26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Amos 6:1a, 4-7; 1 Tim 6:11-16; Lk 16:19-31

Where did the rich man go wrong?
How did he end up in torment?
It doesn’t seem to be simply that he was rich.
It doesn’t even seem to be that he 
was self-indulgent and gluttonous,
dressing in purple and fine linen 
and feasting sumptuously every day.
And, at the root of things, 
it doesn’t even seem to be
that he failed in his duty to help Lazarus,
for behind this duty was a deeper call
and so a deeper failure:
a call to imagine himself as Lazarus,
to imagine himself out of his luxury
and into Lazarus’s poverty,
to imagine himself as hungry and helpless.
Though Lazarus lay at his gate,
he failed to imagine his way across
the seeming chasm that stretched between them.

We tend to associate imagination with unreality:
flights of fancy that relieve the pressure
of the drudgery of the real world.
And sometimes imagining ourselves as another
can be to indulge in a fantasy:
myself as someone
fabulously wealthy
or twenty pounds lighter,
or with a full head of hair.
This sort of imagining can be either
an innocuous diversion from reality
or a dangerous delusion.

But there is another way of imagining
of ourselves as another:
to imagine myself as that co-worker
that I and everyone else finds annoying,
or to imagine myself as someone 
whose life and experiences have led them
to a set of religious or political convictions
that I find odious,
or to imagine myself as a person 
who must live with a series of bad choices
and who cannot seem to get their life together,
or to imagine myself as one
whom fortune has not favored
and whose life is scarred by tragedy,
or to imagine myself as someone
of a different race or class or gender.
Here I imagine myself as another
from whom I am separated by some gap,
a stranger who stands on the opposite side 
of a yawning chasm of separation.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch 
wrote, “We use our imagination 
not to escape the world but to join it.” 
She distinguished between 
the kind of fantasy
that takes me out of the real world
and into a world in which 
I am rich, skinny, and hirsute,
and a use of the imagination
that opens me up to what is real,
an imagination that breaks me out 
of the confines of what Murdoch calls
“the fat, relentless ego,”
and reconnects me to those 
whom I would see as other.
Imagination is what makes love possible,
for, as Murdoch says,
“Love is the extremely difficult realization 
that something other than oneself is real.”

The rich man cannot love Lazarus 
because he cannot see Lazarus,
even though he lies at his gate;
and he cannot see Lazarus
because he cannot imagine himself 
standing where Lazarus stands—
one perhaps who has made bad choices
or whom fortune has not favored,
one who longs to eat mere scraps,
one who stands on the opposite side
of what the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar
calls “the screaming chasm between rich and poor.”

St. John Chrysostom, in the fourth century,
said regarding this parable of Lazarus and the rich man
that the rich man “had within his grasp so great a treasure, 
such an opportunity to win salvation,
[but] he ignored the poor man day after day.”
We might at first think that Chrysostom is speaking
of the rich man’s wealth as the treasure
with which he might have purchased salvation 
by using it for good.
But in fact, it is Lazarus himself 
who is the treasure.
The treasure is other 
who stands across the chasm—
the chasm between rich and poor,
between white and black,
between citizen and stranger,
between Jew and Greek,
slave and free,
male and female—
beckoning me to come out of my self
and into the mystery of love,
if only I can imagine myself
on the other side of that chasm,
if I can only see the treasure 
who lies at my gate.

But, alas, the rich man’s imagination fails,
and he finds himself in eternal torment. 
His torment is eternal because he remains locked
within the confines of his fat, relentless ego.
Even now he can’t see Lazarus as anything more
than an extension of himself:
one who might quench his thirst
or carry a message to his family,
a family whom he probably also sees 
as just one more extension of himself.
And so he hears, “between you and us 
a great chasm has been fixed.”
The rich man’s fate gives narrative form 
to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes,
which come with accompanying woes.
In the afterlife the chasms of our world—
between the rich and the poor,
the hungry and the full,
the weeping and the laughing—
are eternally fixed and the poles are reversed,
so that the poor are rich and the rich are poor,
the hungry are full and the full are hungry,
the weeping laugh and the laughing weep.
And those who have failed to find themselves
in the poor and hungry and weeping
are left to dwell eternally in their separation.

Of course, the depiction of the afterlife in the parable
is not a prediction, but a warning and an invitation—
an invitation to imagine 
not simply what might lie beyond death,
but what it might be like to be someone else,
to break out of the confines of our ego,
to be saved from our separation.
The conclusion of the parable suggests
that Moses and the Prophets are given to us
to expand our imaginations.
Their words are given to us an invitation
to see ourselves is the stranger and alien,
the poor and the weak,
the annoying and the odious.

But how can we do this?
The ego is a prison we ourselves construct,
but which we are powerless to deconstruct.
Its construction is the work of sin in us,
but its deconstruction is the work of grace.
The Holy Spirit comes to us as the fire 
that enlightens our imaginations,
melts the boundaries of our ego,
and shows to us the reality 
of the other who lies at our gate. 
The Spirit knits us together into one body,
giving us imaginations that are the ligaments
binding us together across chasms of difference.
The Spirit illuminates out hearts so that we may love
those who seem to us most unworthy of our love.

Come Holy Spirit,
fill the heart of your faithful,
and kindle in us the fire of your love,
so that God, who is merciful,
might have mercy on us all.

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Readings: Num 21:4b-9; Phil 2:6-11; Jn 3:13-17

I don’t think couples 
generally get married
because they want to suffer.
They get married because love 
has moved each of them 
to join their life 
to the life of another.
And this is a joyous thing.
But the very vows by which
a couple joins their lives
speak of suffering that will come
intertwined and entangled with joy:
the worse with the better,
poverty with riches
sickness with health.
And this suffering is not something
incidental to their joining.
It is suffering they experience
precisely because of their joining:
for the poverty of the one 
becomes the poverty of the other;
and the sickness of the one
becomes the sickness of the other.
No one marries because they want to suffer,
but they know that suffering will come
because they have opened their hearts
to one another.

And it is the same way with Jesus.
Jesus did not join himself to our humanity
because he wanted to suffer,
but he knew that suffering would come,
because he had opened his heart
to suffering, sinful humanity.
He made himself vulnerable,
just as we are vulnerable,
knowing that in a world of sin,
in which our fear of each other
turns us into predators,
the vulnerable are preyed upon.
He could have come 
as the kind of king who reigns
by being the apex predator,
but instead he became a king
whose throne was the cross.
Because God so loved the world
he sent his only son,
who emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave.
He became “obedient to death,
even death on a cross”—
because he had bound himself to us,
and even the torment of the Cross
could not separate him from us:
what God had joined together,
no human being could put asunder.

But, of course, that is not the end of the story.
We call this feast the Exaltation of the Holy Cross,
not the degradation of the Cross;
because it is about the joy of triumph,
not the sorrow of defeat.
It is about how through the Cross
that Jesus bears for our sake out of love,
God has exalted him above all creatures,
so that he is worshipped 
as Lord of the universe.
Even on the Cross 
God is raising Jesus up 
as the sign of his love for us.
Sorrow and joy,
poverty and riches,
pain and healing 
are intertwined in the Cross,
but after the Cross and tomb
there is resurrection,
when sorrow and joy are untangled,
when poverty and pain are banished,
when the richness of God’s healing love
rises again in the person of Jesus.

And it is the same way with marriage.
In their vows, a couple acknowledges
the reality of the sorrows they will face,
the poverty and sickness intertwined
with richness and health,
the worse with the better.
But they make their vows in faith
that sorrow and joy will one day be untangled
and there will be nothing but the joy
of the wedding feast of the Lamb.
And even now, as they share in Christ’s cross,
they, like him, are a sign of God’s love for the world.
They, like him, are a sign 
of fidelity to the bond that love creates.
They, like him, are a sign
of the joy that awaits 
our sorrowing world.

Typically, at a wedding, 
I say these kinds of thing
presuming that the couple has no idea 
what it is that they are getting into,
or what it is that I’m trying to say.
In the case of Justin and Gabriela,
who this past week celebrated 
the tenth anniversary of their civil wedding,
I know that they know 
exactly what I am talking about.
I know that they know because they have lived it:
how the worse and better are always entangled,
sickness with health,
sorrow with joy.
I also know that they have faith
that the great untangling awaits us all,
because they have glimpsed it 
over their past ten years together:
in their own baptisms 
into Christ’s death and resurrection, 
in the birth of their daughter,
in the slow spreading forth
of faith, hope, and love in their lives.
They have seen the sorrow of the Cross,
but they have also seen its exaltation.
And in coming today to have their vows to each other
recognized and blessed by the Church,
they become for us all 
a sign of the triumph that awaits us
at the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Gabriela and Justin,
may God bless your family this day,
and may God bless us all 
through your love for each other,
and may God in his mercy
have mercy on us all.

 

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Wisdom 9:13-18b; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Lk 14:25-33

VIDEO

What should we make of
the words of our Lord in today’s Gospel?
His examples of the builder and the general
would seem to counsel prudent calculation:
don’t start projects you can’t finish;
don’t get into fights you can’t win.
But when he tells his listeners
that to be his disciple you must
hate your family and even your own life,
take up your cross and follow after him,
renounce all of your possessions…
well, this sounds pretty reckless 
and imprudent.

But what if our sense of what is prudent,
our capacity to calculate,
changes when being Jesus’ disciple
comes into the equation?
I’m not any sort of mathematician,
but it seems to me a bit like trying 
to introduce infinity into basic math
(those of you with math-phobia 
might want to tune out for a minute
and read the bulletin or something).
For example, since the value 
of five-plus-one is larger than five
and a thousand-plus-one 
is larger than a thousand
and a billion-plus-one
is larger than a billion,
you might think that the value
of infinity-plus-one 
would be larger than infinity.
But it’s not, since “infinity” is, by definition,
that than which nothing can be larger. 
So infinity-plus-one would still be infinity—
indeed, infinity-plus-infinity
would still be infinity.
You can’t treat infinity
like a number in making basic calculations,
because it is not a value among other values
but rather it is the concept of limitlessness.
As someone once put it, “infinity”
is a shorthand way of saying
“what would happen if we kept going?”

(Those of you who are math-phobic
can now tune back in,
because the math is over.)
The point is that being Jesus’s disciple,
following him on the way of the cross,
entering the kingdom he proclaims,
is not a value among other values,
something that can be a factor 
in calculating our life plans.
Rather, it is an invitation to live a life
that hurls us beyond the limited horizon
that the world offers us.
It is an invitation to step into 
the wild world of God’s limitless love,
the God whose counsel
no mortal can comprehend
and whose intentions are beyond conception.
It is an invitation that makes us ask,
“what would happen if we kept going?”

The book of Wisdom says,
“the deliberations of mortals are timid,
and unsure are our plans.”
Our problem as humans
is that we believe too little;
in our calculations, we underestimate
the limitlessness of the journey
that Jesus is inviting us to join.
We want to weigh the value of following him
against things of real but finite value,
like family and possessions 
and our own lives.
Jesus invites us to count the cost
of being his disciple
not so that we can put a number on it,
but only so that we can realize
that it is beyond calculation;
it costs both everything and nothing;
it demands the totality of our life,
it demands that we keep going
beyond the limits 
of what we have to give, 
but only so that we can realize 
that everything is already given us, 
everything is already gift.
And realizing this will change our lives.

Our second reading gives us 
a bit of the letter Paul wrote 
to a Christian named Philemon,
a letter that was borne to him by Onesimus, 
who had been one of Philemon’s slaves.
Onesimus had fled the household of Philemon
and encountered Paul and his preaching 
and had been baptized as a Christian.
He desires to remain with Paul, 
but Paul sends him back to Philemon,
telling him to receive Onesimus
“no longer as a slave
but more than a slave, a brother.”
Onesimus is not exactly freed—
he is to return to be a part 
of Philemon’s household—
but neither is he a slave.
Now that they are both Christians,
now that they have both taken up the cross,
now that they have joined Jesus 
on the journey without limits,
the relationship of Onesimus and Philemon
is radically changed:

Philemon can no longer 
be master of Onesimus
but must become his brother.
Think what this might mean 
in their social context,
in which slaves and brothers were people
of quite different kinds of value.
However useful your slave might be to you,
the value of a brother or a sister
would always be more.
To treat one who had been a slave 
as a family member
could be seen as a gross insult
to other members of the household;
as if the elevation of the slave’s status
were a reduction of everyone else’s.
Some might even see Philemon’s act as
“hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters.”
Were Philemon to calculate the cost,
he might well decide that welcoming Onesimus
back into the household as a brother
is simply not worth it.

But Paul is inviting Philemon 
to be not timid in his deliberations,
to calculate not in the terms 
of the values of his world
but to open himself up
to the limitless love of God,
to look at Onesimus, 
who has become his spiritual equal 
in the waters of Baptism,
and ask himself,
“what would happen if we kept going?”
What would happen if we pressed forward
with our newfound brotherhood in Christ?
Can the call to be Jesus’ disciple
lead us to places of love and communion
that we cannot even now imagine?
Can it lead to a life together
where there are no slaves and masters?
Who can conceive what the Lord intends?

And for us too,
what might happen if we kept going,
if we let the infinite kingdom 
disrupt our calculations?
What love and communion might await us
if we let go of everything to follow Jesus?
What impassible borders could be crossed?
What irreparable harms could be healed?
What unimaginable gifts could be received?
We should pray that being a disciple of Jesus
would hurl us beyond the limits
of what we think possible,
and tune our hearts to God’s intentions.
We should pray that God, in his mercy,
might have mercy on us all.