27th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 5 October 2025
We have explored before something of the nature of parables in the Gospel and the techniques the parables use to communicate their meaning. One of these techniques is hyperbole: something is overstated to make a point. It was an excellent technique in an oral culture, used to the art of storytelling. The hyperbole itself is not to be taken literally. It is the point of the hyperbole that demands our attention.
The use of juxtaposition is another technique: two statements are put aside each other, one informing and opening the meaning of the other.
However, the use of juxtaposition in the texts of Scripture indicates to us the importance of paradox in all matters religious: things that at first appear opposite or even contradictory, if held in tension, work to reveal the truth.
Most often we find it hard to deal with paradox: we want one side to the exclusion of the other. Life feels simpler that way. The people of the Scriptures, however, delighted in paradox. They knew “life flows from springs both muddy and clear.” (Carl Jung). Thus, the Scriptures are not written with the linear logic we are used to in modern times. The people of the Scriptures honored apparent contradiction, paradox, as the way by which the Sacred is preserved. They knew God is immanent and transcendent, distant and near, unapproachable and approachable – all at one and the same time. This preserves the Mystery of God.
Perhaps the closest we, in our modern times, come to some appreciation of the importance of paradox is in the tension between rights and responsibilities. We need to hold both in our society, never one without the other.
It’s not surprising that when Jesus himself, schooled in the Scriptural logic, talks about sacred things, like faith, he too uses the engagement of paradox.
There is a paradox in the two pieces we have just heard. They are two little statements about the nature of faith, but we need to hold the two statements together if we want to understand what Jesus is teaching. In other words, if we only take one statement to the exclusion of the other, then we will miss the full significance of what Jesus is teaching us about faith.
So, given both statements, what is Jesus teaching us about faith? Using two sets of images, he is saying to us on the one hand faith empowers us; on the other hand, it renders us accountable. On one hand it takes us beyond what is imaginable; on the other hand, it has concreteness about it. It takes us beyond the merely empirical, on the one hand, yet it is known by our actions. It is beyond the ordinary standards of measurement, yet its quality is fully observable. Faith renders our life with completely unexpected responses, yet faith also brings a certain demand on us.
There might be any number of ways that this essentially paradoxical character of faith might be apparent to us. Yet we only know faith in and through some concrete experience. Faith in this sense is like love. We do not know love as something abstract. We know love by having loved someone. Thus, we only know faith in the way that we bring it to bear on actual experiences in our life.
So, what is an experience in life in which we come across this paradoxical character of faith? There could be a number from which to choose but let me just highlight one – that experience of life that most tests our faith: the battle we have with the mystery of forgiveness, i.e. how we respond to the experiences of being hurt.
The expected response when we are hurt is vengeance, resentment, pay back, getting even, punishment on the one who has hurt us. Our faith in the possibility that Jesus offers us invites us, however, to a completely unexpected response, often as apparently bizarre as uprooting a giant tree into the ocean. This is the unexpected response which holds back from revenge, the response which stands back and waits, the response which in the waiting considers, not without pain, what action might bring lasting healing to all.
This completely unexpected response, the response that defies our ordinary expected instincts, is a specifically Christian demand, difficult as it is for all of us without exception. Yet struggling with its demand reminds us in a very real way, and, as I say, not without pain, of the One whom we are following.
The Gospel teaches us that faith informs our life with unexpected responses, sometimes even judged crazy by a logic not informed by Christian faith. Though it is a struggle at times, may we not shy from the demand of those responses to which we are invited by our faith.
