27th Sunday of Ordinary Time (05.10.14)
The Taking Of A Breath
Peeling back obscuring layers can be a revelation. In so doing, art experts, using modern scientific tools, have discovered many a lost or unknown, hidden, master. If we peel back the multi-layered human what do we find? The very first and crucial encouragement given to a newborn is to breathe independently. It’s an obvious statement but sometimes we overlook the obvious and its less obvious implications. From that first breath breathing becomes one of our subconscious, continuous activities. From our first intake of air to our latest we are investing in not only our personal existence but also that of humanity. Our capacity to breath and the vital oxygen it brings to our body is part of God’s creative investment in us.
In the gift of breathing, God launched humanity on multiple unique journeys of independence. Nobody can take more than one breath at a time. So a breath is the ultimate common denominator of humanity equally shared in by all. If you have not previously thought of yourself as an investor in humanity, breathe and realise that you are!
Humanity is God’s investment made in his own image and likeness. He imbued humanity with a capacity to live with his life-endowing, perfect Divine love. God also entrusted to humanity the management of his investment giving us responsibility for all life, including our own, along with all material creation. To assist us in our vocation, God also laid out his ground rules:
“The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him.” So the Lord God formed from the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and the man chose a name for each one. He gave names to all the livestock, all the birds of the sky, and all the wild animals. But still there was no helper just right for him.
So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the Lord God took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the opening. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man. “At last!” the man exclaimed. “This one is bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh! She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken from ‘man.’”
This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame. (Genesis 2: 15-25) Then there is the exposition of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 1-17). When was the last time you reflected, as opposed to read through, God’s blueprint for life?
In the 27th Sunday’s Gospel, Matthew has Jesus focusing his parable teaching, (Matthew 21: 33-46) on the chief priests and Pharisees, without mentioning them by name. As always, Jesus’ teaching is applicable to humanity in every age. The scribes and the Pharisees who heard Jesus in person felt uncomfortable. How do we feel listening in the 21st century? Have we reason to feel any discomfort?
If a breath is humanity’s ultimate common denominator, it stands to reason that God intends us to hold in common all that he places at our disposal. Can you conceive of God sanctioning a palace for one and a refugee cave for another or a ‘high end’ restaurant for one and a table without food for another? These inequalities do not harmonise with the Creator’s equality of beneficence beginning with a breath for each person. What all human inequalities identify is the damage done, through culpable sinfulness, to the equality that is at the heart of God’s creation.
Has humanity become so desensitized by the proliferation of ‘palaces and hovels’, ‘luxury food and starvation’ that they have become an almost inescapable norm having lost their capacity to shock us. Have popular, harmless daytime TV series, such as ‘Escape to the country’; become forms of escapism from the reality of the 28 million homeless people in the Middle East alone (UN statistics)? It is true that we must not focus only on the negative death-dealing disorders of humanity. But is it sufficient that we take a breath, make a donation to the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee) and continue as before until the next emergency lights up our screens?
The appetite for more and more is no longer seen as injuriously selfish but my just rights! ‘Have I the right to be a millionaire’, is no longer the question. The challenge now is, ‘Who has the right to say I should not be a millionaire?”
Ask yourself, when hearing or reading this Gospel text, what picture the landowner brought to mind, almost without any prompting? Were you seeing an oppressively calculating, uncaring, grasping individual? Was he just like all ‘them at the top of the pile’? Did you even wonder if he managed his landholding, probably inherited, as a co-operative justly sharing the proceeds to each according to their responsible involvement – a sort of New Testament ‘John Lewis’?
Ask yourself what were your unbidden thoughts about the tenants. Did you picture them as respectful of each other’s right to breathe, including that of the landowner? Did you imagine them sharing the landowner’s vision that, unless there was investment, there mightn’t be a future crop? Were you inclined to excuse their behaviour because of the oppression you imagined they had experienced?
Depending on the level of our engagement with this Gospel extract, as it was being read or subsequently, it’s almost impossible not to have conjured up our own pictures of the characters Jesus identifies. Where did the characteristics we applied to the passage’s characters come from? According to Matthew, Jesus tells us nothing about the landowner other than that he is a landowner. Who’s to say he didn’t see himself more as custodian than owner; as bearing as much responsibility for his tenants and their families as for his own; as answerable before God for the wellbeing of his tenants as for his own family?
Our feelings are coloured by all that encompasses our personal as well as our generational history. Jesus’ parable characters are almost colourless, bland people. Yet, in the hearing or reading of this extract, we will probably have added colour and character definition. Whom did we engage as our personal ‘artist in residence’? To whom did we grant control of the palette of our feelings?
The further question is whom have we most frequently allowed to add layer upon layer to the foundational image of our individual likeness to God? To whom have we given access as our personal ‘artist in residence’? Has that artist been true to the Creator’s blueprint or has he layered deceptive distortion so cleverly that we no longer easily recognise the original masterpiece? If the concept of your having your own ‘artist in residence’ is new to you, then consider this. Human are intrinsically spiritual beings. Either the Spirit of God is our ‘artist in residence’ or that role is usurped by spirit of Evil. There is never a vacuum. We are never in a state of being without a spiritual influence. We freely determine which spirit is our ‘artist in residence’.
Try breathing purposefully, gratefully in a silent, wordless, reflective prayer. Then, after a pause, ask that you may see what may have become hidden beneath the layers of your busy life. If you truly believe that restoration is needed, be brave, courageous and loving. Take a breath and call upon the Restorer of restorers that you may once again be able and willing to produce the fruit of the Kingdom, breath by gentle breath. Remember the old adage that the moving of a mountain begins with the lifting of the first stone.