Mass readings for the Patronal Feast of St. Augustine:
Isaiah 66.18-21 Psalm 117.1, 2 Hebrews 12.5-7, 11-13 Luke 13.22-30
This morning, we have a distressing, plaintive question from someone in the crowd Jesus is teaching: “Lord, will only a few be saved?” Clearly, he’s been talking about judgment, the kingdom of God as integral to the notion of redemption, but also the needed changes we must make to be able to enter that kingdom, the difficult choices that, well, these don’t save us, but they make us open to receive grace, and so God’s salvation.
However, Jesus to a great degree, actually ducks the question. His answer is not a direct response, but a reframing of that and similar questions that continue among the faithful (and not so faithful) today, especially in anxious times.
We get from Jesus’ parable that we need always to be considering our relationship with God, asking ourselves, “Does God know us?” and “Do we know God?” or are we at risk in holding the dangerous presumption Jesus alludes to in this story where many are dumbfounded to find themselves shut out, protesting that “we ate and drank with you…” only to hear “I do not know you.” Are we true friends of God? Or have we presumed upon our baptisms, our participation in the sacraments, to know Christ when really, we’re strangers.
The temptation that Jesus is anxious to remove is this neglect of our own spiritual lives by casting our eyes around at others, wondering if they are damned or redeemed. To reference another time Jesus talks about judgment and our personal salvation, we can become those who see the specks in the eyes of others while being oblivious to the splinters in our own – and so, we fail to see what we are doing that is taking us out of friendship with Christ, and leads us to presumptuous judgment of others. We can become the busybody, the self-righteous, smug and self-satisfied. Too often those who repeat the question about the lost and the saved do so with the unconscious assumption they are saved by their acknowledgment of God’s judgment.
There’s an unfortunate recurrence of that thinking in our society, both Christian and secular elements. Historically, we know about theological movements such as Calvinism that came with the Protestant revolt, and later Jansenism, a Catholic heresy. Both claimed to offer knowledge of who is saved. And one understands the appeal in knowing: through the difficulties of life, one has the consolation of getting to heaven; and one’s sense of justice is satisfied in knowing the bad people will get theirs in everlasting hellfire.
In secular terms, we might speak of “political correctness” or “being woke” as the counterpart to the Christian heresies I mentioned. The concern here is not about getting into heaven, but more about social acceptance and status, whether we’re good people or not, and so rightly admired by others as we feel good about ourselves. And the evidence of our goodness is in our correct opinions about the issues of the day. Being among “the good” justifies the wealth and privilege we enjoy, absolves us of guilt for society’s failings.
Again, what inevitably occurs is that those who assume their righteousness become smug and self-satisfied, but what is more odious is they come to judge others. Seeing little or no evidence of another’s goodness, and so, in Christian terms their redemption, in secular terms their right to participate in society, it becomes too easy to rationalize injustice against them. We can unconsciously or with conscious contempt, deal with others in a condescending, dismissive manner because they are God’s enemies, because they are “bad” people.
Coming back to the question to Jesus from the crowd, we should appreciate the context for this question: the apocalyptic expectations of the Jewish people in the first century. As I’ve mentioned before, there was a pervasive sense of impending crisis in what we today call “the Holy Land.” And that was manifest in the formation of alternative communities of faith outside the cult of the Jerusalem Temple. So, you have the Essenes who went out in the desert near the Dead Sea at Qumran (they are suspected of being the ones who originally hid the famous Dead Sea Scrolls). There were many short-lived popular movements like the one that formed around John the Baptist; and, of course, there is the community that coalesced around Jesus of Nazareth. They were responding to the signs that Israel was disintegrating, and its end would certainly bring something cataclysmic; and so, they were forming communities in which to weather the storm, but also to provide the nucleus of a new civilization, one that would be pleasing to God. But because this is the nature of their project, they don’t want to allow in the contagion that led to Israel’s downfall; they don’t want to repeat the same mistakes.
I’ve spoken also of the political dimension of this. The different factions in Jerusalem, pro-Roman, anti-Roman, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the family of Herod, they were all trying to use these spiritual expectations to further their own designs on gaining power – these politicians were offering to shepherd the people through the coming change and into a bright new future. They too came to the conclusion that not everyone is fit for the new kingdom – in the case of Jesus, there is no need for this disruptive Messiah. When we look at more recent history, we can see that impulse to eliminate those unworthy of the new world that is being made in the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulag, the murderous persecution in communist China under Mao, the nightmare of Cambodia’s “Year Zero” seen in its infamous killing fields.
Pope Leo’s concern is that the new economy taking shape will exclude huge numbers of people; some projections see as much as a third of the population unemployed, who will then need to be maintained, warehoused in public housing, or in some government subsidized accommodation, given a stipend for the purchase of food, and doubtless cannabis and alcohol to self-medicate for the depression that comes of lives without purpose. But then, could we not then say, this was always their destiny, these are the damned, the irredeemable, and the evidence of their fallenness lies in the state of life they are in, forgetting that none of them actually chose it.
Our patron, St. Augustine, who we celebrate today, laid much of the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built. He’s been misused, and flagrantly misinterpreted to support a lot of the bad theology I’ve spoken of. While he did teach that human beings are fallen, and very morally and spiritually weak, he nonetheless said that with God, by grace, we all have the possibility of making it through that narrow gate. We just need to see our way there, and so, he was very concerned that as an initial step toward this, we have clarity of sight, spiritual sight: to see what we are doing, and correct what we are about when it strays away from Christ’s teaching. What gives us this sight, purifies it, is love – the love that is the desire for the good of others. And as he radically proposed, true divine sight is had when we can look at the sinner and the saint, the seemingly fallen and the apparently saved without preference. That is, we reach out to them and serve both without favour to one or the other, hopeful for all.
The purpose then of the Church, this particular parish community that we are constantly repairing and rebuilding, is one of mutual encouragement and help in becoming Christ’s friend, gaining purity of sight, and so, seeing ourselves with honesty, regarding others with charity, and then doing what needs to be done. That the help we can offer to each other is in getting the specks and splinters out of our eyes so as to see more clearly, and love more dearly.
Today is a time of change, with a sense that the settled arrangements of the last eighty years, those made in the aftermath of the Second World War, are coming to an end, and there is understandable anxiety. We might not have the same society-wide anticipation of an apocalypse, but I would say that thoughtful Christians are framing their understanding in terms of where God is taking us, and asking how we are to get to that new place that God will show us. As Christ’s friends, known by him in our knowing him, we can take on the disciplines both painful and pleasant involved in discipleship that will yield the fruit of righteousness – these secure our place in the kingdom of God, and not our knowing how many are saved or lost. This is a training of heart and mind, through prayer, service, worship and study. This is a training that restores strength to drooping hands and weak knees, heals us in our lameness and disjointedness, makes us able to make those straight pathways for Christ to come among us, and for those arriving from all points of the compass to eat, indeed, feast with him and us in the kingdom of God.
Amen.