Today is the both a Sunday in Pentecosttide, but also the Sunday in the octave of Saint Matthew, our patron. So let us do justice to both the pericopes of today and the Matthaean story.
Jesus gets into it with religious authorities because he is not ordained or otherwise authorized to practise the Rabbinate. He uses the clever scheme we hear in the gospel [Mt. 21: 23-32] to trap his antagonists. The ploy he uses is on a par with the old canard, "Do you still beat your wife?" There can be no good answer. He asks whether John Baptiser's ministry was authorized by God. If they say yes, then they have no excuse to reject Jesus' authority. If they say no, the crowd -- who accept the authority of John -- will stone them. So they simply say that they don't know. Jesus then says he accordingly has no obligation to answer their query. Jesus 1, Phony Religion 0.
Then Jesus goes on to illustrate the real point of the exchange. A father asks a child to get to work. The child agrees but than does not go to work. The other child demurs but then goes to work after all. Point: the only thing that matters is what you do in response to God's call. You can sign many "faith statements" about accepting Jesus as your personal Lord, but unless you act on it, it does no one any good. In fact, elsewhere Jesus tells us that acknowledging him as Lord will not get us into the Kingdom, only doing God's will, doing right, can do so. [viz. Mt. 7: 21-22]
To put a sharper edge on his point, Jesus goes on to say that hookers and tax agents are taking action in the light of God's call and, thus, entering the Kingdom ahead of these pretentiously pious clerics. That must have stung the professional religionists who specialized in judging and excluding people they considered sinners. Jesus, in fact, had a preferential option for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed.
The Cross turns the world upside down, acting out the story of a Deity who takes on the Dark Side unconditionally, exposing the false values of the world and its systems of domination, and lifting the lowly. It is the drama of God's calling all people of good will into a new kind of community, a new way of living, keeping always before our eyes the vision of the Kingdom of God, a world of peace and justice. There are no natural-born Christians, only people who have chosen to say yes or no to the Good News of what our lives and our world could be.
No comments:
Post a Comment