Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
(July 19-20, 2014)
The best spiritual advice I ever received about how to approach the Scriptures was
from the director of a retreat which I was making many years ago. He said: “Try to
catch Jesus in the act of becoming himself.” “Try to catch Jesus in the act of
becoming himself.” At first I did not know what that meant. Eventually it dawned
on me that there are episodes in the Scriptures which give a special glimpse into the
life of Jesus as he was actually experiencing it, into his ministry as he was inventing
it. One example of this would be from the Wedding Feast in Cana when Jesus replies
to Mary’s request for assistance by saying: “My hour has not yet come.” But then
Jesus has a powerful insight: his ministry is not going to be governed by his own
personal calendar but rather by the needs of people. And so we have the miracle of
the wine at the feast! Another example of Jesus becoming himself is his encounter
with the non-Jewish Canaanite woman (Mt:15:21-28) who has asked for his
intervention and healing of her daughter. Jesus says “no”, “I was sent only to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel” and that it is “not right to take the food of the children
and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman persists in her request and challenges
Jesus by claiming that even scraps of the food from the table fall to the dogs. Jesus
is startled by this woman’s humility and faith and he overcomes his prejudice and
heals the sick daughter. His mission is now not just to the Jews. This is Jesus in the
act of becoming himself.
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Today’s Gospel gives us another example of this becoming himself because the
parable gives away Jesus’s response to the question, “How will he deal with the
existence of evil?” And that is the question that is posed to each of us as Christians,
and Jesus’s response to it is his guidance for us. First of all, there is no evasion:
throughout the Gospels Jesus is constantly recognizing that there is evil in the world.
The importance of this recognition of evil was brought home to me when I was
reading a book on the history of the civil rights movement in this country. The
author claimed that there had been all sorts of studies done on the situation of
African Americans but things only changed for them when their religious leaders
recognized that the injustice toward blacks was not due to some failure of education
among whites but it was rooted in evil, in a wickedness that had to be denounced as
cruel and had to be overcome by action. And that is what they did.
The second attitude that Jesus takes up in the face of evil is a profound
compassion toward the people who suffer it. He saw that people were afflicted by
forces for which they were not responsible and they needed assistance. Just recall
the parable of the Good Samaritan and its showing of how we should respond to the
effects of evil.
The third attitude is the awareness of risk and the danger of being misunderstood
that each person runs in dealing with evil. We know that Jesus’s confrontation with
it led to his own crucifixion and his disgrace in the eyes of the world. I was thinking
particularly of this element of risk the other day because I am something of a
student of German history and tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the failed
assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by the von Stauffenberg brothers and their
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associates. There was a pretty good film about the plot a few years ago in which
Tom Cruise starred. It was a very heroic action that would have saved well over a
million lives if the war had come to an end in July of 1944 instead of nine months
later. But what I found particularly courageous about von Stauffenberg is that he
was convinced that he would go down in history as a disgraceful traitor to Germany.
Fortunately that has not happened and now there is honoring and commemoration
of his action every July 20th and the Berlin street where the plot was managed and
its leaders executed is now named von Stauffenberg Street. But he never anticipated
that and thought quite the opposite.
The fourth attitude which Jesus teaches in how to confront evil is the power of
hope, the conviction that the good will triumph, that the weeds will be separated
from the wheat. Today’s reading from “Romans” reminds us that we are led by the
Spirit and that Spirit teaches that no matter what the evil might be, the divine image
in each person is never, never lost. In our lives, no matter what mistakes we have
made, it is always the good that is under construction and we are its builders. And
how are we builders? I have always derived great consolation from the Psalm that
contrasts our God with the seeming perfection of idols that are made of silver and
gold. In contrast to our God and to us, the psalmist says
Those idols have mouths but speak not,
Eyes but see not, ears that hear not,
Hands that feel not.
In examining our speech, and in recognizing what we want to see and and what we
wish to hear and what we feel, we confront our capacity for evil but also the
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blessings of our senses and perhaps, and perhaps, even catch ourselves in the act of
becoming who we are, who we have been called to be.
James Bernauer, S.J.
Church of St. Ignatius Loyola
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