11th Sunday in Ordinary time 2021
Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34
Where are we up to in our sowing and reaping? Or, to put it more accurately, where and how is God working to build the Kingdom? (Because we must always remember that the growth of the Kingdom is God’s work, not ours. We are, as St. Paul commented, co-workers with God, but when we forget that, and attempt to do the job ourselves, the results are disastrous.)
When I was a child, in the 1950s, I don’t think that those questions would have been asked. People rarely spoke about the Kingdom: they spoke about the Church, and effectively identified the Church with the Kingdom. I learnt in Primary School about the Church Militant, the Church Suffering, and the Church Triumphant: the Church Militant was extremely militant, and was seen as being well on its way to becoming the Church Triumphant.
These were the latter days of Pope Pius XII, an ascetic and almost Messianic figure, invariably clothed in white, his trademark gesture a spreading of his arms like those of the crucified Christ. As the Church in this country grew in numbers and confidence, we would often bellow, in churches packed to the doors for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, Cardinal Wiseman’s triumphalist hymn “Full in the panting heart of Rome”, with its chorus, rising to a crescendo: “God bless our Pope, God bless our Pope, GOD BLESS OUR POPE, the great, the good”.
Little did we or our elders suspect that, behind the splendid facade, lurked a great mess of rottenness. Scandals continue to come to light which show that sexual abuse by clergy, far from being a result of the alleged indiscipline of the 70s (pace Pope Benedict XVI) was very much alive in the 50s and before. Meanwhile, other scandals are unearthed. Hard on the heels of the revelations of cruelty and forced adoptions in mother and baby homes in Ireland, we learn of ill-treatment in Church-run residential schools for First Nation (formerly called “Indian”) children in Canada, covering the first half of the twentieth century.
Pius XII himself has suffered massive blows to his reputation. His response to news of the treatment of Jews in occupied Europe continues to divide opinion. There is no doubt that the Vatican, along with many monasteries and convents, sheltered and saved the lives of countless Jews, or that the Pope had legitimate fears that speaking out more forcibly might prove counter-productive. Nonetheless, he was a man of his time and background, with that innate dislike and distrust of Jews typical of his era and social class. Even throughout the 50s, when Pius had reformed the Easter liturgy, we still prayed on Good Friday for “the perfidious Jews, that God may remove the veil from their minds”.
Why do I mention this, trawling, as it were, through relatively recent history? It is because we must always remember that the growth of the Kingdom is indeed God’s work: it takes place silently and unseen. Far too easily, we fall into the trap of thinking that it is up to us to make the Kingdom grow; that we know when it is time to begin reaping.
We need a very hefty dose of humility. During that era of our confidence, we were, as often as not, reaping weeds. The danger now lies in our believing that we have learnt from our mistakes, and that, “This time, more than any other time, we’ll get it right”, as the 1982 England World Cup squad sang—and we know what happened there. Hence, in this country, there has been a plethora of programmes and assemblies: “A Time for Building”, “The Church 2,000”, “The National Pastoral Congress”, “Renew”, “New Start with Jesus”, “Fit for Mission”, and various others, all of which have come and gone, barely creating a ripple.
So what do we do now? Perhaps most importantly we remind ourselves that the growth of the Kingdom IS God’s work, and we set ourselves to seek a deeper union with Him, while, at the same time, “reading the signs of the times” as the Second Vatican Council suggested, though always aware that our reading ability is less than we imagined.
