Eye of the Storm

HOMILY for the 15th Sunday per annum (A)

Isaiah 55:10-11; Ps 64; Rom 18:18-23; Matt 12:1-23

Today’s readings invite us to pause and marvel at something that perhaps we take for granted: God speaks to us! So, in Verbum Domini, Pope Benedict XVI observed that “The novelty of biblical revelation consists in the fact that God becomes known through the dialogue which he desires to have with us.” For God’s word has been sent into the world, and indeed, even into our hearts as today’s Gospel tells us. And God’s word, precisely because it is God’s is creative and causes things to be. The Hebrew word dabar encompasses this Scriptural idea that God’s word is always both word and deed. “The word of God always accomplishes something”, Herbert McCabe would say, and so it is never futile, never mere words like some kind of divine filibuster nor merely sentimental words meant to bring comfort. Rather, the Word of God acts and speaks divine truth and thus imparts divine life into our world, into our personal human situations. Our reading of Scripture and the cultivation of a life of prayer in silence helps us to hear that life-giving Word, so that it will be fruitful.

Our notion of the Word of God can be problematic if we think of it merely as a one-sided communication, as if God merely gives his commands and instructions that come to us from on high, and we simply have to discern and obey. But that isn’t how God works, and certainly not how we Christians understand divine revelation and the gift of grace. As McCabe says, God’s word is “not merely something that is listened to and understood, it is creative and life-giving… [it] is compared to the bread by which a man lives.” Indeed,  as the Gospel reveals, God’s Word has been planted in the soil of our human hearts precisely so as to give us life, and not just natural life but divine life. I like how McCabe explains this: “This share in divinity is first of all expressed by the fact that we are not merely things created, we are creatures who are on speaking terms with God. Because of the divine life in us, the Spirit of God in us, we are able to listen to what God says–this is what we call faith. Because of the divine life in us we are able to speak back to God.” The life of grace, the authentic life of the Christian, is thus marked by our dialogue with God, with the One who speaks, who is the eternal Word. 

In fact our Christian life is to be caught up in the eternal dialogue of love that is the Blessed Trinity. As Pope Benedict said: “the Word, who from the beginning is with God and is God, reveals God himself in the dialogue of love between the divine persons, and invites us to share in that love.” To share in that divine love is a work of a lifetime, and it involves all the pain and labour of being freed from our slavery to sin, of learning to suffer for the sake of the good and the true, of becoming able to sacrifice, for there is no love without the sorrow of sacrifice, which is a share in Christ’s Cross. For the seed that is sown in the ground must die if it is to have life (cf John 12:24). Hence the central image of the parable today is one of sacrificial love, like seed sown in our hearts. If our hearts are open to being ploughed, it will open up to this divine word that is imparted to us from within by an act of grace, teaching us the costliness of love, the sacrifice needed for fruitful and life-giving Christian discipleship.  

Christ himself explains the things that hinder this growth: superficial understanding, trials and persecutions, worldly attachments and the cares of this life. But his word invites us to dig deeper and reach higher. As McCabe says, “grace does not make man a better kind of creature, it raises him beyond creaturehood, it makes him share in divinity.” Christ’s word, therefore, invites us to have faith, to receive his Word with joy, with trust, with openness to heaven’s possibilities. And the one Word that is spoken into our world, into our hearts and lives is both word and deed, which means it not only reveals God’s truth but also elicits the act of belief within us. McCabe thus says: “The response to the Word is a part of the coming of the Word, it is the Word in us.” Thus, in faith, we become part of the divine dialogue of love, the dialogue of the Son and the Father, in the Holy Spirit. 

This is why, in order for God’s Word to germinate and flourish in us, we help our hearts to become good soil through humble and faithful prayer. Prayer is nourished by silence, fertilised by an intelligent understanding of the Scriptures, and moistened by our the sweat and tears of our lives. Indeed, McCabe calls this theology, which is (like St Dominic’s own example) speaking to God or about God; living the Christian life authentically. As McCabe says: “In this sense faith refers to a particular aspect of our response to Christ, our reliance on the Word of God for insight into God’s plan. In this aspect our abandonment to Christ means that we do not reply on our own intellectually powers, but, confronted by God’s plan, we (literally) take his Word for it.” We learn, in humility, to trust in God’s goodness and the assurance of Isaiah, for example, that God’s word does not return empty without accomplishing God’s will. Or as St Paul says, even in suffering and sorrow, we hope and wait “for our bodies to be set free.” 

Ultimately, then, to ponder God’s word is to turn our gaze on the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Hence Benedict XVI said: “Here the word finds expression not primarily in discourse, concepts or rules. Here we are set before the very person of Jesus. His unique and singular history is the definitive word which God speaks to humanity. We can see, then, why ‘being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a definitive direction’.” 

And like there was no permanent cast, all these celebrities seem to have gotten a scene or part of a scene to do (i’m not sure exactly, I did not ever watch Quibi and thus haven’t seen this yet), and then they just… recreated it as best they could. At home. Under quarantine.

So like, you had Jennifer Garner in a blanket cape playing Princess Buttercup AND the Booing Old Woman with a crowd comprised entirely of stuffed animals:

Or Taika Waititi paying Westley off a badly-drawn Inigo on a piece of cardboard held in front of someone’s face:

And it’s all just delightful.

But my absolute favorite part of this thing that I’ve sadly never seen but assume is probably absolutely hilarious and a treasure and I want to find it some day and watch the whole thing… is that Carey Elwes is in it.

As Prince Fucking Humperdink.

Here ya go

Anyway, we should all watch this and then send some money to World Central Kitchen (which was the charity this was originally done for and they’re a good one).

Tumblr may crush the quality of those, so I’m going to zoom in on a few details here—

He has individually rendered every discolored, separate tile on the facade of the Duomo in Florence…

And this relief of Isis is divided into discrete blocks of stone. He’s drawn every outline.