26th Sunday 2020
Ezekiel 18:25-28; Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32
That Gospel always makes me think of Jim. Jim, who will now be in his mid-fifties, was one of the eleven year olds entrusted to my tender care when I was a bright and shiny new priest, starting out as a member of the staff of Upholland College.
One morning, Fr. O’Neill, the Headmaster, was principal celebrant at Mass with the lower forms. The Gospel was the one you have just heard, and after it, Fr. O’Neill, in good headmasterly fashion, posed a question. “You have heard that parable about the two boys, the one who said ‘No’ and went, and the one who said ‘Yes’ and didn’t go. Now, there could have been a third lad. What might he have done?”
Immediately, some smart aleck stuck his hand in the air and replied “He could have said ‘Yes’ and gone.
“Very good” said Fr. O’Neill and launched into a good, sound headmasterly discourse on saying ‘Yes” to the Lord’s will—and by extension to the commands of the staff—and carrying it through.
While this was going on, Jim was looking, first thoughtful, and then eager. At last he could stand it no more. Up shot his hand.
“Father, there’s a fourth one. He could have said ‘No’ and not gone.”
Fr. O’Neill withered him with a glare. “Yes, well, I don’t think we need to consider that” he replied dismissively, while I was thinking “Oh. That’s the only one that occurred to me. I never thought of the third option.”
Of course it would be better if we were always eager to fulfil God’s will, to leap into action at the first hint of duty. “Let me be slow to do MY will, prompt to obey”, as we used to sing in the hymn “Lord for tomorrow and its needs”.
Or would it? Many of us, I suspect, have a sneaking distrust of those saints who used to be held up to us as paragons of virtue: Blessed Dominic Savio, the schoolboy saint, St. Aloysius the model novice, and others, who seem by and large to have died of a surfeit of piety at a ridiculously young age. What good is a model novice? Would we not be better off with a flesh and blood one? Most of us can probably identify more readily with the backsliding, blundering St. Peter, or with Mary Magdalene, from whom seven devils had gone out. It is difficult not to feel that they would have had more sympathy with the weaknesses of others.
I have spoken before of the late Fr. Tony Pearson, and of the advice given to him by his parish priest—who was, incidentally, Chesterton’s model for Fr. Brown—at the outset of his seminary career. The young Tony was informed that, if he kept all the rules on his passage through seminary, “then they will make you a bishop”: this however came with a postscript—“and Tony, you’ll be no bloody good”. I am reliably informed by his former fellow students that there is one member of the present hierarchy who, in his seminary days, was precisely as described, and I have strong suspicions about another: it goes without saying that they are currently demonstrating the truth of that parish priest’s words long ago.
So am I encouraging people to be disobedient, wayward, sinful? No, I am suggesting that anyone who doesn’t feel the tug of sinful Adam, who invariably responds to the whispering of the Lord and the stirrings of conscience with alacrity and enthusiasm, is almost certainly lacking a roundness of character, an element of humanity, and a capacity for genuine sympathy with the struggles of lesser mortals. There is a danger that the compassion (cum passio, suffering with) which Jesus demands of His disciples as being an attribute of God Himself, will be lacking.
Do not be discouraged then if your own response to the promptings of the Lord strikes you sometimes as somewhat sluggish, provided you get there in the end. After all, Our Lord didn’t mention Fr. O’Neill’s imaginary third boy, and we are not called to be more Christlike than Christ Himself.
