Homily 16th Sunday OT 21st July 2024

One of the most common literary devices used by the Old Testament prophets is the kind of thing of which this first reading today is a good example. And that is to draw a picture of the great contrast between the ways of things are now and the way they will be sometime in the future.

It was to be a Messianic age, brought about by God’s own agent, the Messiah, the Anointed one, in God’s own time. And all the people had to do really all they could do, was to wait patiently and faithfully for God to move.

Then, of course, God did move. God sent Christ with the message that the renewed and perfect world that had been promised for so long was not going to be just the handiwork of God. God had become human, and from then on, humanity was the agent God had chosen through which God would accomplish God’s work.

Well that is a staggering challenge. It calls for some very concrete virtues. It calls for faithfulness, for patience for a great deal of humility. And perhaps as much as anything else, it calls for balance.

One of the most obvious applications of all of this is found in the Gospel reading for this weekend. Finding a balance in one’s life between action and rest, work and play, service and prayer. Even Christ said to his apostles from time to time, enough is enough, slow down, come away and rest, and think for a while. We don’t do that very well as a culture.

We are not good relaxers. Too many times our play, even our prayer, is as driven and draining and anxious as our work ad that is not good. Those who are never genuinely playful, genuinely at rest, are not balanced people, and their chances of contributing to their own perfection, let alone the world, are fairly slim.

There is another dimension to the virtuously balanced personality, and that is a moderation in the expectations that we set up of ourselves and of one another. The fact is that in a world that grows perfect only slowly, every inhabitant is still imperfect. Now that can never mean that we let ourselves grow passive in our judgement of evil, but it does mean that we never grow too discouraged in the pursuit of good, even though that good may have to co-exist with evil for a time.

So, a balanced personality is always tempered and guided by faith. A personality that is open to all of the potential goodness of life, but one which is prudent enough to be able to concentrate on those goods which are under one’s control, which can be accomplished, even if it doesn’t seem like much. That is the messianic role of everyone of God’s people. That is the way, it is the only way, that the world will be made perfect.

Fr Andrew