The Monastic Preacher

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Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

The Roman Catholic Monastery of the Holy Cross was founded in 1989 and became a Benedictine house of the Subiaco Congregation in 2000. We follow a traditional contemplative life, chanting Psalms seven times a day and singing Gregorian chant at the Eucharist. We do this in a distinctive way by living our monastic life on the South Side of Chicago. Prior Peter, the author of this blog, was appointed Prior in August of 2004.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Fr. Brendan

In the spring of 1988, on our way back to the US from our year with the Jerusalem Community in Paris, we had a few days stopover in London. We found a hotel near Earl’s Court and because it was a bank holiday (the Queen’s birthday) we had to go into Westminster to find a place to change travelers checks.

When we arrived back at our hotel between 8 and 9 pm we found all of our luggage sitting outside on the front step. The hotel manager took advantage of our absence to rent the room to four people rather than three: more money for him and no room for us.
We spent the next hour going from hotel to hotel trying to find a vacancy. Nothing. Finally, someone directed us to a family not far from Victoria Station who had a small apartment in the basement of their house. They were willing to take us in for a reasonable amount. The apartment was not exactly opulent but it was a lot better than sleeping in the street.

That family was from Pakistan, their presence in England, like many others from Pakistan and India are a consequence of the British Empire. They came from all over the Commonwealth to seek a better life than the one they knew. And the British, true to the tradition of hospitality and sanctuary, let them in by the thousands.

And this is why the recent terrorist attack on London is so sobering for the British: because the four men who bombed the bus and trains in London last week were not foreign nationals, not terrorists who infiltrated the country from abroad. They were the sons of Pakistani immigrants. They were British, born and raised on English soil from middle class homes in the city of Leeds. British subjects who were essentially no different from the 54 people they killed and the 700 left wounded.
Weeds among the wheat: the Gospel comes alive in the headlines. And as it happens with tragedies like this the first inclination is to pull up the weeds and destroy them. In effect, to redefine who and who is not British. Not every Briton of Pakistani origin is a terrorist. But how do you tell who’s who? The question is making governments on both sides of the Atlantic uneasy as they look at their own large immigrant communities.

It is with this feeling of unease that we can begin to unpack the parable of the weeds and the wheat (because it does not make as us as uneasy as it should or could).

The parables that Jesus tells in the Gospels like the sower and the seed, the wheat and the weeds, the lost coin and just about everyone’s favorite the Prodigal Son are not just folksy stories meant to teach moral lessons on how to be nice to other people. They are radically subversive stories in which He calls his listeners to take stock of how God is acting in history for Israel.
The parables are provocative and confrontative. Well, maybe not for us, but they were for the people of 1st century Palestine because they re-tell the story of Israel but with a devastating twist. And the proof is that Christ got himself killed for telling them.

So what is so radically subversive about a lesson in farming techniques. The answer is that the people who first listened to Jesus tell this story knew he was talking about them. They knew it because they were as familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures as we are not. They heard the subtle illusion to Isaiah 6, Ezra 9, Amos 2, Zechariah 10, all of which compare Israel to the good seed which God has sown in the field of the world. A seed intended to bear a great yield.
Jesus is suggesting however that something has gone terribly wrong with the divine agriculture project. Israel has not yielded a rich harvest of justice and truth for the nations because someone has sown weeds among the wheat. And who are the weeds? In the context of the Gospel these are the forces in 1st Century Israel whose religious and political agendas are not in keeping with the precepts of the Torah, forces which will ultimately precipitate a long and deadly war and bring about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple itself in 70 a.d.
The long and the short of it is that Jesus is asking, by way of the parable, what does it means to be a true Jew? Is it Judaism according to the Pharisees’ agenda? Or Judaism according to the Sadducees agenda? As the Essenes define it? Or the Zealots?

Each of these parties within 1st Century Israel had a clear and definite set of criteria for who a real Jew was and just as import who they were not. The parable confronts these agendas and says that they have it all wrong. The real Jew is Jesus Christ. He is the true image of what Israel is supposed to be, the icon of her vocation as a light among the nations.

But we are not living in 1st century Israel. We’re living in 21st Century America. And we are listening to this story in the light of one of the gravest crises the Church has ever faced in this country. I am referring to the scandals that have filled the pages of the papers over the past two years. There are weeds among the wheat. And this is to name only one problem that confronts us. There is no lack of agenda’s out there to solve them. Is it Catholicism as the Liberals define it? Or the Conservatives? The Church as the Traditionalists would like it to be? Or Call to Action?

Each of these ideologies not only have their own agenda’s for what it means to be a Catholic in 21st Century America they also would like us to know who is and is not a true Catholic.
If the various parties in 1st Century Israel got it all wrong how is it possible that the competing visions in 21st Century America have it all right? I doubt it. And I doubt it because there can be only one true agenda for the Church and that is Christ himself as we encounter him in the Sacraments, in the teaching authority of the Magisterium and in the faithful.

I said that parable should make us uneasy. It is a parable of judgment and divine vindication. It says that in the end God’s judgment will fall, not on those who do not believe but on those who have preferred to man the barricades erected by their ideologies. A message that is as true today as it was two thousand years ago.