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561 - Making Homilies for Our Times |
Making Homilies for Our Times
WE all have our own styles, of course, in preaching or in writing homiletic aids. We also have our own characteristic insights in the interpreting of the Scriptures. This is not only inevitable but also very helpful, because life would be intolerably dull if our insights and approaches did not vary. In describing a method of homily preparation, therefore, one can offer certain possibilities, explain certain assumptions and procedures, but all in the realization that other ways may well be better in other circumstances.
I
My own experience is mainly in the writing of a weekly homiletic column which serves various types of readers. Commenting in advance upon each Sunday's readings in the Catholic three-year lectionary, the column is widely read by Catholic parish priests looking for help and inspiration in preparing their own Sunday homilies to be delivered in their churches. They may read the column because they have been preaching so long, year after year, Sunday after Sunday, that they appreciate the contribution of someone else's reflections on the readings. The column is also read by large numbers of devout and rather highly educated lay persons. Some like to meditate on the Scriptures before attending the Sunday Eucharist. Others find the preaching in their own churches unhelpful, and substitute the reading of the column for what they would like to have found in the Sunday homily. What is offered in the column, therefore, is not actually a homily but a homiletic aid which can also serve as a meditation on the Scriptures of the day in the absence of a suitable homily.
The Catholic lectionary offers three readings for the Sunday eucharistic celebrations: the third is always from the Gospels which are read in a continuous sequence from Sunday to Sunday, with some interruptions for special feasts and seasons; the first is generally taken from the Hebrew Scriptures and is selected as commentary upon or supplement to
Monika K. Hellwig is Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, Washington. She is the author of several books on theology and the Catholic church, such as The Christian Creeds (1973), Understanding Catholicism (1981), and Jesus, the Compassion of God (1983). She writes a weekly homiletical-liturgical column for the Jesuit magazine America, a collection will be published in 1987. Her regular readers include some on the editorial staff of THEOLOGY TODAY, and she was invited to prepare an essay on how she goes about her assignment. We feel sure that this personal reflection will be of wide interest to pastors, preachers, and teachers. The sample column which follows the article is reprinted with the permission of the editors from the Oct. 11, 1986, issue of America.
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the Gospel reading of that day; the second is from the other books of the New Testament, and this second reading follows its own continuous sequence from Sunday to Sunday. The result is that on any given Sunday there is supposed to be a clear connection between the first and third readings, but the connection of these with the second reading is only the general connection that all parts of Scripture have with each other. Any closer link is left to chance.
The homilist at a Catholic Sunday Eucharist is directed by the Second Vatican Council and the guidelines of the post-conciliar liturgical commission to preach on the text of the Scripture read that day. The homily is not required to deal with all three readings or any two of them. Many preachers comment on one text only, more usually the Gospel text, and some even take a single sentence or phrase. In writing my column, I have chosen to comment always on all three readings and to explore the connections as far as possible. This choice has been prompted not only by the desire to make the column as broadly helpful as possible to those using it in preparing their own homilies, but even more by the conviction that the Scriptures which are read must be allowed to speak to the congregation. It has not seemed to me helpful to have three texts read and to pay full attention to only one or two of them.
The way the texts are selected and combined is intended as a guide to the Christian reading and interpretation of Scripture. It suggests a Christian perspective on the Hebrew Scriptures and offers a kind of training in reading the Gospels with the depth they derive from the Hebrew Scriptures. The arrangement further suggests the complementarity of the narrative presentation of the good news characteristic of the Gospels, and the proclamation and exhortation mainly found in the letters of the New Testament. For this reason, I have been inclined to take the combinations very seriously, and to consider it as part of the homiletic task to explore their complementarity.
The task of a homilist in the post-conciliar Catholic liturgy is not simply to give a discourse or sermon with a text of Scripture as its starting point. The task is not simply to edify or exhort or accuse or encourage while holding the congregation's attention by oratorical style, poetic expression, or humor. There may be a place for any or all of these, but the essential task is to let the Scriptures speak for themselves to this congregation at this time. That may involve clearing away some misunderstanding or ignorance of context, vocabulary, allusions, idiomatic usages, and so forth. It may also involve a quest for contemporary analogies to the situations portrayed, the relationships described, the customs and obligations observed. Yet, all of this may not turn a homily into a scholarly disquisition. A homily must always be an invitation to deeper faith, greater hope, more practical charity. With all this in mind, I have worked out a method in preparing a homiletic column to serve the purposes outlined above.
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563 - Making Homilies for Our Times |
II
If at all possible, I allow myself several days for the texts to resonate in my consciousness. That means that I read them once, lay them aside, get on with my otherwise very busy life, and refer to them again later when I have a few moments. The day before I must actually write the column, so as to get it to America magazine in time, I set aside some time to consult commentaries to make sure I have understood as closely as may be possible the intent of the original author. This concern is prompted by the Catholic tradition about the meaning of Scripture, which allows for three levels of meaning for any text: the literal, the spiritual, and the applied. The literal meaning is not the sense that the modern reader may see as the obvious one when reading the text more or less naively in translation. The literal meaning is the meaning intended by the original author, which can only be discovered by inquiry into the language, culture, and circumstances of that time, and which is in some cases very elusive. This level of understanding the literal meaning of the text is obviously a matter for the biblical specialist. Being a systematic theologian, therefore, I make it my habit to rely upon commentaries.
Very frequently, I must confess, I find the commentaries unhelpful, although I usually consult several. The reason for this is that the commentators, following their own highly specialized interests, often omit to ask the questions which I find crucial for the next step. For the preacher and the worshiper, the significance of the literal meaning is that it is the foundation for the spiritual meaning which the believing community has come to see in the text. In preparing the column, therefore, I would like to know not only what the coin was worth, or where the city was situated, or how the event must be dated, but also what we know of the people's attitude to the tax, of their experiences of exile, who was literate at this time, what folk-tales were current, and what extra-biblical allusions are being made in the text.
In coming to a better grasp of at least some aspects of this, I have found over a long span of years that it is very helpful to read the Scriptures with the marginal cross references found in larger editions of the Jerusalem Bible. I do not mean the footnotes, but the cross references that indicate earlier texts to which an author appears to be alluding, parallel texts in which the same matter is discussed, and later texts which allude to the present passage in some way. I have often found that a text which seemed flat and obscure became luminous and gained three dimensional depth when seen in the context of these cross references. Moreover, getting a firmer grasp of the literal meaning in this way has often been a large step into the spiritual meaning.
The spiritual meaning is of course the main concern. My own definition of the spiritual meaning is that it is the sense which the believing community discerned in the text and which led them to include it in the canon of writings to be set aside from all others and placed at the
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heart of community worship. Sometimes that sense was already clearly determined at some stage in the redaction history, though in other instances such as the Song of Songs it seems to have been later. In a Catholic context, the key to this spiritual meaning is in the tradition of the churches-in liturgy and hymnody, in patristic writings, in the spirituality traditions, in iconography both graphic and verbal, and in theology. Of course, there have been misinterpretations, mistranslations, and false inferences about the literal meaning, so that the traditions have constantly had to correct themselves in the light of better information. Yet, there is no doubt that there is a treasury of traditional wisdom in discerning the spiritual meaning, which yields a far richer meditation on the text than anyone could achieve by personal reflection aided only by a biblical commentary.
How one draws upon this traditional treasury is more complicated, or at least more elusive. It is certainly a great help to be acquainted with the church Fathers and to read them often. It is immensely helpful to be acquainted with the Hebrew tradition of midrash, and to turn sometimes to the Midrash Rabah for discussions of texts from the Pentateuch. Most helpful of all, perhaps, is the liturgy itself. To be immersed in the liturgy for successive cycles and to observe how the liturgical prayers, hymns, antiphons, responsories, and so forth, echo and reflect, combine and apply, select and juxtapose, biblical imagery, story, and more complex symbol is indeed to internalize and appropriate the spiritual sense as drawn out by the worshipping church, and to grow into a certain spontaneous orthodoxy in the matter.
It is largely for this reason that I like to read the texts some days in advance and allow them to echo in my mind and memory and imagination, so that there is time and opportunity for those passive mental processes in which connections and correspondences appear spontaneously from shadowy recesses storing things read and heard and experienced long since. It is for this reason also that, after consulting commentaries and getting the literal meaning as fully and clearly as possible, I like to give time again for those passive mental processes. Of course, there are many occasions on which I would greatly appreciate having another week or two to draw things together and find the best focus, but the weekly deadline is inexorable, and something has to be put on paper then and there and dispatched with the next mail.
III
When the deadline draws near, the remote preparation necessarily comes to an end, and the immediate preparation for the writing of the homiletic column begins. The first part of this, in my way of going about it, is to discern what is the dominant theme in these texts. That usually means eliciting the main theme of the Gospel reading, and trying to see what the excerpt from the Hebrew Scriptures contributes to that theme, whether by way of clarification or comment or supplement. Sometimes the Gospel reading offers a narrative paralleled in some way by a
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narrative in the Hebrew Scriptures-two resuscitations of the dead, two healings, or something like that. In this case, one story may carry more explanation than the other, or the earlier story may provide the clues to the symbolism or allusions in the Gospel story, or the Gospel story may be constructed quite deliberately to surpass the earlier story. At other times, only one of these two readings is a story while the other is an exhortation or proclamation conveying the same message as the story. In this case, it may be possible to use the exhortation or proclamation as commentary or elucidation of the story, or to take the proclamation as the primary text and use the story as illustrative. In any case, it seems important in the immediate preparation to arrive at some clarity for oneself concerning the principal theme and the way the two readings relate to that theme.
Once I have the theme, my next step is to find a title for the column which will immediately tune the reader's mind and attention to the theme. Sometimes this takes me considerable time and reflection, but I find it worth the time and effort because I am convinced that the two or three words of the title are the most important words of the column. They provide the focus or perspective in which the column is going to be read. At the same time, I search for the best quotation from the day's Scripture readings for the text set at the beginning of the column (as a brief text might be read or proclaimed at the beginning of a homily). When at all possible, I take as the title for the column a phrase straight from those Scriptures which projects an image, evokes a story, or points readers to their own experience by referring to some universal human situation or relationship. It seems that the closer the connections can be made at this point between the text, the title, the reader's experience, and the development of the theme in the column, the more the Scriptures are able to speak for themselves with resonance-and this, after all, is the purpose of a homily or a homily aid. Because it is so important to make the connections as closely and spontaneously as possible, it is especially helpful if a good quotation from the second reading (the one that moves in its own sequence) can be used as an approach to the two connected readings. Sometimes this is possible, but it seems better not to strain the point if it is not reasonably possible.
Once the title and the introductory quotation have been chosen, it only remains to choose the order in which the three texts will be introduced, to decide how to develop the meaning and connections, and especially to consider in what way to tie in the third reading. The content of the column will be: an elucidation of anything not immediately clear in the literal meaning, so far as this is possible from scholarly sources; reflection on the spiritual meaning as this has come into focus from the ecclesial sources mentioned and from the column writer's own prayer and experience; and finally some suggestions concerning the applied meaning of the texts in our own society and times. This last, of course, has to be done with a very light touch, because the danger always lurks that the writer or preacher might drown out the voice of God in the
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Scriptures with the clamor of some personal preoccupation or pet project. On the other hand, it is important to suggest the applications, because the danger at the other extreme is that a homily can be treated as a piece of oratory to be enjoyed for its entertainment value and evaluated for its literary content and form, and that it may never become an invitation to deeper faith, greater hope, and more practical charity.
In planning the development of the theme, two aspects may be troublesome. The first is the question of the order in which the writings are to be introduced. If possible, without mental and literary gymnastics, I introduce them in the order in which the congregation has heard them read out. However, this is frequently not the best order because it separates the two connected readings, putting the one that moves in its own sequence in the middle. Therefore, I tend more often to introduce first the text that most clearly presents the theme, then move to an exposition of what the other (connected) text adds to it, and finally come to the other New Testament passage.
This other text provides the second troublesome aspect. A reading that follows its own sequence will not be closely tied in to the theme except by a happy coincidence. When there is such a coincidence, there is no problem. When there is not such a coincidence, many preachers think it wiser to let the third text pass without comment. I have three objections to this. In the first place, it means that a large and important section of the New Testament is not made part of the worshiping community's prayer and reflection. In the second place, it is precisely this section of the New Testament that many believers find obscure and confusing, requiring elucidation and careful discernment to understand what is culturally conditioned and applicable only in that time and circumstance and what is for all time. In the third place, because all the Scriptures speak to us of our salvation, there is necessarily some connection between any two readings, though it may not be close.
After all the remote and immediate preparation described above, I consider the main theme of the day's readings from the point of view of a disciple learning a way of life, an interpretation of reality. Having reflected on that theme as presented by the two connected readings, I come to the third reading to find out what it has to offer as guidance to a disciple who has in mind the understanding just gained from the main theme. Whatever strikes me as significant in this context I state in the concluding paragraph or so of the column, allowing it to be as closely or as loosely connected as is spontaneously suggested. In this way, the third reading is not neglected, but it is also not forced into an artificial pattern.
Having thought all this out, I usually find that by the time I come to write the column, it all falls into place very smoothly. At this stage, the main task is to keep the expression as simple as possible, so that it does not get in the way of the message. When all is said and done, the point of a homily is just to allow the Scriptures to speak with the fullest possible resonance.
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For the reader's perusal and consideration, there follows a column that appeared in America about the time I was writing this description of the method involved.
Twenty-ninth Sunday of the Year, Oct. 19. Readings: Ex. 17:8-13; II Tim. 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8.
"He spoke to them in a parable to show that they should keep on praying and never lose heart" (Luke 18:1).
Some of the comparisons Jesus draws or suggests are startling, even shocking. If anyone else had dared to compare God with an unjust judge swayed ultimately by the nuisance value of the plaintiff, we should be inclined to consider it blasphemous and irresponsible. And yet, in times of persecution, disaster, oppression, and widespread injustices in society, God may appear to the victims as just that-an unjust judge. While the violent and the greedy continue to enrich themselves, the poor suffer. The wickedness of the powerful against the powerless seems to go unchecked in the affairs of the world.
No one could have realized better than Jesus that it frequently looks as though God is asleep or simply does not care. Certainly the circumstances in which he himself lived and died could well have been interpreted in that way. Jesus urges us to believe, trust, and pray against all the appearances of divine indifference. But the question the whole passage prompts is whether, when the Son of Man comes, he will indeed find that sort of faith among his followers.
The widow in the parable is, of course, more than anyone else, Jesus himself. Yet he stresses that the only claim she has upon the judge is her powerlessness, her need, and the injustice that has been done to her. And this, Jesus suggests, is the claim that the elect, God's chosen, have against the all-powerful compassion of God, whether the elect be the people of Israel, the friends of Jesus, or simply the powerless poor who enjoy God's predilection.
Certainly the parable is applicable to the story from Exodus, which forms the first reading in the liturgical setting. The preceding sections of Exodus suggest not only that Israel's resources to fight the Amalekites were inadequate, but also that their morale was at a low ebb. Entirely dependent for sustenance on the heavenly manna, barely calmed of their riotous panic by a miraculous flow of water to slake their thirst, they are attacked in their precarious existence by the forces of Amalek. Moses here is like the poor widow of the parable. Sustained by the support of Aaron and Hur in his dramatic gesture of prayer hour after hour through discouraging weariness and powerless exhaustion, Moses is surely the one who pleads without ceasing in the dogged faith that God will vindicate the elect.
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The excerpt from II Timothy is also about patient perseverance in the confident expectation of final vindication. But it is not concerned so much with prayer as with perseverance in the way of life that has been shown to the followers of Jesus, and particularly with perseverance in the pastoral ministry that has been entrusted to Timothy. The context of the passage tells us that this advice also is given in the expectation of persecution of the "godly," while the wicked and the deceitful move unchecked from bad to worse. There is more than a suggestion that the credibility of the Christian faith may be strained to the utmost, and that steadfastness in Christian life and ministry will not come spontaneously. It will be necessary to seek wisdom and discernment in the Scriptures, and to take constant care to lead a disciplined life.
It is only in the confident expectation of the coming of Jesus in judgment and in victory that courage and perseverance can be found to continue the ministry of the gospel in season and out of season by every means available. So the text proclaims, and so it has in fact been, then and ever since the apostolic foundations. But the implication of this passage is that to live the life and ministry of the gospel great confidence is required, not only in God, but also in the possibility of human conversion. It is clear here that the expected vindication is not so much the punishment of the ungodly as the conversion even of the most unlikely, even under the least promising circumstances. The attitude of ceaseless pleading in the face of seeming indifference is appropriate, not only in prayer when God does not appear to answer, but also in action for faith and justice in a world that does not seem to respond.
Reflection on all three readings suggests that the shocking comparison in Jesus' parable penetrates to the core of our situation as Christians in the world of our own time, with its unchecked cruelties and oppressions, its heedlessness of the threat of total global annihilation, its increasing gap between rich and poor, its money-hungry compromises with poisons, addictive drugs, and disease. Ours is a time for the poor widow to plead in the face of a hostile silence with the indomitable hope that God will still vindicate.