June 25, 2023
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 25, 2023 – Jeremiah 20:10-13; Romans 5:12-15; Matthew 10:26-33
About two years ago, there was a viciously anti-Catholic cartoon among my favorite cartoons in the Times Herald-Record. And, for two years, I refused to read that cartoon, I was so angry. But now I'm reading it again because it really is a funny cartoon. Way back in the late 1970s or early ‘80s, when I was working in the Chancery office - it was probably right after the stonewall incident or maybe at the beginning of the terrible HIV crisis - I was walking along Fifth Avenue passing store windows and a very flamboyant gay person walked up to me and spit in my face. I took out my handkerchief and wiped off my face, and as soon as I got to where I was going, I went to the men’s room and vigorously scrubbed my face. In one parish where I worked, we had a small village, like the village of Wurtsboro, with just a mayor and two trustees. It was a very interesting village because it was very old, and the sidewalks were very high. They were created so that people stepping out of a carriage could step right onto the sidewalk without having to step up. And then, underneath that sidewalk, there was another sidewalk that jutted out into the street, and that’s where the carriage wheels would edge along. So, if you stepped off the curb, you had to be very mindful of that second curb. Well, one night I missed it, turned my heel, and broke my ankle. And, because the sidewalks had been there for 150 years and there was no marking to warn anyone there was a danger, I wanted to sue the village. Well, one afternoon the doorbell rang, and one of our parishioners, who happened to be the only and the very first Catholic trustee ever elected to office in that village, came to me and said, “I've been sent to tell you, Father, if you try to sue the village, we've noticed a couple of cracks in the church’s sidewalk and we will make the church tear up all the sidewalk on both of the streets that it owns.” We never think that we are the victims of prejudice or persecution, but sometimes we are.
Back in 1960, Elvis Presley issued his first album of religious music. It was called His Hand in Mine. And I went out and bought that album. I was a junior or a senior in high school. So, a teenager. And there was one song on the album with a lyric that went like this. “Though a sparrow is all I may be. On me, He will still keep an eye.” And, stupid me, I knew so little about the Bible as a teenager in a Catholic school, that I didn't know that that line was taken from this morning's gospel. Except that, the way it comes out, it sounds like an individual protection for you or me by a benevolent and all-loving God. The problem with that interpretation is, you can say this, “On me He will still keep an eye”. Well, you know, the sparrow still falls to the ground and dies, whether God has his eye on it or not.
And the reason why there's this difficulty is because the word knowledge or see is not in either the Greek or the Latin bible. It just says, “Although two sparrows are sold for a small coin, it does not happen without of your Father.” It makes no sense in English, “… without the of your father.” That's all it says. So, English translators are left to try to figure out what that was. It could be knowledge. It could be permission. God says, “Okay. It's okay for that sparrow to die.” Which seems kind of arbitrary. It could even mean “without the power of your Father.” In which case, He’s the active agent of the sparrow’s death.
None of this is very comforting to us because it raises the perennial question. Why do bad things happen to good people? And it’s a question that every one of us has to answer several times during our lives as faithful people, but it’s an answer that goes beyond the scope of a Sunday homily.
If you noticed how our gospel began, it tells us what's going on here. Jesus said to the twelve - we're right in the middle of a very long address, by Jesus, to one particular group of people, His missionaries. In His own lifetime, He sent out the twelve to get towns ready for His coming. In the time that Matthew's writing the gospel, Christian missionaries were being sent out to parts of the known world, where they’d never been before. And they were very much afraid, for a whole bunch of reasons that we don’t have to discuss here. And Matthew is trying to use the words of Jesus to get them off the dime. So basically, he’s saying, “Fellas, God has your back. Get going.”
But, in order to understand that message, you have to understand the other two basic things that Jesus says in this gospel. The first thing He says is what happens when you get to a town. He says, “If they accept you, sit down, have dinner with them, tell them your story. If they don't accept you, brush the dust of the town off your feet and move on. Move on.” At the end of today’s gospel, He says to the missionaries, “If you acknowledge me before others, I will acknowledge you before my heavenly Father.” Sometimes you have to speak up and defend what you believe.
Right now, in our country, we are very divided about a whole bunch of things. And some of it can be traced to a very aggressive style of Christianity. Even assuming that they have the best of goodwill in what they’re doing, an aggressive attempt to push one’s doctrine or one’s faith on others is not what Jesus calls us to. It's the end justifying the means. What Jesus calls us to is to calmly say what it is we believe and let it sit out there and then move on. Because we can't win ‘em all.
If we don't do what our faith requires, that's a problem. If we do it, and nobody's listening or nobody accepts it, nobody cares. Shake the dust off our feet and move on.