Twenty
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time ©
1 September 2013
WITHOUT EXCLUDING ANYONE
Luke 14:7-14
Jesus attends a banquet invited by “one
of the leading Pharisees” of the region. It is a special Sabbath day meal
prepared on the eve with great care. As usual, the guests are friends of the
host, prestigious Pharisees, experts in the law, models of religious life for
all the people.
Apparently Jesus doesn’t feel at ease. He is missing his friends,
the poor – people he finds begging on the roadsides, those never invited by
anyone, those who don’t matter: excluded from social life, forgotten by
religion; despised by almost everyone. They are the ones who usually sit at
table with him.
Before leaving, Jesus addresses the one who invited him. It is not to
thank him for the banquet, but to stir his conscience and invite him to live a
less conventional and more humane life:
“Do not invite your friends, your brothers or
your relatives or your rich neighbours, because they will correspond by
inviting you… Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind; happy are
you because they cannot pay you back; they will repay you when the
righteous rise again.”
Once again Jesus tries to humanize life by breaking if necessary
set ways of behaving and thinking which seem to be very appropriate but which
basically indicate our resistance to building a more humane and fraternal world
willed by God.
Ordinarily, we live in a closed circle of family, social, political
or religious relationships by which we mutually help each other to look
after our interests leaving out those who can do nothing for us. We invite into
our lives those who in turn can invite us. That’s all.
Slaves to self-satisfying relationships,
we are not aware that our
wellbeing is maintained by excluding those who most need our freely
given
solidarity, simply to be able to survive. We have to listen to the
evangelical
pleas of Pope Francis in the small island of Lampedusa: “The culture of
prosperity makes us insensitive to the cries of others.” “We have
fallen
into the globalization of indifference. We have lost our sense of
responsibility.”
We followers of Jesus must remember that opening paths to the Kingdom of
God does not consist in building a more religious society or in promoting an
alternative political system, but, above all, in creating and developing more
humane relationships which make possible dignified conditions of life for all,
beginning with the least of us.
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