The Tenth Sunday of the Year, A

            In a parish where I was once visiting as the priest-celebrant, after the Sunday Mass, a man came up to me, incensed at something the deacon had said during the homily.  “If Jesus were among us today,” the angry man declaimed, “He would identify Himself with the political right!”  “I really don’t think so,” I responded.  “Why not?” the man answered, eager for a political debate (something I am not very good at, due to a general lack of interest).  “Well,” I said, “I think He would do and be just as He did and was two thousand years ago.  He’d certainly cause all kinds of angst among the politicos, of whatever strip, but He’d remain the enigma, politically speaking, now as He was then.” 

            Let us remind ourselves of the situation in our Lord’s time on this earth and of how He actually did behave and teach, a behavior and teaching that won over many a heart and yet alienated so many more.  The land of the Jews, as we know from the Bible and other sources of history, was under the iron heel of Rome, and the Jews, especially those moved by a sense of their nationality and religion, despised the Romans.  Jesus was a Jew, and a very observant one at that.  Yet, He was friendly to the Romans.  He graciously healed the Roman military officer’s servant and pronounced that this pagan had more faith than most everyone else.  And yet, in the end, it was the Romans who executed Him. 

            The Pharisees, a very observant religious group within Judaism, could not figure this Jesus out.  His teaching would appear to get right to the heart of the Law of God, and then Jesus would go and do something like perform a miracle for pagan woman, or heal someone else on the Sabbath.  To the relief of the Pharisees, Jesus would make it clear that He most certainly had not come to abolish the Law; but then He’d go and say something to the effect that the whole of the Law and the Prophets were being fulfilled in Him.  He was, then, an enigma, precisely because He could not be reduced to a political category.  He seemed to have a mission – as He Himself often said – that really transcended the concerns of all parties.  He stated quite clearly in today’s Gospel the goal of that mission. 

            What do we find Him doing in today’s Gospel?  There He is calling Matthew to be one of His twelve Apostles, Matthew, a tax collector.  To add insult to injury, Jesus then proceeds to Matthew’s house to have dinner with other tax collectors and “sinners.”  Strange behavior for someone, a Jew, who so freely assumed the mantle of a teacher of the Mosaic Law. 

            Now let us remember what a tax collector really was, as we know from history.  He was a collaborator with the Romans, who levied the taxes.  Such men were known not only for this kind of treacherous activity, but also for their unscrupulous means of making their job quite lucrative for themselves at the expense of their fellow countrymen.  They were despised more than the Romans themselves, and yet here Jesus is sitting down to a celebratory banquet with them.

            But our Lord was not declaring an alliance with the Romans.  He was not insinuating Himself into the moneyed classes.  He was not disavowing the Law of Moses and sanctioning the dishonesty and other misbehaviors of self-serving people.  He was not posturing Himself as an illustration of our modern political tenet of toleration (which really so easily slips into the relativism of declaring that there is no such thing as good or evil behavior).  “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”  There’s His mission. 

            Again, precisely because He refused to be a tool of political parties or a means of political and merely social unity, He was an enigma, a mystery, to those who could not bring themselves to see the purpose of His presence in this world.  Did not Jesus Himself say, so very emphatically, in the imperative, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household.”

            A sword, our Lord said.  Certainly not the sword of violence nor even the sword of political coercion, but nevertheless a sword of division.  And the line of demarcation is readily understood in the light of His mission:  to call sinners to Himself; the division falling between those who hear His voice, like Matthew (and other sinners), and those who conclude that this Jesus, whom we Christians know as Savior, is really of no use to them.  He just will not serve their purposes and interests – whether political or social, economic or even cultural.  Christ has His own mission that is to mark the very nature and heart of His holy Church:  to call sinners to repentance, redemption and salvation through Him, a mission that, if accomplished in many, certainly could begin to transform all the realms of human activity. 

            Our Lord’s mission, then, is not very flattering to those of merely worldly concerns.  His life, death and resurrection is even a direct rebuke to those in the Church who are engaged in ecclesial ladder-climbing or to those who are enmeshed in present-day ideologies of secular “salvation” that aim at using the Church for their own ends.  The mission of the Church is Christ’s mission:  to bring sinners together in communion with God so that sin and evil in human hearts might be vanquished by the love, holiness and mercy of God, a mission that far transcends worldly categories and concerns.  That’s why Jesus Christ, when taken for who He really was and is, is so mysterious (and frustrating) to the world – to all, that is, except those who hear His voice as St. Matthew did, “Follow me.”