Homily for Monday, 30 July 2018– Ferial

Monday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time


Optional Memorial of St. Peter Chrysologus

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 13:1-11; Responsorial Canticle: Deuteronomy 32:18-19, 20, 21; Matthew 13:31-35

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

Has anybody here ever wondered why, occasionally, as in passages like the one we hear today from Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus chooses on purpose to “speak in parables”? When Jesus teaches in this way, would it not seem that anybody who does not understand what he is teaching would have little to no chance of progressing in understanding of his teaching? “What has been hidden from the foundation of the world” would therefore remain hidden. And what is Jesus trying to keep hidden and from whom? Is it not God’s way to reveal to us at least the truths we need for our salvation?

Let me answer “yes” to this last question: Neither Jesus nor St. Matthew deny that God reveals to us all the truths we need to be saved. But, still, verses like the one at the end of our Gospel reading today can be troublesome. We might think that Jesus might simply have become exasperated by the obtuseness of the people following him, and so we might allow him space for some godly snark (Or was the occasional snark part of his human nature? This is hard to say).

Sayings of Jesus like this make me imagine him, completely lifted from his historical or other context, as at least capable of a tone more like Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup in “A Few Good Men,” with the people following Jesus taking the place of Tom Cruise’s Lieutenant Kaffee: “I want the truth”! “You can’t handle the truth”!

At worst, sayings of Jesus about elements of God’s revelation being “hidden from the foundation of the world” have become fodder since the earliest days of our Christian faith for Gnostic teachings, consistently condemned as heresies by the Church, that some truths that are necessary for our salvation lie outside what God has revealed to us through Scripture and the Church’s teaching tradition.

God has hidden nothing of essential truths we need to be saved. Yet we are free to reject truths proclaimed either in Scripture or in the tradition of the Church. We are free, because God has given us free will, to make ourselves unable to “handle the truth.”

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase: “The medium is the message.” At the time, he was referring to how various media, like radio or television, and now increasingly social media, affect how individuals and societies receive and interpret a message, more than the content of the message itself. But could we not extend McLuhan’s point to say that, in some way, when we receive a message, if not a divinely-revealed truth, we become part of “the medium” that influences how we interpret the message?

This, to me, resonates better with Jesus’ time, place, and culture behind our Gospels and especially behind some of Jesus’ more troublesome sayings, like those about “hidden” essential truths. Divinely-reveled truths remain “hidden” to us insofar as our “medium” is not receptive to those truths. We know the frequent Biblical metaphor of hardness of heart. This metaphor is all about medium, when the people become “hard of heart,” in other words, unreceptive to truths God wants to reveal to them. This lack of receptivity is not God’s fault, but ours. Jesus, far from being needlessly sharp with the people, teaches in parables to soften our hardness of heart, to make us a better medium for his saving message.