Homily for Friday, 24 October 2014– Ferial

Friday of the 29th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 4:1-6; Psalm 24:1-2, 3-4ab, 5-6; Luke 12:54-59

How does Jesus call us “to interpret the present time”? In the Gospel reading we hear today, Jesus criticizes “the crowds” of his time, those who follow Jesus from place to place, who hear his message, but do not wish to commit to the radical but ultimately saving demands of his message; his Gospel.

We hear Jesus admonish two particular groups of people: First, those who can predict rain when “a cloud” rises “in the west” and heat when the wind is “from the south” but cannot “interpret the present” signs of the kingdom of God, beginning with Jesus’ presence among them. Second, Jesus speaks against legalistic types who bring petty disputes before higher courts instead of settling them among themselves.

I have no personal slight against lawyers. I know of faithful and honest lawyers here in our parish. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for meteorologists. My father is a retired weather forecaster. Once, during my second stint teaching in Colombia, I was on pilgrimage, riding on the back of a Jeep in the mountains with other Basilian seminarians and people of the coffee and banana farming community we were visiting.  Farmers are interested in the weather, and so I was interested in the discussion they were having on the back of the Jeep. I was even able to predict correctly the storms that would hit or miss us that day. Was I channeling my father’s forecasting skill, or was this sheer luck? I suspect it was the latter.

Jesus’ point in our Gospel reading (perhaps meteorologists like my father and some lawyers may disagree) is that there is something more important than the weather or manipulating the law to resolve disputes in our favor. Most importantly, we are invited “to interpret the present time.” How do we do this?

One Vatican II document that speaks verbatim of discerning “the signs of the times” is the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. This document laments much of the state of the world in 1965, from hunger, widening disparity between rich and poor, challenges of rapid improvements in technology and social communication (well before Facebook and Twitter!), spiritual indifference especially among youth, to the arms race and increasing destructiveness of war. And yet Gaudium et Spes was criticized by some as too optimistic!

The bishops who wrote Gaudium et Spes were optimistic or, better yet, discerned one point with profound accuracy: Despite the world’s problems, there is still a longing for God. Gaudium et Spes begins by acknowledging “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of [people] of this age” as the same “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the followers of Christ.”

Is this not the most significant sign of “the present time”? Jesus invites us “to interpret the present time”; to discern “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of [people] of this age”; to discern God’s presence in our midst and to build the Kingdom of God, a project brought to the present time through the life and Gospel message of Christ.