Today’s readings: Isaiah 66, 18-21; Hebrews 12, 5-7.11-13; Luke 13, 22-30.
Honestly enough, today’s readings sound very contradictory. A great sense of inclusiveness transpires from Isaiah, portraying God’s kingdom as wide open to include as many as possible beyond any imaginable boundaries. Then the gospel reading couples this inclusiveness with the concept of the narrow door through which, Jesus affirms, “many will try to enter and will not succeed”.
Yet reading in depth both Isaiah and the Lucan text, there is a very clear message. God’s mercy is infinite, even boundary-less, but should in no way water down the gospel’s radical call to discipleship. If the gospel message is watered down and loses its peculiarity, it is no longer the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This explains what is affirmed in the gospel itself about those who “ate and drank in the Lord’s company”, and yet who were not known to him. “I do not know where you come from”, the Lord answers, shutting them out.
So the Lord’s embrace is wide open, but the door to access Him is narrow. It sounds contradictory, but it is not. His grace is gratuitous, but it can be missed. In the gospel frame of mind, a superficial acquaintance never works. There is a calling that is open to all, but it demands a following. The opportunity is offered to all, but not taken by all. There is nothing automatic, having to do with belonging to a particular culture or people or even religion.
The personal dimension of answering the call can never be delegated or substituted by a secured membership through baptism or the routine sacramental practice. In this day and age we are past the times of a national Church or a national identity as Christians. What makes one a Christian is no longer the belonging to a civilisation or to a culture. Culture no longer determines one’s faith. It is the inner spiritual journey that each and every one of us are pursuing that posits us within the orbit of the kingdom of God.
Tomas Halik, a Czech priest and author who worked as a psychotherapist, in his book Night of the Confessor speaks about a weary Western European Christianity going through a time of lethargy and drowsiness. We live in an era that has been labelled ‘post-modern’ and which has declared the end of the great narratives. As Halik comments: “Maybe today we won’t encounter Christ where people tend to seek him first but instead he will come to us like he did to the travellers on the road to Emmaus: as a stranger, an unknown fellow traveller.”
I consider this very telling about our situation and it explains further what the gospel today is saying. We are living in times when our call is to go back to the drawing board, where our understanding of Christianity is concerned. As a people and individually, we need to let Jesus retell the great narrative we hunger for and which does not simply consist of the same old Bible stories which throughout time we watered down to bedtime stories for children.
The opposite of belief is not unbelief, but when as far as faith is concerned we are diagnosed as having a burnout syndrome. The monks and hermits in the early centuries of Christianity identified this as acedia. Acclaimed writer Kathleen Norris wrote extensively about acedia, exposing the damage it does not only to individual lives but also to our culture as a whole, as we are inundated by distractions, and lose the ability to care about work, marriage, commitment, friendship, faith and community.
In contrast to the monastic rhythm of prayer and work that established a routine that monasteries have followed for centuries, acedia is the routine that makes us impatient, restless, inattentive, wanting always to take shortcuts. There is so much of what we do, even in our churches and in our personal lives as Christians, that simply doesn’t work anymore.
We seem to be, to use today’s gospel imagery, knocking in vain on a locked door. This is a wake-up call lest we continue to miss what faith and belief are about. Eating and drinking in his company can so easily be transformed into baroque celebrations where he remains the stranger and we become the estranged.