Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 21 / Sunday
Readings: Isaiah 66.18-21 / Psalm 116.1,2 (R/v Mk 16.15) / Hebrews 12.5-7,11-13 / Luke 13.22-30
Doors. They surround us everywhere. We see them every day. We use them every time. Open doors suggest a new beginning, a way out or a warm welcome within. So, we enter. Closed doors symbolise a dead end or no entry, imprisonment or a ‘do not disturb’. And so, we stand and wait, or we move on. Revolving doors, however, can trap us into going round and round mindlessly, with no exit.
We are invited this Jubilee Year of Mercy to contemplate on Jesus who is the face of God’s mercy. Jesus is also the door or gate to God because he shows us “the way” to life (John 14.6).
This is why we have the Holy Door each jubilee year; it reminds us of conversion in Jesus. Pilgrims passing through it express their choice in Jesus to leave behind sin, slavery, and darkness and to cross the threshold into grace, freedom, and light. The Holy Door for the Year of Mercy is in Rome. Locally, we have five Holy Doors to celebrate this year's Jubilee. One of these is at the Church of the Holy Cross in Clementi. The face of Jesus that covers this Holy Door helps us remember his words: “I am the door; if anyone enters through me, he shall be saved” (John 10.9). It is Jesus then who gathers the sinful and the broken in order to redeem all into the wholeness of being one with God.
This image of “gathering” is a central theme in the Scriptures. The Old Testament tells of God gathering one people out of many tribes. The theologian Gerhard Lohfink considers this “gathering” of the scattered to be a key biblical term for the event of salvation. Salvation is therefore not about being saved for heaven after death, as we know it. Rather, salvation “is about gathering people in communion, thereby restoring the good creation that sin and violence have torn apart” (William T. Cavanaugh). Only God gathers like this. And in the New Testament, we learn that God gathers all into God’s life through Jesus, with Jesus, and in Jesus.
In the first reading, Isaiah records that this is indeed God’s desire: “I come to gather all nations and tongues” so that “they shall come and shall see my glory”, God says, “and I will set a sign among them.” God’s gathering is creation itself: God makes from the many a new and holy people whom he sets apart with God’s sign. It is right and just that the psalmist calls “all you nations” to praise God for God’s steadfast love.
We too want to acclaim God. Isn’t this why we are here again at Mass: to praise and reverence God? And when we become the Body of Christ in Communion, to go forth to serve God’s people? But could it be that we are here because we consider ourselves the chosen and the saved? If we come for these reasons, then, we have forgotten that there is a challenge that goes with being chosen — it is Christ-like discipleship.
I think we all forget about this challenge, every now and then. We do because of that selfish human tendency in all of us to take things for granted, including our faith life. Isn’t the Church always here whenever we want to go to Mass? Aren’t the sacraments readily available when we want them for our children and ourselves? Don’t the priests and parish community serve us whenever we need them?
In today’s gospel, Jesus uses three images of doors* to teach us how we can become more responsible for our discipleship.
First, the narrow door and the lesson on the cost to discipleship
We grow as Jesus’ disciples in and through the relationships we have with God and others. We become part of this community of relationships through the process of discipleship.
This involves the practice and discipline of letting God correct and train us so that we grow to become more like Jesus. This is Paul’s teaching in our second reading. Such a relationship is however not cheap or easy. It demands a life of discipleship through which we share and participate in God’s holiness. This is why Jesus says, “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.”
For Jesus, the narrow door expresses the challenge of following him to be with God by serving others selflessly. We enter when we take up the Cross. This is the cost of the narrow door.
Second, the locked door and the lesson on taking our faith seriously
We mature as Jesus’ disciples when we really listen to Jesus teachings that we live our discipleship fully in his ways.
Jesus uses the image of the locked door the master has secured his house with to warn us that the door to God can be shut. When that happens, we will stand apart from God and we will feel the heart-wrenching pain of the closed door. His words are harsh but they are graced. They are to wake up self-righteous and spiritually smug disciples who consider themselves the chosen and saved. They can re-ignite the complacent faith of such presumptuous disciples.
The strident, urgent tone of Jesus’ words should jolt you and me to do the same and make the right choice today, and not tomorrow or another time because these may never come to be. Choosing the narrow door is the right choice. When we choose otherwise, we ourselves close that door to God. So, let whoever has ears, hear what Jesus is teaching today.
Third, the big, wide and opened door and the lesson on God’s largesse
We celebrate that we are Jesus’ disciples when we selflessly share God’s goodness in our lives with everyone, especially the sinful and the needy.
Luke’s gospel reminds us that all are invited to participate in God’s life: “people will come from east and west, from north and south”, and they will feast in God’s kingdom. While some present are the expected, many are not, surprising us. And not everyone who thinks they’re “in” will be for the master of the house will leave then out, saying, “I do not know where you come from.”
I believe that all who are present and feasting at this banquet have come through the big, wide and opened door of God’s mercy. Luke’s gospel does not mention it but it is there.
This is the door God audaciously flings open to any and everyone who seeks God. Jesus unhinges this same door of mercy and re-purposes it as God’s table of plenty for everyone, saint and sinner alike. And yes, you and I can enter this open door to celebrate with God because Jesus has made squeezing through the narrow door doable for all through the Cross.
The doors we encounter daily can teach us much about life and faith. Our faith experience has shaped many of us to think that the narrow door is for the chosen few who will be saved. But this isn’t Jesus’ message. For him, God’s goodness will always lead everyone to the narrow door.
As Jesus’ disciples, we should permit God to walk with us to it, and together pass through it with hope — with hope because nothing less than God and God’s goodness awaits us on the other side. Maybe then, we will truly know that God has always constructed this door to be big and wide — never narrow — to gather and save everyone, no matter our state of grace.
Are you still waiting to enter? Wait no more; God eagerly awaits our coming. Let us enter.
* Inspired in parts of James Prasnell
Preached at St Ignatius Parish, Singapore
photo: talentcutlure.com
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