Homily for Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Oct. 18-19, 2014)
Where do you and I belong? To whom do you and I belong? These are the
questions that today’s readings raise for me. It would be a mistake to interpret the
Gospel simply as a report on how opponents of Jesus tried to trick him into either
celebrating or denouncing the Roman occupation of the Land of Israel. We must
recognize that for religious Jews there was a real problem involved: Is their Holy
Land being desecrated by its absorption into the Roman Empire? Remember that
for those who believe in the revelation of the Hebrew Scriptures, this Land of Israel
was not one place among others. Abraham had been told by God to pack up and
journey to a land that he would be shown by God and when he reaches that territory
God promises him: “To your descendants I will give this Land” (Gn 12:7) We do not
know why this particular piece of land was chosen but for most religious Jews at
Jesus’s time, its possession was considered essential for the divine mission God was
giving his chosen people. We know that disobedience to God will lead to forced exile
from that land; as “Leviticus” says, if the children of the covenant do not keep God’s
commandments, “The Land will vomit you out.” (18:24-27) But we also know that
the exile will be temporary, that God will lead the Israelis back from Babylon and
Egypt into the Land again as our first reading from the Book of Isaiah reminds us.
The people return to the land in rejoicing and in celebration. Throughout the
centuries our Jewish brothers and sisters have never abandoned the faith and hope
that God will lead them back again: As they say in their Passover prayers: Next year
in Jerusalem. And as Psalm 137 prays:
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How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand wither;
Let my tongue stick to my palate
If I cease to think of you,
If I do not elevate Jerusalem in memory
Ahead of my joy..
We appreciate that for many Jews, both religious and secular, the establishment of
the State of Israel, is the miraculous return to the Promised Land. For Jews, both
religious and secular, this homecoming should not permit injustice to the land’s
other inhabitants and need not abolish the joy of living in the many different
countries of the Jewish Diaspora.
Don’t worry: I am not going to try to resolve the political problem of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict today. But this Biblical issue of a promised and holy land has
significance for how we Christians understand who we are, where we belong, to
whom we belong. Jesus’s reply in today’s Gospel is a clever response to his
opponents but is not really an answer to the anxiety of the religious Jew; Jesus is
indignant in his dismissal of any effort to make God’s covenant a trap. But it also
launches us Christians into a new way of being religious. We have no physical holy
land that has been promised us; we have no sacred language in which we have been
commanded to pray; we have no territorial destination to which we must make
pilgrimage. Have these deprivations made you and me poor? Are we without
holiness? Are we speechless? Are we homeless? Our relationship with Jesus Christ
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is our Holy Land. Our ties with men and women, all of them, are the holy sites
through which we journey. Loving speech to others is our sacred language. No, we
are not poor. We are rich. The covenant God made with Israel is different than the
covenant Jesus has made with us but both lead to lands that flow with milk and
honey.
As Christians we are sent to go throughout the world, never arriving at some final
destination. But this is far from some aimless wandering or ceaseless touring. We
are called to live the good news of Jesus Christ and each of us tries to find his or her
own way of doing that and on that journey we are constantly discovering holy lands,
sacred people. We are not on some pilgrimage; we are pilgrims who, since the death
and resurrection of Jesus, have discovered that we belong everywhere, that we
belong to every man and woman. This radical character to our Christian identity
was brought home to me in the account that a missionary priest gave about a
discovery he made after preaching the Gospel to an African village. The leader of the
village was very impressed by what the missionary had preached but not less so by
the very fact that he had journeyed over such distances to tell them that there was
such good news. This is what the leader of the village said to the missionary:
“We did not search you out, Padri. We did not even want you to come to us. You
searched us out. You followed us away from your house into the bush, into the plains,
into the steppes where our cattle are, into the hills where we take our cattle for water,
into our villages, into our homes. You told us of the High God, how we must search for
him, even leave our land and our people to find him. But we have not done this. We
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have not left our land. We have not searched for him. He has searched for us. He has
searched for us and found us.” (Christianity Rediscovered, 63)
God has searched for each of us. Jesus Christ has found each of us. We are able to
rejoice in the Divine milieu, the sacred space where we are and which we share with
one another. We have very good news to pass on to others: We know where we are.
We know to whom we belong. Amen.
James Bernauer, S.J.
Church of St.Ignatius Loyola
Chestnut Hill, MA
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