HOMILY for 19th ORDINARY SUNDAY : 7th August 2022
There are two things in our Readings today that can easily be misunderstood. The first is the use of the word “Faith” You can see and hear me giving this Homily on
The problem is that we use the word “Faith in two ways. One way is when we talk about “The Catholic Faith” as a set of beliefs and practices, just as we might talk about the Buddhist Faith etc. This is where lots of people faulter. They just cannot bring themselves to accept the whole package, as in the Creeds and in the Teaching of the Church. So they say to me “I do believe in God and Jesus, Father, but I really have problems about…” and then they mention some belief they can’t swallow, or they talk of how much is wrong with the Church as a human organisation. My answer is to say to them “Look, this is the same for everyone. You don’t need to tick all the endless boxes in order to be a Catholic.” But then they tell me how wrong I am, by quoting to me the words someone has to say when they join the Church as an adult. The words are : “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.” My reply is that they are not being asked to say they believe every single bit of Catholic teaching. After all, no Catholic can do that.
Have you ever met a Catholic who knows all the teaching in the Catechism? Of course not! But that doesn’t stop them being good Catholics. I’m reminded of St Francis Xavier who arrived, somewhere in India I think, and found all these Catholics who knew they were Catholics but didn’t even know the words of the Our Father. He didn’t say they weren’t Catholics! He just began to teach them, and they loved it. And so it is with us. What is asked of us is that we believe that God is present (has revealed himself) in the Church and its Teaching, not that we can tick every box and have knowledge of every bit of that teaching. Of course, it is good to learn more, and I often meet people who, when they learn more, discover to their relief that something they thought was the Church’s Teaching wasn’t like that at all. In the end, what is essential is our trust in God and in Jesus as revealed to us in the Church.
Now that word “trust” takes us on to the second use of the word “faith”, which is the one being used in today’s 2nd Reading. (Hebrews 11:1-2.8-19) The whole passage is about people trusting in God even when they have little idea where God is leading them. So we hear “Abraham obeyed the call… and .. set out without knowing where he was going.” And that’s us! For, like Abraham, we cannot know fully all that God is, or all that God will lead us to in the future. This can only be something that our faith leads us towards, something that we perhaps catch glimpses of, even – and I stress this - even when God seems far away. It is simply about putting our trust in God whatever we feel like, and whatever happens: and that can be very hard. But let me remind you of that lovely story of the father, desperate for Jesus to heal his son. (Mark 9:23-25) Jesus challenges him by saying, “All things are possible to him who believes.” But the desperate father just cries out, as we might, “I believe; help my unbelief!” He offers the little faith he has, rather than the faith someone thinks he ought to have, and that is enough. His son is healed. It’s just as Jesus says at the beginning of today’s Gospel. (Luke 12:32-48) In the midst of groups of Pharisees filling people with fear, by insisting that the only way to be loved by God is to strictly follow every bit of the law, Jesus says, “There is no need to be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom.” It’s just like the servants keeping watch for their Master to return, they don’t need to know what he is doing or what time he is going to arrive, they just need to be on the watch.
I want to move on now to the second thing that can be misunderstood in our Readings today. It’s the story of Abraham nearly killing his son Isaac. Now the story is presented as if God actually wants Abraham to do this, and quite rightly people say “How can we accept this idea of God demanding such an horrific thing?” And the answer is, that we don’t have to. We’re always called to read the Bible through the mind of Jesus; and so, if we meet a text which contradicts what Jesus teaches us about God, we have to look at it a different way. So, reading this story through the mind of Jesus, I see Abraham learning to think about the true God as different from the other gods around him. You see, first he assumes that his God is like these pagan gods; and the point is that some of these pagans believed that they needed to used human sacrifices, even of their own children, in order to please their god. So he begins the process by behaving like them; but then, like a servant on the watch for his Master, we hear how he’s shown an alternative way that no longer requires such horrendous actions. He doesn’t know, when he starts up the mountain, where his faith will lead him. He even thinks it means killing his son, and in this as I explained he was influenced by the world around him, as we can be of course. But his faith takes him beyond this point, his faith keeps him awake to what God might say to him next, and so he finds a new way forward, a way that would lead eventually, many hundred of years later, to the love of God shown to us in Jesus.
The message for us today therefore is not to think that we can know exactly what God wants of us. It reminds us not to be stuck with our own ideas about God, perhaps the rather simplistic ones we learnt as children; but always to be on the watch for new ways in which God may be speaking to us in and through our faith in Jesus, and inspired by his Holy Spirit. The way forward must always be at least partly unknown. So many different things can or may happen to us, even if we’re old, and definitely if we’re young. Our faith is that God is always alongside us, and ahead of us, and what we need to do is keep our spiritual eyes and ears open to what God may say to us next. This is what prayer is about, and that’s why we need to do it.
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