26th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle A 22-23

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekial 18:25-28 | Philippians 2:1-11 | 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 to make those hastening to attain your promise 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, God forever and ever, amen.

From the very beginning of God’s relationship with human beings in a garden, sin was there, and ever since, we have struggled with this part of human nature that seems so foreign to who God is and who we are told we’re created to be. So when I look at the first reading, it’s clear that what’s being said is that the ways of God are fair. If you commit a sin, God destroys you; you die. Look at the covenant that was made to Noah when God decided to destroy the entire human race and all the animals, everything, and when he was doing all that, he found just this one person that he thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll work with this one person.” And what’s so powerful about that is the promise he made then was, “I will never again destroy sinners.” But throughout the Old Testament, the history between God and his people is really fraught with God separating himself from sinners, God condemning sinners, God judging sinners, God punishing them. It’s not until the New Testament that something radically new, something radically different comes into the picture, and what comes into the picture is what we’ve always longed for, is a way to deal with sin by not motivating somebody to not sin by fear. And that’s what I think the readings are about today.

The God who created you and created me tells this wonderful salvation history story, and in that story, he has this wonderful progression of ideas and thoughts that move from a God of punishment to a God of love and a God of forgiveness. So we know clearly that what we should see in the Old Testament is many things that had to be what they were because of the people that God was working with, but there’s so much in the Old Testament that we have to leave behind. And when you’ve been imbued in something and grown up in something, it’s so hard to get rid of that. It’s a pattern in your very being, it seems. If you’re guilty because every ⎯ when you do something wrong and you feel separated instantly from God, that’s because that’s what you’ve been trained to think. And what has to happen is a change, and we see that so clearly in the gospel. Jesus came into the world to change people. The Old Testament didn’t really talk that much about changing behavior from the inside out. It always seemed to say, “There will be a reason for you to keep this commandment. So look at that, weigh it, and then choose, because if you’re smart, you’ll choose to do what God asks you to do, because then you’ll have God with you.” But in the New Testament, it’s radically different. No, God says, “Not only am I with you in your sins,” but if you’re a person who doesn’t feel the need to change, who lives in the past, who is working out of, more or less, let’s say, the Old Testament model, he’s saying, “I have a really hard time reaching you, because it’s so much a part of your life. You can’t imagine something other than the law being the thing that is going to save us from sin.” It never will save us from sin. It’ll only control behavior.

So what does change us from sin? Well, Paul has a beautiful way of describing it. He’s saying so clearly that this Jesus, who comes into the world, is the model of what we’ve longed for from the very, very beginning. This being Christ, this teaching Christ, this truth that is in Christ has been longed for, and what we have to do is make sure that people understand it, embrace it, accept it. And this is a hard thing ⎯ not a hard thing to say, but it’s a hard thing to do, to stop trying to earn it and try to give God permission to enter into your heart and to make you like Christ ⎯ make you like him. And what did he do? He destroyed sin. That’s what they tell us. He destroyed the power of sin. How? He didn’t make stricter rules. No, he did this weird thing. He loved sinners, and in that love that he had, there was this grace, this energy, this force given to people who, when they are in sin and they know that they are deeply loved and that there is someone who believes in their potential to change and longs for them to be free of all the pain they’re in, that’s their intention. When a person responds to their own sins and the sins of somebody else with that same disposition, compassion, mercy, they begin to feel a participation in something. The healing, transforming presence of God entering into the heart of a sinner will do the work that the law could never do. And what it does, it awakens in someone a sense that they are valued, and when they’re valued, they want other people to feel that value. When they feel the freedom of not being filled with shame and anger and fear all the time, they’re going to want that for other people, and that’s the way it’s supposed to work, individuals believing in what’s been given to them, feeling its power and its beauty and wanting it to be given to others. And what melts away is all that judgment, condemnation, wanting to destroy someone, because we think that this sin thing has to be hated out of the world, destroyed and removed. We want to get rid of all the bad people, and then we’ll have something wonderful. No, we want to transform all the bad people by doing what Christ tells us we should do, and that’s to have a different disposition toward them where we’re longing for them to change, and we believe they can change.

It's interesting. In the world today there’s a lot of tension. In religious circles, there’s a lot of attention about change. It’s certainly true in the Catholic Church. People that are so used to the old way that we used to do things, especially the way we worshipped, some people feel that could not change, should not change, and yet it’s clear that the Holy Spirit knows that we need something different now than we did back then. And it may be unfamiliar. It may be difficult. It may not seem as comfortable, but that’s the direction God wants us to go toward. And I will tell you, the fundamental difference is a religion that is private in a kind of separatist, only wanting to be around the people that think and believe like I do, to a community of believers who have been transformed by this extraordinary power of forgiveness and acceptance and wanting to give that to others. That’s the shift. That’s the change.

Father, the power that you have shared with us is beyond our imagining, but you fill us with your Spirit. And that Spirit not only transforms us but gives us the ability, when we join your intention to save those who are struggling with darkness, that it will take place. Bless us with this faith and trust, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.