17th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter
You are hot and I am minus one working arm. So, to preserve the bond of peace, today’s homily will be brief.
In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with the mystery of God’s overflowing generosity as well as His attention to detail. Put another way we have God’s grandeur and His economy. Both of these aspects of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence escape our attention much of the time, perhaps because they challenge the habitual human scale in which we live our daily lives. God’s generosity is a challenge for two reasons: first, it suggests that we, too, need to be generous, even when what we have clearly seems insufficient to the task at hand. We’d prefer to conserve and not take our chances that God will catch us if we extend ourselves. The second challenge of God’s generosity suggests that we stop being anxious about tomorrow and trust God. If we have eyes to see it, God lavishes everything we need for fullness of life on the world at every moment. In a strikingly beautiful image, Pope Benedict once summed up God’s generosity being shown to us in His willingness to scatter thousands of acorns in the confidence that one of them will become an oak.
Yet this brings us to another challenge from the opposite side. Is God wasteful? According to Jesus’ instructions, not at all. “Let nothing go to waste.” God’s greatness is such that He cares for all things, especially the smallest. This is a challenge to us who can only observe a few things at a time. For many of us crowds are scary things, and the sheer amount of people in the world today is frightening. Can God provide food for so many? I say yes, if humans weren’t so cruel to one another, but that is for another day. The point here is that because we can only come to know so many persons in our human capacity, we have a tendency to discount the importance of all kinds of persons whom we don’t know.
The scandal can be summed up another way. At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus calls the first disciples to follow Him. We find in today’s Gospel a whole throng following Him. Surely this can’t be the same kind of following, can it? Why not? Are these people hungering for the Kingdom of God any less than the fishermen were? So, too, we might be tempted either to discount to discipleship of the weak and weary, or to excuse ourselves from discipleship because God hasn’t called us to be a religious, or a priest, or a superior, or even just a devout person. Yet however it is that we have come to be followers of Christ, Jesus loves us and cares for us, each individually. His concern and compassion go out to us and all in need. All praise to Him with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.
In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with the mystery of God’s overflowing generosity as well as His attention to detail. Put another way we have God’s grandeur and His economy. Both of these aspects of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence escape our attention much of the time, perhaps because they challenge the habitual human scale in which we live our daily lives. God’s generosity is a challenge for two reasons: first, it suggests that we, too, need to be generous, even when what we have clearly seems insufficient to the task at hand. We’d prefer to conserve and not take our chances that God will catch us if we extend ourselves. The second challenge of God’s generosity suggests that we stop being anxious about tomorrow and trust God. If we have eyes to see it, God lavishes everything we need for fullness of life on the world at every moment. In a strikingly beautiful image, Pope Benedict once summed up God’s generosity being shown to us in His willingness to scatter thousands of acorns in the confidence that one of them will become an oak.
Yet this brings us to another challenge from the opposite side. Is God wasteful? According to Jesus’ instructions, not at all. “Let nothing go to waste.” God’s greatness is such that He cares for all things, especially the smallest. This is a challenge to us who can only observe a few things at a time. For many of us crowds are scary things, and the sheer amount of people in the world today is frightening. Can God provide food for so many? I say yes, if humans weren’t so cruel to one another, but that is for another day. The point here is that because we can only come to know so many persons in our human capacity, we have a tendency to discount the importance of all kinds of persons whom we don’t know.
The scandal can be summed up another way. At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus calls the first disciples to follow Him. We find in today’s Gospel a whole throng following Him. Surely this can’t be the same kind of following, can it? Why not? Are these people hungering for the Kingdom of God any less than the fishermen were? So, too, we might be tempted either to discount to discipleship of the weak and weary, or to excuse ourselves from discipleship because God hasn’t called us to be a religious, or a priest, or a superior, or even just a devout person. Yet however it is that we have come to be followers of Christ, Jesus loves us and cares for us, each individually. His concern and compassion go out to us and all in need. All praise to Him with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 11:27 AM
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