Readings: 2 Cor 9:6-10 Ps 111 John 12:24-26
We have heard a lot already – and will hear a lot more in the months and years ahead – about synodality. Alongside the synodal way is another, the paschal way. Today’s readings point that out, Paul writing that ‘thin sowing means thin reaping’, the Gospel announcing that ‘unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies’. It is not surprising that given the geography of Galilee and its agrarian ambience that Jesus drew heavily on examples and images from nature to instruct his disciples about the nature of God’s Kingdom. Given what a theologian recently referred to as ‘the goodness of the Catholic doctrine of Creation and sacramental grace; the Catholic intellectual tradition for its marrying together of revelation and reason, grace and nature’[1], it is evident that the earth and eternity are not entirely separate, that God holds heaven and humanity in both hands. Paul’s message is about generosity, the sense of sharing that gives and gains even more from God’s generosity; Jesus goes even further, expressing self-emptying even unto death, the example that he gave to the end, laying down his life. This is the economy of salvation not in a mercantile but in a merciful manner. Jesus is the seed of God’s Kingdom, a person and not a principle at the heart of the paschal mystery. As followers of Christ we are called to participate by faith in this mystery, perform it in love, pray for it through hope.
The synodal and paschal ways run parallel to each other in the church: without the paschal journey of personal conversion the synodal process might produce change for change sake, setting up structures that will not survive since they are without the support of the Holy Spirit; without the synodal journey in the church the paschal passage might be what Pope Francis calls a ‘self-referential’ process, a so-called spirituality that doesn’t see beyond the blinkered self, that builds on the sand of so-called relevance rather than the rock of God’s revelation (See Matt 7: 24-27).
Fr Kevin O’Gorman SMA
[1] Tina Beattie, The Tablet, 27th July 2024, p. 11.