11^th Sunday of O.T. (B); June 16^th, 2024

Ez 17:22-24.  Ps 92.  2 Cor 5:6-10.  Mk 4:26-34

Deacon Jim McFadden

         The recent storm that hit Houston left thousands of residents without power underscored that we live in a world where more and more of our devices require charging and concomitantly we have become so dependent upon technology just to function in our modern society.  Such dependency has spawned new and unique mental, psychological, and spiritual challenges.  One has to be super-organized just to keep track of one’s passwords: the average American reportedly has over 100 of them.  So, it seems that we navigate through life via our digital devices and technology, which shapes our consciousness.

            Such dependency raises a basic question: does technology, an extension of reason, form our consciousness; has it become our primary orientation towards life?  In our second reading from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, offers an alternative view when he tells us that “…we walk by faith not by sight” (5:7), which is a pithy statement of the Christian life.  As Christians we perceive the world through our bodily senses and we interpret that sensory data through our rational interpretative lenses just like non-believers do.  But our primary orientation is not given to us by the body or reason:  it is given by faith, which has nothing to do with gullibility, superstition, or naivete.  We’re not going to put our Chromebooks, iPads, smartphones, etc.  in the closet.  What faith does is to integrate our sensory perceptions and rational inferences into our I-Thou and communal relationship with God and each other.    Through faith we can appreciate what the Jesuit poet Gerald Manly Hopkins once wrote that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

            Perception and reason: that’s walking by sight—nothing wrong with that; indeed, that where we start.  But we walk primarily not by sight, but by faith. That means we are attentive to God and the movement of God within our ordinary experience.  The contemporary spiritual writer Paula D’Arcy put it this way, “God comes to us disguised as our life.”  And that can’t be a matter of direct vision or rational insight.  Rather, God is appreciated in faith which goes beyond reason without contradicting it.

            But, sometimes it is very difficult to see how God is at work.  As we emerged from our 15 month pandemic exile, we carried the burden of one million of our fellow Americans who had succumbed to the virus, along with millions more world-wide.  Understandably, we may ask,  where was God in all of this?  What is God up to?  Sometimes, its exceedingly hard to see, but we trust because we walk by faith and not just by sight.  What God is doing might happen very slowly and in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.  But God is always acting!  He’s never missing-in-action!  From the smallest beginnings can come the accomplishment of God’s purposes.  We hear this in our first reading from Ezekiel who sings of Israel’s great universal destiny which was prophesized during Exile in which they lost everything!   THEY LOST EVERYTHING (!) and yet they still believed that God was present. 

            Five hundred years after Ezekiel, Jesus is making much the same point.  We hear in the Gospel, “This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed in the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how” (Mk 4:26-27).

            God is working, but we cannot see it with our ordinary eyes; we cannot understand it with our ordinary categories; no app is going to give us that access.  God is at work, but we know not how.  That’s okay because we walk by faith not by sight.

            This is why the kingdom of God, as conveyed in the second parable, is like a mustard seed: the smallest of all the seeds of the earth, but once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants, so that “birds of the sky can dwell in its shade” (v. 32c).  It’s not easy for us to enter into this logic of the unforeseeable nature of God and to accept his presence in our life.  But, during a time of uncertainty, loss, and cultural/political divisiveness, God exhorts us to an attitude of faith which exceeds our plans, agendas, calculations, and predictions.  God is always at work and since his ways our not our ways, he will always surprise us. The parable of the mustard seed invites us to open our hearts to surprises, to God’s plans, both at the personal level and that of the community.  In all of our relationships—familial, parish, political, economic, and social—it is important that we pay attention to the little and big occasions in which we can live the Great Commandment.  That means we disengage from the divisive rhetoric that objectifies our brothers and sisters or those policies that inhibit social justice.  Since we walk by faith and not sight, we engage in the dynamics of love, of welcoming and showing mercy towards others without qualification. 

            People of God,  the authenticity of the Church’s mission, which is exactly the same as the Risen and Glorified Christ, does not come through success, programs, or outcomes, but by going forth in and through Christ Jesus: to walk with him courageously and to trust that our Father’s will always bears fruit.  We go forth professing that Jesus is Lord, not Caesar or his successors, and that it is the power of the Holy Spirit who alone can transform peoples’ hearts.  It is the awareness of accepting that we are a small mustard seed, which in the hands of our loving heavenly Father and his grace, great deeds can be done through us to bring about the kingdom of God.

            Here’s the point, brothers and sisters: never give up on God!  Never let yourself be governed by what ordinary perception tells you.  Don’t put your trust in princes.  Rather, look with the eye of faith and see what God is up to.  As the mustard seed grows into the largest of plants, walk by faith and not by sight.  Amen.

Reflection Questions:

1. Is technology forming your consciousness or do you walk by faith?
2. How do you discern that God is actively at work within your life?
3. Does the parable of the mustard seed resonate with you?  How so?