EYE TO EYE

EYE TO EYE
Homily for Wed of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time,
Memorial of Sts. Joachim and Anne,
26 July 2023, Mt 13:1-9

I wonder if you’ve noticed that when British royal parents talk to their children, they don’t talk down at them. They stoop or lower themselves to be able to communicate with them at eye level. I find that edifying. It means they take their children seriously—even when they are having tantrums.
That’s the kind of image that I get of God in our first reading—like a father patiently going down to the Israelite people’s level, looking at them in the eye, even when they act in a very annoying way like entitled brats. The responsorial psalm picks up from the first reading to caricature the bad attitude of the people in the desert when they began to get hungry and long for the fleshpots of Egypt, how they even regretted that they had left Egypt at all. The psalmist says, “They tempted God in their hearts by demanding the food they craved. Yes, they spoke against God saying ‘Can God spread a table in the desert’?”
I remember my own maternal grandfather doing what Prince William does to his children. When he wanted to talk to me, he would sit on his rocking chair and make me stand beside him so he could speak with me eye to eye, with his hand on my shoulder. Since he became well- known in Pampanga as a sculptor and maker of religious images and icons, he told his stories complete with visual illustrations—the kind that children will never forget.
Today we commemorate the maternal grandparents of Jesus. I have a feeling that Jesus became a master storyteller as in today’s gospel, because of stories that Sts Joachim and Anne had told him while he was growing up in Nazareth. You see, many of the stories we heard from our grandparents are like precious seeds. Obviously not all of them germinate and bear fruit.
I remember a young priest talking in his homily about how his grandfather tended to tell the same stories over and over again. Apparently the old man