TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – C
Sirach 3:17-18,20,28-29
Hebrews 12:18-19,22-24
Luke 14:1,7-14
Young people might have a hard time imagining this but in the olden days – that is, after the dinosaurs but before the internet – there were only three television channels. Viewers had to wait for the station to decide which movie to broadcast. Happily, once every year the movie which aired was The Wizard of Oz. Dedumpdedumpdedahdump. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. The climax of the movie happened when the four travelers (and Toto too) confronted the Wizard. He was fearsome, he was frightening – smoke and fire and booms and bangs. He was frightening — until he wasn’t, until Toto pulled back the curtain and revealed that he was, in his own words, a humbug, an ordinary guy. But as the story unfolds, it was as an ordinary person that he was able to help the travelers to reach their goals. Not the terrifying spectacle but the human connection made the difference.
That memory came to me in hearing the words of the Letter to the Hebrews: You have not approached that which could not be touched and blazing fire and gloomy darkness and trumpet blast… No, you have approached the city of the living God and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. All too often our image of God is like the Wizard of Oz – “blazing fire and gloomy darkness and trumpet blast.” Any God who could create hundreds of billions of galaxies with hundreds of trillions of stars is beyond anything poor human minds can handle. Just as the Hebrew children sent Moses in to talk to God for them, we tend to leave dealing with God to the experts, to the priests or nuns who presumably have the proper channel. Oh, we say our prayers but they seem to be designed to keep God content with being UP THERE while we try to cope with things DOWN HERE.
Then along comes Jesus and we find that God has a human face. It was not enough for God to make quasars and quarks, to create porcupines, pineapples and platypuses. God was not just going to spin the universe into existence and then sit back and watch. God became involved, became a player in the world he created. We not only have a God out there we also have a God right here. We not only have a God above us we also have a God with us. We not only have a God beyond us but also a God who is like us. Jesus in our midst demands we shift the way we relate to God. It turns out that God cares about all those things human things care about: family, home, health, justice, neighbors, food, climate. Our God does not want to be worshipped from afar but related to in a personal and intimate way. There’s a story of a painter who was way up in the ceiling of a church when a little, old lady came in. She couldn’t see him so he thought he would play a joke and said in a loud voice. “Mary, this is Jesus. Mary, this is Jesus.” No response. He said again, “Mary, this is Jesus.” She finally answered. “I’ll get back to you in a moment. Right now, I’m talking to your mother.” We need such familiarity with God. Because of Jesus God is not only the Lord of History also a companion for our journey in life. We human beings have a family resemblance to the Son of God and, thus, possess an infinite, a divine importance. Because God has a human face, the ordinary ways we think about God and the ways we think about ourselves has to change.
In the gospel of St. Luke Jesus tells a parable to illustrate the implications of having a God as close to us as our God is to us. Ironically, it means we should take “the lowest place.” This seems counterintuitive at first but think about it. When we don’t know our true relationship with God we figure we have to make something of ourselves. We’ve got to be the big dog, the main man, the hot chick, the cool dude. We’ve got to have the most, the biggest, the richest, the fanciest. We’ve got to have things go our way, to be noticed, to have a name, to be in the room where it happens, to sit at the head table. But when we see who God is and who we are because of Jesus, humility is a natural (or perhaps better a supernatural) consequence. I don’t need to make something of myself because who I am already ensures me of a worth and value beyond counting. As a child of God my place at the table is assured so I don’t need to elbow anyone out of my way to get it. Become content with how God made me and I’ll end up where I belong.
The other lesson from the gospel: since God has a human face in Jesus all those other human faces are images of the divine. We should look particularly, Jesus tells us, into the faces of “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” those who aren’t the beautiful people. Our Lord suggests that connecting with those who are hurting opens us up to recognize the face of God in others more than with our relatives and friends. When we recognize the face of Christ in those who have been given a raw deal, we are on the way to seeing things as God does, in seeing every individual as precious and valuable. To take one concrete example, I am sure that you are appalled that there has been another school shooting, alas, the 39th of the year. They will continue to happen unless we realize that God is in our midst in all the people surrounding us, particularly the most vulnerable and who is more vulnerable than a child. Only after we see Christ in everyone, do we truly know him. As the song in Les Miz says, “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
