“I’m not trying to convey concepts. What I’m trying to convey is my own reliance on God and my own hope in God,” Sam Sawyer, S.J., says when asked to describe his approach to delivering a homily. “The best thing I have to offer someone else is the invitation to deeper love and trust in God.”
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Sam is a Jesuit of the U.S.A. East province of the Jesuits and the 15th editor in chief of America Media.
In his conversation with host Ricardo da Silva, S.J., after the homily, Sam shares how ancient monastic wisdom has inspired him to lean into the more difficult lines in the Scriptures.
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“The best thing I have to offer someone else is the invitation to deeper love and trust in God.”
Scripture Readings for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ex 19:2-6a
Responsorial Psalm: Ps 100:1-2, 3, 5
Second Reading: Rm 5:6-11
Gospel: Mt 9:36 - 10:8
You can find the full text of the readings here.
Homily for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A, by Sam Sawyer, S.J.
“Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed; nothing secret that will not be known.” That’s what the Gospel tells us. That’s what Jesus has to say to his disciples. And look, as most of you know, my day job is in the news business. I’m an editor of a magazine. And even though America magazine doesn’t do investigative journalism as such, if you tell me that there’s a secret that’s about to be revealed, I start to expect a scandal—“News at 11: What they’ve been hiding from you.”
And if somebody told me that something secret about me was about to be revealed, I would get anxious. What did I do wrong? How did I get caught? Those are the kind of questions that would be in my head. And I think many of us might, by our own history of religious formation, have some sense of God is watching us—as if God is surveilling us; the sense that (maybe as we’re told by a well-meaning grandparent at some point, or by a teacher somewhere early at elementary school) God sees what you’re doing. Even if it’s done in secret, God sees it. And maybe this language from Jesus in the gospel—“Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden, nothing secret that will not be known”—maybe that starts to get us thinking, “God is watching. God knows. I’ve got to be extra careful.”
But I think it’s important for us to ask ourselves the question: What does it feel like to have God watching us? And does it feel like surveillance? Or does it feel like support? Because we should also remember that in this Gospel that we just read, it’s not just, “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nothing secret that will not be made known,” but also, “God sees even the sparrow, and fear not, for you are worth more than many sparrows.” What we have to remember most deeply is that the line right before “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nothing secret that will not be known,” right before that, Jesus says, “Fear no one.” This is supposed to somehow be a message of confidence. And so I think it’s worth diving into our readings today to explore how that confidence is something that Jesus wants to communicate to his disciples—what Jesus’ insight is, for his disciples and for us today.
So it might help to look back at the first reading, where the prophet Jeremiah is talking about the experience of persecution. And for him, this cuts very close to the bone, because he’s saying, “All those who are my friends are on watch for any misstep of mine.” He does have this sort of experience of surveillance, of people on whom he had relied, people whom he thought should be supporting him, should be friends, should be people on whom he can count. And all of a sudden they’ve turned on him, and they are looking to catch him out. But instead, what happens through the rest of the first reading is that Jeremiah turns to God for vindication, turns to God for support. So this surveillance of “What’s he gonna do wrong? How can we catch him out?”—that’s not coming from God. That’s coming from Jeremiah’s enemies. That’s coming from the people who are resistant to the message that Jeremiah is commissioned by God to preach.
And it’s God who offers vindication and support, and God on whom Jeremiah relies. And that, I think, actually does lead us into hearing the Gospel somewhat more accurately, hearing the Gospel that starts “Fear no one” and ends with reassuring us of God’s care for us, God’s “counting every hair on our heads.” Because this chunk of Matthew that we’re reading—which, really, there isn’t a story in this Gospel; there’s just a bunch of advice from Jesus, some sayings that have been compiled together—but it occurs in Matthew just after Jesus has told his disciples to expect coming persecution. So some of the context we have for this is, we know that the community for which the Gospel of Matthew was written was a community of largely Jewish Christians, who were in the process of struggling about whether or not they belonged in the synagogue and how the message of Jesus and how their faith in Jesus would relate to their friends, their family members, the other people in the Jewish community around them.
So they were working themselves with this question of: How do we live together as a community? How do we relate to a larger community? And to whom do we belong, on whom do we rely, when we preach the message of Jesus and it is not received as readily as we might hope? So that’s sort of the context where we are in the Gospel of Matthew, and it’s to these people that Jesus says, “Fear no one, because nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, and nothing is secret that will not be known.”
“The best thing I have to offer someone else is the invitation to deeper love and trust in God.”
And so what we’re talking about being revealed here isn’t that there’s some great closed-circuit television system in the sky, with which God is recording every last transgression and will hold us to account for it. What we’re talking about being revealed here is the revelation of God’s purpose and kingdom and care for us. That’s why this leads into the lines about “You are worth more than many sparrows,” which is also just a great and funny line, and I think is meant to elicit at least partially a chuckle, right? Like, we are worth more than many sparrows! That feels like a thing that we should trust. And yet it’s announced to us here as a reminder that we have to be woken up to.
So as Matthew is proposing this council from Jesus, these recommendations from Jesus about how to approach the coming of the kingdom; about how to approach our own preaching of the kingdom and commitment to the kingdom, often in the face of doubt and persecution and division; what he reminds his hearers is that God’s care, the meaning of God’s kingdom, God’s abundant generosity and deep love for us, even if it feels secret and hidden and concealed now—it will be made known. And if we want to think our way in, if we want to pray our way into that real transformation, that conversion of imagination that Matthew is inviting, that Jesus is inviting in this Gospel, then I think we also have some resources from the second reading in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. And I’d like to point us to one line in particular there, where St. Paul says, “The gift is not like the transgression.”
So he is doing (and Paul does this frequently, especially in Romans) a kind of back-and-forth between sin and grace in tension with each other. And he uses the tension also, the archetypes of Adam, of our fallen human nature, and of Christ as the redemption of our human nature. But when he says “The gift is not like the transgression,” Paul reminds us that these are not just one-for-one equivalences: sin bad, grace good. He’s saying that sin closes in on itself. There’s no life there. It collapses, almost. It doesn’t get any bigger. But “the gift is not like the transgression,” because grace opens up to something much larger. Grace is not just the mirror image of sin. It’s not like sin is negative five, and grace is positive five. Grace is something entirely different and larger and more wonderful than sin could ever be. And so if we’re modeling our imagination on sin, and then just saying grace fixes sin, we will never have a big enough imagination to begin to relate to what God is doing. And so I think that rhymes as well with the message of this Gospel, with Jesus saying, “What is secret, what is concealed now will be revealed. What is done in darkness, what you hear in darkness, you should proclaim in daylight. And what you hear in secret, you should announce it—from the housetops.”
Jesus is imagining a larger future, a more hopeful coming of the kingdom, than the community that’s hearing this is ready to imagine right now. And so that’s the challenge I’d invite us to consider today, too. When we look at all the ways that the world is broken, that the world experiences strife and division, that we are set against each other—are we able to imagine how God might transform that? Are we able to imagine that a God who cares for the fall of every sparrow (or since we’re here in New York City, a God who has accounted for every last pigeon everywhere in Manhattan), are we able to imagine what the care of such a God will actually look like when it is brought fully into the light? When that is the shape with which we experience the whole world?
I think that’s what the Gospel asks us to imagine today: a transformation towards God’s kingdom, a transformation in which we know right down to our bones that the God who watches over us does so in care and in love and in support. And once we know that, once that secret has been revealed in our hearts and in our communities, then we’re supposed to speak that message in the light and announce it from the rooftops.
“Preach” is made possible through the generous support of the Compelling Preaching Initiative, a project of Lilly Endowment Inc.
