The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Ezekiel 18:25-28 | Philippians 2:1-11 or 2:1-5 | Matthew 21:28-32

Oh God, who manifests your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us, and make those hastening to attain your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

It’s confusing to a lot of people; the way God has revealed himself to us.  It’s clear that there were human beings for a very long time before God began to speak to them, when he spoke to Abraham.  And he had a longing that he wanted Abraham to understand, and that was he wanted to call the people separate from the way the world was, a people that would be dedicated to him, that would listen to him most especially and grow from what he wanted to teach them.    And as the story evolved, it became clear that there was a focus in what God was going to do for people.  He wanted to free them from slavery.  He wanted to free them from a master who would control them and tell them what they had to do, and if they did it, they were rewarded.  If they didn’t, they were punished, and that’s exactly the way people understood gods.  It made sense to their egos, because that makes a lot of sense to the ego.  Do wrong, and you’re punished.  Do good, and you’re rewarded.  The focus is on my actions, what I do, and so many times people would say, “Well, God is so unfair.  He’s always condemning us.”  And this first reading is beautiful, because it’s trying to say, “Well, look, you’ve got to be careful about judging God.  You think he’s unfair.  You think when you do something wrong, he condemns you, and if you do something right, he rewards you.  And you think that’s wrong.  What Ezekiel tries to say is, “Look, God is not the one punishing.  God does not go after the sinner and want them to be destroyed.  If they choose to do something that is destructive, they will experience destruction.  If they do something that is life-giving, they will experience life.”  So whether or not or – how we’re treated by God is not unfair, because we set it up.  We are the ones that choose to live in the way that will either produce life or produce death.  If we are who we’re intended to be and we act on that, we will find life.  If we choose to be someone we’re not and choose to be something that is against our very nature, we’re going to be miserable.  So that doesn’t seem unfair to God, and it isn’t unfair.

So what is the distinction between the two?  What is it about doing what we are called to do and finding life and doing what we’re not called to do and finding death?  Well, St. Paul, in the next reading, makes it pretty clear.  He said basically when we saw, when we feel the full revelation of who God is in Jesus, we see something that is very different than the God of the Old Testament.  In a way the God of the Old Testament was master.  He was demanding, and he said, “Do this or die,” and it looked like he was the one causing all the punishment.  Well, that was something the ego certainly understood, and we have to understand, at the time that those readings were proclaimed for the first time, they time they were written down, all of that, this was all at a time when human beings were very different than we are now, meaning there’s been an evolution of consciousness that began at the very beginning of the human race, whenever it started.  And human beings have been growing and growing more in response to a seed that has been placed in every soul, every human being that is made to evolve and develop into what God has always intended us to be, and we are surprisingly, according to the New Testament and according to the revelation that comes through Jesus, we are made in the image and likeness of God, and we are to become like him.    And so in the Old Testament, it would seem easy that people would say, “Okay, I need to master myself.  I need to be like God who masters us and demands that we change.”  That would make sense to an ego that is in charge, and a part of us that’s who we are is yet undeveloped.  It’s like finding a criminal or maybe a sociopath.  And a sociopath doesn’t have any empathy or compassion, and so when they start acting in a way that is destructive to others, someone has to step in and say, “Stop it.  Control that behavior.  Don’t do it, or you will be punished.”

So you can see that there is this image of being a master in life, to your life, that is grounded in the Old Testament, but then in the New Testament, God does the most amazing thing.  He reveals himself as someone who is not what we thought he was, and so when Jesus comes into the world as the perfect representation of who God is, he comes in in a certain appearance.  His appearance is that of a slave, a servant.  Now, Jesus is God incarnate, so what’s happening for the first time, though there are hints to it all through the Old Testament, who God ultimately really is and what we are intended to understand as who he is, he’s a servant God, not a master God.  Yet the master God is something that keeps creeping into religion.  When I was a young boy learning about my religion, I figured that I had to master myself by making sure I stopped sinning.  So control, control, control.  Don’t let yourself do those things.  Focus on your actions, and if your actions are bad, then you’ve got to step in and use your will and your mind to figure out, “This is wrong.  This is dangerous.  Don’t do it.”  And you’re controlling your behavior.  And for many people, that’s all religion has ever been, a way to control behavior, to change your actions.  It’s an action-centered religion, a moralistic religion.  That’s the antithesis of what God really wants.  He’s not interested in your ego controlling your life.  He’s more interested in something else much more subtle, and that is discovering your nature.  Who are you?  And yet everybody is on a, maybe, different level of how far they’ve evolved.  Some people come into the world.  They’re way further evolved than other people, but there are more and more and more people in the world that understand the only way to find life in this world is to turn your life around, from being the master of your actions to being a servant to other people’s needs.  That’s exactly what Paul is trying to say, and he’s saying, when God revealed himself as a servant God, that is the glory of God, that he forgives, understands, loves and gently continues to move us in a direction of being more and more interested in being who we’re intended to be as being a servant.  Use your gifts and your life for the good of others.  It’s the only thing that really satisfies the heart. 

The mind loves to be in charge and in control and master over people.  Leadership is usually considered to be very good when it’s strong and powerful and makes decisions without considering all the ramifications of those decisions.  They seem to be – in the eyes of the ego, these are great leaders, powerful leaders.  Then you get somebody in there who is a servant’s heart, has a servant’s heart, and they are a different kind of leader, and they can’t make these sweeping changes and decisions without caring for every individual.  And once you start caring for the individual, it’s very difficult to make major decisions.  And the only way you can do that is with the grace of God’s presence inside of you, which is another way to say the seed that’s placed inside of you and me in terms of who we are intended to be is there in seed form, and we keep moving closer and closer and closer to it.  And the beginning of really being able to discover it is discover who God really is, because when we know who he is, we know what we’re made to be, what we’re destined to be, and when we’re not like that, there is no rest, there is no calm, there is no real peace.  So when I describe life this way, I think it makes sense.  What I’m saying is that we’re here to change.  That’s it.  We continue to move, evolve and grow from a master spirit to a servant spirit. 

So look at who Jesus is talking to in the gospel.  It’s always important to say, “Who is Jesus talking to?”  He’s not talking to his disciples.  He’s not talking to the people in the streets. He’s talking to the chief priests and all the elders, all the people that represent religion, and that religion was a religion of a master, control, perfection.  And these men fell into it, and they did it.  And the irony of any perfectionist is that they have a low self-esteem, and they’re desperate to look better, stronger, more powerful, more perfect.  So when you’re in that world of perfection, in the world of mastering your behavior so that you look to yourself and to others as perfect, you are so far off the track that God is calling us into.  That is something essential when we’re dealing with people with a very low level of consciousness.  They have no way of understanding what it’s like and why they should ever want to serve someone else, and those people are still with us.  We call them sociopaths.  They have no empathy, no compassion, and they will always be in the world.  And they’re in the world for a reason.  They’re in the world so that people can see the misery that they create.  They can see that it doesn’t work.  They can see the anxiety and the stress that’s in that life form.  When you talk about a world of peace and a world of union and communion and oneness, that role of being a master and controlling people never creates unity and oneness and peace.  It creates the opposite, separation, anxiety, stress.  So when he’s talking to the Pharisees and scribes, he’s saying, “I want you to understand something.  You have been called into the world to represent my Father, and you’ve bought into something that is the antithesis of my Father, but it was truly something that you were not innocent of.  You’re not innocent.  I mean, you are innocent in the sense that that’s the way, in a way, you can read the Old Testament.  He’s a master that’s demanding that, if you don’t do what you’re told, you’re crushed.”  And that’s the way they treated other people. 

It’s so interesting.  When you think of these men, these chief priests and elders of the people, think of the way they dealt with sinners.  They weren’t allowed to talk to them.  They weren’t allowed to get near them.  That’s the interesting thing about perfection.  Perfection is getting rid of everything that isn’t perfect.  It’s like Nazi Germany.  If we kill and destroy everything imperfect, we will be perfect, when the truth is very different.  When you embrace and accept everything imperfect, when you forgive it, when you long for it to change, when you serve that person who’s struggling with something that’s self-destructive and long for them to change, then you’re in the kingdom.  What I love about this is a subtle thing that I noticed when I was reading this over and over again.  The first master goes and says, “My son, would you go out and work?”  And he said, “No, I’m not,” but he changes his mind and went.  Well, that’s what he’s begging these disciples, these elders to think about.  You’ve got to change.  But when he goes to the other guy, who is the perfect one, who represents them, what’s his response?  “Yes, sir.  Yes, sir.  I’m always here to do everything you want.”  That’s the way the Pharisees presented themselves to the world.  “I am doing everything that God wants me to do.  I do it perfectly with perfection.  I know the law.  I follow every one of those rules and laws.”  But their hearts were so far from what God wanted them to be.  They had no compassion, no interest in anyone else but themselves, and they wanted to seem to the world as – they were presenting to the world an image of who you would become if you surrendered to their teaching.  And look at them.  They were hated by the people.  Why?  Because they knew, the people knew they had no concern for them.  They had no interest in them, always called to do something that was an action.  They were treated as if they were there to serve the temple.  The temple was there for them, but they were not ever receiving from the temple, only demanded – demanding, demanding, demanding from the temple.  Sacrifice this.  Buy this.  It was expensive, and these men were powerful.  Their image was perfection.  They were wealthy.  They got wealthy, they got rich over all of this, so there was money involved.  It’s the classic syndrome of power, and what Jesus wants so much to teach them is that, “That is death, and you’re choosing it.” 

Now, he forgives them for this.  “Father, they don’t know what they’re doing.”  At the same time, he is desperate to show them that, when anyone acts against who they are, really are, when they do not follow their basic, core instincts that flow from their heart, their compassion, their understanding, when they don’t do that, they die.  And that’s so interesting, because that’s the way Jesus talked about the Pharisees.  “You’re dead.  You’re – inside you’re dead.”  What does that mean?  The very nature that God has created for them to evolve into was absolutely so undernourished and so unfed that it died, and that’s the great tragedy.  That’s the heart of sin. 

Father, your love, your gentleness, your kindness is beyond our imagining.  Your desire for us to experience the fullness of the life that you’ve created for us is your burning passion.  You will do anything for us.  Bless us with, first and foremost, awareness of your servanthood, your desire to serve us, and let us receive this gift.  As we receive it, it changes our awareness of who we are, and we begin to reflect you in everyone around us in terms of our dealings with one another.  Then we’ve found the kingdom.  Bless us with the kingdom.  It’s so needed today, more than ever, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.