14th Sunday of the Year A

Almost as soon as I read those readings last Sunday afternoon and began the week-long process of reflection which ends up as a homily, I was aware of a tension between two truths, one rooted in the Gospel passage and the other in the life of the Church at a time when we are constantly asking at Mass for the grace to be alert to the signs of the times in which we live. And it is the nature and implications of that tension, a tension which, if we approach it in a faith-filled way, is ultimately life-giving and constructive, that I would like to reflect on today.

In the gospel passage, Jesus thanks God ‘for hiding the things of the Kingdom from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. ‘No one knows the Father,’ he says, ‘except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him,’ reminding us that knowledge of God is not fundamentally something we come to through study, through the intellect or through human understanding. It is a gift from God, something freely given, resulting in a deep interior knowledge which enables us to go far beyond the limits of our own intelligence and know, through faith, truths which, left to ourselves, we could never know. And how clever of God to do it this way! It means that direct knowledge of Himself is possible for every human being. The greatest minds in history have no advantage over a person with even the most profound learning difficulties, and I have no doubt personally that, even in the most severe cases of Alzeimers or dementia, God continues to deal directly with us in ways beyond normal human experience. There is, in the end, only one unsurmountable obstacle to knowing God. And it is the kind of arrogance Jesus is confronted with in this morning’s Gospel.

The passage we heard follows immediately on a section where Jesus condemns the Jewish leaders of his day for their refusal to believe in him. They are the great experts in the law, and it is precisely because they are so ‘learned and clever’ that the mysteries of the kingdom are hidden from them. The reason they refused to believe in Jesus, the reason why, in the end, these religious leaders cried out for Jesus to be crucified, was that they could not reconcile what he was saying with the Law, with what they had always known, and, faced with this dilemma, they made one of history’s great misjudgements and chose to stay with their own fixed ideas because they made sense to them. In their arrogance they put human understanding before God. Their very cleverness blinded them to the truth. The Word made flesh was among them and they refused to accept him. But to those who did accept him – the uneducated poor – he gave power, as we read in John’s Gospel, to become sons and daughters of God.

But what does this mean in the context of the world we live in today? For years documents from Rome have called for adult education in faith. Ignorance of what the modern Church teaches is widespread. Pope John Paul II and the present Pope, Benedict XVI, have spoken time and time again on the theme of ‘Faith and Reason,’ arguing that, faced with the modern world, we must be able to show that faith is based on reason and can more than stand up for itself in the open market-place of ideas which is our modern society. So is all this wrong? Is the Gospel anti-intellectual or anti-reason? Well, clearly it isn’t, but it is important that we get the right balance between faith and reason and that is what I would like to say a few words about now.

During an earlier existence in the 1980s I was Diocesan RE Advisor for Secondary Schools. And one of the things I saw with great clarity during that period was that when otherwise well educated people have no in depth understanding of their faith, one of two things happens. Nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum, and so when there is a vacuum where there should be understanding, superstition, and religious mumbo-jumbo quickly move in and set up home. There is so much of this still around in the Church and for many people it is a way of avoiding much deeper questions about what they really believe. But the other thing that happens, and this is the real sign of the times in this area, is that educated people simply give up on faith. Since after the war, and therefore during the lifetime of many of us here, millions of people have had access to education in a way that was never possible before. Sadly, however, their education in faith has not kept pace with their secular education and, as a result, the things of faith have been left seeming childish and infantile, causing many to stop believing in them the way they stopped believing in a certain gentleman from the far north whose name I don’t want to mention. And the effect of this has been made worse by the fact that, during that same period, enormous advances have been made in the Church’s own understanding of theology and Scripture.

1943 was a key date in this process. On 30th November that year, Pope Pius XII published an encyclical – ‘Divino Afflante Spiritu’ in Latin – which revolutionised the Catholic Church’s whole approach to the Bible. Since the middle of the previous century great advances had been made in Scriptural Studies, and many great Catholic academics had been part of this. But initially, as it always does, the official Church was slow to accept what was happening. But in 1943 the Pope changed all this for ever. He gave his full approval to what was going on, unleashing a movement in the Church which is still going on and which contributed enormously to what became the Second Vatican Council. But there has been a serious problem, and it has been the failure so far to communicate the fruits of this renewal to the vast bulk of people in the pews. Many, indeed, have dug in their heels and refused to move, and it is for this reason that adult education in faith is so important if we are to become a Church fit to enter into meaningful dialogue with contemporary culture.

But knowledge will only take us so far. It was not the learned and the clever who accepted Jesus. And so, once we have done all our courses and been opened up to the truths awaiting those who are willing to learn new things, the time will come when all we can do is fall on our knees and say with the Apostle Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’

BIDDING PRAYERS

In the first reading today the prophet Zechariah speaks of a Messiah who, far from having the trappings of earthly power, comes humbly, riding on a donkey. And so we pray for the grace of humility, not only for ourselves, but for the whole of humanity at this moment in history. Humility is truth. The truth will set us free. And so we ask God to open up our minds and hearts to the full truth about who are, recognizing that he is the Creator and we the creatures.....................Lord hear us

The book of Genesis pinpoints the root of all evil. Eat from the tree, the serpent says, and you will be like Gods, a lie we are still running after today. We see it above all in the modern tendency to think that what we don’t understand or don’t agree with isn’t true. But truth is greater than we are. It exists separately from us and does not depend on our understanding or accepting it. The wise person this and we ask God to pour his wisdom into the world at this moment in its history.............................Lord hear us

God has given us the gift of intelligence and expects us to use it. The ordinary man or woman in the street has access to education and information today in a way unknown in the past. The last two Popes have emphasised over and over again that faith is reasonable and well able to stand up for itself in the face of modern discoveries and insights. But for this to happen, we must be willing to engage with the truths of faith at a deeper level than in a past, a grace we pray for today....................Lord hear us

The last sixty years have seen enormous advances in our knowledge and understanding of Scripture, and, for many years, Catholic scholars have been in the forefront of these advances. But for a variety of reasons, the Church, while calling for this to be done, has, to a large extent, been unable to communicate the fruits of these developments to the ordinary person in the pew. And so a great treasure is hidden from the Church, a treasure we ask God to open up for us now..........Lord hear us

One of the signs of the times is the way many intelligent, well-educated people have, in recent years, abandoned the faith handed on to them by their parents. An unbridgeable gap has developed between their secular and their religious knowledge leading them to conclude that faith is something that belonged to their childhood and has no place in their adult life. And so we ask for the wisdom we need to address this misunderstanding and show it up for the mistake it is...................Lord hear us

At this time of the year many people who celebrate Mass with us each week will be away on holiday. And so we pray for them. We pray that, in the language of St Paul in today’s second reading, the time spent away will be deeply spiritual. This does not mean visiting churches or shrines. It means recognizing, and above all enjoying, the presence of God in everything that happens and we ask God to pour this grace into all of us who away in the course of the summer...................Lord hear us