Twenty First Sunday Homily of Ordinary Time Year C

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY HOMILY OF ORDINARY TIME YEAR C

IN ORDINARY TIME

Is 66:18-21 Heb 12:5-7, 11-13 Lk 13:22-30

Who in the World Will Be Saved?

To Whom Does Salvation Come“); Education in Christ; Salvation: What Does It Mean?; Is Salvation Easy?; Are We Smug?; Discipline and Correction.

1st Reading – Isaiah 66:18-21

¹⁸ Thus says the LORD: I know their works and their thoughts, and I come to gather nations of every language; they shall come and see my glory.

¹⁹ I will set a sign among them; from them I will send fugitives to the nations: to Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan, to the distant coastlands that have never heard of my fame, or seen my glory; and they shall proclaim my glory among the nations.

²⁰ They shall bring all your brothers and sisters from all the nations as an offering to the LORD, on horses and in chariots, in carts, upon mules and dromedaries, to Jerusalem, my holy mountain, says the LORD, just as the Israelites bring their offering to the house of the LORD in clean vessels.

²¹ Some of these I will take as priests and Levites, says the LORD.

Responsorial Psalm – Psalms 117:1, 2

R.(Mk 16:15) Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
or:
R. Alleluia.

¹ Praise the LORD all you nations;
glorify him, all you peoples!
R. Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
or:
R. Alleluia.

² For steadfast is his kindness toward us,
and the fidelity of the LORD endures forever.
R. Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
or:
R. Alleluia.

2nd Reading – Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13

Brothers and sisters,
⁵ You have forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as children: “My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him;

⁶ for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges.”

⁷ Endure your trials as “discipline”; God treats you as sons. For what “son” is there whom his father does not discipline?

¹¹ At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.

¹² So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees.

¹³ Make straight paths for your feet, that what is lame may not be disjointed but healed.

Alleluia – John 14:6

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
⁶ I am the way, the truth and the life, says the Lord;
no one comes to the Father, except through me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel – Luke 13:22-30

²² Jesus passed through towns and villages, teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.

²³ Someone asked him, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” He answered them,

²⁴ “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.

²⁵ After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door, then will you stand outside knocking and saying, ‘Lord, open the door for us.’ He will say to you in reply, ‘I do not know where you are from.

²⁶ And you will say, ‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’

²⁷ Then he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you are from. Depart from me, all you evildoers!’

²⁸ And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves cast out.

²⁹ And people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.

³⁰ For behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”

Homily

Anthropologists have never encountered a culture where people do not laugh to express merriment and sociability; even deaf people sometimes laugh out loud. Babies begin laughing at the age of two or three months. The rate of laughter picks up steadily for the next several years, until around the age of six, when the average child laughs 300 times a day. After that, social training and the desire to blend in with one’s peers conspire to dampen liberal laughter. Estimates of how much adults laugh vary widely, from a high of 100 chuckles daily to a dour low of 15, but clearly adults lose their laughter edge along with the talent for ﬁnger-painting

Some authorities View that decline as a blow to the health of body and spirit. When you laugh robustly, you increase blood circulation, work your abdominal muscles, raise your heart rate, and get the stale air out of your lungs; after a bout of laughter, your blood pressure drops to a lower, healthier level than before the buoyancy began. And there are subtler effects of laughter on the immune and neuro-endocrine systems. Big business is beginning to be persuaded of the ﬁnancial value of laughter on the job.

Our Judeo-Christian tradition includes both comedy and tragedy; we often forget the comedy. Some artists—Botticelli, for example— never painted saints smiling. A Renaissance genius with great poetic imagination, fantasy, and elegance, he became famous for the softness of his light and his skillful use of perspective. Among his renowned paintings on religious themes are many Madonnas, his exquisite “Adoration of the Magi”, and a solemn “Nativity”. But, deeply affected by Savonarola’s preaching, he never painted smiling saints.

Although the Gospels don’t record any instance of Jesus laughing outright, there are instances of his humour; it would be most surprising if he didn’t enjoy, for instance, the wedding ceremony and reception at Cana. All the expressions in the Jewish Scriptures about joy and laughter were, after all, his tradition.

And laughter is an essential part of our heritage. That heritage has pointed out that to laugh is proper to human beings. We instinctively know that at times we must quickly laugh for fear of having to cry, that it is ﬁtting for us to laugh because hope has a happy place with us, and that our destiny, heaven, must contain an inextinguishable laugh. Even though the world be mad, we are born with the gift of laughter. Children jingle with laughter as though they had swallowed sleigh bells, and their laughter is natural until life takes — or we take —it away from them.

And of all the people who have ever lived on this planet not one is known to have ever died of laughter. To the contrary, when you laugh, your diaphragm vibrates as though dancing, and you have dancing cells. All your cells are happy, and when you are happy you have a longer life.

But it is also important to be serious, and today’s liturgy deals with that. In St Luke’s Gospel, as Jesus was going through towns and villages, teaching as he went and making his way toward Jerusalem (v.22), someone asked him a serious question that has always intrigued people. How many people will be saved? (v.23). Isaiah’s answer had been general — “a remnant” (Is 10:19-22). The prophet Amos had been more speciﬁc —‘one-tenth of the population (5:3). The questioner here probably expected an equally precise number.

But the person had asked the wrong question. The right question is, “How do you get to be saved?” So Jesus made the three points that are the message of today’s liturgy salvation requires effort (v. 24); you should seize the present moment (vv. 25-28); and no one should be smug about salvation. Some “outsiders” will be accepted and some “insiders” will be turned away (vv. 29f.)

With regard to salvation requiring effort, two erroneous religious traditions have grown up. One is the conviction that baptism or religious heritage alone — being Catholic, for example — will be a ticket of admission. The other is the delusion that we can earn salvation by some kind of spiritual athletic exercises alone. Jesus’- narrow door is somewhere between these two. Jesus is saying that we are not to travel with the mob, but to struggle with all our might in-our own particular circumstances. One thing’s certain: no one just saunters in.

As for seizing the present moment, Jesus’ parable isn’t only told; like a gun, it is aimed — at the Jewish leaders. The time will come when it will be too late; the door to salvation is going to be locked (v. 25). At that time, the leaders will come to the master of the house — Jesus himself — and try to remind him that they ate and drank in his company and he taught in their streets (v. 26). Their efforts will be in vain. There comes a time when. in the words of St Augustine, the lackadaisical must come to realize, “Too late have I loved you, 0 Beauty so ancient yet ever new! Too late have I loved you!”

As for smugness, the labels we hang on “outsiders”, like some of the Jewish leaders hung the label “evildoers” on non-Jews, may be reversed (v. 27). The leaders, and sometimes we, are like little children who form secret clubs with secret passwords for the membership of those whom they like and the exclusion of the unpopular. When the door to salvation is opened the smug, arrogant, and self—satisﬁed leaders will be surprised to find inside the very ones they would have excluded — non—Jews from every corner of the earth (v. 29). The sole key to inclusion is transformation, made possible by loving, grace—ﬁlled commitment.

Jesus’ words reﬂect today’s First Testament imagery from Isaiah which speaks of bringing people from all the nations to the holy mountain of Jerusalem. Today’s portion of Isaiah — the ﬁnale of the whole book — opens a vision of a glorious future in which humankind’s covenant with God is opened to the whole human family. Returnees from every part of the globe known to people of that time (v. 19) in which God’s people had been scattered from around the entire Mediterranean, from Spain to Turkey, will come back to Jerusalem. (Their strange names in the reading come from Gen 10, the “Table of Nations”)

Their procession is almost liturgical. Nations of diverse cultures and races will lead the Israelites home (v. 20), using horses, chariots, carts, mules, camels, and every other form of transportation imaginable. A joyful concept and a joyful procession indeed! Both Isaiah and today’s Responsorial Psalm highlight the teaching of Jesus that salvation extends beyond the borders of Israel.

Yet, why do people suffer so much for salvation? Why does God seem to treat His children so poorly? Today’s portion of the letter to the Hebrews addresses that question and continues the lessons of the Gospel. The unknown scholarly author gives practical advice in handling the consequences of being a true follower of Christ — both those who have been on trial for their faith and those who must suffer the minor tribulations of trying to lead a Christian life in a non-Christian ambiance.

God begins by encouraging them. All of us who travel the road to salvation, both the strong and the weak, need encouragement. The word “encourage” comes from Latin and French words meaning “one who fills the heart”. You can encourage by a personal note, a greeting card, a phone call, a small gift, a favourite food, a funny story, or even just a smile, a wink, a hug, or a handshake. Encouragement is oxygen to the soul. No one ever climbed spiritual heights without it; no one ever fully lived without it. All of us must bask in the warmth of approval now and then or lose our self-conﬁdence.

As artists ﬁnd joy in giving beauty to others, so anyone who masters the art of encouraging will find that it blesses the giver as much as the receiver. There’s much truth in the saying, “Flowers leave part of their fragrance in the hand that bestows them.” A near miracle happens to people whose self—esteem has been raised. They suddenly like other people better; they are kinder and more cooperative with those around them; they want to like you and cooperate with you. (Nowhere are these realities truer than in marriage!)

In the style of the rabbis, the author of this letter chose one word as God‘s encouragement of us and as the answer to the problem of following God: paideia (v. 5). Literally the word is from pais, child, and means everything that adults want to pass on to their children — formation, culture, civilization, education. Someone once observed, “There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children — one is roots, the other wings.” Giving both to our children and to others means empowering them with the freedom to rise above negative scripting. Instead of transferring negative scripts to the next generation, we must change them.

Often, as here, paideia is translated into English as “discipline”. ‘When ‘We teach our children discipline, we are teaching them how to suffer, yes, but also how to grow. What are the tools, the means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that is discipline? There are four — delaying of gratiﬁcation, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.

The letter gives as its ﬁrst key image that the Lord disciplines as a father does his child, but with even more love and even greater wisdom. God’s children can, for their part, have many attitudes toward discipline. We can simply he resigned and accept it, with the defeated recognition not of a father’s love, but of his power. Or we can accept it with the grim determination of getting it over with as Soon as possible. Or we can take it with self-pity. Or we can take it as a resented punishment from a God Who’s vindictive, which is the way many see Him. But the attitude advised here remains the best: to accept it as coming from a loving father, asking, “What is God trying to teach me through the discipline of this suffering?”

If God didn’t discipline, that kind of non-caring lack of love would be a worse punishment. All discipline from God has its source in love and is aimed at good. In the face of the fact that life’s way to salvation is often tough, there are always members with drooping hands and weak knees (v..12). Sometimes that includes us. So the letter returns to another key image. We are in a race, and we must persevere despite occasional pain that goes right down to our very bones.

As we go, and perhaps wonder about our salvation, let us remember that there will be surprises, and there is hope. Amid our contemporary promotion of selﬁshness as the way to freedom, we find in the life of Jesus in today’s liturgy at least two elements that are clearly worth imitation. First, Jesus was committed — disciplined, as the letter to the Hebrews might say — to face up to all the consequences of his life choices before God, right up to death itself. Secondly, his penetrating vision cuts through human pretence to the core where the true person lies under whatever we may have acquired of complacency, narcissism, self-inﬂation, or other detritus. May God help us on our way, through both laughter and tears, to salvation those who accompany us — no matter what the number of those who accompany us.