Today’s readings: Isaiah 66,18-21; Hebrews 12,5-7.11-13; Luke 13,22-30.
God’s dream is to gather all nations together so they may proclaim His glory and make their offering on His holy mountain in Jerusalem. This is what the prophet Isaiah tells us.
But has he got it all wrong? Or is it we who fail to grasp God’s ways and dreams? Between the imaginary Inferno of Dan Brown and the raging infernos in what we prematurely labelled the Arab Spring, today’s scriptures talk to us with realism.
In our theologies and in our struggles to explain the unexplainable, we’ve denuded God of His transcendence and reduced what is spiritual to materialism. We’ve gone so far as to think God belongs to our culture, rendering entire peoples and continents as outcasts far from the centre.
All this because we put ourselves at the centre, like when we believed planet Earth to be the centre of the universe. We repeated the same mistake in the spiritual sphere.
Many attempts were made in the 20th century to broaden our perspective beyond the restrictions that favoured the white western imperial mindset. As author Diarmuid O’Murchu writes in his book Christianity’s Dangerous Memory, “central to all these new developments was a desire to reframe the power basis of the Christian faith”.
A clash of ideologies began to emerge in the wake of these developments, a phenomenon we are still experiencing with all the attempts in the post-Conciliar Church to reverse the clock. Pope Francis is a breath of fresh air in all this. He seems to prefer the risk of reaching out rather than the security of being entrenched in a fortress Church.
Huge sections of the local Church, hierarchy and laity alike, still remain alien to this wake-up call. Alarming forms of restorationism are emerging that obscure any signs and movements of vitality. The alternative to reframing the power basis of our faith lies in continuing to perpetuate a faith that is backward-looking, a faith rooted not in tradition but in traditionalism, a faith that for many people is void of any hope.
With such a faith, Isaiah’s dream would remain a dream. A dead faith would block us from seeing the signs God is giving in our culture. The provocation from Isaiah is powerful, in that as believers, rather than simply repeat doctrine, we are called to make tangible and visible God’s glory “to the distant islands that have never heard of me or seen my glory”.
In the gospel it is remarkable how the people Jesus depicts as knocking on the door after the master had locked it seem to have been insiders, not outsiders, those who ate and drank in Jesus’ company and who had familiarity with him. Salvation is too serious a matter to be bound to a set of requisites. Jesus speaks of “the narrow door”, which should throw light more on the journey of life than on the exit from it.
It is the journey that puts us all on common ground in front of God’s mystery. Settling down and feeling self-assured, as if belonging to the Church would of itself serve as guarantee, can yield surprises. The only guarantee, if we can ever speak of guarantee at all, are the words from Hebrews: “Hold up your limp arms and steady your trembling knees and smooth out the path you tread; then the injured limb will not be wrenched, it will grow strong again.”
The real powerful prophecy of today’s gospel is in the words of Jesus when he says: “Men from east and west, from north and south, will come to take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God.” It confirms Isaiah’s dream and belies many pseudo truths we have propagated as God’s truths.
The church father Gregory of Nyssa, in his book The Life of Moses, speaks of the mystical significance of Moses’ experience of God. Moses “at no time stopped in his ascent. Once having set foot on the ladder which God set up, he continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained.”
Encountering God face to face, which is, after all, what salvation is about, is a matter of self-improvement, of fundamental and existential choices that chart our path and that help us seek out for that step higher in life.