A Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Isaiah 56:1, 6-7  Romans 11:13-15, 29-32  Matthew 15:21-28

In 1911, the American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce published the masterpiece The Devil’s Dictionary. Perhaps it did have a supernatural origin because its satire does not seem to have aged.

One needs to read no further than the entries under the letters A, B and C to see how contemporary this dictionary remains: 

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion. 

BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do 

not entertain.

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

The world has not seen any softening of intransigence since Bierce. Indeed, we seem more polarized, more directly opposed to one another than ever before. The Devil’s Dictionary does not define the word “progress.” Perhaps Bierce did not think it ever occurred.

The Scriptures sing a different song. In Isaiah, the Lord speaks of breaking down barriers:

The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
ministering to him,
loving the name of the LORD,
and becoming his servants—
all who keep the sabbath free from profanation
and hold to my covenant,
them I will bring to my holy mountain
and make joyful in my house of prayer (Is 56:6-7).

Jesus tells a Canaanite woman that he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt 15:24), yet he heals her daughter in response to her repeated request. Jesus did not change his mind about the identity of the chosen people, but his attitude toward the Canaanite woman altered when he saw her faith.

God appears in sacred Scripture much more frequently as one who gathers rather than scatters. And Christians have a particular reason to rejoice or a charge to uphold, depending upon how you look at it. We are those who need not divide the world into the right and the wrong, into the good and evil. Not because these opposites do not exist. They do, and they compel us to choose, but the task of sifting them ultimately belongs to our Lord. 

Those who bear the name Christian claim Christ as their Lord, not themselves. To profess faith in Christ is to submit one’s own intellect to the revealed wisdom of God. 

Being Catholic is more than a look or a style. It is adherence to a living, undivided community of faith. Today there are those who reject the authority of the Second Vatican Council. So here is the First Vatican Council (1870), which also produced a Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, “Dei Filius.” It spoke of the intellectual submission that characterizes the very act of faith: 

Faith…is a supernatural virtue by which we, with the aid and inspiration of the grace of God, believe that the things revealed by Him are true, not because the intrinsic truth of the revealed things has been perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. For, “faith is,” as the Apostle testifies, “the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not (Heb 11:1)” (No. 3).

Christians do not need to divide the world into opposing camps. Not because the world cannot be so separated by right and wrong, good and evil. No, because truth is bigger than we are, because we have been called into a Catholic (a universal) communion that submits its judgment to that of God. 

The council went on to teach:

Further, by divine and Catholic faith, all those things must be believed which are contained in the written word of God and in tradition, and those which are proposed by the Church, either in a solemn pronouncement or in her ordinary and universal teaching power, to be believed as divinely revealed.

A Catholic owes what is called the obedience of faith to a real and demanding voice, a Catholic community of faith that has existed in the world for two millennia. This may sound coercive, but it sets the individual believer free from the burden of constantly declaring his or her own mind to be the judge of all things, from dividing the world into my correct opinion and your foolishness. While we can never abandon our individual consciences, Catholics do not expect them to fend for themselves, to be the sole arbitrators of truth. 

And even the church does not possess truth, if possession means she must not constantly and prayerfully ponder what has been revealed to her by her Lord, asking new questions with confidence in God’s guidance as she moves through history. Better to say, not that the church owns the truth but that she is summoned by the truth.

Here are two more definitions from The Devil’s Dictionary.

PIETY, n. Reverence for the Supreme Being, based upon His supposed resemblance to man.

IMPIETY, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

When people insist that right and wrong, good and evil, can be perfectly accessed by themselves alone, they have neither glorified nor submitted to God. They have only deified their own judgment.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.