25th Sunday in ordinary time: Fr Mathew's Homily Sept.21

Have you ever heard about a game by name “Zero-Sum Game?” A Zero-Sum Game is a game in which there are x number of chips on the table. In this game one person has to lose for another person to win.

We play this game in this world. Big winners live in mansions and drive expensive cars. They have boats and planes. They spend winters in Miami and spend summers in Maine. The winners get whatever they want and the rest of us get what is left.

In today’s gospel, Jesus turns the “Zero-sum game “upside down. Jesus explained the Kingdom of heaven with parables. It is a mystery to understand.

If you are planning to move to a foreign country, I am sure you would learn their customs and their rules to live as a good citizen of that country.

For us heaven is like a foreign country. Most of us would like to go heaven one day. So for us it is important to know some of the rules by which heaven is governed. We already know some of those rules. The Fist will be the last in haven. The more you are at the service of others, the more you become great in the Kingdom of God.

Here is another important rule for us to know before we go to heaven. It is called “the rhetoric of excess.”

Let me give you a great example for this rule, “the rhetoric of excess.” When we go to Portage (Kalamazoo), at the Westnedge exit, have you ever seen homeless people standing with a placard “I’m homeless, Please help me, and God will bless you?”

Every now and then I would give them a dollar. Onetime as I opened my wallet, I had only a twenty dollar Bill. So I gave that homeless man $20 dollar. When I told my friend about this he said I was crazy and it was too much money.

The British literary critic Frank Kermode (1919–2010) called this phenomenon “rhetoric of excess.” Our God practices the Rhetoric of excess. .” Our righteousness must be produced to excess. In the gospels, we can see many times this principle being practiced.

In the gospel, the apostles ask Jesus, “How many times should we forgive? “Seven times?

Jesus replied, seventy times seven. It means divine forgiveness, given and received, is beyond calculation or comprehension.

Or think about the good shepherd who abandons a flock of ninety-nine sheep in order to find one lost sheep. In the parable of the prodigal son God is like an indulgent father who welcomes back his indigent son with the best party that money could buy, despite the anger of the older son at such excessive generosity.

John compares God's kingdom to a wedding party with an outrageous excess of fine wine.  In the parable of the sower, God sows the seeds indiscriminately. God scatters all over the place without calculating the outcome.

I gave that homeless man my twenty dollar bill. It was an honest effort to imitate the excessive generosity of God by doing something that defied common sense or conventional wisdom.

One day you and I will be standing at the pearly gates.  Sunday school teachers and choir members – priests and deacons and bishops -- will get a big surprise when they go to heaven. They will expect to be kings of the castle. But there will be a lot of surprises. You will see a lot of people least expected..

 And when we go to heaven, we might just find ourselves standing in line at the heavenly gates -- with a drunk who came to Jesus on his deathbed standing IN FRONT OF US!  Surely I should go to the front of the line and he should go to the back." But God will remind us that he has been generous to us as well as to the other person. He will ask, "Are you envious because I am generous?"

A few years ago, at St. John Bosco I gave a homily in which I said that God’s love is unconditional. To make it more concrete, I said, "God loves George W Bush and Saddam Hussein alike" and a few in the congregation thought I was a heretic and pronouncing blasphemy.

  

Even long time Christians forget the fact that Our ways are not God's ways. We get furious when God deviates from our way of operating. Many a time the kind of God we believe in is very limited and finite and our image of God  is a projection of our own behaviors and perceptions from human experience.  Insisting on our personal freedom we sing with Frank Sinatra "I did it my way." On the contrary, when God does things His way, we resent and grumble about the mercy that God shows to whom he pleases. 

God's’s love is without limits. He pours out His Grace without reservation and without regard to who deserves it and who doesn't deserve it;  but we forget how we ourselves benefit from his mercy. If that bothers you, get over it. We , human beings,  may be unfair, but God is fair. God’s ways are not our ways.

These readings challenge us to see people and events in the world the way God sees them. Our automatic responses are egocentric. When we follow God's ways and practice the principle "Rhetoric of Excess," we're not that far from the Kingdom of heaven.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation(C.S. Lewis).