Mass For Thursday 18th Week Ordinary Time Year II
HOMILY FOR MASS FOR THURSDAY 18TH WEEK ORDINARY TIME YEAR II
CANONICAL VISITATION OF PANANIA AND REVESBY HEIGHTS PARISHES
St. Patrick’s Church, Revesby Heights
When people complained to Picasso that his portrait of Gertrude Stein did not look like her he famously replied, ‘No matter – it will.’1 Picasso’s point was not merely that as Stein aged she would become more likely the unflattering face he had painted: it was that in time how we saw her and saw the painting would influence each other. Interestingly, if he was right, then how we understand such things is not just a matter of the information we receive – for over time we would not be learning any new facts about the painting or its subject – but rather a matter of changed understanding of those facts.
Our famous Gospel passage today (Mt 16:13-23) is normally heard by Catholics as the occasion on which Jesus first made His breathtaking promise to the Church that it would last to the end of time and His institution of the papacy to help ensure that. Undoubtedly this passage is very important, therefore, for our ecclesiology or theology of the Church, as well as our piety towards the popes and the Church as a whole. Yet there are other things to notice here too. One is the important difference between knowledge – like Peter’s knowledge that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, and the Son of the Living God (Mt 16:13-23) – and understanding – like Peter’s failure to understand that this Messiah was not to be a worldly liberator, but a spiritual one. This evokes Christ’s stinging words to His friend: “Peter, your way of thinking is not God’s way, but man’s.” Here Jesus is echoing God’s words through the prophet Isaiah: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8-9) The point is: try as Peter might to fit Jesus into his own conception of the way things are and should be, there is so much more to God than that; but if Peter keeps insisting on his own limited way of thinking, he will find himself Satanically contradicting the Son of God and trying to tell Him what to do!
Knowledge, then, is a beautiful thing, and our extraordinary ability to gather and order facts part of what distinguishes us from all other animals. Yet it is not enough: we might know all there is to know about some science, or art, or literature, or profession, yet lack real wisdom or understanding about such matters.
Our faith is like that. We gather together many facts about Jesus, God, the Church as we grow up; if we are inquisitive, we gather as many as we can. We hear the Word of God and the stories of the saints. We read the Catechism or other good sources of Catholic teaching. We get to know more and more. But in the end, it’s more crucial to understand human beings than to know everything about them. It’s much more important to know Jesus than to know about Jesus. It’s more essential to be wise about God and the things of God, than to be a scholar – important as it is to have theology and theologians. Peter must come to understand who Jesus is and how to relate to Him, not just what Jesus does and how that might be useful to him. We must let our faith not only inform us but also form us.
Conversion comes on many different levels: not just moral conversion, from sinners to saints, but also conversion of our whole worldview, our whole way of perceiving things, making sense of them, and then responding to them. “Deep within them I will plant my Law,” God says through Jeremiah today, “writing it on their hearts.” (Jer 31:31-34) If we are to think in God’s way rather than man’s, we need faith, a faith that goes to the heart of things, a faith that is God speaking to our hearts. And that demands prayer, reflection upon the Scriptures and Catechism, discussion, devotion, a certain amount of humility and teachability in the face of the boundless mystery of God, an openness to the grace of the sacraments and of the present moment.
INTRODUCTION TO MASS FOR THURSDAY 18TH WEEK ORDINARY TIME YEAR II
CANONICAL VISITATION OF PANANIA AND REVESBY HEIGHTS PARISHES
St. Patrick’s Church, Revesby Heights
Welcome to this morning’s Mass as I continue my canonical visitation of the Parishes of Revesby Heights and Panania. It has already been a pleasure and I thank Fr Maurice and all the parishioners for the welcome I have received. To everyone present this morning a very warm welcome!
1 Cf. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to A Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1968), p. 33. A slightly different version is reported in Roland Penrose’ Picasso, in which his reply is said to have been ‘Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it.’ Roland Penrose, Picasso (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 122