Our Lady of Guadalupe
The hymn ‘In bread we bring you Lord’ by Kevin Nichols has two lines that always speak to me:
The chances we have missed, the graces we resist,
Lord, in thy Eucharist, take and redeem.
It sometimes seems to me that to be human is to be half-hearted. We want God, but not too much God. We want faith, but not to the extent of our faith inconveniencing us. We want the church to be there when we need it and not to bother us when we do not. We resist grace. God gives us chances and we miss them. The Spirit inspires us and we do nothing about it. Lord, have mercy.
Yet there is another side to us. We believe in God, especially in God revealed in and through Jesus. We have faith, even if it is a struggle sometimes, especially when we are faced with the mystery of why good people suffer. We gather with others and stretch out our hands to the bread of life, which we know is Christ among us, even although we also know we are unworthy. We can do this because we know that God accepts us and loves us no less for knowing who we are.
The gospel today is food for those who know that they are tepid Christians. It is a gospel for the half-hearted. One son says that he will go and work in the vineyard and yet does not go. Another says that he will not go, then almost despite himself, he does go. This parable (Mt 21.28-32) says to me that Jesus recognizes the conflicts and compromises within us. He knows that we rarely walk a straight line. There is a link with last week’s parable about the workers in the vineyard. Last week we learned that it is never too late to repent, never too late to turn to God, never too late to begin again, never too late to make an act of trust in the love and mercy of God. Lifetime saints and last-minute Christians are all welcomed by God. Today we learn that God accepts us despite our reluctance, our half-heartedness, our initial lukewarm response. And yet, we have to make an effort, no matter how feeble it seems. God accepts us, but we have to make a free step towards God. It is a message of hope and encouragement to take that step.
The parable was offered in response to the religious leaders who challenged Jesus by asking him the source of his authority. We would be misguided, however, if we saw this as a word addressed only to Jewish leaders. The word of the Lord speaks to all people of all times, and in our own context it is a challenge to our assumptions of respectability. From the words of Jesus today we learn that notorious sinners were able to come to know God’s love before the respectable did. It was those who believed that their lives were quite good enough who failed to recognise God’s call.
Many years ago, when I was a young man, I read a story about a Mexican prostitute who had a picture on her wall of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I was a righteous young man and a little shocked at this holy picture in an unholy situation. Now, many years later, I hear Jesus say wonderingly that even prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God, while the respectable and the righteous hold back. Today I am glad that she had that picture. But then I am older and wiser, and I understand more fully how generous is God’s love, a love embodied by Christ as he set aside his heavenly glory (Phil. 2.1-11) to come among us.
Fr Terry is Parish Priest at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Brook Green, west London. His latest book: Ronald Knox and English Catholicism is published by Gracewing.
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