AUGUST 25th 2013. TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY OF ORDINARY
TIME
GOSPEL: LUKE 13:22-30
From a homily by
Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio.
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Don Fabio’s
homily follows the Gospel.
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GOSPEL:
Luke 13:22-30
Through towns and villages he went teaching, making his
way to Jerusalem. Someone said to him, 'Sir, will there be only a few saved?'
He said to them, 'Try your best to enter by the narrow door, because, I tell
you, many will try to enter and will not succeed.
'Once the master of the house
has got up and locked the door, you may find yourself knocking on the door,
saying, "Lord, open to us" but he will answer, "I do not know
where you come from". Then you will find yourself saying, "We once
ate and drank in your company; you taught in our streets" but he will
reply, "I do not know where you come from. Away from me, all you wicked
men !"
'Then there will be weeping and
grinding of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the
prophets in the kingdom of God, and yourselves turned outside. And men from
east and west, from north and south, will come to take their places at the
feast in the kingdom of God. 'Yes, there are those now last who will be first,
and those now first who will be last.'
THE GOSPEL OF THE LORD: Praise to you Lord Jesus
Christ.
Kieran’s summary . .
. A man asks Jesus if only a few people
will eventually be saved. Jesus does not reply that only a few will be saved,
but that the door to salvation is narrow and many will not succeed in entering.
But if God is really good, then why is this door to salvation so narrow? Don
Fabio points out that the narrowness of the door is not spatial but temporal.
We are presented with opportunities every day to follow the Lord and these same
opportunities will not present themselves tommorrow. These opportunities are
doors that are open for a narrow window of time and then they are closed
forever. This Gospel should rouse us to the seriousness of life. Life is not a
video game where you can be killed and then start again. The business of living
is not like being a trapeze artist who has a safety net to catch him whenever
he falls. I can’t afford to wait another day before becoming a good parent, a
good spouse, a good worker. The Gospel condemns those who eat and drink
with the Lord, listen to his word, but who are not with him in the sense of making his word the fulcrum of their daily
life. Every day we must ask
ourselves a simple question: What opportunity does Christ give me today to be
with him? What is the narrow door that Jesus presents me with today so that I
can enter to be with him? Maybe that door is a situation in my life that I need
to entrust to the Lord!
A man asks Jesus an
apparently academic question. But it is not an academic matter for Jesus!
A man asks Jesus
if only a few people will end up being saved. Curiousity of this sort hardly
seems inspired by the Holy Spirit! I would never ask the Lord, “Will my brother
live or will he die?” as if it were an academic question. Indeed, Jesus is
described in this passage as being on his way to Jerusalem Jerusalem
The door is not
narrow in a spatial sense. It is narrow in a TEMPORAL sense: the opportunities that
are presented to me today will never be presented again.
Why is the door
described as being narrow? Will overweight people have a problem getting
through? The rest of the passage, however, indicates that the door is not
narrow in a spatial sense, but in a temporal
sense. It remains open for a certain
interval of time, then it closes. We have occasions and opportune moments
for receiving salvation. But if God is really good, why would he close the door
after a certain time? Because life is not a video game. Life is not a western
from the fifties where the posse arrives in the end when all appears lost. Life
is a serious matter. It is high time I stopped thinking that life is like being
a trapeze artist, and if I fall it doesn’t really matter because there is a
safety net below to catch me. This is not to say that salvation comes from me
or depends completely on my acts. But it is
true to say that it is up to me to go through that door that has been presented
to me. We must stop thinking that it doesn’t really matter whether I sin or
not; that it doesn’t really matter whether I am obedient to the Lord or not.
God places a way before me and it really does matter whether I take that path
or not. It isn’t true that I can afford to live one more day without showing
true love to the spouse that the Lord has given me. It isn’t true that I can
afford to be negligent towards my children for one more day. It isn’t true that
I can afford to do another mediocre day’s work. My work is an open door towards
greatness, towards the joy of sharing in the banquet with my master. And that
door will eventually become a closed
door. Every door of this sort does have an end in the temporal sense. To give a
banal example: if there were no final exams, few students would bother
studying. Activities need to have end moments that give sense to the activity
that preceded this moment. Otherwise we would have difficulty motivating
ourselves to undertake the activity in the first place.
Jesus
does not deny that we have listened to his word and shared in his banquet.
However he denies that the WORKS that we do are rooted in listening to his word
or partaking of his banquet.
Jesus goes on, “Once the master
of the house has got up and locked the door, you may find yourself knocking on
the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us’ but he will answer, ‘I do not know where
you come from’. Then you will find yourself saying, ‘We once ate and drank in
your company; you taught in our streets’ but he will reply, ‘I do not know
where you come from. Away from me, all you wicked men !’” What a terrible thing
for us Christians! All of us have eaten in the company of the Lord in the
Eucharist and all of us have received his teaching. Jesus does not deny that we
have eaten in his company. He does not deny that we have heard many splendid
homilies. But he questions the origins
of our actions saying, “I do not know where you come from”. Our point of
departure in daily life, in other words, is not
his word. We are doers of unjust works in the sense that we fail to do his works. Our deeds do not
stem from our relationship with God. Injustice, in the Hebrew sense, is not a
legal term. It indicates, rather, the failure to act out of one’s relationship
with God. We eats the Lord’s wine and bread, we listen to this words, but our
actions are not rooted in the Lord. In the parable, the master of the house
says, “I do not know you”. We have no intimacy with God if we do not act in
accordance with his word.
If we fail
to be intimate with Christ, if we fail to make his word the origin of our
actions, then the condemnation that awaits us is simply distance from Christ
The real condemnation that awaits
those who who fail to enter by the narrow door is expressed in the words, “Away
from me!” The gravity of the issue, in the end, boils down to the fact that our
failure to act in accordance with God’s word means that we have no intimacy
with him and find ourselves distant from him. It is interesting that the
condemnation is expressed in these words! Jesus does not formulate his parable
to say that those who fail to enter by the narrow door end up being hungry, or suffering
some sort of physical discomfort. The condemnation, rather, is purely in terms
of distance from Christ. And the words of comfort addressed to the good thief
on the cross is that he would be with
Christ that day in paradise. When one is with Christ one is in paradise. When
one is distant from Christ then there is “weeping and grinding of teeth”.
We must
ask ourselves continually: What opportunity is Christ placing before me today
so that I can be with him? Where is the narrow door?
We must ask ourselves a simple
question: What opportunity does Christ give me today to be with him? What is
the narrow door that Jesus presents me with today so that I can enter to be
with him? Maybe that door is a situation in my life that I need to entrust to
the Lord!
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