33rd Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

Today’s Gospel – Good News? or Bad News? How we hear it reflects, I think, how much we have taken to heart Jesus’ invitation made right at the beginning of the Gospel, The Kingdom of heaven is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News! Jesus effectively was saying, “God is around. It is Good News. But to recognise that, you need to change, and to keep changing – beginning with the way you see God, how you value things, and how you choose to approach life!”

If Jesus’ God is Good News, then the wealthy slave-owner in today’s story is not a figure of God – absent most of the time, obviously greedy, capriciously generous one moment and ruthlessly violent the next. So what is the story about? The first disciples thought that the Son of Man would come in glory at any time, and that they would be in the box-seat. The clock ticked on, and nothing happened. By the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, two generations had passed since Jesus died and rose again. It slowly dawned on them that they were in for the long haul across history. What they made of this life would become very important, but would also be up to them.

The parable is essentially about life on this side of the grave – though what we make of ourselves during this life will determine how we shall experience life beyond death. The possibilities seem to be either a joy-filled life or, as the story colourfully describes it, out in the dark, weeping and gnashing our teeth, feeling we have missed out, bitterly resentful and hopelessly despairing. The poet TS Eliot wrote of people going into death “not with a bang but a whimper”!

What makes the difference? Matthew did his best to answer that in the body of his Gospel. He summed it up best in the Sermon on the Mount essentially as love, and teased it out further in the other signs and teachings of Jesus, climaxing it with Jesus’ love-inspired death and resurrection.

Why do we not enthusiastically sign on to the vision of Jesus? Do we not want our lives to be joy-filled? Since Jesus’ way is the way of love, why do we not give loving our best shot? Today’s story has a view on that. The master in the story put it down to the slave’s laziness – you wicked and lazy servant! The slave put it down to his fear, I was afraid and went off and hid your talent in the ground. Laziness. Fear.

What is it that stops us loving more? What is it that stops you loving more? For my part, I am sort-of stuck in my life-style. It is familiar. I feel comfortable enough. I do not want to change my attitudes to people, my opinions on issues. They almost make me who I feel I am. Even to think of changing means facing the possibility that I might be wrong – after all these years! What is the resistance? – laziness? fear? I think there is a bit of both. 

Like a number of you moving into the senior bracket, I do not think I have the energy to reach out more by way of actively loving and serving.  Improvement will not lie there. It is more a question now of letting go activity. But the quality of my loving, my readiness to accept, to listen, to gently share what I really feel and think leave plenty of room for growth, and hopefully, for deeper joy.  Yet on these issues I think that I have gone as far as my good resolutions are likely to take me. As I see it, the task now is to accept my powerlessness, to surrender my need to control, and to entrust myself, just as I am, totally to God. I am not scared of dying. But I do also like the prospect of even deeper joy in whatever time lies ahead.