23rd Sunday2021
Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark7:31-37
Oh heck! It’s here again! Every three years, this Gospel passage recurs, and every three years I am transported straight back to the equivalent Sunday in 1976, the first Sunday of term at St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, my first Sunday as a member of staff, the oil of ordination still wet on my hands.
Every three years I recall the homily by the headmaster Fr. Peter O’Neill, as he focused on one sentence “He has done all things well” and told the two hundred or so lads assembled before him that they should so conduct themselves that, at the end of the year, people would say of them “He has done all things well”. Good headmasterly stuff, even if not quite Alan Bennett.
What are the things that Jesus had done well, and how far may we be expected to imitate them? He had, most recently, as we have just heard, cured a deaf man who had a speech impediment, and had thus fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which we heard in the First Reading.
Can we do that? “Can we heck as like!” I hear you cry. Wait a minute though. What really lies behind Jesus’ miracle here? It is a sign that the Kingdom of God, foretold by the prophets, has arrived. The cure of this man, important as it was for him, has a wider significance. To an extent, we are all deaf, and each of us has a speech impediment, until Jesus ushers in the Kingdom, touches our ears and our tongue, and enables us to hear and to speak clearly.
The Kingdom IS here, Jesus HAS touched our ears and our tongues and enabled us to hear and to speak clearly, if only we are willing. If we are prepared to listen, we can hear His message, and can convey it by word and action. Through the way we live, we can and should be “heralds of the Great King” as Francis of Assisi described himself.
When Pope St. John Paul II added the Luminous Mysteries to the Rosary, he included as the third, “the proclamation of the Kingdom and the call to conversion”. The Kingdom of God is proclaimed to us, and we are constantly called to a conversion of life, to an ongoing adjustment of our lives in response to the call of Christ. This, in turn, calls us to be a sign of the Kingdom in the world, and therefore a channel of conversion for others, as they see the Kingdom at work in us.
Is it likely that we shall do this well? Maybe, maybe not: that isn’t really the point. We do it to the best of our ability, according to the gifts, talents, and graces which God gives us. GK Chesterton coined the expression “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. Of course we want to do worthwhile things well, but what matters is that we do them at all, and leave the results to God, who makes good our defects. Whether we have done them well or badly is not for us to decide; nor, pace Fr. O’Neill, is it for other people, but only for God.
What else are we called to do? Isaiah begins his prophecy with the words “Say to all faint hearts ‘Courage! Do not be afraid’”. All of us have faint hearts at times. We are weighed down by events; sometimes troubles seem to pile one upon another. Yet the Kingdom has been established by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, and so those words are addressed to us “Courage! Do not be afraid”.
At the root of the word “courage”, and of “encourage”, “discourage” is the Latin word “cor” meaning heart. The prophet, and Jesus the Lord, speak to our hearts, calling us to have strength, and an absence of fear, at the very root of our being—and then to convey that same strength, that same lack of fear to others, to be encouragers of others, people who put “heart” into others.
Do we do that, or are we among the negative people, the grumblers, the purveyors of misery? Do people recognise the joy of the Kingdom in us, a joy which is not to be identified with surface happiness, but which may exist along with deep unhappiness at times, because it comes from the very root of our being, where Jesus shares with us the Kingdom? We may never do all things well, but we can strive to be alive with the Kingdom, and so help to build that Kingdom among others.
