21st Sunday Year C - Homily 5

 Homily 5 - 2019

I remember a short verse that I learnt from childhood: “Every time I pass a church, I always make a visit, so that, when I’m carried in, Our Lord won’t ask, “Who is it?”” It had quite an influence on me. [Not so likely these days: You can’t always find the church doors open, and I suspect the younger generation may not even know what you’re talking about when you refer to a “visit”.] And also I wonder now if, from my child’s point of view, I was trying to keep sweet with God, unconsciously trying even to manipulate God – a bit like how children hope to get on side with Santa Claus.

I suppose, even as adults, we think in certain situations that we can expect a bit of special treatment. We priests have been notorious for it. It’s called clericalism. But it is not just priests. The ‘old-school tie’ might be a secular equivalent, or barracking for the same footy team. Just because we are Catholics, we might be tempted to hope that we will get a bit of preferential treatment with God. Not on! Irrelevant! Thank goodness!

Look at today’s Gospel, and the question: “Will there be only a few saved?” As far as God is concerned, God wants everyone to be saved – God loves everyone. “People from east and west, from north and south, will come to take their places at the feast” – no preferential bookings, no corporate boxes. But who gets saved is not just up to God. It is up to us as well – necessarily so. Salvation is the lived experience of our loving relationship with God; and relationships are two-way: God loving us; we loving God. Salvation essentially calls for our whole-hearted, absolutely indispensible loving cooperation. It does not, however, depend on people consciously believing in God, or having an orthodox definition of God. The Mystery that is God can be encountered and embraced in real life in the transcendent values of Justice, Compassion, Truth, Peace-making, etc., whatever practical shapes they take.

This is what Jesus was talking about when he advised us, “Try your best to enter by the narrow door”. Travel light. All we need, really, is love on our part. And loving calls for nothing more than, firstly, genuinely trusting God and God’s love, and then entrusting ourselves wholeheartedly and enthusiastically to God. Everything else is superfluous, and even gets in the way. We can’t win special treatment. Manipulation, or bargaining, does not work with God – just love. We need to strip ourselves of the heavenly equivalent of bringing to God’s attention “We once ate and drank in your company; you taught in our streets”. So what?

How do we rid ourselves of the expectation of special status, or special treatment? It can work right across life, and not just with God. However people feel about the result of Cardinal Pell’s unsuccessful Appeal against his original conviction in the County Court, it must be heartening for victims of abuse in general, so many of them innocent young Catholics when they were abused, along with their families and friends, to realize that their voices have been heard and their suffering taken seriously – and that secular prestige, access to financial backing and ecclesiastical rank did not sway the outcome of the legal process.

Where to from here? Perhaps as a Church we could do well to ponder long and deeply what Jesus had in mind by recommending that we “enter by the narrow door”, whether as individual Christians or as Church community – radical change or cosmetic touch-up? He obviously meant what he said back then. And whatever our first reactions, Jesus saw it somehow as good news.