Homily for Thursday, 28 July 2016– Ferial

Thursday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 18:1-6; Psalm 146:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6ab; Matthew 13:47-53

This homily was given at the chapel of Kateri House Women's Residence of St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Has anybody here ever done pottery or known somebody who has? Has anybody ever fished or known somebody who has?

Both pottery and fishing can be painstaking and even frustrating work. I have fished although, perhaps thankfully, not for a living, and I know at least one of my brother Basilian priests who has done pottery. Often my Basilian confrère would bring home mugs or other pieces of pottery he had made, and I would think of how beautiful these pieces of pottery were; how much work he had put into each one! On one occasion, when I was out fishing as a boy, the fish in the lake where my family fished had all been infected with a strange parasite. Many of the fish we caught, although they were large enough that we did not need to release them, were no longer good to eat, but we could not know which fish were infected with the parasite until we examined them more closely.

Both pottery and fishing can be hard work. Today the prophet Jeremiah presents God as the potter, working and reworking the clay, the people of Israel, into a vessel that seems “good to him.” And, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus presents God as the fisherman who has “caught fish of every kind” in “a net” and, “at the end of the age”; the end of time, will separate the good from the bad fish; “the evil from the righteous.”

Might images like the “furnace of fire” and like the clay vessel being broken down and “reworked… into another vessel” give us the sense of a harsh God? Instead, the reworking of the “spoiled” clay vessel “into another vessel” by the potter and the sorting of fish from the net in our Gospel reading are meant for us to be images of a patient, merciful God.

Our God does not want to break us down in order to re-mold us in his image. Our God does not want anybody to be lost to the “furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” But our reality is that sin exists in our world. It exists and infects us like a parasite: Divisions among and within nations; among and within families; fearmongering and gossip; exclusion of entire groups based on their ethnicity, religion, or other reasons; all forms of violence, verbal and physical.

Sin is real. And yet it would be a mistake, a heresy, to suggest that any person is totally depraved or beyond redemption. Our God keeps molding us as the potter breaks down and reworks one vessel into another, “as [seems] good to him.” This is an act of re-creation by our God, bringing us back to our beginnings, when God fashioned us and declared us “very good.” Our God will wait until the end of time to “separate the evil from the righteous.”

Until then, God will continue to work to heal us of the parasite of sin; to re-mold us. And God invites us to work with him with patience and mercy, until we are made fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.