13th Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2023

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew is situated within the time-frame of the Public Ministry of Jesus. However, even a quick look at the text will notice that it reflects a time some years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. While drawing on memories of the teachings of Jesus probably held in Matthew’s Christian community, it certainly had knowledge that Jesus died on a cross, and seemed to reflect a stage in the early Church’s life when disciples whom it called prophets were common. Its background might suggest the increasing threats of persecution that broke out towards the end of the first century.

From Paul’s letters and from Luke’s history of the early Church — the Acts of Apostles — we learn that figures called Prophets played important roles in the small Christian communities scattered around the Roman Empire. With exceptions, their role was not to foretell the future but to apply the remembered teachings of Jesus to the concrete circumstances and considerably different practical life-styles of each particular Christian community. In some ways they fulfilled the role of being the “corporate conscience” of the community.

I think their contribution may not have been all that different from what we priests try to do in our homilies at Mass. Luke had prefaced his Gospel, written about the same time as Matthew’s, by stating his aim:“I have carefully sifted through everything from the beginning, and have decided to put into writing for your sake an orderly account, Theophilus, so that you may come to know the sound foundation of the catechesis you have received.” Perhaps Luke had a few doubts about what some of the prophets had been saying. Most of you have been around long enough to wonder whether some of the things we priests have to say at Mass always reflect the mind of Jesus.

My hope, generally, is to stimulate your own consciences to think through the implications for your own lives of the short Gospel passages we have each week. And the human consciences of all of us have been made by God to become more and more reliable as we hopefully grow and mature through life. One of the things that fascinate me in the Hebrew Scriptures is the evidence they provide of how the Hebrew people’s sense of God and of morality developed over the twelve centuries and longer of their history — even if generally with a tentative “two steps forward, one step back”.

Matthew also has Jesus referring in today’s passage not only to prophets but to the ones he called “holy ones” [unfortunately translated as “holy men” — but there is nothing exclusive about holiness]. Wonderfully, there often are in our communities those people who have developed over their lives an obvious closeness to God and who serve as attractive examples to the rest of us. Their presence in any community is precious.

In today’s passage, Matthew also has Jesus promising to ones who “welcome” a prophet or a holy person what he calls a prophet’s “reward” or a holy person’s “reward”. Have you wondered what on earth they might be? I do hope that they might be something more than the equivalent of a “pat on the back” or a child’s dream of “a higher place in heaven”. I wonder if “a prophet’s reward” might well be an ever clearer ability to see and to understand the practical implications, in often complicated real-life conditions, of Jesus’ emphasis on the non-negotiable priority of love. Consistently, I also wonder if a “holy person’s reward” for the one who “welcomes” the holy person might be an ever closer relationship to God, the source of all life and love.

It is worth remembering that at our baptism each of us was called to be holy, and also to exercise a prophetic role within our community.