Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

January 28, 2007

Three weeks ago I received some good natured razzing after mass for my homily on the “da Vinci Code”. In matters of preaching I take a measure of comfort from today’s Gospel: even the Lord Jesus had his critics. At least none of mine have attempted to throw me off the bell tower.

Given the sad state of preaching in the Church today it may surprise you to know that homiletics is actually taught in theology as a required course before ordination. I took one of those courses at Washington Theological Union in the later half of the last century. And while I have long forgotten the name of the instructor I have always remembered his 4 short rules for effective preaching: stand up, speak up, shut up, sit down.

Standing up and sitting down are the easy parts, it’s what happens between speak up and shut up that’s crucial. This is because the goal of a homily is not to inform but to transform. Unfortunately, this guarantees that every homilist will inevitably defeats his listener’s expectations. Because if we had to choose between inform and transform it would be inform nine times out of ten. Transform implies change and change never comes easy.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about: There was a young priest ordained for a rural diocese in Kentucky. For his first assignment the bishop sent him to a parish where he was the assistant of an old and venerable Monsignor. The first Sunday the new priest preached on the evils of drinking. The old monsignor said to him “take care Father, a third of the parish works for a bourbon distillery”. The next Sunday the newly ordained preached on the evils of gambling. Again came the warning: “take care Father, one third of the parishioners raise race horses”. The third Sunday he preached on the evils of smoking and again came the advice “take care, one third the parish raises tobacco.” On the fourth Sunday, the young priest preached on the evils of fishing within the territorial waters of a foreign nation.

Those charged with responsibility for preaching the word and those burdened with having to listen to it on any given Sunday morning might recognize the sharp truth hidden behind the humor: it is easier, and so more tempting, to entertain and inform on a Sunday morning because we all resist transformation.

In the years before I entered the monastery I worked in Minnesota among God’s frozen chosen as they liked to call themselves. I had to preach at mass four or five times every weekend. I faithfully followed Fr. What’s-his-name’s rules for effective preaching and inevitably heard people say to me: “thanks for the message. It was short and sweet and to the point”. This was music to my ears for the first few years of priesthood, but then I began yearn for the day when someone said: your homily really brought me up short. Now I’ll have to go home and re-evaluate all my priorities and start living like a follower of Christ.

In these late winter Sunday’s before the arrival of Lent, the Lectionary moves, episode by episode, through the Gospel of Luke. These stories can seem odd to us. They are often difficult to understand because they come out of a culture and a time alien to our own. But they are passionate and powerful attempts to describe the length to which our God will go to befriend the human race.

In the time provided all that a homilist can hope to do is to trigger the religious imagination that lies dormant in most of us. It lies dormant not merely because we are preoccupied by the tasks of daily life but because we have unconditionally surrendered our imaginations under the assault of popular culture. So now the media does our thinking for us, provides us with the images that define who we are or stokes our desires for things we want but don’t actually need, and force feeds us predigested sound bites from the “talking heads” that become our opinions and ideas. In the end this robs us of the ability to think outside the cultural comfort zone.

This has its spiritual and theological consequences when it comes to living our Catholic faith. Someone writes a book claiming that the Vatican has engaged in two thousand year old conspiracy to hid the truth that the real Jesus was just an ordinary man. The book becomes a phenomenal best seller and people, like my 16 year nephew who read it, begin to imagine that the Church is nothing more than a web of lies and distortions. They forget that the book is a novel which, if my research is correct, is still shelved under fiction in better bookstores everywhere.

This also has its spiritual and theological consequences when it comes to celebrating liturgy on Sunday morning: we may be full of information about God but often are powerless to imagine the kind of life he has called us to live or that this life is in any sense different from the popular culture around us.

This is perhaps what the Lord Jesus is attempting to do when he preaches to the people of his own hometown. Like 21st Century America, 1st Century Palestine had its own cultural stresses. No Jew could have been unaware that Israel was an occupied land paying taxes to Imperial Rome. Herod, in a spirit of realpolitik, fixed the Roman eagle above the main gate of the temple as a reminder to one and all that the pagans were really running the show. The rabbinic students who tore that eagle down in their zeal for the Torah were hunted down by Herod’s police, dragged in chains to Jericho where Herod was wintering and burned alive in his presence.

The prior mentioned last Sunday that Nazareth was just five miles across the valley from the Greek speaking city of Sepporis the site of the revolt led by Judas the Galilean who proclaimed himself messiah in 6 ad. When the Romans took the city they crucified 6,000 men along the road that lead to the town.

Across the valley the people of a little village named Nazareth doubtless stood and watched the spectacle playing out before them. Among the eyes witnessing the power of Imperial Rome must have been those of a young Jewish boy named Jeshua ben Josef. He would have been about 12 years old.

This is why it is an electric moment when Jesus takes the scroll and reads from the Isaiah a passage in which the prophet foresees the day when Israel will no longer be oppressed by pagan nations and God himself will come to Zion. It is clear that no one sitting in that room could have possibly imagined that the prophetic text had been fulfilled in the person of Jesus, the son of a carpenter. Which illustrates an important principle they don’t teach in homiletics classes: that it’s hard to preach to people who knew you when you were in diapers.

What the citizens of Nazareth did understand however was that Jesus was using the coded language of a text sacred to Judaism to proclaim himself the messiah. Visions of Sephoris with its six thousand crucified must have danced through they’re heads. Was this another Judas the Galillean? The incident shows the poverty of their religious imagination just as it shows the power of their communal memory for state terror in the form of mass executions.
All the gospels speak about this incident but they locate it later in the ministry of Jesus. Luke moved it to the beginning of the public ministry because it foreshadows what is to come. His rejection by the people of his own hometown, the people he grew up with who knew him is a portrait in miniature of the rejection that he will meet at his crucifixion.

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet wrote about this passage from Luke in one of his poems:
A preacher’s temptation
Is the voice persuading
He is his own message.
So the emphasis on the other
Proved to them he blasphemed.
This stripling, this Nazarene
Nobody the mirror
Of God! They hurled their scorn’s
Stones and the cracks accentuated
The sky’s edge. There was scant time.
He withdrew into the wilderness of the
Spirit. The true fast
Was abstention from language.
Thomas was an Anglican priest and speaks out of his experience when he says that a preacher’s temptation is the voice persuading he is his own message. He titled the poem “Incarnations”. The only person of whom it can be said that he was his own message was Jesus Christ. When God the Logos became incarnate as a Nazarene nobody the medium, the human flesh of Jesus Christ, became the message: Jesus is the mirror of God for anyone who has the religious imagination to see it. He is also the mirror image of who we are, though that may take more imagination for us to comprehend.

Scripture scholars sometimes express frustration that in the environs of Nazareth there is no great hill from which Jesus might have been thrown off by his inhospitable listeners. But it you will find that hill much later in Luke’s story, on a Friday in April, just outside Jerusalem.