A Homily for the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 5: 1-7 Philippians 4: 6-9 Matthew 21: 33-43
Gus was always an “all-in” guy. I suppose one had to be, back in the 1950s, if one accepted a college scholarship to play football. He must have been all in when it came to studies as well. Gus graduated from high school at age 16, and, despite his youth, quarterbacked for Saint Mary of the Plains College in Dodge City, Kansas.
One does not expect all-in guys to go missing on game day, but with little time to spare, the Saint Mary’s coach learned that Gus, who had volunteered as a firefighter, was in a small town outside of Dodge, putting out a fire. What can be said? Gus was all in—all over the place. A college bus was dispatched to retrieve the quarterback, and the Saint Mary Cavaliers were ready to play.
Gus broke his right hand in the game’s first half, but he convinced the coach that he could play and throw using his left arm alone. That is how all in Gus was. Sadly, in the game’s second half, Gus broke his neck, ending his college career, athletically and academically.
It sometimes seems as though God demands more of those he has greatly blessed. Maybe that is the meaning of our Lord’s statement that much will be asked of those to whom much has been given (Lk 12:48).
This past week I buried Gus, the all-in quarterback. Like many who have moved away only to return to the Kansas prairie for burial, the man was not someone I knew. But I wish that I had because throughout his life Gus continued to be an all-in guy.
He worked his way into his own successful business until a flood took it and his home. It sometimes seems as though God demands more of those he has greatly blessed. Maybe that is the meaning of our Lord’s statement that much will be asked of those to whom much has been given (Lk 12:48).
Somewhere in those years of struggle, his obituary says, Gus became addicted to alcohol. It ruined his marriage. But the Gus we buried had been sober for more than four decades. When he finally realized that he could lose his children as well as his wife, Gus stopped drinking and smoking, both on the same day. Even then, Gus was still all in.
Jesus identifies himself with God’s decision to be all in for us. But the parable’s point is that it did not have to be this way. God gave more than was required, much more.
At Baptism, each of us is called into Christ. We are commissioned to become another Christ, to become something of who Christ was for others. Consequently, in the lives well-lived of God’s holy ones, God’s saints, we see something of who Christ is. When I think of Gus, I remember that Christ was God’s own way of being all in.
In telling the parable of the vineyard owner, who sends out his son, Jesus identifies himself with God’s decision to be all in for us. But the parable’s point is that it did not have to be this way. God gave more than was required, much more.
Let’s review salvation history. We were created by God to love and to serve. Had humanity never sinned, our lives would have come to some happy end that did not involve entry into God’s own interior life. We would have lived and died serving God, and we would have known contentment in both.
Ironically, if you follow much of what we now say when someone dies, even we Christians have returned to a notion of the afterlife as something considerably less than life in God. We speak of our dead living on in something of a “country club” existence, endlessly pursuing their favorite activities in life. This is essentially the medieval notion of what was called “limbo,” literally life on the edge of heaven. The dead enter the afterlife the living would have known had we never sinned.
When we speak of having a supernatural life in Christ, we mean that we were given back more than we had ever lost.
But once we had sinned, we lost something we could never regain by our efforts. We cut ourselves away from our origin and our destiny. If that bond were to be repaired, the initiative would have to be God’s, but God need not have made his own Son to be the means of our reconciliation. Who among us responds to a rebuff with an even greater commitment of self? Yet God did just this. God threw himself all in.
This is the meaning of a term we do not use much these days, though the Christian faith hangs upon its significance: the supernatural. When we speak of having a supernatural life in Christ, we mean that we were given back more than we had ever lost.
There was a lively debate in the Middle Ages. Would God have become man if we had never sinned? This much is certain. What we were given in Christ is so much more than what we had surrendered in Adam. In Christ God gave himself as the means of our reconciliation.
Our country club talk in the face of death is comprehensible, even forgivable, because our imaginations are not up to the task of picturing what it is like to enter God’s own life, yet this is what our faith professes our resurrected lives to be.
What is it like to be drawn by Christ into God’s own life? How is it so much more than a celestial country club?
First, it involves a radical consciousness, such as we have never known. We will know all there is to know in every moment of eternal existence. What is and what is known will then be for us—as it is now for God and his saints—one and the same. This is why we pray to the saints, the famous and the familiar, with all confidence that they perfectly understand us.
What is it like to be drawn by Christ into God’s own life? How is it so much more than a celestial country club?
Secondly, rooted in the loves and experiences of earth, in eternal life there will be no love, no experience that is foreign to us. We will love all others in a way we could love only a precious few on earth, and we will do this because God will have raised us into God’s own life through these earthly loves. This is why we pray to our saints convinced that they respond to us as those who know and love us.
And finally, there is no past and future in resurrected life, no passage of life’s elements in and out of existence. There is only an ironic satiety, a fullness that grows ever fuller though it has never lacked for anything.
In Adam, we were created by God for something wonderful, something rooted in our natures. We rejected that life, with its natural, blessed terminus, only to have God go all in and offer his own self to us. The remedy for sin is so much more than a restoration of human nature. It is the divinization of our nature.
In Christ, the one who once blessed us with gifts becomes the blessing himself, the great gift. We receive from him nothing less than his own life. Talk about being all in!
