Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 136

When John came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him; but tax collectors and prostitutes did.
Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him."

What a man is before God is what a man is; neither more nor less." So said Saint Francis of Assisi as he charged his friars to live the life they'd vowed to live. 

Always there is this challenge from God. We must be holy, and not merely pretend like it. This is just as true of Catholic laity as it is of our priests and religious, bishops and cardinals. God demands and the world expects us to be holy. 

But we are cemented with a resilient, sturdy epoxy to our self-images and nothing seems to break that bond. Whether that self-image is virtuous or wicked, rigid or plastic, it is not who we are; it’s only what we think we are, or should be, or might yet be. It’s a fiction, an imagination, an idea, with some resemblance to who we are before God. 

I sat with a counselor once as we reviewed my sad story and the healing I'd experienced under his tutelage. He explained that he'd call my religious superior and the three of us would discuss me via speaker phone. 

Always eager to appear agreeable, and not realizing what I’d signed up for, I went along with the plan. I didn't foresee my gut reaction. When the conversation began, I died a thousand deaths as the counselor reported my progress to the friar, a man and classmate I'd known almost my entire life. 

I have often spoken of other people when they weren't present, and I suppose that people talk about me when I'm not in the room. I have no quarrel with that. But I don't want to hear it, or hear about it. Let me not know what people think of me. I have my self-image, such as it is. Let me alone.

The self we meet in the Scriptures is often ugly. We have sinned, we and our ancestors have sinned. Or, as the Prophet Isaiah said, “I am a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips.” 

Although the sacred text describes the people of God long before I was  born, the self who appears in the Word of God  bears a powerful resemblance to the virtuous who turns away from virtue to commit iniquity. 

I sometimes hear people say they prefer the New Testament god to the Old Testament god, but the us which appears in both Testaments, the sinful people, is the same. As Pogo said when Albert dropped his cigar in the lemonade, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” 

Grace reveals the LORD to us; we cannot know God unless the LORD shows himself to us. He appears to us through prayer, the scriptures, and the sacraments. 

But grace also shows us who we are. We are loved intensely, and we are sadly embedded in resistance to God's merciful justice. 

As we gaze into the life of Jesus, Mary, and the saints – a window which Saint Clare called the Mirror of Perfection – we might see the aura of Mercy that glows around and through us. Hopefully, that halo appears to others. But our sinful habits, attitudes, and customs also stare us hard in the face. And it's hard to take.

The scriptures insist that we have sinned and are saved by the forgiveness of our sins. The Lord  comes not to save the righteous, but sinners. We hear this message repeatedly and yet we reassure ourselves that we've discovered the formula and we’re living it just about right. We'll nod our heads and piously agree we're all sinners – O Lord have mercy on me, a sinner – but, we tell ourselves, the real sinners are not here in church. 

And then grace slams us again, as I was slammed in the counselor’s office, with a blessed humiliation. 

Woody Allen once said, “I don’t mind dying, but I don’t want to be there when it happens.” But we’ll be there with our self-image when that moment comes. 

How about this vision of heaven? Heaven  is that place where I leave my self behind. I – that is my self-judgment, my pride, my self-consciousness, my fear of what people think, feel, or say about me, will not be there when it happens. Self-images don’t live after we die; they disappear like annual weeds that are not reseeded into eternity. 

Heaven is where no one pretends to be what they’re not. In God’s presence, we will know as we are known, and love as we are loved. And we'll be grateful, for we will finally understand that we could not save ourselves;  and never could have, saved ourselves. And we will know, despite whatever we thought of ourselves, that God thought we were worth saving.