There is a story told of Napoleon
when he was at the height of his power.
At one stage he met the cardinal of Paris and said to him, “I am going
to destroy the Vatican!” The cardinal
replied: “You won’t be able.” Napoleon
said, “I will. Just you wait and see.” The cardinal said to Napoleon: “You will
never be able. We priests have been
trying to destroy it for the last 1800 years and we haven’t been able!”
I often think it is amazing how
so many people keep coming back to the Church, or even just remain with the
Church, in spite of so many reasons to leave it: scandals, bad example, bad
preaching and so on. Working in Lourdes
as a confessor a couple of times I was amazed at how people from all over the
world would come and confess their sins, many after being away from the Church
for decades. Why is this? It is because the Spirit of God goes on
moving people, drawing people and inspiring people to keep coming back. And where the practice of the faith decreases
in one part of the world, such as in Europe at the moment, it increases in
another and so the cycle continues.
The Lord does not wait until we
are ready to act, or to preach, or to reach out to people. God simply goes on loving his people all over
the world and moving people to act where it is needed, whether we are ready or
not. In the Gospel today are these
lovely examples of what the kingdom of God is like. Jesus compares it to plants growing in the
ground. The farmer plants the seed, but
the plants grow by themselves, ‘how, he does not know.’ God continues to work and guide people to
himself whether we take part or not.
Sometimes I think that our work
is a bit like that of the farmer in the parable. We are called to plant seeds. We try and be signposts to God, pointing them
in the right direction and then God does everything else. By ourselves we are very limited in what we
can do, but the thing is that we do have a part to play. God invites us to be part of his work,
helping others along the road to heaven, perhaps by prayer, by example and for
a few of us by preaching. But all of us
are invited to play a part. For most of
us it is a hidden part. I think we often
underestimate the importance of praying for others. We speak to them about God mostly by the way
we live.
Jesus uses the parable of the
mustard seed. It is a tiny seed, but it
can grow into something many thousands of times its size. In other words, although we are small we can
have a lasting influence on the world around us, even though we may not realise
it in our own lifetime. The Church is
meant to be small. We are not meant to
be big and powerful and we have seen what happens when we get too big and
powerful; we forget what we are about and we caught up in prestige and status
and our own importance. But when we are
small we remain dependent on God and focused on God. That is when God can work through us most
effectively because we don’t get in the way.
When we are not full of ourselves there is room for God.
I’m sure that one of the things
that is happening in the Church at the moment is that God is helping us to
become small again. While once we were
big and powerful, now we are despised in many places. It is painful, but it is also helping
us. The Lord allows this to happen because
He loves us and He knows what will help us the most.
The Apostles too wanted Jesus to
be big and powerful. James and John
asked if they should call down fire on a town that didn’t make them
welcome. Another time one of them asked
Jesus if the time had come for God to ‘restore the kingdom to Israel,’ in other
words to kick the occupying Romans out and become powerful once again. But the way of Jesus was something very different
and unexpected. His was the way of the
cross. He was despised and rejected and
appeared to be a complete failure. The
Apostles found this very hard to accept, but eventually God helped them to
learn that this was the path that they too must walk.
God goes on making his kingdom
grow; drawing people to himself and helping people to find their way; most of
the time we don’t know how. We are
invited to play our part by praying for those around us and speaking about God
by the way we live.
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