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The Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Garrison Keillor fans among us know that the name of the Catholic parish in Lake Woebegone is Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. It’s Keillor’s playful way of poking fun at us Catholics for being responsible – relentlessly responsible. We have almost made an art form out of responsibility as we take on whatever comes our way and feel guilty if we don't. Of course, there are a lot worse things we could be guilty of! Responsibility is front and center in today’s reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. He tells us that followers of Christ really have only one responsibility -- a serious one and, yes, a perpetual one -- but only one: the responsibility to love. "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another." None of the other commandments, he tells us, not even the ones we tend to think of as the biggest and most demanding ones, the ones we picture as written in capital letters ("You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal")--none of these other commandments adds anything to the one commandment to love. Over fifteen centuries ago, the great St. Augustine in one of his sermons said it even more succinctly than St. Paul. He said it in a way that must have raised eyebrows in his day and probably still does: "Love,” he said, “and do as you will.” "Love and do as you will." If those words sound like an invitation to license -- and historically some have tried to them that way – it helps to realize that they were for Augustine anything but that. They were his very challenging way of stating what Christian morality is all about and of restating St. Paul’s words in today’s second reading, "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another." To underline for us just how demanding is the way of love, we had that passage from Matthew’s gospel which, according to scholars, gives a little window onto the early Christian community of Matthew's time, an insight into how that community dealt with the conflicts and disagreements that are inevitable in any community. (As one rather irreverent commentator put it, paraphrasing words from today's Gospel, "Where two or three are gathered together, there will conflict and disagreement be!"). In dealing with this very human reality, Matthew's community remembered words of Jesus that made it clear that the way of love is always to tell the truth, always to deal with conflicts and disagreements openly and honestly, never by cowardly avoidance, never by taking the easy way out. Love never takes the easy way out. I remember listening to a radio talk show some time ago. The topic was morality and the common good. One caller, a young man, offhandedly made the statement, "I don't really care what anybody does just as long as it doesn't get in my way." He went on to bolster his point of view by quoting Scripture. "Doesn't the Bible say I'm not my brother's keeper," he asked. Curiously, neither the talk show host nor any of the subsequent callers seemed aware that the young man’s biblical quote from Genesis about “my brother’s keeper” is not a statement at all, but a question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" And, you may remember that it was Cain who asked the question, Cain with the blood of his brother Abel on his hands. But in reflecting on what the young man said, I had to agree that his line of thinking finds a good deal of resonance in a culture that tends to fixate on the self, exalt individualism, ignore the common good, and confuse tolerance with indifference. My friends, we are our brother's keeper, and our sister's. We are each other's keepers as today's scripture readings make abundantly clear. We even have a responsibility for each other's holiness -- we really do, as if our responsibility for our own holiness were not enough. We wouldn't be here in the Cathedral today if we didn't need each other in order to grow in holiness. Churches like this would be superfluous. We could get our religion at home or in the mountains or on the beach. The fact that we choose to come together in this place says that we know that grace is not a ‘God and me thing’ – a narrow pipeline from heaven to each individual. In God's plan, grace flows to the individual through the community. My salvation is tied up with yours, and yours with each other’s: with the elderly woman in the pew in front of you, with the homeless person next to you, with the family sitting behind you. With people you know and people you don’t, with people you like and people you find it hard to like. "Wherever two or three are gathered in my name," Jesus tells us, "there am I in their midst." What a commentary that is on a community like ours, and what a challenge it is for us to open our eyes to find Jesus -- often where we least expect to find him and, of course, to love him where we find him. "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another." My friends, St. Paul surely had it right: we Christians really have only one responsibility -- one "perpetual responsibility". And St. Augustine had it right, too: “Love and do as you will.” Father Michael G. Ryan |
