Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB - celebrant
Isaiah 66:18–21
Hebrews 12:5–7, 11–13
Luke 13:22–30
The vision God puts before us today through the prophet Isaiah is expansive. It is truly a picture of a universal community coming together in the Lord. It is catholic, in the root meaning of that word. It is also one we should feel comfortable with and are able to recognize. The key seems to be in the geography. It is helpful to update the place names of Tarshish, Put and Lud, Mosoch, Tubal and Javan. When we do this, we find that it is all the peoples who live in the Mediterranean basin that are coming to the gathering that God has called. Today we would have to say places like Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal and on the south side, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. If the peoples represented were diverse in the 500 years before Christ, they are just as diverse today. Just think of all the nationalities and ethnic groups that border the Mediterranean. Think too of the great variety of religious beliefs today: groups representing various approaches to Islam and the variety of Christian communities of West and East, not to mention those today who profess little or no belief. This is the source of the community God is calling together and it includes those who have never even heard of him.
If the makeup of the peoples is overwhelming, so is what God asks us to see in them. He calls them our brothers and sisters, for he understands them all as in some way, his children. He even envisions that they will be integrated into the worshiping community; they will not be given back row seats let alone left outside. Some, the Lord says, will even be serving at the altar and exercising leadership. And they will not come empty handed. They will themselves become an offering to the Lord. They will come with the treasures of their culture, their language, their recognition that there is an author and father of all life.
I say we should recognize this vision, this gathering that God is bringing about, because we know it as our experience of Church. For us it is not just a list of where the Church can be found today in distant lands. It is a reality for our Church in the USA today. There may not be too many from the Mediterranean basin. But our world is truly global and in its mobility that globalization is experienced in our land. The people are coming from our own sea, the Caribbean, like Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic. These can all be found in our gatherings as Church. So also our neighbors to the south, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama and further south. And to the West, beyond the Pacific, we have seen the peoples of Vietnam, Philippines, Korea and China and India especially. In many of our communities the universal church is not over there or far away, it is in our own backyard. Our own back yard—there are the nations of the indigenous peoples, and those who find their roots in Black Africa.
The final vision of the prophet Isaiah is not something in a dream world or for a distant future. It has become our present experience of God building up his family. It is apparently not accidental, this gathering of everybody. It is part of the mystery of our God’s way of working.
So it might seem that the Gospel today comes with a discordant note to this grand vision shared by Isaiah. Jesus does speak of the Kingdom of God as the place where nations gather, east and west, north and south, he says. In other words, the world. But he seems to put a limit on who can sit at the table or enter the Kingdom. He talks of entry through a narrow door. What does he mean by this rather restrictive attitude?
Remember, Jesus is talking to the home community, to those who are to get ready to receive this global membership. What he is doing is checking their expectations. We humans seem to prefer being selective. We take charge and make sure that those come in whom we might judge worthy. We set up some criteria for sitting at the banquet table. Jesus chooses one example. Namely, it is who you know that matters. Or put another way, a place in the Kingdom is open to those with connections. Who did you or I do business with, the stranger or a family friend? Jesus roundly rejects that entry ID, to the consternation of his friends. When they claim to know him and have been in his company, his response is “I don’t know where you come from?” It turns out that it is not who you know that matters it is who you are. It is a matter of where your heart is not social status or connections that are so dear to us. Sitting and eating at table with Jesus does not seem to be the key to getting into the Kingdom. It is not a matter of being seen as belonging to Jesus for a while. It is a matter of what you carry within you. It is a matter of “where do you come from.”
Jesus doesn’t answer the question of how many will make it into the Kingdom. All he does is point us to the narrow door and send us back to our origins in our deepest self, in our heart. The key to entrance into the Kingdom is that narrow gate. And Jesus has made it clear that the narrow gate is what he is walking toward on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The narrow gate is his Passover accomplished on the cross.
You and I know that the cross is more than a violent end to an innocent man. The cross is a work of love. It is a work of giving up oneself for the sake of another. Suffering and death are what the Father is asking of Jesus in Jerusalem. This is the offering he is bringing. This is what Jesus will recognize as what relates him to us and we to him, and you and I to one another. Remember Jesus said that it is the one who does the will of the Father that is brother and sister to Jesus, son and daughter to the Father, brother and sister to fellow human beings. And the Father’s will is clear: I want all to be my children. And I want all my children to be those who love from the heart, love enough to set aside self so that others can live. This self-emptying for others is possible now. It is not restricted by geographical limitations or by social status or by race, by sex, not even by religion. The only restriction is a failure to hear God’s call to turn toward him and to one another with a heart open to the Spirit’s breath of love.
To do this takes discipline of action, of attitude, of values and priorities. But that too is part of the narrow gate. And for those who are strong enough, they know that when they do that, their heart, as St. Benedict and the Psalmist affirms, will expand in inexpressible love. And that is the key to recognizing who will be at the table in the Kingdom of God. Because a heart of faithful love is who our God is.
~Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB