Homily for the Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people:
“What is your opinion?
A man had two sons.
He came to the first and said,
‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’
He said in reply, ‘I will not, ‘
but afterwards changed his mind and went.
The man came to the other son and gave the same order.
He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir, ‘but did not go.
Which of the two did his father’s will?”
They answered, “The first.”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you,
tax collectors and prostitutes
are entering the kingdom of God before you.
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.”
-Matt. 21:28-32
“O God who show forth your almighty power most of all by sparing and having mercy…”
These words from the Collect of the Mass today provide us with the motive for our calling upon God in the hope of receiving the effects of his promises of eternal happiness.
Both St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa and St. Faustina in her Diary tell us that the greatest of God’s attributes is his mercy. This is no wonder, since mercy is the most powerful and perfect kind of love. “God is Love” the beloved disciple tells us, and so his effects in his creation show his love at its utmost; that is, they show forth his mercy.
The Savior upbraids the priests and scribes, because even though they witnessed the conversion of persons deep in sin by the preaching of St. John the Forerunner of the Lord, still they did not believe.
Truly, miracles are meant as proofs of divine revelation. We have all heard of the miracles wrought by Jesus: raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, wholeness to the lame, food for the multitudes. But on the authority of the Church’s liturgy, and of her Common Doctor, St. Thomas, and of her mystics and saints, we can safely say that the greatest witness to the almighty power of God is the conversion of the sinner.
If we are brought from a state of grave sin to repentance and grace, we have within ourselves the witness to his almighty power. Remember that for Thomas, the conversion of a sinner is a greater work of God than the creation of the whole universe: “I baptize you” and “I absolve you from your sins” carry more power than the “Let there be light” and the other “Let there be’s” of the days of creation. These sacramental forms are the works of the Most Holy Trinity through the humanity of Christ, as the Holy Trinity created all things through God the Son “by whom all things were made.”
Have you ever been pardoned a mortal sin? St. Thomas says that for a person to go through the course of a whole life without a single grave fall would be a special grace. We are easily distracted by our emotions and acquired tendencies, and so it happens that even people who are normally upright and living good lives can still fail seriously. Or we can have habits of sin whereby we fall and rise and fall and rise again and again.
Instead of being discouraged by our falls, we should look to an already established and experienced fact: God has pardoned us, again and again, and the evidence of this is our own lives. We have reason to hope always in God’s pardon for ourselves and for those we love.
The priests and scribes believed in the law of God, but they did not acknowledge his power. Not knowing his mercy, they were not disposed to show mercy or to appreciate his mercy experienced by others.
The great sinners, on the other hand, had no alternative but to seek mercy. They did not have a case in their own defense. And so when John the Baptist and the Savior invited sinners to repentance, those sinners were eager and relieved to be offered the hope of salvation. And they laid hold of it.
Did they fall again? Did they backslide? Perhaps. The purpose of God’s mercy is the increase of love in the sinner turned saint. Sometimes God allows even virtuous and holy people to fall, so that in their repentance they may rise to an even greater love than they had before they fell. This is not an excuse for sin, but it is proof of God’s power working with and in our fallen weakness.
If this is true of the first human sin, that of Adam, it is true of our sins as well. “O happy fault, O surely necessary sin of Adam that gained for us such and so great a redeemer!” the Church sings in the triumph of Easter.
The devil’s currency is discouragement. The Savior always encourages and invites us, even as he warns us. He was so intent on loving us that as we read in today’s epistle lesson, “He did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being found in the likeness of men.” St. Paul even says that Christ “became sin” for our sakes. It seems that he understands his being God as involving his identifying with sinners. It is in this that he is at his most almighty.
In the soul of each one of us is the priest or scribe, the tax collector and the prostitute, the first son and the second, but also John the Baptist, and most of all Jesus who wants to take up his dwelling in us. Through the ups and downs, the victories and defeats, the insights and the deceptions of our moral life, the gospel teaches us what we can expect from the God of Love: pure power shown in pure mercy.
Let us run to him to the promised gifts of eternal life for which we prayed in the Collect of the Mass, and never stop running to them after every fall until we are safe in the happiness of heaven.