20th SUNDAY(A) 17 August 2014

Fr. Gerard Kelly 

There are some things that are troubling in the Gospel story that we have just heard.  But there are also things that encourage us.  It can be good to recognise that the gospel can speak to us at a few different levels.

Perhaps the easiest level to appreciate the gospel is to note the attitude of the woman who approaches Jesus.  She is a woman who is determined to be heard and to make sure that Jesus understands her needs.  But she does this with the greatest respect for him.  She is persistent in calling out to him.  Perhaps another way we could express this is to say that she keeps knocking at his door, even when there is no answer.  She is convinced that he will respond to her.  In the end Jesus praises her for her faith.  What was her faith?  Faith can be hard to define.  In the case of this woman, the best way to know her faith is to look at how it was demonstrated.  She begins by falling at the feet of Jesus and addressing him as Lord.  Here she shows that she recognises him as someone who comes from God.  This gesture is basically one of worshipping him.  In worshipping him she acknowledges that he is God and that she is depends on him.  This is why her prayer – and that is what it is – is “help me”.  She knows that her life and her daughter’s life depend on Jesus.  This tells us something about faith, namely that faith is always saving faith.  This woman has an encounter with Jesus who saves – saves her and saves her daughter.

There is an important message here for us.  We learn something of how our relationship with God, in Jesus, works.  We learn a number of very profound things about prayer.  One is that before all else, our prayer is an act of worship.  We worship Jesus as Lord, as did this woman.  In worshipping him as Lord we acknowledge his power to transform our lives and our world.  We also acknowledge our own neediness and our dependence on him.  We also learn that prayer is an honest and direct encounter with Jesus.  The woman was not afraid to keep going back to Jesus while ever her need lasted.  Yes, she was respectful, but this did not stop her from speaking in a forthright manner to him.  We can learn from this that there is nothing that we can’t raise with Jesus in prayer.

This gospel can also speak to us at another level – one that is a little more difficult to comprehend.  We can be troubled by the way Jesus begins his response.  This woman is from foreign territory.  She does not belong to the People of God.  Jesus’ initial response is to say that his message is not meant for foreigners like this woman; it is for God’s chosen people, the Jewish people.  Jesus uses the phrase that he was sent to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.  It seems that he only reluctantly responds to this foreign woman.  Because she was a foreigner, she would have been considered to be an enemy.

These facts can tell us a few things.  One is that Jesus is in a line of prophets who proclaimed God’s message and called the people of God back to that original relationship God offered them.  God was never going to revoke that relationship.  In fact he wanted to offer a similar relationship to the whole world.  So, his message goes out from the Jewish people to the whole world.  That is how all of us have received it.  Of all the people who appear in the gospels, this woman is the person who is most like us.  So this gospel story today marks an important development in God’s plan.  We learn that his is message for the whole world.

We, then, become part of the new people of God who continue to take that message to the whole world.  The Christian faith is always spreading out.  The most important way that it spreads is by its attractiveness.  Recently, Pope Francis made the important point that effective Christian witness is not bombarding people with religious messages.  We can bombard Jesus with our prayer, but we become witnesses of his message by showing to the world that he is concerned with our doubts, our hopes, our sorrows, our joys, our pain and our needs.  To put it simply: he is interested in our salvation; he saves. 

Just as the story of this foreign woman remains in the Gospel as a witness to us of Jesus’ concern for everyone, so too our own stories of his saving action can show others that he also cares for them.

16th SUNDAY(A) 20 July 2014

Fr. Gerard Kelly

Anyone who has done any gardening probably knows the type of situation that Jesus is talking about in the parable of the wheat and the darnell.  However, they probably don’t act in the same way that the farmer did in the parable.  All the gardeners I know spend a lot of time weeding the garden, making it look good and making sure that there is plenty of room for the plants to grow.  In the parable, the weeds are allowed to keep growing among the good crop of wheat.  I am sure that those listening to Jesus back then were just as shocked as any gardener today would be if we told them to leave the weeds to grow among the plants.

But Jesus wants to make the point that sometimes it is hard to distinguish the weeds from the wheat, especially in the early period of growth.  To stay with the gardening analogy, the fear of any parent allowing their child to weed the garden is that the child might pull out some of the plants as well as weeds.  In Jesus’ time the situation was a little more complex because the roots of the wheat were often intertwined with the roots of the darnell.  Pulling out all the darnell would easily result in the wheat crop being destroyed.

Why does Jesus tell this parable?  It is like all the parables of Jesus: it tells us something about God and the kingdom of God.  The kingdom of God is growing in the world.  The temptation for a lot of people is to see God’s kingdom as being outside the world and having nothing much to do with the world.  They see it as a type of utopia that might even help them escape from the things they don’t like in the world.  But this is not the kingdom that Jesus preaches.  If the wheat in the parable is a sign of the kingdom growing, then those who think of the kingdom as being outside the world are simply thinking of a perfect field of wheat with no weeds growing anywhere.  But that is not how God works.  The fact that the field contains both wheat and weeds is a sign that the kingdom is taking root and growing in the world – even in the midst of the messy aspects of the world and of life.  The kingdom doesn’t change the world into a utopia, but slowly transforms the world.  Once God’s work is complete then we will see a good field of wheat.  But right now God is patiently at work bringing the kingdom about.  While we live as people of the kingdom even now, we also live with the messy things of the world.

What is true of the world is also true of our own individual lives.  Part of being human is to have dreams and expectations about life.  We all want what is good; we want the best.  At certain moments in our lives that vision of what is good for us clarifies and we make a resolution to set our course for what will bring that vision to life.  But this does not always last, and we can be overcome by disappointment.  The reality of our own weakness can even lead to a certain paralysis, or we can feel that it is too hard to get up and keep going.  Sometimes this is an intense feeling, but at other times it just seems part of the normal everyday experience of living in our family or workplace or community.  We are confronted by an imperfect world.  We are confronted with the weeds that seem to be growing along with the wheat.

This does not mean that we should simply sit back and not worry about personal conversion or looking for ways to change our lives.  That is not the point of the parable.  The point rather seems to be that God is patient with us.  In the parable, the farmer knows that the crop will produce wheat.  For us, this means that the kingdom of God is definitely taking hold of our world and our lives.  It is this conviction that allows us to transcend weakness and frailty, and not be weighted down by it.  God does not abandon us because of our weakness, but rather uses the very things that are weakest in us and that perhaps trouble us most, to transform us.  This is the great paradox about God.  The religious leaders of Jesus’ time thought that God was only interested in those who were worthy of him – those who were ritually and socially pure.  But Jesus showed time and time again that God was more interested in stooping down to lift up those who were bent over in pain or sorrow or sin.  He loved them.

To appreciate what is going on here we need to take account of the other parables that Jesus tells immediately after he speaks of the wheat and the darnell.  He compares the kingdom to mustard seed.  This is a tiny seed, yet it contains all that is necessary to grow into a huge tree.  In other words, God has given all of us the gift to grow into a kingdom people.  We all have the potential to become the sort of person that God has called us to be.  We have the capacity to love the God who loves us.  Sometimes we may feel that we don’t know how to seek out this God.  St Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God dwelling in us helps us in our weakness.

The parables today invite us to be open to the Spirit of God and to see God’s Spirit at work in our lives and in our world, transforming them.  This is not a call to run away from the world, but to be part of a world that is slowly being transformed in the kingdom of God.  We too are slowly being transformed so that we reflect more clearly the image of God.