33rd Sunday A

Last Sunday afternoon I did what I always do. I sat down and read those readings as a first step towards what would become this week’s homily. But from Sunday to Tuesday I was quite disturbed by them, or, to be more accurate, by one of them; the first reading from the Book of Proverbs about the perfect wife with her wool and flax and fingers grasping the spindle from whom her husband will derive no little profit. Obviously I have read it many times before and been aware of how patronising it is towards women and how far removed from the experience of so many women in today’s world, but this time something different happened in me. I was angry, not at the reading, but at the faceless men responsible for giving it to us today. Had they no sense of how so many women in the Church feel about passages like this? Angry and fed-up with the stereotypes of womanhood and femininity they so often meet in a male-dominated Church, many have walked away while others just cling on by the skin of their teeth. And even if you are a woman who does not feel this way yourself or a man who cannot or is not even willing to try and understand what they are talking about, that is not the point. In British law a hate crime is a hate crime if it is perceived by the victim as a hate crime, a principle which applies surely to any situation where a person feels slighted or offended, including ways of speaking about women which many women - and men too - find offensive. The Gospel tells us that we must treat other people as we would like them to treat us, what is known as the Golden Rule, and even if they are so entrenched in the male world of the Vatican that they are incapable of understanding why, surely those who drew up the Lectionary should have shown some sensitivity to the feelings of others and chosen some other passage for this Sunday. Only the other day, to give another example, we had Paul at morning Mass reminding wives that they must obey their husbands in all things.

And then, on Tuesday, the anger subsided and I realised that, for me, the whole point of that reading this week is, in fact, the sheer irrelevance of much of what it says, a reminder to me of the very nature of the Scriptures themselves. Inspired by God and yet deeply rooted in history, they are a mixture of what is eternal and what belongs to its own time only. They contain great truths which will be true as long as men and women walk the earth and they contain other things which belong entirely to their own time and have no direct relevance to us today except that they are the packaging in which the eternal truths have come down to us. And even these eternal truths have to be adapted and applied to each moment in history. The parable of the talents speaks of how fear is the greatest obstacle to everything God is trying to do in our lives and in the world. But each of us, and each generation, has to identify the particular form that fear takes in our own experience. We have to pray the story until it becomes a story, not about fictional characters, but about ourselves and the time we live in. So let’s try and do that for a moment

In so far as the story is about ourselves as individuals, the questions we need to ask, if the not the answers to them, are fairly straight-forward. Things like: what gifts, what aspects of myself have remained buried and undeveloped because I have been afraid to do anything about them? What hopes, thoughts, desires, longings, movements of the Spirit in me have I suppressed and denied over the years because I have listened to that persistent, ungodly voice deep within myself which tells me that I can’t do it, that I’m not good enough or that, even if I were, it’s just not possible. Few of us are free of this kind of thing and if you are not sure where to start looking for it, then you could do worse than look for signs of unrest, frustration or unhappiness in yourself. And, of course, it has been by doing this very thing that so many women have been led to the point where they are now able to stand up against the historic injustices perpetrated against them, a movement which, out of fear, many men, including a male-dominated Church, have resisted and continue to resist. But the point of resistance, the thing we are afraid of, is itself very often the place where God is at work in us.

But when we turn to the much larger question of the world and the kind of Church we are called to be in the midst of it, then fear and that voice telling us we can’t do it, really kick in. Called, literally, to show the world a new way of living, the task can seem to big even to contemplate. Look at us! How can we change the world? How can we be a new kind of Church for a new age, which is what God is calling us to be? And these are legitimate questions. And yet, at the same time, we are living through a moment when the world itself is looking for exactly what we have to offer. This weekend in Washington, the twenty richest nations on the planet are meeting to begin discussions about how to respond to the recent crisis in the global economy. Twenty years ago we saw the collapse of Communism. In the last two months we have seen the collapse of Capitalism in the sense that it would already be flat on its face if it were not for the support of tax-payers all over the world. And now the world is looking for something new. And that new thing can be, and, if we are to survive in the long-term, must be the Gospel. And that is what we and millions like us are called to make a reality.

It is, of course, a huge task. But I read something recently which is relevant here. It was by a social anthropologist – whatever that is – and what he said was this. It takes ten years to change a law. It takes two generations to change behaviour. And it takes another two generations to change attitudes. It can be done and I believe will be done. But it will take time. And as someone else said, and it could have been the man in the parable, all we have to fear is fear itself.

BIDDING PRAYERS

The man in today’s parable was paralysed by fear, the greatest obstacle to all that God longs to do in us. Over and over again the bible tells us not to be afraid and yet fear continues to limit us and prevent us being the people we are capable of being. And so, at a time when the world needs new ideas and new ways of doing things, we ask God to raise up many fearless men and women of faith willing to explore new ways of doing things and who live out of hope rather than fear.................Lord hear us

It would be foolish to expect too much from the meeting of the world’s twenty richest countries taking place in Washington this weekend. It can only be one step in a longer journey, and even now the cynics are writing off any possibility of radical change in the way the world’s economies work. But as people with a deep sense of God at work in history, we pray that the day will come when people will look back on this weekend and see it as the beginning of something great.................Lord hear us

Throughout history, the tendency in a male-dominated society has been to either oppress women or idealise them in a way which itself becomes oppressive, this week’s first reading, with its romantic image of the ideal wife, which nobody could ever live up to, being an example of this. And so we pray that, in our time, age-old injustices against women, still widespread throughout the world, will be finally be seen for what they are and brought to an end.................Lord hear us

We have been shocked in recent days by the latest case of the unimaginably violent death of a toddler in our country. Even although women, as in this case, have often colluded with such violence, it has, historically, been a predominantly masculine phenomenon. And so we pray for all hidden victims of such violence in our society, whether it be physical, verbal or psychological. And we pray that men everywhere will come to see that such violence is totally unacceptable...............Lord hear us

We live in an age which, on the surface at least, is much more sensitive to the possibility that, by the way we speak or the kind of language we use, we could be hurting people or causing them offence without realising it or wanting to. Sometimes this leads to a kind of political correctness which irritates or annoys us. But we pray that, even when we don’t understand the feelings of others or feel they are unjustified, we will always be sensitive to them........Lord hear us

Next weekend the Church History Course gets under way. And so we ask God to bless it. We pray that it will help all those who take part come to a more mature and informed faith which will fill us with a profound sense of the movement of God in history and so help us make sense of the times through which we are living. But we pray most of all that the course will help us, not only to understand, but respond to the challenges of the moment in history we are living through...............Lord hear us