Celebrity Status. Always a problem.

15th Sunday of Ordinary Time. Gospel - Matthew 13:1-23

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Such crowds gathered round Jesus on the beach that He had to flee into a boat.

Brad Pitt knows how that feels. And George Clooney. And Kim Kardashian. (Nope, no idea.) It’s the celebrity thing.

Whatever celeb-watchers think they know about today’s star-in-their-eyes, in fact they know almost nothing about the real person behind the showbiz image. Just whatever stories their PR feeds the media and – oooh! – everyone’s talking about them so they must be important! And so it’s, ‘Wow, George Clooney’s filming in the park! Let’s go!’ And they go and they gawp and they get a selfie with George (autographs are so last century) and George smiles on cue and they bask in his aura and they go home and tell anyone who’ll listen that George is their NBF. And years later they’ll remember that once they briefly met a handsome movie star… ‘Oh, you know, thingummy… what was his name?

How many of the crowd driving Jesus to flee into his boat had come to gawp at the latest celebrity? One might guess more than a few, and one might also suspect that Jesus thought so, too.

For a start, He did not explain the parables to the crowd, as a rabbi customarily would, but only to his disciples, privately. Why? Because it would have been a waste of breath? Because they would have been bored? Gone off him, because the celeb wonder-worker they'd come to see didn't live up to the advertising? Jeered at his preaching, chucked the odd stone, earned him the tag ‘trouble-maker’?

The disciples wondered about this, and they asked him,

'Why to you talk to them in (unexplained) parables?'

Jesus answers:

‘Because,’ He replied, ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven are revealed to you but they are not revealed to them…'

At first glance, Jesus seems to be deliberately excluding all but his in-crowd, but we know that God loves all His creatures and excludes no-one, so that cannot be right. A good question might be, ‘Who’s doing the excluding here? Jesus, or the people in the crowd themselves?' Jesus goes on, puzzlingly quoting Isaiah:

'[for] they look without seeing and listen without hearing or understanding.'

Gawping at a celebrity, perhaps, with no interest in who He really is or his propositions? 

Both Isaiah, speaking the mind of the Lord, and now the Lord Himself, directly, seem to be saying that only those who decide to be disciples of the Lord are able to grasp the meaning of the teachings. That is, not those who want to gawp or jeer but those who seek to become His friends and follow Him in His mission. To be a Christian is to be a missionary...  

Isaiah and Jesus also make clear that those who are not disciples and do not wish to be do not understand the message because they cannot. They are gawping but not really looking or really listening to the Lord in order to perceive, and so, not even perceiving what is right in front of them, how on earth can they understand it? Moreover, Isaiah says, they positively refuse to see or hear because behind all their bluster they are afraid: 

For the heart of this nation has grown coarse, their ears are dull of hearing… they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and be converted and be healed by me.

How like Isaiah’s age is our own, coarsely shouting Christ and His disciples down at every opportunity. For fear of hearing the truth? Why, yes, because such a truth, if perceived and understood, turns one's world upside down and knocks one to one’s knees, as St Paul and countless others testify.

'If it were really real (which obviously it can’t be… er, can it?) it would ruin everything and blow away all my carefully acquired certainties. So maybe best not, then. Let the preacher talk, mutter a few ‘sky fairy’ insults for larfs, and then get back to our safety zone and the comfort of all our everyday stuff.'

It’s very understandable, wanting to hang on to one's peccadilloes and little vices, one's prejudices, one's delicious, dearly-bought comforts and pleasures, one's illusions and delusions. To hold on to your life rather than lose it, for God's sake!

With people who fear to risk meeting Absolute Truth in the person of Christ lest He upset their apple-cart, all the learning and eloquence in the world will not get past their determinedly squeezed-shut eyes and stuffed-up ears. They cannot perceive and therefore cannot understand the truth of the message, no matter how lyrical our words and reasonable our explanations, because they do not perceive the essence of Christianity which is not a proposition but a person. 

Some of the people in the crowd would certainly have looked and seen, listened and heard, and, inspired by the grace of faith, would have wanted to get closer to Jesus in order to understand. To be His disciple. Only they, only His disciples, understood, because understanding begins not with the words but with perception of the Speaker of the words, the Word; the priceless grace (free gift) of personal encounter with God, that falling to one’s knees, gasping, ‘My Lord and my God.’ And immediately, one knows only that one knows nothing but this hungry ache to know it all, to know Christ who is all in all.  And as Christ draws the hungry heart near to his own Divine Heart, He himself begins to teach His new, beloved disciple whose eyes and ears are, at last, working properly, saying:

'Happy are your eyes because they see, your ears because they hear! I tell you solemnly, many prophets and holy men longed to see what you see, and never saw it, hear what you hear, and never heard it.’

The holy ancients, many of them very learned, longed to see God’s face and hear God’s voice. They never did, in this life. But here Jesus is telling His disciples that they are seeing and hearing the living God in the flesh. This is what the holy ancients longed for, and now the living God, Incarnated in human flesh and blood, is walking and talking, right here, and explaining all things to them directly. Truly seeing the Word, they hear and understand His words. Oh, happy, happy disciples!

The gift of faith in Christ and the longing to be His disciple are indispensable prerequisites of understanding. Only Christ can give the gift of faith. It sometimes comes unsought and sometimes comes in answer to the desire for it. However it comes, faith in Christ is a gift, without which understanding is impossible.

The foundations of Dominican life are prayer and contemplation, deepening one's friendship with Christ, the friendship indispensable to understanding which in turn grows through prayerful study. Thus the praying, contemplative student-disciple, luxuriating in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, prepares to follow the lead of our Master, fr Bruno Cadoré, who tells us:

We can simply say to those we meet in our everyday lives, "I have met Jesus. I know Him. I would love to introduce Him to you!"

Is there a better description of Christian mission?

We, like the first disciples, wrestle with the mystery of why some are given the gift of faith (and so of understanding) and some are not. Only God knows the answer to that and we can but trust Him, thanking Him humbly for our own faith and doing what we can to introduce Jesus Christ to those who have not really yet looked at Him properly - merely glimpsed Him, perhaps, from somewhere out there in the crowd.