Homily for the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

I’ve just returned to Little Flower from a couple weeks of retreat and vacation with my religious community, the Congregation of Holy Cross, and a good bit of that time was spent at the University of Notre Dame.  So you’ll have to excuse the fact that I was thinking a lot about the history of my religious community and my alma mater when I prayed over the readings for this Sunday’s Liturgy and prepared this homily.

I think I’ve told you before that the Congregation of Holy Cross was founded in France in the years immediately after the French Revolution.  Prior to the Revolution there were some 60,000 priests in France, some 55,000 nuns, and religious communities owned some ten percent of the surface area of France.

But during the Revolution all that land was confiscated, some 20,000 priests abdicated their posts, some 30,000 fled France entirely, and nearly 800 were executed or died in prison.  By the spring of 1794 only 150 parishes in the whole of France had Mass on Sunday!

Suffice it to say that at the beginning of the nineteenth century very few observers would have bet on the survival of the Church in France.  But, in fact, the Church not only survived, it experienced a new flowering.

The first 80 years of the new century saw some 400 new religious orders for women founded and some 200,000 women enter religious life.  Blessed Basil Moreau founded our Congregation at precisely this time, and out of the inauspicious setting of post-Revolutionary France, his order grew and spread all around the globe. Today Holy Cross has over two thousand priests, brothers, and sisters in 16 countries on five continents. 

One of the places Moreau sent his religious was to the American frontier.  In December 1842 Fr. Edward Sorin stood on a snowy hillside overlooking a frozen lake in northern Indiana.  He and seven Holy Cross brothers had only a tiny log cabin in which to huddle against the elements.  Sorin wrote a letter to Father Moreau back in France in which he named the place Notre Dame and pledged to build a school there in Our Lady’s honor.

 Fr. Sorin made this prediction:  “As there is no other school within more than a hundred miles, this college cannot fail to succeed.... Before long, it will develop on a large scale ... It will be one of the most powerful means for good in this country … at least, that is my deep conviction. Time will tell if I am wrong.”

Observers at the time would have thought Sorin insane, but today he’s been proven right a hundred times over.  Notre Dame did indeed grow into a massively successful international research and teaching university, even if at the beginning most sane people would have scoffed at Sorin’s run-down log cabin.

I thought of these historical examples when I read this Sunday’s readings, because the interpretive key to all the other readings is found in today’s second reading from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.  Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”

Friends, human sight, reason, logic, economic statistics, and demographic projections would never have come up with the rebuilding of the Church in France after the devastation of the French Revolution.  They would never have foreseen the development of the University of Notre Dame from a single ramshackle log cabin in the desolate Indiana countryside.

And yet with the eyes of faith, the followers of Christ have been “beating the odds” from the very beginning.  After all, human sight, logic, and reason would never have foreseen the Resurrection on Good Friday afternoon, and could never have fathomed twelve Galilean fishermen building an international Church of billions of members that has endured for two thousand years!  And yet, here we are in Bethesda, Maryland in 2012.  “We walk by faith, not by sight.”

That’s the key to understanding the first reading.  The prophet Ezekiel had been a priest in the Jerusalem Temple, but when Israel had abandoned the covenant and God delivered the nation into the hands of the Babylonians, Ezekiel and the rest of the inhabitants of Jerusalem were sent into exile.

And yet, in our first reading, Ezekiel uses the poetic imagery of a large cedar tree to predict that the family tree of King David would indeed survive – and that through David’s family tree, all the nations of the earth would find blessing in the Lord.

To most of Ezekiel’s listeners this must have sounded like a cruel joke. No one would have predicted such a future for Israel while it was in exile and bondage, and yet … “We walk by faith, not by sight.”

That’s the key to understanding today’s Gospel reading as well. First, we have to understand that today’s Gospel is not the passage from Luke, in which the disciples ask for an increase in faith, and Jesus tells them that if they had “faith the size of a mustard seed” they could uproot mountains and drop them in the sea.

No, today’s Gospel is from Mark and it begins with Jesus saying: “this is how it is with the kingdom of God.”  So Jesus’ analogy employs the image of a seed not to describe our faith, but to tell us about God’s kingdom.

First, Jesus says that like the seed buried in the earth, and watched by the farmer – the kingdom grows and spreads, and has its effect, “we know not how.”  In other words, God’s saving activity in the world is a great mystery.  It cannot be fully seen, explained, comprehended, or predicted. 

And therefore it requires a certain kind of patience, both with God who sows the seed and with our own hearts and minds that provide the soil for the seed’s growth.  The kingdom of God is indeed present and growing in our midst, just like a seed.  But just like a seed, it requires time for hidden growth before its fruit becomes obvious to the human eye. 

Second, Jesus says the Kingdom is like the mustard seed which starts small and produces an exponentially larger plant.  So large, in fact, that all the birds of the sky find a home in its branches. 

If you think that sounds a bit like the first reading from Ezekiel you’d be right.  Jesus is the descendant of David through whom all the world finds blessing.  So, like the mustard seed, the kingdom of God starts in the smallest, seemingly insignificant and least obvious ways – in a manger in Bethlehem, and on a cross outside Jerusalem – and yet it grows into an immense reality.

Here we might add something that Jesus doesn’t explicitly point out: namely that the mustard plant is an invasive species! It can easily get out of control and takeover even where it isn’t planted or wanted!

So too, the Kingdom of God is capable of taking control of our lives, even when we would sometimes choose to keep it out, or to give it only a small portion of our attention and commitment.  All the better if we yield to it, and comply with it – that we cultivate and nourish its growth and help it to bear fruit in us and in the world.

Brothers and sisters, throughout our lives there are any number of instances in which human sight, logic, and reason would have us believe that God has abandoned or rejected us, or that there is no future to hope for, or that the Church is dying, or … well, fill in the blank.

But friends, “we walk by faith, not by sight.”  We have faith and trust – like Blessed Basil Moreau, and Fr. Sorin, and St. Francis of Assisi, and Mother Theresa, and all the great saints throughout history – that even when sight, and logic, and reason find it difficult or even impossible to recognize God’s activity in our lives and in the world, He is in fact bringing about a future even better than what we could hope for or imagine.

In this Eucharist we ask for the grace to continue to walk by faith – to patiently trust in God’s grace active within us, to yield evermore fully to His grace, so that God’s grace might produce abundant fruit in us, and His kingdom might be built in our midst.