July 17, 2014
The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for Sunday, July 20.
Something was obviously wrong; we could see it from a distance. We were at Paradise Cove, Hawaii’s most authentic luau as they advertised themselves, and here was a man yelling belligerently, insulting his companion and making her daughter cry. It was so out of place – Luau’s are practiced, happy places with lots of food and drink, amazing performances of dance and song, and a way in which Hawaiian culture shines. But here he was, creating a stink, out of control, unable to get into the luau because he was drunk – an embarrassment. “I think they’re calling the cops,” my host said. “Not soon enough,” I thought.
It’s a very natural reaction – get rid of the person, get the problem out of my life, throw the bums out. And that’s the reaction of the workers in the Gospel who discover that weeds have been strewn in among the wheat. “Shall we yank them out for you?” they ask, expecting a positive response. “No, let them grow together, or else the wheat will be pulled up inadvertently.” We are astonished by the restraint of the owner.
One problem, of course, is the difficulty of making judgments. How often are we ready to read the riot act against someone when we realize that it can be read against ourselves as well? I am always commenting on the driving of others, but I’m not going to win the AAA driving prize myself. How often do we create whole categories of people to be damned – infidels, addicts, the homeless, the immigrant? It’s so easy to put people into boxes, but how do we feel when we end up in someone else’s box ourselves?
The other, bigger issue is mercy. We hear this in the first reading, how God forebears punishment because God is merciful. Pope Francis has underlined this as the chief characteristic of God – God is defined by God’s mercy. Before we even can look at God’s justice, we need to understand God as merciful. Yet mercy is a difficult concept because we only think of it as letting someone off the hook. We like mercy when it comes to us, but feel shortchanged when it applies to others. “How did they get off?” we ask ourselves.
But mercy is far more than letting someone off the hook. What God’s mercy does is – at God’s initiative, out of sheer love – to create a space for us to go to be reconciled with God. God creates a bridge back to divine love and life. It is like an act of creation itself – because when we experience God’s mercy, we move from a situation of isolation to one of union, to a place in the Kingdom: from estrangement to discipleship.
Of course, the point of the parable is to make sure we remain a church of mercy. It’s far too easy to write almost everyone off because we want a church purer than any church can ever be. Again Pope Francis: ours is not a church of the perfect, but a church for the wounded, the broken, for those in need of first aid. The point that goes along with this is also clear: we cannot be a church of mercy unless we learn to exercise mercy ourselves. As God creates spaces for us to draw near, so we all have to create spaces for each other – drop the grudges, the postures of righteousness, the holier-than-thou faces behind which we hide our own failings.
We are astonished at dramatic acts of mercy – when the Amish forgave the criminal who murdered their schoolgirls, when mothers publicly forgive those who killed their children, when St. John Paul II met with his would-be assassin. We should be astonished because such acts of mercy create a different world – one quite distinct from the world of payback that we usually walk in. Of course we need integrity, and of course we need principles to live by. But the Scriptures are suggesting that this world of revenge gets quite small, but the world of mercy is vast and unlimited.