Homily for Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Many of you will be familiar with the profile of the twelve apostles drawn up by a management consultant in an effort to establish their business potential. I used it in the church before here, so if you heard it before, bear with me. It does make a point.
LETTER: TO JESUS SON OF JOSEPH
A management consultant was asked to examine the business potential of the twelve Apostles. He gleaned whatever information he could retrieve from the gospels concerning each of the twelve individuals. He then submitted this information to an industrial psychologist who happened to be an agnostic and who never heard of the Apostles. He told the psychologist that the he intended embarking on a new project and that he had these twelve men in mind for managerial positions. After some time he received back the following letter:
Thank you for submitting the resumes of the twelve men that you have picked for managerial positions in your new organisation. All of them have taken our battery of tests. We have run the results through our computer and arranged personal interviews for each of them with our psychologist and vocational aptitude consultant.
It is the staff opinion that most of your nominees lack the necessary background education and an aptitude for your enterprise. They have no team concept. Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. He is not to be relied upon in moments of panic or crisis. Andrew has no qualities of leadership. The two brothers, James and John, placed personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas shows a sceptical attitude that would tend to undermine morale. Matthew has been blacklisted by the Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus definitely have radical leanings and registered a high score on the manic-depressive scale.
One of the candidates, however, shows great potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness, meets people well, has a keen business mind and has contacts in high places. He is highly motivated, ambitious and responsible. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right hand man.
Sincerely,
Ace Management Consultants.
From a human point of view, the project upon which Jesus was embarking was sheer madness. Largely fishermen, they had no educational background and some of them had, what we would call today, very serious character flaws. Yet these limitations is the best proof we have that something greater than human power lay behind the project. Because a group such as this could never have succeeded by their own power. The scriptures have more to say about some of the Apostles than others. Simon for example is clearly drawn.
As we see from today's gospel, Jesus called him Peter, or Rock, which shows that Jesus had a sense of humour. He comes across as the most impetuous and fickle of all the apostles. He seems to have had little understanding of the mission of Jesus. When Jesus announces that he is going to Jerusalem, the place that killed the prophets, Peter says, Lord, this must not happen to you. He follows Jesus to Jerusalem at a distance, the gospel takes care to tell us. When a woman points out that he is actually a friend of Jesus Peter denies it with vehemence and under oath. When his friend Jesus is going through the lowest point of his life, in Gethsemane, Peter falls asleep at the gate. At the very end, Peter runs away. Yet Jesus would appoint Peter as the rock upon which the whole project would stand or fall.
The sons of Zebedee, James and John, were extreme characters. In Mark's list of the Apostles we read that Jesus gave them the nickname Sons of Thunder, Boanerges, and not without reason. One day they went preaching in a Samaritan town. The inhabitants went about their own business and ignored them. Their sense of their own importance had been badly bruised, and they took the snub rather personally. They rushed back to Jesus and said: "Should we not call down fire from heaven and burn up that town?" But it wasn't off the streets that they picked up this sense of their own importance. It was the mother of these two fellows who approached Jesus with a request: that the two best positions in his Kingdom be reserved fro her two sons. It was inevitable I suppose that her sons would inherit some of that burning ambition, if you will pardon the pun. Without the influence of Jesus they would have been proud, ambitious extreme characters who would have walked over dead bodies to achieve their own ends. But in the healing company of Jesus, their characters matured and he harnessed their great energy to less selfish ends. Their excesses, when channeled in a different direction, became their virtues. As we read in the Acts of the Apostles, James was the first apostle to be martyred. John's driven restlessness produced the most philosophical of the four Gospels, a work that bears his name.
We have a soft spot for Thomas, doubting and pessimistic. When Jesus announced that he would go to that dangerous spot Bethany when Lazarus was ill, all Thomas could see was the inevitable death. Yet bravely he said, "Let us go too and die with you." Unlike Peter, he refused to desert Jesus in difficult times. But today, that bravery is forgotten and we remember him best for his scepticism. He could not accept the resurrection on hear say.
Then there was Simon known as the Zealot, part of an armed terrorist group that opposed Roman occupation through force of arms. Then there was Matthew, a tax collector for the Romans. But in the vision of the new society outlined by Jesus, these two old enemies could sit down together and co-operate in the construction of that new society. Without the influence of Jesus, Simon would have seen it as his duty to eliminate Matthew.
This then was the unpromising foundation on which Jesus built his Church. In human terms, it was a non-runner. Sin and human weakness was part of its fabric since it foundation. But sin is only part of the story. Love, prayer, loyalty, selflessness, and dignity and great bravery are also part of the apostles' story. Through the spirit of Jesus, many of them suffered death rather than deny him. The same qualities characterise every generation of Christians, indeed every individual Christian. Through his choice of the apostles, Jesus sends a clear message down through time that sin is no bar to his love. His love is greater than our sinfulness and weakness. Sin may obscure the dignity of humanity but it will never extinguish it. Consequently, the community of Jesus still worship together two thousand years after he walked among us.