A Homily for the Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 55:6-9 Philippians 1:20c-24, 27a Matthew 20:1-16a
It is easier to get God wrong than right. Much easier. At least, without the grace of God.
That was the melancholy message that Abraham Lincoln delivered in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, just 41 days before his assassination. Many pundits found the speech closer to a sermon than a political address. The president had turned prophet.
With hundreds of thousands killed since his previous inauguration, Lincoln stood beneath a capitol dome, still under construction, and contrasted the ways of God and men.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
It is easier to get God wrong than right. Much easier, but that should come as no surprise. God said so himself.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
As high as the heavens are above the earth,
so high are my ways above your ways
and my thoughts above your thoughts (Is 55:8-9).
However we might define God, we are not God. We speak of God as the fullness of goodness, truth, unity and beauty. But whatever we know of these things, we certainly do not possess them in their fullness, which is God. So, how is it that our world never lacks folk who are so sure that they get God right?
It is easier to get God wrong than right. Much easier, but that should come as no surprise. God said so himself.
Perhaps it is this talk of God dwelling within us. But the talk is true! So that is at least one thing that we get right, is it not? Not really. God lives within us the way our origin and our destiny dwell within us. We carry both with us, but we cannot be said securely to put our hands on either.
Indeed, this notion of God within us as origin and destiny perfectly illustrates a maxim, which Pope Francis has repeatedly used in many of his most important writings—among them the encyclicals “Lumen Fidei” and “Laudato Si’” and the apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia”—that time is greater than space. His most detailed exposition of the theme is found in his encyclical “Evangelii Gaudium”:
A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space (No. 222).
But of course, we believe that God has come to us in the very person of Jesus the Christ. He is the fullness of God, the one who remains among us, as he promised, in the mystery of the church. So we cannot speak of revelation itself being wrong. And we possess God’s revelation, do we not?
Revelation is not a personal possession, which we can lock away in space. Precisely because it comes from God, revelation has depths we have yet to fathom.
Yes, but even revelation comes before us as a collective horizon, something unfolding in time, as the Holy Father insists. Revelation is not a personal possession, which we can lock away in space. Precisely because it comes from God, revelation has depths we have yet to fathom.
Moving forward into the fullness of faith, infallibility belongs only to the teaching office of the church. Collectively, Christ will not allow his church fundamentally to lose the way. No such promise is made to an individual, acting as an individual.
Individuals can be quite wrong about what has been revealed. All of us are limited by our intelligence, our backgrounds, our education and our prejudices. All of us are compelled to make judgments under the reign of sin.
Yes, we are sinful. Yes, we so often get so much so wrong. Arrogance weighs us down. But if we at least attempt to walk ahead, the Scriptures tell us, God awaits us.
And of course, one can know the faith and fail to live it. Doctrines, right teachings, matter greatly, but doctrines are ordered toward graced decisions just as right teachings are ordered toward righteous lives. You can be right in the head but not yet healed in the heart.
Yet the Scriptures do not bring our fallibility, our sinfulness and our limited vision before us only to castigate. No, they do so by way of encouragement. Yes, we are sinful. Yes, we so often get so much so wrong. Arrogance weighs us down. But if we at least attempt to walk ahead, the Scriptures tell us, God awaits us.
Seek the Lord while he may be found,
call him while he is near.
Let the scoundrel forsake his way,
and the wicked his thoughts;
let him turn to the Lord for mercy;
to our God, who is generous in forgiving (Is 55:6-7).
God is not inconsistent in pardoning or hiring at the last moment. All of us are far from home. God is the fullness of our future. God is our horizon, not some prized spot of the present moment. So simply to go forward is to walk in the way of grace, to walk toward the Lord. As Lincoln himself is said to have put it, “I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.”
God must come to meet us all.
