Day: June 26, 2022

“Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God”

It is true, profoundly true. Why then does Jesus respond to the statement with a parable about our excuses? We excuse ourselves from the heavenly banquet by turning to our worldly interests such that “none of those which were bidden shall taste of my supper.” Strong words that highlight the problem of our indifference. We exile ourselves.

Once again, it seems, like the parable of Lazarus and Dives, the rich man, that we have ignored the truth that is before us and negated the calling of our humanity to abide in that truth. Our preoccupations are with ourselves and to the neglect of others more than perhaps we realize. In a way, these readings counter the tendency to think that salvation or human happiness is found in our choices and actions in themselves. We forget that the ground of all human activity is God. The parable Jesus tells is simply about our turning away from the divine life into which we are constantly invited and turning instead to our own concerns apart from God. In a literal sense, it is about turning to the ground of human affairs as if that were everything, a kind of divinizing of ourselves and our doings.

It is not that the places of our lives, the “piece[s] of ground” upon which we live, and our activities with the living creatures of the land, “prov[ing] five yoke of oxen,” and our lives with one another in such things as marriage, symbolizing one of the sanctified states of life in the world, don’t matter. The question is, in what way? Through our daily lives God is readying us for the fullness of life which is found in him with one another. “Come, for all things are now ready.” Such is the banquet of heavenly love in which we participate now sacramentally. The strong teaching is that our liturgy is not simply an add-on, an extra, an option; rather it is a necessity and for no other reason than that it is about our life with God and in God. When we ignore or neglect that we are forgetting the real truth and dignity of our humanity.

We meet in the Octave of the Nativity of John the Baptist. His whole ministry from the moment of his conception in the womb of Elizabeth to his being beheaded by Herod is about one thing: pointing us to Jesus as the one whom we seek and with whom we dwell. He points us to Jesus so that we can be with Jesus. His ministry is a ministry of preparing the way of Christ by the “preaching of repentance.” That is about a constant metanoia, a constant turning of hearts and minds to God in Christ. Repentance is the counter to all our prosaic complacencies and preoccupations; in short our indifference to the things of God. It means taking the love of God revealed to us in Jesus Christ seriously and joyously out of an awareness of our sinfulness.

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