Thirty-seven years ago a giant in love and relationship, a man who loved the Church and worked all his life to promote the gospel message, died at the age of 63. That man was my father. His vision of relationship within the Kingdom of God and relationship as key within the Church informs my words today.
Relationship is at the heart of our sense of the kingdom of God and also at the core of our best sense of Church. The theologian Father Richard McBrien, who holds the Crowley-O’Brien Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame has explored this concept in recent articles in the National Catholic Reporter on the Church as a communion. His writings are also a springboard for these reflections.
Let us take a look at the first two readings to see what they tell us about relationship. That beautiful passage, from the prophet (and priest) Ezekiel, written during his exile in Babylon lays the groundwork for our notion of salvation as that which brings us to wholeness through healing. The image of shepherd in this passage is wrought with words that speak of healing: rescue, rest, injured, sick, heal, etc. This is one compassionate shepherd! The last line tells us that in the end, there will be a reckoning but not until after we have been given countless experiences of compassion and healing.
The second reading is a selection from the Pauline letter that gives us a full insight into the life of the early Christian community - that first generation of followers of Jesus. What it tells us is that in the face of death and resurrection, the Christian reality that entered the world in Jesus is not really about “I” but rather is about “we”. Paul writes that the first fruits are for “those who belong to Christ”. That is us. And that is, according to scholars, the whole of humanity and the whole of the cosmos – the new Body of Christ. The Church, in its best sense, treasures the interrelatedness of that new Body. The last words of that passage are “that God may be all in all.” That is the basis of the inter-relatedness in Christ.
The gospel passage, of course, is the ultimate key to the kind of relationship to characterize that new Body of Christ. But first, a little more on this notion of communion. Communion is an apt description of our Church (at its best) and Communion is certainly the idea behind the gospel notion of kingdom toward which we are moving.
The Second Vatican Council taught us that the Church is both a communion of God and ourselves (the vertical dimension) and a communion of ourselves with one another in Christ by the poser of the Holy Spirit (the horizontal dimension).
(National Catholic Reporter, September 2, 2011 Richard McBrien)
The Church’s challenge today is to recognize that it is not an end in itself but a means toward the eschatological reality of the Kingdom. The ritual, the sacrament in the Mass, celebrates this reality. And we are continually called to recognize that participating in the Mass, a celebration of communion in this sense, is not enough.
The mystery, the challenge, of living this sense of communion goes beyond the walls of the Church. It is misunderstood if not connected to today’s Gospel story.
In a recent speech at the Jewish Federation awards event, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said:
To be a Jew is to be a member of a community and that’s not just our community but the community at large…. We have an obligation beyond our community to serve.”
He also quoted the prayer that is to be said at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem:
Who are you if you are not for yourself?
What are you, if you are only for yourself?
Many, today, are seeking to enhance this sense of communion across generations, across cultures, across levels of authority, across nations, throughout the world. Desmond Tutu’s words ring so true in this context:
God’s passion is the transformation of the world.
This gospel gives us a clue as to how. One way is through compassion.
At the Call to Action conference a couple of weeks ago, the final keynote was given by Cuban-born theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz. Ada focused on compassion as a central element of communion. She said that compassion comes naturally to us and that it even has a physical component which is rooted in the brain. We know that many of us human beings don’t develop this natural tendency. She claimed that the exercise of compassion is crucial to the new order of relationship that is called for in the gospels.
She spoke of the tiny nation of Bhutan that measures a GNH each year. I bet most of you have never heard of a GNH (I had not!). You know well, of course, that the GNP (Gross National Product) is supposed to give us some sense of the economic health of a country. Well, this relatively new nation, it seems, wants to measure happiness rather than economics so they have instituted a Gross National Happiness (GNH) measure. Part of that process is to look at the compassion citizens have toward one another (wondering how we would measure up in this country? ….so am I!)
The gospel message today is so familiar to us that it might just roll over us….Who is it that this passage calls us to be in relationship with, to be in communion with?
Those who are hungry…thirsty...strangers…in need of clothes…sick…in prison….
Okay! You might say….I support this or that group or I volunteer at this food pantry or that soup kitchen or…I give to those bell ringers who are now on the streets of our city. Shouldn’t that put us on the side of the sheep rather than the goats?
I would like to suggest a different kind of relating to people who are hungry or poor or strangers or in need of clothes or sick or in prison.
My thoughts here are based on the writings of the recently deceased Jesuit Dean Brackley who died last month in El Salvador. Dean articulated a common experience of us, North Americans, who visit the poor people of El Salvador:
We, North Americans, come to “give” and then find ourselves wondering why our hosts are smiling in the face of physical poverty and hardship beyond our experience and even, beyond our comprehension.
The more people, like us, let down our defenses in this situation, the more, Dean says “things fall apart” (he quotes here from William Butler Yeats).
The visitors begin gradually to allow themselves to be freed from their own sense of superiority and allow themselves to begin to experience the different dimension of life that these people, living in utter poverty, are willing to share with these visitors. Once the visitors let down their guard and let go of their role as the ‘ones who come to give”, the more they begin to realize that these people are full-fledged human beings and in a rather complex awareness of the fullness of these people’s lives, the visitors are the ones who are transformed.
If we allow others (those who are poor, those who are hungry or thirsty or in prison or sick or lonely…) to liberate us from our own sense of power or superiority or thinking we are better than they, Dean says, we are led to know the fullness of our own selves in a new way and we are placed before
"the abyss of the holy Mystery we call god. These people are… a kind of door that opens before that Mystery and through which God passes to get to us. Clearly we need them more than they need us."
(Meeting the Victims, Falling in Love, Solidaridad; Articulating a Spirituality of Human Rights by Dean Brackley SJ, Salvanet, CRISPAZ, January-February 2000)
That meaning of the people this gospel beckons us to recognize in our lives has such potential!
When we can be open to the Mystery of God in the “least of these”, we will also be better able to be open to that Mystery in ourselves.
Matthew calls us to that notion of relationship through this gospel story as we hear the question:
When and where, O God, do we see you in those who are different than we are or different than we see our selves?
It is in these least ones that we truly discover our true selves and that we discover the fullness of the Mystery of God!
Herein lies the basis of the notion of communion, of Church, and, of course, of Kingdom. In that sense of communion, we celebrate this feast of Christ the King today!
