Small actions can have a big impact, both for good and bad, like yeast working in dough. Fr Richard reflects on today’s readings from Mass.
Readings for Monday of week 23 of ordinary time can be found here.
On 1 December 1955, a woman called Rosa Parks, who happened to be Black, was travelling home on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, USA. The rules of the time in Montgomery required Black passengers to give up their seats to white passengers when the white section was full. When asked by the driver to move, Rosa Parks refused, was arrested, and later fined. In one sense it was a small act, though one requiring great courage – a woman sitting on a seat on a bus. But her small act led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted more than a year and became a hugely important moment in the American civil rights movement. Rosa Parks challenged the existing rules of the time with a sense of what was right.
We see something similar happening in today’s Gospel. What Jesus does is, on one level, a small act – healing the right hand of one man (though I’m sure it made a big difference to that man!). It takes courage on the part of Jesus, for he is challenging the rule-and-regulation focussed mindset of the Pharisees. Yet Jesus’ act goes beyond healing just one man, in the same way that what Rosa Parks did was about more than one woman on one bus. He is demonstrating a completely new approach to life, one where the driving force is love, compassion, healing and wholeness. In this simple act of healing, Jesus is showing us what his Kingdom is all about.
In our first reading, Paul talks about the negative side of a small action having a big impact. “You must know how even a small amount of yeast is enough to leaven all the dough, so get rid of all the old yeast”, he says. He uses this image to reflect on problems in the church at Corinth. Yet we can also turn the image around. In the Gospels, Jesus compares the Kingdom itself to yeast, working away quietly inside the dough. So the question for us is this: what does our yeast look like? What are those small actions and attitudes which can have a big impact on our life and community? Like some in Corinth, is it a yeast which corrupts the dough, or like Rosa Parks and Jesus himself, is it a yeast which brings life and wholeness?
Mass today is in St Dyfrig & St Samson at 6.30pm.
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