Good Students of the Master of Parables, 16th Thursday (II), July 23, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Bridget of Sweden
July 23, 2020
Jer 2:1-3.7-8.12-13, Ps 36, Mt 13:10-17

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• “Why do you speak to the crowds in parables?,” the disciples ask Jesus in today’s Gospel. It’s a very important question for us to know the answer to, especially as we enter more deeply into Chapter 13 of St. Matthew, which contains eight of Jesus parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, parables we’ll be hearing through next Thursday. Jesus gives us the ultimate answer at the end of his explanation, which tells us not only why he teaches in parables but what is the point of all his teaching. Quoting the prophet Isaiah he says that the reason is so that we “may understand with [our] hearts and be converted and I heal [you].”  Jesus teaches in order to help us convert and be healed, to turn away from whatever is poisoning our relationship with God, to turn toward him the Divine Physician and then literally to “turn with” him (con-vertere).
• He needs to use parables with the crowds in order to circumvent the problem of the three types of infertile soil Jesus spoke about in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. If he were preaching only to those with good soil, he could speak very directly. When he would say, “I need you to stop doing that,” those with good soil would stop. When he would say, “I need you to go here,” those with good soil would go. But relatively few listen to the Lord with the willingness to let it change their life in 30, 60, 100 ways or more. So Jesus, in order to try to bring them to conversion, healing and holiness, uses the images of the parables.
• We see the power of a parable in achieving what direct speech would not be able to accomplish in the interaction between the Prophet Nathan and King David. If Nathan had simply upbraided David for committing adultery with Bathseba and then having Uriah murdered, David likely would have been defensive, since he had already had his conscience eclipsed with regard to what he had done and was self-justifying. Bathsheba was now living with him and he showed no real recognition that anything he had done was wrong. So Nathan went into his presence and called him to conversion parabolically. He asked him, “Judge this case for me! In a certain town there were two men, one rich, the other poor. The rich man had flocks and herds in great numbers. But the poor man had nothing at all except one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He nourished her, and she grew up with him and his children. She shared the little food he had and drank from his cup and slept in his bosom. She was like a daughter to him. Now, the rich man received a visitor, but he would not take from his own flocks and herds to prepare a meal for the wayfarer who had come to him. Instead he took the poor man’s ewe lamb and made a meal of it for his visitor.”  David was outraged at what had happened and said, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this merits death!” Then Nathan said to him: “You are the man!” That’s when David realized what he had done. After he had recognized the terrible injustice parabolically he was able to grasp what he had done. That’s the first reason why Jesus speaks in parables, because it is through parables that he is able to communicate the truths of the Gospel to those with hardened, rocky, or thorny soil who wouldn’t receive the lessons in an ordinary didactic way, because they listen but do not hear with faith and look but do not see with faith because they don’t want to hear the message of conversion and see the path to a converted life.
• But there’s a second reason he speaks in parables. It’s because the rehabilitation of infertile soil requires some work and the parables are an invitation to do that work. They are a test to see if the person is willing to do the work to understand the meaning of the parable, whether the person cares about learning the meaning and growing in faith or whether the person is prepared just to blow off the parable as irrelevant to his or her life. This is what Jesus is pointing to when he says, “To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” This is one of the central lessons of life. Those who study grow in knowledge. Those who lift weights grow in strength. Those who practice a skill develop it. But those who don’t study, work out, or practice gradually lose their abilities. It’s a similar thing with faith, which is a both a divine gift and a moral muscle. The more we make acts of faith, the more we grow. The more we hunger to learn and live our faith, the more those hungers are fed. Jesus’ use of parables expose whether we care about the truths of faith enough to do the spiritual exercise required to understand their meaning and apply it to our lives. And so for us during these days examining Jesus’ parables both at daily and Sunday Mass, the big question for us is whether we’re going to respond to them by examining what type of receptivity and response we have to his Word by means of the Parable of the Sower, Soil and Seed; what type of growth we’re experiencing by the Parable of the Mustard Seed; what type of influence we’re having in lifting people to God by the Parable of the Leaven in the Dough; whether we’re wheat or weeds in the fields, or good fish or bad caught in the dragnet; whether God is truly the most important reality in our life in the parable of the treasure buried in a field and the pearl of great price; whether we really value the inheritance of God’s word that we try to integrate with everything we learn in the parable of the storehouse with the owner taking from it both the new and the old. The parables require work to understand them and much more work to live them. Are we prepared to put in that work?
• In the first reading today, God gives us a powerful image through his prophet Jeremiah that should lead us to put in work to understand and then to apply to our lives. He says at the end of today’s passage, “Be amazed at this, O heavens, and shudder with sheer horror, says the Lord. Two evils have my people done: they have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water.” He uses the image of water, which is extremely powerful in an arid climate full of desert areas like the Holy Land. The first thing those in Judah did was forsake the spiritual well God had given them. He was the font of living waters, seeking not only to quench their thirst but to hydrate them and make the healthy. Instead of coming to the well God had given them and getting flowing water, they thought they didn’t need it. They built cisterns. Cisterns in the Holy Land were carved into the thick layers of limestone a few inches underneath the soil. The problem with limestone, however, is that it’s porous and hence needed to be lined with plaster and sealed in order to maintain any water. When that plaster was broken for any reason, however, the cistern would quickly lose all the water it contained. God was accusing the Jews, first, of foolishly forsaking a well of fresh flowing water for a cistern of stagnant water and, second, for doing so for a broken cistern that can’t even hold water. That’s what they did when they forsook the Lord for pagan gods and an immoral lifestyle. What they did was summarized by God a little earlier in this chapter, in a passage that was excerpted out of today’s first reading, but gives us the key to understand it: “What fault did your fathers find in me that they withdrew from me, went after empty idols, and became empty themselves?” We see that whole progression in this reading, how the Jews were devoted in their youth as they followed him in the desert but when he brought them to the land flowing with milk and honey, the “garden land to eat its goodly fruits,” they defiled the land and make the heritage of that land loathsome. They basically desecrated the gift God gave them by their idolatry and sin. Even those who were supposed to be especially committed joined in the spiritual adultery. The priests, he said, who were supposed to teach “asked not, ‘Where is the Lord?,” because they had totally abandoned prayer and were passing on, instead of God’s word, their own worthless platitudes. Those who were supposed to be teachers of God’s law “knew me not,” God said. The rulers of the people, referred to symbolically as the “shepherds,” “rebelled against me.” They stopped following the Lord as their shepherd and led the sheep not into verdant pastures but to the slaughter house. The prophets who were supposed to announce God’s word instead “prophesied by Ba’al,” the god of sex and pleasure, “and went after useless idols.”
• The parable of the exchange of the flowing well for a broken cistern is given to us not as a tidbit of historical curiosity but to help us, like every Biblical image, to convert and come to the Lord to be healed. Do we still love the Lord with the intensity of the devotion we had when we used to pray as children, on the day we came to receive our first Holy Communion, at the time of the great graces we’ve received when we knew how real God was, that he loved us, that he was with us? If we were poor at one point of our life and really depended on God and on prayer, are we still as dependent and prayerful now that we can make all our ends meet? Have we helped to make the land of our soul a real garden where the Lord roams as we eat of all of its “goodly fruits” or have we defiled the great heritage he has given us? In his dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus identified himself as the “living water” who would well up inside of us to eternal life. Do we go regularly to drink of that font as Jesus seeks to hydrate us in the Gospel, in prayer, in the sacraments, in deeds of self-less charity, or have we traded Jesus’ living water for a refrigerator, or a summer cooler, or a keg? In the Responsorial Psalm today we prayed repeatedly, “With you is the fountain of life, O Lord!” Are we able to say of God that fountain what we pray in the Psalms, “O God, you are my God, for you I long! For you my body yearns; for you my soul thirsts, like a land parched, lifeless, and without water”? (Ps 63). God gave us Jeremiah’s image, Jesus has given us all the parables, so that we might return to Him, the font of living water, and receive within the medicine that will make us truly whole.
• One person who always put in the work to get to know what the Lord Jesus was saying, who was good and fruitful soil, who came to drink deeply of the living water flowing from Jesus’ side, was St. Bridget of Sweden, the saint whom we celebrate today. St. Bridget of Sweden (1304-1373) was married at the age of 14 in an arranged nuptials to Prince Ulf Gudmarsson. She had eight children and was an exemplary wife and mother, doing the Lord’s will and passing on the faith to her husband and children faithfully: one of her children, Christina, also became a canonized saint. When Bridget was in her late 30s, she and her husband made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, the shrine where the remains of St. James (whose feast day we’ll celebrate on Saturday) are interred. Returning from Santiago, Ulf and Bridget decided that God was calling them, now that their children were older, to go their separate ways as they continued the pilgrimage of life. Ulf entered a Cistercian monastery and Bridget founded a new religious community, the Order of the Most Holy Savior, which has ever after been called the Brigittines after her. There she was blessed with many mystical visions of the Lord’s passion, which bore great fruit in her own life as she united herself to the sufferings of the Lord for the salvation of the world. Calvary is the paradigm of all those who do not their own will but the Father’s and the more she pondered Jesus on the Cross. In the opening prayer of the Mass, we turned to God “who guided Saint Bridget of Sweden along different paths of life” — as a daughter, a wife, a mom, a religious and a foundress — and asked him, “grant us that, walking worthily in our vocation, we may seek you in all things.” St. Bridget sought God in all the phases of her life, she went to his as a font of living water, she heard and understood, looked and saw, understood with her heart and was converted. She was blessed with deep knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom and from her knowledge not only the Brigittines but the whole Church continue to be nourished.
• Today at Mass walk with her to the place where she sought the Lord each day, to the place where Jesus continues to teach us his parables, to the garden where we eat the most goodly fruits of all, to the place that answers the question “Where is the Lord?” We come to the source of living waters to enter into the greatest mysterion of the kingdom, where the full fruits of Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection upon which St. Bridget contemplated, are given to us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel
MT 13:10-17

The disciples approached Jesus and said,
“Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?”
He said to them in reply,
“Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven
has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.
To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich;
from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
This is why I speak to them in parables, because
they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.
Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says:

You shall indeed hear but not understand,
you shall indeed look but never see.
Gross is the heart of this people,
they will hardly hear with their ears,
they have closed their eyes,
lest they see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their hearts and be converted
and I heal them.

“But blessed are your eyes, because they see,
and your ears, because they hear.
Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people
longed to see what you see but did not see it,
and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”

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