Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time Yr A
Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time Yr A
02 July 2017
Homily
Today’s first Reading has an element that makes me smile, and one that a female Scriptural made me reflect upon.
The element that makes me smile is “the woman of influence’. Even then, if you wanted something done, you needed the women on side!
The other element is Elisha’s “reward” for her. We are told that her husband is getting on in years, so we assume she is also. The point the female Scripture scholar made was that if she was, did she want to become a mother? If she is on in years, a pregnancy and childbirth could be a death sentence for her. Did she worry about what would happen if she died but the child lived? Or if all went well, but she died while he was still young? Elisha did’nt ask her, he just assumed that he knew what she would want.
In our Gospel, we are still in the “missionary discourse”, Jesus’ instructions and briefing to the apostles who are about to go out. The first words we hear, would to someone of the time, be quite shocking. The people of the Ancient World, especially the Jewish people, had a quite communal and family consciousness rather than an individual or personal one. You went with what the family decided, especially what the head of the family decided.
Jesus here is not saying not to love one’s parents. It is rather a call to see one’s family and community not as purely ethnic or genetic based but as a wider one based on being children of one God. He is also speaking to the lived experience of the early Christians, their new faith called them one way, family and community expectations often called them another way. Sound at all familiar?
Given some of the calls we are hearing from some political leaders today, who seek to divide people into “us” and “them”; who then proceed to demonise “them”, today’s Gospel is very timely.
Whenever someone seeks to divide rather than reconcile, to create barriers rather than passageways, then we are hearing the Devil calling. That is the same Devil as tempted Jesus in the Forty Days.
With Jesus, there is no “us” divided against “them”. We are all us, we are all them.