30 August, 2013

22nd Sun C - Vally D'Souza sj / Pagola

Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time ©
     1 September 2013
   WITHOUT EXCLUDING ANYONE
Luke 14:7-14
Jesus attends a banquet invited by “one of the leading Pharisees” of the region. It is a special Sabbath day meal prepared on the eve with great care. As usual, the guests are friends of the host, prestigious Pharisees, experts in the law, models of religious life for all the people.
Apparently Jesus doesn’t feel at ease.  He is missing his friends, the poor – people he finds begging on the roadsides, those never invited by anyone, those who don’t matter: excluded from social life, forgotten by religion; despised by almost everyone. They are the ones who usually sit at table with him.
Before leaving, Jesus addresses the one who invited him. It is not to thank him for the banquet, but to stir his conscience and invite him to live a less conventional and more humane life: 
“Do not invite your friends, your brothers or your relatives or your rich neighbours, because they  will correspond by inviting you… Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind; happy are you because they cannot pay you back; they will repay you when the righteous rise again.”

Once again Jesus tries to humanize life by breaking if necessary  set ways of behaving and thinking which seem to be very appropriate but which basically indicate our resistance to building a more humane and fraternal world willed by God.
Ordinarily, we live in a closed circle of family, social, political or religious relationships by which we mutually help each other to look after our interests leaving out those who can do nothing for us. We invite into our lives those who in turn can invite us. That’s all.
Slaves to self-satisfying relationships, we are not aware that our wellbeing is maintained by excluding those who most need our freely given solidarity, simply to be able to survive. We have to listen to the evangelical pleas of Pope Francis in the small island of Lampedusa: “The culture of prosperity makes us insensitive to the cries of others.”  “We have fallen into the globalization of indifference. We have lost our sense of responsibility.”
We followers of Jesus must remember that opening paths to the Kingdom of God does not consist in building a more religious society or in promoting an alternative political system, but, above all, in creating and developing more humane relationships which make possible dignified conditions of life for all, beginning with the least of us.
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