The Purpose of Parables and All Jesus’ Teaching, Sixteenth Thursday (II), July 24, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Thursday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Charbel Maklouf
July 24, 2014
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 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. If he were preaching only to those with good soil, he could speak very directly. If he said, “I need you to stop doing that,” those with good soil would stop. If he said, “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 see 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. The 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 simply 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 both at daily Mass and at Sunday Mass, the big question for us is whether we’re going to respond to Jesus’ parables 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 parable through his prophet Jeremiah that should lead us to examination. 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 used 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, constantly 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 (what we talked about with stoney soil). The problem with limestone, however, is that it’s very porous and hence it 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 them joined in the spiritual adultery. The priests, he said, who were supposed to teach “asked not, ‘Where is the Lord?,” because they totally abandoned prayer and passed on, instead of God’s word, their own worthless platitudes. Those who were supposed to be teachers of God’s law “knew me not.” 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 parable, 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, or have we used our relative material prosperity to exchange the true God for the idols we watch on large screen HD TVs? Have we helped to make our land 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 the United States by sin and sordid behavior? 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 parable, 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.
• Today we celebrate a saint whose whole life was an example of a soul thirsting for God like a dry weary land without water. St. Charbel Maklouf (1828-1898) is a great Maronite monk and priest. As a young boy, he was drawn to the example of his maternal uncles who were monks. Shepherding his family’s small flock as a boy, he would take them to a grotto where he had installed an icon of the thirstiest human being who ever lived — the Blessed Virgin Mary! — and would spend the day in prayer. His family wanted him to marry and to continue his hard work on the farm, but when he was 23, he left home without telling them because of the opposition to begin his training as a monk and then as a priest and finally as a hermit. He pondered and lived the parables. He sought constantly to turn with the Lord in prayer. He not only went to the living well, but sought to become a cistern not letting any of that living water escape. He was deeply devoted to the Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, who was the fountain of his life, and it’s significant that he basically died during Mass. While he was celebrating the divine liturgy he had a stroke from which he never recovered. God waited to call him home for eight days and summoned him on Christmas Eve to the verdant pastures where he would give him eternal repose and fill his cup to overflowing. We ask through his intercession that the Lord may fill us with St. Charbel’s holy thirst so that we might drink from the living well who is Christ throughout the day, throughout our life, so that our eyes may be blessed like his with the beatific vision and our ears be blessed with hearing Christ say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom” about which I preached so many parables!

The readings for today’s Mass were: