Readings of the day: Jeremiah 18:1-6; Psalm 146:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6ab; Matthew 13:47-53
We hear two distinct messages from Matthew’s Gospel today. First, Jesus offers us one of his many similes of the kingdom of heaven that are very typical of the Gospel of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like”… Second, Jesus extols the ideal scribe (maybe the ideal faith leader?) as “the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is old and what is new.”
Today, Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a net, thrown in the sea, in which many “fish of every kind” are caught. Once the net is ashore, the fish are sorted into good and bad; the bad are thrown out. The comparison to heaven—in fact, to the final judgment at the end of time—is simple: Angels will, at the end of time, “separate the evil from the righteous”; the righteous will enter heaven, while the evil will be cast into a place (or state) of eternal punishment, “the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Matthew will take up this image of strict separation of the good from the bad in the end times toward the end of his Gospel, just before the Passion of Jesus, when Jesus gives an extended discourse of the sheep and the goats. In that discourse, in Matthew 25, we hear more about what kinds of actions or inaction will result in us finding ourselves either among the sheep, those who will enter the kingdom of heaven, or the goats, those who will be excluded from heaven and punished eternally.
In Matthew 25, whether we inherit the kingdom of heaven hinges mainly on our attention to social justice, to care for our sisters and brothers most in need: The hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the imprisoned, and so on. This is a good reminder to us in our quite individualistic cultures in well-off countries (mostly) in the global north that our Gospel understands what we might experience at the end of time—our Church once spoke more often about death, judgment, heaven and hell, the “last things”—less in terms of reward or punishment for individual righteousness or evil (although we are still, individually, morally accountable to God and one another) and more in terms of a social or common good.
Among the biblical Gospels, Matthew is maybe the most sensitive to the corporate, social, common, communal good. We are not saved or condemned eternally alone, but together, depending on our society’s attention to the common good of one another, care for all of creation.
I have had this thought many times as Pope Francis continues what he has called his penitential pilgrimage to Canada, to further reconciliation with our Indigenous peoples against whom our Church participated in horrific, intergenerationally traumatizing abuses; cultural assimilation and colonialism, especially through the residential school system. From his first public address of this pilgrimage, just south of here in Maskwacis, a former residential school site, Pope Francis has begged forgiveness for the wrongs of Catholics and other Christians in the name of our faith and in collaboration with Canada’s governments against our Indigenous people.
There have been calls for Pope Francis to acknowledge not only the wrongs of many Christian individuals against our Indigenous people, but the evils perpetrated against them as corporate, institutionalized, social sin of the Catholic Church. We may be inclined to dismiss these calls as unnecessary, the special interest of “the media” often looking for a counter-narrative (in this case to the acknowledgement of the pope’s sincerity). But, considering today’s Gospel, I suggest that these calls include a valid and important reminder for us: Just as we are not saved or condemned alone, reconciliation and forgiveness are not individual pursuits but those of the whole Church. Matthew the Gospel writer had a keen sense of this whole-Church, whole-community dimension of sin and grace, judgment, accountability, forgiveness and reconciliation.
To forget this is to forget the value of Jesus’ second point in today’s Gospel reading. To forget this is to continue to devalue the treasures, new and old, that Indigenous cultures can offer that enrich our Church, that remind us of our social, communal, familial roots that ultimately draw us back to God, the common Creator of us all. It is easy for many (even, maybe especially, in the leadership of the Church) to fall back on blaming “media” contrarianism for speaking messages we do not want to hear. It is easy to fall back on forms of clericalism, slavishness to existing power structures—all forms of perpetuation of colonialist, nationalist, individualist attitudes that continue to create victims, have-nots, and to commodify human lives.
Instead, today’s Gospel invites us to reflect and act on the communal, social dimensions of sin and evil, but also grace and reconciliation. Our Gospel invites us to be like the ideal scribe, who brings out of our treasure the best of who we are, in a gift exchange with other peoples and cultures who also bring us their treasures, their memories, their recognition of God’s gifts—lands, ancestors, communities—both old and new.
