Readings of the day: Isaiah 66:18-21; Psalm 117:1, 2; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, and St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.
Do many of us ever reflect on
the phenomenal diversity in our world of religious faith; of the number of
faiths in our world, each with a particular approach to encountering the divine
through acts of worship and devotion, and also through acts of individual charity
and social justice? Of the more than 7.5 billion people on Earth now, 2.4
billion are Christian, and 1.1 billion are Catholic. Even among these 2.4
billion Christians and 1.1 billion Catholics in our world, do we not see great
diversity of religious practice, some of which is divisive, even a
counter-witness to Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel that we might “all be one,” but
much of which is legitimate and enriches our Christian faith and the world?
Our reading today from Isaiah
and our Psalm particularly view this diversity of faith in a positive way,
especially for the time of these Old Testament writers. Isaiah writes
originally to encourage the people of Israel who are nearing the end of a
lengthy exile in Babylon, a foreign nation that worshipped gods foreign to
Israel and Israel’s God. I suppose Isaiah could have urged the people of Israel
to close in on themselves and to develop a set of religious practices and
worship of the God of Israel closed off to the rest of the world. But instead Isaiah
prophecies that peoples and nations who do not even know the God of Israel, “the
coastlands far away that have not heard of [God’s] fame or seen [God’s] glory,”
will be drawn to the God of Israel by the descendants of Israel’s exiles to
Babylon.
Isaiah does not say how these foreign nations will be drawn
to the glory of the God of Israel, only that they will. This presumes that the
people of Israel will become messengers, prophets after their prophetic leaders
like Isaiah, of the glory and fame, and so right worship of the one God, the
God of Israel. But how they will communicate this message and have all the
nations accept the glory and right worship of one God remains a mystery as the
book of Isaiah ends at the prophecy we hear today.
Our Psalm, even more than
Isaiah, emphasizes that the worship of the one God of Israel is and will be for
all nations and all peoples. Psalm 117, the shortest Psalm in our Bible,
proclaims with pithy energy, “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all
you peoples! For great is his steadfast love to us, and the faithfulness of the
LORD endures forever.” Again, though, our Psalm is not specific as to how all peoples and all nations are to
praise and extol the LORD, or how
they are to experience this “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” of God that the
Psalmist proclaims to be so universal. After all, can religious experience ever
be exactly uniform everywhere and at all times, even among people of the same
faith, let alone among people of different faiths?
If we see our world today, would
it not seem that prophecies like those of Isaiah and our Psalm are far from
realized? Some experts on these questions estimate that there are about 4 200
recognized religions in the world today. It would seem, then, that we are far
from all peoples acknowledging and worshipping one and the same God, much less
the God of Israel; the God of “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” extolled by
our Psalm.
Even among people of the same
religious faith, there is sometimes great diversity in religious experience.
There are not only differences in denominational traditions, as we see in
Christianity among Eastern and Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, but
differences within each of those traditions: Differences in particular private
devotions and forms of prayer; generational and ethnic differences from one
worshipping community, parish, or diocese to another; differences in religious
experience created by the increasing mobility of people and globalization
nowadays, and so on.
All this diversity and
difference can be wonderful, even enriching to a faith community or to the
world, but can it not also be a challenge to us? Does this diversity not
naturally lead us to ask: When is diversity legitimate or not? What are
essential truths (or is there any single Truth) that allow for little or no leeway?
Is there one or are there several true religious faiths? And, if there is only
one true faith or a limited range of true religious practice, what about the
salvation of people who do not belong to the one true faith, who choose not to
believe the claims to truth of a particular faith, or have never experienced
religious faith? Are people of no faith, by choice or not, saved?
The easy answer to these questions
is that all this is a mystery. Whether our God, as we Christians believe God to
be the God of all peoples and nations, will save only people of our Christian
faith, of many, or all faiths, is beyond our capacity to answer. But simply to evade
the question like this may not be helpful to us. In contrast to Isaiah and the
Psalmist, whose tone toward the diversity of religious and experience of the
peoples and nations around Israel is more accepting, even welcoming (although
Isaiah and our Psalm still limit true praise; true worship to one God), in
Luke’s Gospel we hear a more exclusive message from Jesus: There is a “narrow
door” through which we are to “strive to enter” in order to be saved. The
person who asks Jesus, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” seems to have
understood Jesus’ teaching correctly: Indeed only a few will be saved. But what
does Jesus actually mean by this pessimistic-sounding teaching we hear in
today’s Gospel: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you,
will try to enter and will not be able”?
We could go back to evading
the question: If we cannot understand what Jesus was trying to teach, why
bother continuing to discern what Jesus meant? Or we could try to place Jesus’
teaching about striving “to enter through the narrow door” in the context of
the rest of our Gospel reading and of the other readings we hear today. At this
point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are well into their long
journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Galilee, for the most part Jesus and his
teaching and healing ministry had been well-received. In Jerusalem, he would
enter the city through its narrow, crowded gates. Within days of being received
into the city as a king, he would be expelled from the city and crucified outside
its gates. A quick note about Jerusalem: I have been to Jerusalem, so I have
experienced literally the narrowness of its gates; its doors. Probably, then,
in today’s Gospel, Jesus is referring to his impending entrance into the
literal city of Jerusalem of his time. More figuratively, to follow Jesus; to
be a disciple of Jesus would have meant to follow him through the “narrow door”
of the earthly Jerusalem, to the end of a journey that was to lead to death,
for Jesus and for many of his earliest disciples. To enter the earthly
Jerusalem through its “narrow door,” though, to accept humiliation and even
death was and is the only way to resurrection; the only way to salvation; to
eternal life.
So I do not think that, by
inviting his disciples to “enter through the narrow door,” Jesus is or was
excluding anybody who is not of a specific religious faith—who is not
Christian, or who was not of Jesus’ own Jewish faith in his time—from the
possibility of salvation. In fact, the rest of today’s Gospel reading gives us
some needed context on Jesus’ meaning by, “Strive to enter through the narrow
door.” Salvation will be denied to those who insist on being “first” at the
expense of others they exclude out-of-hand: People who think differently from
us; who are of a different religious faith than us; people who look different
from us. In this way, people who insist that they can gain salvation on their
own, on account of their own wealth or the right ideas or right religious faith
and so forth, will be “last” while those dismissed as “last… will be first.”
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