to go to the crowd and tell them that the Master had just had some bad news and wasn't feeling too well. He said 'Tell the crowd to come back in a few days so I can have some time out'?

Instead we read: So as he stepped ashore he saw a large crowd; and he took pity on them and healed their sick.

What would you call that? Generosity? Compassion? Self-forgetfulness? If this had been an exceptional occasion of putting the other first we might be content to call it something like generosity. 'Oh, remember that day, when he was looking for peace and quiet but the crowd was there instead; wasn’t he generous?'

It seems to me there must be another word for it, something to capture the mad extravagance of his total 'being there for me'.

Perhaps divine generosity is a better term. Divine generosity is not just something to thank God for; it brings us to worship him. It is a 'goodness without limits' perhaps best imaged by the twelve baskets full of scraps left over from the miracle which follows. They stand there in a heap, perhaps under a tree, tantalising the imagination much like the stone jars of wine left over from the feast at Cana.

Jesus is just like that. More … always more. Impossibly more! More patient, more forgiving, more loving, more understanding, more merciful, more self-giving - divine generosity - and with those capable of understanding I sink to my knees in adoration.

The crowds have received more than a free meal; it is a free meal pointing them to a fullness of life sustained by a food beyond their capacity to purchase. This was the burden of Jesus' entire mission - to lead them (and us) beyond the material to the spiritual - where true life is to be found.

Isaiah, in the first reading, cries out with the very words of God, imbued with a kind of desperate longing for our response: Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty; though you have no money, come! Why spend money on what is not bread, your wages on what fails to satisfy?

This impassioned invitation from the Lord himself is searching for ears capable of hearing and valuing it; for men and women, and children, who have somehow learned to pierce the gaudy brightness of this world's offerings and have glimpsed the eternal beauty and joy of the world beyond.

Money … wages … can buy food for this life; for eternal life we must draw close to Lord.

When the crowds have gone Jesus sends the disciples across to the other side of the lake and himself goes up into the hills to pray. He shows us the source of the strength and the integration of his inner, psychological life. Jesus lets absolutely nothing stand in the way of his prayer; not a busy day, not a tragedy, not the acclaim of a crowd, not even his death on a cross. Jesus, in fact, died praying.

Chapter fourteen goes on to describe how, just before dawn Jesus goes to the disciples walking on the waters of the stormy sea. The Twelve are terrified on seeing him and Peter steps out to go to the Master who must reach out a saving hand to stop him sinking.

When they reach the shore more crowds come to meet him and he must spend another day, teaching, healing, giving, pouring himself out. What a truly awesome Saviour we have!

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

1 Kings 3:5. 7-12; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13:44-46

Built into the word 'treasure' is the notion of something hidden - but also waiting to be found. I guess this is why the word treasure is so alluring; it's an invitation to adventure, to seeking.

Some would say the adventure itself is a kind of treasure; we learn so much from the journey.

Most treasure just makes us richer, it only 'incrementally' changes our lives. The treasure Jesus is speaking of changes everything; it is the greatest treasure in existence.

The man of the gospel finds the treasure (I wonder if he was looking for it?), and he hides it again. It seems the treasure belongs in the field and he can only own the treasure if he owns the field.

The man goes off happy. Look at the smile on his face and the bounce in his step! But where is he going? He's going off to sell everything he owns so he can buy the field. Can you believe it? Everything he owns!

There is another man in another gospel who is offered the treasure by Jesus himself. He too has to sell everything he owns but he doesn't, he can't. He goes away sad because 'he was a man of great wealth' (Mk 10).

Perhaps the difference was that the first man discovered the treasure for himself and had a personal experience of its beauty and worth, while the other was offered a treasure he couldn't yet see and therefore didn't understand. We can only hope that one day he would have the experience.

At any rate, it seems there is something about the treasure which judges a man; something which discovers the true orientation and 'attachments' of his heart.

The parable leaves us with various questions. What is the treasure, in fact? Is it enough to say that it is the kingdom of heaven? And what is the field? Why can the treasure not simply be removed from the field? And what was the 'everything he owns' that the man sold?

The beauty of Jesus' parables is that their content of truth can be expressed in many ways and at many different levels.

Some of you are familiar with the chasuble I wore at my ordination. It was made for me by a seminary classmate who was a master tailor in a former life and who is now a priest.

This chasuble has a simple image of a cross standing in a field. Buried below the cross is the treasure and from the treasure burst golden rays of light reaching heavenward.

The field, of course, is me, or you. The treasure is the reign of God, the Kingdom. To take posession of the kingdom (to let God reign in us) we have to take possession of ourselves, and that's where the cross comes in. We have to divest ourselves of 'everything we own', not always an easy task.

One of our most beloved possessions, I think, is the control we exercise over the direction of our lives, in other words, our plans for ourselves. We all have them. They are the pathways to the treasure we imagine we want. Our plans lead to the place where we think our happiness is to be found, and all too often our treasure, and the happiness we imagine it will bring, has little to do with God's plans.

The fulfilment of our plans usually depends on external circumstances; things have to go right. God's treasure is not like that. God's treasure is entirely within us and in order to reach this place we have to entirely abandon our plans. We have to surrender our plans to his, even when things appear to be going wrong.

The man in the gospel glimpsed the treasure and hurried off eagerly to set himself free from all that had now suddenly become worthless to him. It would be a wonderful thing if such a sea-change could be definitively made in a person's life with no second thoughts or clumsy stumbles. Unfortunately, the temptation to take back what we have given is always present; we are so attached to the earthly.

But then we are dealing with a God who understands all that, and who works with us so that our goal of total possession of both field and treasure may one day be realised.

Patiently, every now and then, at a time of his choosing he takes from us one or other little trinket, some little plan we had been hiding from him and clinging to. Each time he does so he gives us another opportunity to renew our commitment to both the journey and the goal.

It seems appropriate at this point to finish with a reminder especially to the young people here that God invites each one of you, as an individual who stands before him in all your freedom, to let him show you the treasure buried in the field of your true self, the place where your true happiness is hidden, and waiting to be found.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Wisdom 12:13.16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43

The gospel parable today is about a man and his enemy.

A man ... sowed good seed in his field.

Notice that? - the seed is good and the field is his.

The man, of course, is Jesus; we all knew that, didn't we?

And we know Jesus doesn't sow seeds, he sows the word of God. This changes the picture immediately.

Now the image of a farmer walking up and down the rows of his field scattering seed is replaced by the image of Jesus tirelessly travelling Palestine sowing the word of life.

Another way of putting this is to say that Jesus is calling to communion.

We do well to reflect that the very foundation of human dignity is that we are called to communion with our Creator; no other life form, animate or inanimate, is called to do that.

The word of God which 'sprouts' in a human life draws that life into communion with the Blessed Trinity; into the same communion shared by the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.

What's more, it draws that life into communion with every other life which has allowed the word to grow within it. Together they become 'subjects of the kingdom'. No wonder the seed is 'good'.

Jesus is calling us to fulfilment, wholeness, peace and eternal life.

… his enemy came and sowed darnel all among the wheat …

Notice that? - the seed is worthless and the field does not belong to him.

The enemy, of  course, is 'the evil one'; the devil.

The devil, too, is tireless. He sneaks around the world sowing poisonous seeds called lies; that is why he is called 'father of lies'.

Another way of putting this is to say that Satan is calling to alienation. He is calling us away from the very foundation of our human dignity, and therefore, from all possibility of happiness.

We already see that the evil one himself is alienated. He came in the dark, while 'everybody was asleep', and then he 'made off.'

If a man or woman opens themselves to the 'seed' of the devil and it 'sprouts' in their life they find themselves cut off from God and from all those who belong to the kingdom.

And don't make the mistake of thinking there will be communion among the 'subjects of the evil one' because there will be only alienation and hatred among his followers; even Satan hates his 'subjects'.

'In the beginning' God planted a garden, and then he planted his word in Adam and Eve. It was his word which defined them and, of course, this word was an invitation to communion: … of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat. (Gn 2:17)

Obedience to that word would preserve harmony and happiness and lead to everlasting life and, if they rejected the invitation, they would 'most surely die'.

The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made. (Gn 3:1)

You know the rest of the story. Satan sows his lie in God's field. Adam and Eve fall and become subjects of the evil one. The story should have ended there but God had another chapter to write.

It concerned another seed which one night, in another garden, surveyed the awfulness of the prison mankind had cast itself into, and was 'sorrowful to the point of death'. (Mk 13:24)

Knowing well the truth that 'unless the grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain' (Jn 12:24) this seed 'threw himself to the ground' and surrendered to the death which awaited him.

Three days later it yielded 'a rich harvest'.

Look again at our parable. We should not ask what is the seed Jesus wants to plant in us, we should ask who is the seed Jesus wants to plant in us? It is none other than himself: his life death and resurrection.

Only by saying yes can we become subjects of the kingdom of heaven.

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Isaiah 55:10-11; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

I think that what we suffer ...

To speak of suffering is to speak of human experience. We all suffer and, at various times of our life, most of us suffer acutely. Even here, right now in this Church, in this particular congregation there are people suffering, and some intensely. Suffering is not just a matter of pain. There probably isn't anyone here undergoing unbearable pain at the moment but I'm betting there are people here experiencing terrible suffering:

• a spouse, husband or wife, who no longer loves you
• a son or daughter walking a road you see will lead to unhappiness, or worse still, destruction
• children no longer practising the faith
• the terminal illness of a loved one
• unpayable bills
• slavery to gambling, drugs, alcohol
• serious divisions in the family

On and on it goes; there is suffering everywhere.

So what do you feel when you hear St Paul's: I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us. Is this just 'pie-in-the-sky' stuff, as Joe Hill claimed in his poem:

Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die?

Or is it, as Karl Marx claimed, an 'opium' which makes us docile?

My own experience is that deep down inside me there is a hope, a longing for, even a mysterious remembrance of a voice which has already spoken these words of St Paul to my heart. His words are certainly not foreign to me; they exactly fit into a space inside me which has been shaped from the beginning to give them a home. I do believe there is a 'glory' waiting for us, and a majority of human beings share this belief.

Gobbledegook? You make up your own mind. Ask yourself if somewhere within your own experience of life, and especially of suffering, you 'retain the hope of being freed'? Are you are 'groaning' inwardly, along with the rest of creation, in a kind of 'act of giving birth'; waiting 'for our bodies to be set free?' (Note, by the way, that we are not asking to be set free from the body; we are asking for our bodies to be set free.)

The point of all this is that St Paul is not attempting to smother the reality of our suffering with a promise, however consoling. St Paul is giving voice to a universal experience of transcendent hope which looks forward to a liberation into ultimate wholeness and fulfilment.

St Paul goes so far as to say that all creation shares this 'hope of being freed' with us. He is referring to the rest of the cosmos, the material world of inanimate objects, of plants and of animals. This view is totally in harmony with the Genesis account which sees the entire creation somehow sharing in the effects of Adam's sin. 'Cursed be the soil because of you', says the creator God.

Through Original Sin the creation somehow, through no fault of its own 'was made unable to attain its purpose.' But, with us, it 'retains the hope of being freed from its slavery to decadence (corruption).'

This is a deep reality St Paul is touching on, the truth of the intimate connection between humankind and the material universe. Not only are we actually made from the same 'dust' as the rest of creation but our human bodies, the bodies which defines us as individual persons, will eventually return to this dust. If our bodies are to be glorified so must the whole of the rest of the material universe be glorified, so that, as St Paul says, it may 'enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God.'

What a marvellous, marvellous truth this is. It means that when we, in the material body of which we are essentially formed, praise God - the rest of the world praises God through us. We give voice to dumb creation. And what's more, when we sin the guilt falls on the whole of the material world which sins through us.

We can see now why God said to Adam and Eve, 'cursed be the soil because of you.'

Creation awaits our salvation because our salvation will be its own.

As a final thought we might remember that the sower in today's Gospel sows the seed in the soil. This is not just metaphor. The gospel is not sown in our disembodied souls but in our embodied selves. The seed must grow in our bodies as well as in our souls. Our faith must be complete, embodied, incarnate, like the Master, who saved the whole cosmos by giving his body on the Cross.

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9.11-13; Matthew 11:25-30

Belief in God would soon die out if people did not experience him. This is why, try as they might, the enemies of God will never succeed in exterminating the Faith. Just when they think they are winning the battle, right under their noses, some of their own number suddenly admit that they have come to believe.

Even in our day, with the proliferation of those who believe themselves too mature, too enlightened, or too scientific to believe in the God we lesser mortals have surrendered our lives to, they discover to their horror that other atheists are experiencing conversion.

The mysterious fact is that people experience God - at home, at work, in church, in prison, in professional institutes and research laboratories, and everywhere else - because you just can't stop God.

There is a story that Napoleon, speaking to a cardinal, threatened to destroy the Church. The cardinal allegedly replied, 'We have been trying to do that for centuries and we've had no success at all.'

The mistake the enemies of Christianity make is that they think God is just an idea they can erase, discredit, supersede, destroy. But God is a living Person, three Persons, in fact.  The idea of the Trinity is not just an idea, it is a living reality who reveals himself to those willing to enter into dialogue with him. This 'revealing' has the further consequence of drawing the willing into communion with him; a communion which delivers a confidence, a happiness and a peace which nothing else known to man can deliver.

In this context we do well to identify the difference between knowing something and experiencing something, or in this case, someone. Today's liturgy is full of examples of both these aspects of a healthy religious faith. Take for example the very objective way St Paul informs us that if we live unspiritual lives we are 'doomed to die' while if by the Spirit we put an end to the misdeeds of the body 'we will live'.

His words are undoubtedly true and instructive and important, but hardly likely in themselves to bring about a deep faith. It is only when we experience this dying and living in our own lives that our faith becomes full-blown.

Consider the kind of faith that can produce the exuberant words of the Responsorial Psalm:

I will give you glory, O God my King,
I will bless your name for ever.
I will bless you day after day
and praise your name for ever.

The Lord is kind and full of compassion,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
How good is the Lord to all,
compassionate to all his creatures.

These are the words of someone who has experienced them. They are not formulas or creeds or intellectual statements; they are the joyful outpourings of a heart moved by personal experience of the living God.

Let me ask you - when you hear the words of the psalm I've just quoted do you find your heart nodding in assent? Do you find yourself saying, 'Yep, that is so true! He is kind and full of compassion, slow to anger, abounding in love. How good the Lord is'? Are you able to join with the psalmist and say from the heart:

I will give you glory, O God my King.

I will bless your name for ever.
I will bless you day after day
and praise your name for ever?

Jesus was able to exclaim from out of the living and intimate experience he had of God: I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do.

And many times, as a hospital chaplain, I have been in the presence of Christian men and women whose extremity of suffering was shot through with inexplicable joy and profound gratitude to the Lord. Theirs was no merely notional faith, no dry intellectual assent; theirs was an expression of true communion with the God of compassion and love.

The Communion Antiphon today calls each one of us to approach the Lord in this very personal way: Taste and see the goodness of the Lord...

Taste … see … no one can taste for us, or see for us.

Jesus puts the invitation another way: Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.'

Those suffering men and women in the hospital had come to Jesus. Most probably they had lived their lives close to him for many years and now, in their painful suffering they experienced his abiding presence as more significant than their pain. They had learned from him and discovered that his yoke is easy and his burden light.