21st Sunday 2022
Isaiah 66:18-21; Hebrews 12:5-7,11-13; Luke 13: 22-30
Right then, are today’s readings encouraging, discouraging, or a mixture of the two? We might regard the third option as the most likely, as that is how life seems to operate, as a mixture of good times and bad times, with the good often arising from and through the bad. Leaving aside for the moment the Mysteries of Light, it is no accident that the Rosary comprises joy, followed by sorrow, culminating in glory.
Let’s take a look at the individual readings. The first comes from the prophet generally known as Trito-Isaiah or Third Isaiah, the third contributor to the Book of Isaiah. The Jewish people have passed through the trauma of exile in Babylon, and are now re-established on their own soil. Yet difficulties remain. The return from exile hasn’t ushered in the perfect golden age for which the people had hoped. Life is still a struggle: enemies remain.
In this setting, the prophet sets out a clear message of encouragement. These enemies will become friends: God’s word will go out to the nations, who will in turn give their allegiance to Him, bringing their offerings to Him, being accepted among His people, and seeing ministers of the Lord selected from among their ranks.
If we step back, and look at this prophecy in the wider context of history, we can see how it has been fulfilled in the Church. After the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost, the disciples travelled throughout the known world, and have continued to do so during the two thousand years which have followed. Today we have a Pope from South America, a region undreamed of in the time of the apostles, and men and women from every nation on earth are servants of the one true God, even though, in many parts, huge attempts continue, to suppress knowledge and service of Him, China and North Korea being the clearest examples, though in the lifetime of many of us, communist regimes sought unsuccessfully to wipe out religion in many regions of the earth.
We have, then, clear encouragement from Trito-Isaiah, though it is accompanied by the realisation that both time and struggle are involved if his prophecies are to be fulfilled.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews presents us with a similar mixture of encouragement and discouragement, or rather of encouragement arising out of discouragement. We are sons and daughters of God—what could be more encouraging than that?—but that entails discipline, correction, even punishment; in other words, struggle and suffering. Yet the struggle and suffering must not discourage us, for they are the route to growth and, ultimately, to fulfilment.
Perhaps it is today’s Gospel which sets out most starkly the two elements of encouragement and discouragement. Our Lord echoes the prophet’s promise of the expansion of God’s people: “People from north and west, from east and south, will come to take their places at the feast in the Kingdom of God.”
Yet this comes at a cost: some of those who have apparently belonged to God’s people will find themselves excluded from the Kingdom. Nor must we, or can we, comfort ourselves by imagining that this warning applies only to Jesus’ contemporaries among the Jewish people. His words are universal: all of us must attempt to enter by the narrow door.
What does this mean? It does not mean, as some have believed at different times in the Church’s history, and even in our own time, that we must put ourselves through excruciating penances, mortifying ourselves as it is sometimes called. Nor must we be scrupulous, picking up on each tiny fault of which we may or may not be guilty: that route leads to a morbid temperament, and a judgmental attitude to others.
Rather, what Our Lord calls for is a recognition of both our worth and our responsibilities as children of God. We are called to freedom, but freedom brings its own obligations. We must seek always to follow Jesus in love, living by the two great commandments of love of God and love of neighbour, accepting our share in the Cross, but recognising our sufferings as opportunities for growth, the Cross as the route to Resurrection.
I began by asking whether today’s readings are encouraging, discouraging, or a mixture of the two. In the last analysis, I would say that they are entirely encouraging, as even the apparent discouragements provide an opportunity for growth.
