Homily for Thursday, 27 July 2017– Ferial

Thursday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 19:1-2, 9-11, 16-20b; Responsorial Canticle: Daniel 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56; Matthew 13:10-17

Did any of us hear in our readings today the contrast between how God makes God’s self known in Exodus versus in Matthew’s Gospel?

How God makes God’s self known to us; reveals himself to us: We call this divine revelation. In Exodus today we hear the immediate lead-in to the Ten Commandments, which we will hear tomorrow. God is most concerned that the people being led by Moses in the desert will hear him when he speaks with Moses; when he gives Moses the Ten Commandments. God says to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after.” The people need to be able to trust Moses and so to trust God. This is the primary way in which God reveals himself in the part of Exodus we hear today.

In Matthew’s Gospel, do we not get the sense of a more distant and even irritable God through Jesus’ explanation of why he speaks “to the people in parables”? Jesus offers us a strange and even somewhat troubling explanation for why he teaches in parables: “[So] that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” Does Jesus speak in this way because he really does not want the people hearing him to “perceive… listen,” and understand what he is saying? This seems to me to be unlikely. Perhaps Jesus speaks this way because the people have had a chance to “perceive… listen” and understand him, to believe that he is the Messiah, and they have missed their chance.

But how long do we have before we have missed our chance to “perceive… listen… understand” believe what has been divinely revealed to us, that Jesus is the Messiah, and to back up our belief in Jesus as the Messiah by the way we live? As one bishop I know is fond of saying tongue-in-cheek, we have “between now and five minutes after death” to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and to act by what we believe. In other words, this process that we might call conversion takes a lifetime. But how long do we have?

Nobody fully knows the answer to this question. The Ten Commandments, the introduction to which we hear today in Exodus, were one event of God’s self-revelation to the people of Israel during a forty-year journey through the desert to their homeland. The journey of conversion, of grappling with divine revelation, would take the people of Israel more than one generation. Yet they did enter their homeland, although Moses did not.

We cannot know how much time we have left to believe in what God has revealed to us; what is essential to our faith; in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, and to live by it. Perhaps, then, Jesus is inviting us; pleading with us not to wait. Conversion is not a process we might begin in the future, but a process to live out in the present. And only if conversion for us is a present more than a future reality will we also experience the promise of Jesus to his disciples in today’s Gospel in the present: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”