Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Homily: Tuesday - 15th Week of OT 2016 - Woe to you, Cleveland!



Last Fall, we offered a Bible Study on the Book of Matthew.  What a luxury to be able to go through chapter by chapter, line by line.  Those who attended remember that the structure of the Gospel of Matthew is very pronounced.  Matthew can be divided into five smaller units, each containing narrative and discourse sections.  In the narrative sections throughout the Gospel, Jesus travels to towns, he performs healings, he manifests the power of the kingdom, he confronts Pharisees. And then the narrative, the action, is followed by a teaching, a discourse—for example, the Sermon on the Mount follows Jesus’ calling of his first disciples.

Today’s Gospel passage is taken from the third narrative section of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus has just sent the twelve apostles on their first missionary journey.  He had given them instructions to preach the Gospel and to perform healing miracles, just like he had been doing in the previous part of the Gospel; what the master does, so must the disciples do.  While they are gone, Jesus begins to preach again to crowds of people, people who he had met before. Jesus preaches here with great intensity and seriousness about the consequences for failing to repent.

He calls those who fail to head his words, “a wicked generation”.  He compares the hard-hearted Pharisees to a bunch of children playing games in the marketplace. In today’s Gospel he reproaches the towns which failed to repent. Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe, to you Capernaum! Woe, to you Bethsaida! These three towns, Capernaum, Chorazin, and Bethsaida were places Jesus had spent the majority of his time in his ministry so far.  They had witnessed the majority of his miracles, he had opened the scriptures to them, they heard of God’s love and the need to repent.  Jesus says that if Tyre, Sidon, and Sodom, some of the most wicked cities in history, had witnessed his ministry, they would have repented on the spot.

Jesus speaks with great seriousness, because the something of the greatest importance is at stake: our eternal souls. The second person of the Holy Trinity didn’t incarnate and undergo the Passion because He was bored.  Repentance and living a life of faith is of the highest importance.  Everything else pales in comparison.  

I don’t think we are necessarily called to go out into the shopping malls and sporting arenas and preach: “woe to you Mayfield Heights, Woe to you Cleveland. Repent, for judgment is coming!” But I do think passages like todays should certainly challenge us to ensure that our priorities are in order, that we are living firstly for God, that we have repented of our sins, and that we do take seriously our call to spread the Gospel with conviction and patience for the glory of God and salvation of souls.


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