HOMILY for the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time [B], August 23rd., 2015
“You have the message of eternal life”
It’s exam. results time, so an appropriate moment to look at education.
“Some primary school teachers have so little knowledge of the subjects they teach that they give children
wrong information. Others do little or no teaching but simply supervise their class.” So ran one of the first
ever OFSTED reports. Let us hope that standards have improved.
Meanwhile a county in Scotland was the first to allow pupil assessment of teachers. They were not allowed
to name names, though one wrote: “There is a certain head teacher in this school who ...”
They
complained of teachers who were sarcastic or vindictive, who spoke in an irritating tone of voice, or shouted,
or never believed anything the pupils said, who assumed a pupils had not been listening if they asked for help.
A bad teacher doesn’t care about the students, and doesn’t want the best for them. But some students call
teachers “bad” if they don’t spoon-feed them. “Give us notes!” they wail, “That’s not on the syllabus!”
Some of my most inspiring teachers almost never followed the syllabus, and would probably be in jail for
throwing things in the classroom.
“Intolerable teaching!” That’s is what some of Jesus’ hearers must feel as he comes to the end of his speech
about the Bread of Life. You will see that our translation today actually says: “Intolerable language!” In
fact there are numerous translations of what is said. Literally, the text runs: “This word is hard!” The
word for “hard”, if we may go into Greek, is scleros, which finds its way into English in the word “sclerosis”,
which us oldies know about well enough – we are just generally seizing up.
So this is a fine example of the
irony for which John’s Gospel is famous. Remembering that Jesus is the “Word” – “the Word was made
flesh and dwelt among us” – they are really saying: “The Word has got sclerosis; the Word has seized up!”
But in fact the Word was going to ascend into heaven, as Jesus says. It was his critics who had the sclerosis,
not him.
His teaching has intensified and he wants his hearers to come along with him. “My flesh is real food, my
blood is real drink.” “Anybody who eats my flesh” – actually “munches my flesh” – “will live for ever.”
Jesus stresses that their much-vaunted ancestors are “dead”. Dead! You can’t have much more sclerosis
than that!
The teaching which Jesus has given comes to a head with the tension between “staying” and “leaving”. For
Jesus to stay sounds best, yet he says he is going to leave – “ascend”. Meanwhile his critics say: “we can’t
stay, we are going to leave”, while Peter and the others say: “we can’t leave, we are going to stay”. What
Jesus is teaching is that they must stay together in order to leave – in order to leave their old way of life, their
customs, their presuppositions. They must stay together in order to move – just like in the Exodus.
Jesus is here giving the context of the Church, which is our guarantee, as we stay in it, that we may rightly
move forward. The other day a young man turned up on the doorstep and wanted me to baptise him, then
and there. When I looked doubtful, he said: “I have just read the whole Bible!” My answer was: “Yes, but
with whom?” And that is the issue.
An active form of staying is represented in our Bible translations by the lovely word “abide”, which appears
frequently in John’s Gospel. It is the opposite of a bad form of staying, which means merely getting stuck.
St. John’s first letter includes the verse: “Whoever says he abides in him [Jesus] must walk as he walked”.
That is the adventure – to stay and to walk. To stay without walking is sclerosis. To walk without staying is
to go wildly astray.
Jesus is the teacher and he says that the disciple should be like him. So when the disciples cry: “Increase our
faith!” – which is the same as saying to the teacher “Give us notes!” – Jesus shows them that what they need
is his faith. As a prayer in the Office last week puts it: “Increase in us, Lord, your faith”. But Jesus is not
his own master; he is his Father’s pupil. He tells his disciples that he passes on to them what he has learnt
from his Father.
And, to be fair, just like any human teacher Jesus sometimes blows his top. “It was because you were so
unteachable!” he more or less shouts at the Pharisees, as if saying: “You are the worst class I have ever had!”
which is of course just the sort of thing the teacher shouldn’t say.
We have now finished the discourse on the Bread of Life which has accompanied us for several weeks. Just
as his disciples travelled with Jesus through that discourse when it was first delivered, so we are invited to go
on a journey, the best of all journeys, travelling through life with Jesus who is our teacher in the Eucharist,
our Mass week by week. And if this promotes good within us, then we are to remember that we are only
students following our teacher. “The good works,” says the Letter to the Ephesians, “which God has
prepared in advance for us to carry out”. His good, then, not ours.
Pray up, sing up, and keep walking, says St. Augustine. Walking. For the second Greek word of the day,
that’s peripatein – “to walk”.
And peripatein gives us the word “peripatetic”. As in the “peripatetic
teacher”. In schools peripatetic teachers are usually the ones who come in for odd hours and teaching the
extra things like trombone, Italian or judo. They often get ignored or side-lined, left in the corner of the staff
room.
It’s very unwise to do that with Jesus! He is our great peripatetic teacher. He is always walking, and he
wants us to walk too. And if we turn round and ignore him, he may just simply move away. We wouldn’t
want that, would we?
+ Father David is away next Sunday, August 30th. Resumes September 6th. +