21st Sunday in Greentime
He Has a Way with Words!!
To people of faith, it would be a no-brainer to say that it is obvious that Jesus, the Word Incarnate, has a way with words. He taught in the Sermon on the Mount and in a variety of other settings. He preached in synagogues and ultimately, the Temple in Jerusalem. He prophesied that God was acting in a new way with Jesus’ Presence. He told brilliant stories, the parables, viz., short, pithy vignettes about things that were commonplace in people’s lives. Then, He would zap them with a message to which they had to respond. Here is the Great Communicator, par excellence.
Jesus uses His parables to communicate a variety of viewpoints that challenged conventional wisdom, then and now. He shows us that God’s Ways are not necessarily the system’s ways. He teaches us that all of us will be called to accountability for our use of the gifts which God bestows upon us. (Indeed, everything is a gift, when you seriously think about it.)
He teaches us that God’s clock does not tick at the same rate that our clocks tick. With God, things take time Who is not necessarily in a rush. As all find out either to their joy or chagrin, time and truth are God’s allies.
Jesus also teaches that things can happen at the drop of a turban. (Recall the parable of the Rich Fool a few Sundays ago.) The word in these parables is “Be watchful”.
Jesus also uses a story telling technique, known as peripety, basically “role reversal”. He uses it today when He tells us, “Some who are last will be first, and some are first who will be last!” God is the Judge, not the system.
This week, our Church salutes an African who lived 1500 years ago and who is considered one of the greatest of our Church’s communicator. St Augustine of Hippo who died on August 28, 430AD caught the Gospel of the Great Communicator, the Word Incarnate. He did not do too badly himself, because two of his books, the Confessions (Testimony) of St Augustine and the City of God are considered two of the monumental works of literature. In the Confessions, he began a trend that became known as “psycho-history”. In the City of God, he developed a theory of history that appeals to readers 1500 years later!
Basically, both masterpieces convey the idea that God is at work in each life and in the world’s life as well. So much of the message that Jesus communicated throughout His public life and completed with His death and Resurrection (which
1) St Augustine also teaches that we are accountable to God for how we have responded to God’s gifts during our lives. 2) St Augustine also teaches that measurable time is not the same as God’s time. God knows when and where to act for us. 3) St Augustine also teaches that there is an element of surprise as well. God had plans for Augustine when he was a young man that only became apparent when he had converted and was baptized into Christ. In addition, God had plans for the nation-states as well. Part of the plan is the adage, “All things will pass” and “everything is in process.” 4) God has not to abide by human standards of who is “in” and who is “out”. In a famous saying of St Augustine, spoken 1500 years ago, he declared, “Christ has many who are not of the Church and the Church has many who are not of Christ.” How like Jesus’ saying of the first and the last in today’s Gospel!
St Augustine knew in his personal experience that his personal history, as brilliant and bizarre, in different stages of his life was the process that God used to bring him to the grace of conversion and the free gift of grace. As a modern Catholic theologian put it recently, “God comes to each of us as our lives. God’s Presence in our lives is perfectly hidden and perfectly revealed at different times.”
As the contemplative practice reveals in ineffable language, God is everywhere and we are somewhere. Therefore, God is in my life and my life is in God. When we add the adverb “now”, we can spend a lifetime in silence intuiting how true that is.
St Augustine clearly understood what the Great Communicator, the Word Incarnate, communicates today in our Gospel. In his writings, he teaches us that the last can be first and the first can be last. In his essence, he said that he was a prime example. Then he transferred Jesus’ brilliant insight reflected in his own autobiography with God’s plan for the coming even now, but not yet, of the Kingdom, the City of
