A Homily for the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 18:25-28 Philippians 2:1-11 Matthew 21:28-32
The real pain after all was not that the world had fallen into little pieces. That was a relief from pain. It was rather that the world remained, whole, ordinary and relentlessly to be lived in.
Some two decades into marriage, Nan comes home one morning to discover her husband’s head cradled in a young woman’s lap. Running, with no place to go, she turns up at the door of a friend. He consoles Nan but tells her, “You’d better go back again.” Her husband “will be waiting, and he’ll be in agony.”
But how does one step back into a world that has crumbled? Into a world that refuses to collapse even though its center has been crushed?
That is the question posed in Iris Murdoch’s aptly named novel, “The Sandcastle” (1957).
The real pain after all was not that the world had fallen into little pieces. That was a relief from pain. It was rather that the world remained, whole, ordinary and relentlessly to be lived in.
How do we live our faith when the world falls to pieces? How can our faith be a response to that collapse?
It begins with how we understand ourselves.
To be human is to live in this world and to long for another. Do not immediately think of heaven. Think of the tomorrow that continually calls to you. What we lack today lies just around the corner, if only we can push through.
Granted, we would be hard pressed to explain the meaning of life. Yet to be human is to invest the world with meaning. We cannot help but believe that life is going somewhere, that it has purpose.
Humans inherit creeds, stories about the meaning of life, but there’s a great distance between hearing a story and making it our own. Many people find the tangible meaning of their lives in those whom they love.
How horrible then, when our worlds of meaning crumble like a sandcastle! If only the world in which we are then forced to live would follow.
The real pain, after all, was not that the world had fallen into little pieces. That was a relief from pain. It was rather that the world remained, whole, ordinary and relentlessly to be lived in.
When St. Paul sought to explain the meaning of his faith, the significance of the story he had preached to the church in Phillipi, he most probably quoted a song they already knew.
Scholars think these lines are just that, the earliest possible trace of a Christian hymn, one Paul could presume his flock already knew.
Though he was in the form of God,
(Jesus) did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross (Phil 2:6-8).
Ponder the meaning of this hymn.
Whether you believe in God or not, let us at least settle upon a shared definition of God: Whatever God is, if God is, God must be the ultimate meaning of the world.
So the real question is not about the nature of some occult being whom we cannot know. No, it is whether the world is meaningful. Either our lives have a destiny or they do not.
For the first disciples, the meaning of the world collapsed when Christ, the one whom they loved, died on the cross. Only in the light of resurrection did they come to perceive and to preach this love as the meaning of the world. Christ emptied himself, as the hymn says, to redeem us from senselessness.
All sandcastles collapse. Either it is sandcastles all the way down or the very meaning of the world is a person who loves us, who has the power to empty himself to bring us to fullness.
If the world has meaning, then there is a God.
But our hearts, so bent upon meaning and purpose, seem made of sand. How can the world have meaning when the heart collapses?
It cannot. Not unless Paul’s song is sacred and true.
Christ, the eternal Son of the Father, the fullness of love whom we can only imagine, emptied himself to free the world from senselessness and to fill it again with the purpose we name love.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:9-11).
To paraphrase another Paul, you would think the world would have had enough of silly love songs.
But if this song is true—and we can only know that by taking up its verses, making them our own—then here we go again!
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