Homily for Thursday, 3 August 2017– Ferial

Thursday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 40:16-21, 34-38; Psalm 84:3, 4, 5-6a, 8a, 11; Matthew 13:47-53

“Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old,” so we have just heard from the Gospel of Matthew.

Of what treasures, old and new, is Jesus speaking?

When I hear this Gospel reading, I often think of the great prayer of St. Augustine of Hippo, reflecting on his conversion from a dissolute lifestyle through Manichaeism, a heretical philosophy that preached a dual creation, good and evil both originating in God, and eventually to the Christian faith. Augustine prays in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, beauty ever ancient and yet ever new”!

Like St. Augustine, are we not all in a way “late” in our experience and love of God? We are late in experiencing God, “beauty ever ancient and yet ever new,” not only because of our sin, although our sin plays a role in distancing and obscuring us from God; in making us less able to experience God’s beauty of which St. Augustine speaks. Naturally, we are the latest to experience God; to be able to live in relationship with God, since we are living more than two thousand years after the birth of Jesus Christ. We cannot be faulted for this historical circumstance beyond our control.

But living as we are, more than two thousand years after the birth of Christ, have these last two thousand years of experiencing and relating with God as Church; the spiritual, intellectual, and social tradition of our Church not been staggeringly rich? And our Church tradition continues to be dynamic and rich. We continue to be enriched by our pilgrimage with God as Church; as a people of God. Truly, we have known many abuses of the richness of this tradition, but this is where sin enters into play. Still, we continue to experience God as “ever new.”

And yet, in experiencing the dynamism and the richness of God “ever new,” we never cast off the ancient; “what is old” in the treasures of the “master of [the] household.” We continue to remember those encounters, long before Jesus’ time, between God and God’s chosen people, the people of Israel. We hear in Exodus today that God dwelt in the tabernacle God had commanded Moses to set up in “the tent of meeting,” where Moses had been meeting and speaking with God face to face.

Today, right here, our tabernacle reminds us of the tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, which Moses built and in which God first made an earthly dwelling. In our tabernacle, in the Blessed Sacrament, the real presence of Christ, divine “beauty ever ancient,” continues to dwell. And, almost every day of the year, we are able to witness bread and wine being newly consecrated at Mass, Jesus Christ really and truly entering into ordinary “fruit of the earth” and “of the vine” and “work of human hands,” and then to receive and be the treasure we witness to our world! We witness treasure that “is new” at the same time we witness treasure that “is old.”

“The master of [this] household,” God, creator and sustainer of the universe and of our Church, continues to be at work and to bring “out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” And so we stand in awe but also in celebration and thanksgiving for our experience of “beauty ever ancient and yet ever new.” O God, “late have [we] loved you”!