GOD'S CALL IS IRREVOCABLE.

“THE GIFTS AND CALL OF GOD ARE IRREVOCABLE”

Homily for August 20th, 2017: 20^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. 

         Is. 56:1, 6-7; Rom.11:13-15, 29-32; Mt. 15:21-28.

AIM: To counter anti-Semitism by showing the role of the Jews in God’s plan.

 

          Some years ago a Baptist minister in Texas provoked an enormous flap by claiming that God does not hear Jewish prayers, because Jews do not accept Jesus as God’s Son. During most of Christian history this remark would not have been controversial at all. Hadn’t the Jews demanded that Christ be crucified? When the Roman governor Pontius Pilate tried to evade responsibility for Jesus’ death, didn’t the Jewish leaders respond: “His blood be on us and on our children”? (Mt. 27:25). For the better part of twenty centuries most Christians believed that the sufferings of the Jews were God’s answer to that cry, divine revenge for the crime of killing God’s Son. 

          Moreover, there is a long and too little known history of Christian persecution of Jews. This culminated during World War II in the slaughter of some six million Jews by Adolf Hitler, for twelve years ruler of a nominally Christian country, Germany. Most of the killing was done in the Catholic country of Poland. Other supposedly Christian countries, including our own, did nothing to halt the Holocaust, and must thus share some of the guilt.  Hitler justified his persecution of Jews by the false, but widely believed, claim that he was merely putting into practice what the Church had taught for centuries: that the Jews were enemies of God because they crucified God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

          We need to consider this painful subject of anti-Semitism from time to time.  This Sunday is a particularly good time to do so. All three readings concern the special role of Jesus’ own people, the Jews, in God’s plan. In the first reading Isaiah prophecies a time when the Temple at Jerusalem will become a house of prayer not just for his own people, but “for all peoples.” In the gospel Jesus initially rejects the request of a Gentile woman for healing because she is not a Jew. He grants her request because of her courage and persistence. She refuses to give up despite her double handicap. She’s handicapped first, as a woman in a man’s world; and second, as an outsider in the Jewish world of Jesus. Finally, in our second reading, Paul confronts the problem which tormented him, as a devout Jew: how was it possible that God’s own people rejected God’s Son, their long awaited Messiah, when he finally came.

          Paul’s answers this question in three ways. First, he says, Israel’s rejection of Jesus is partial only: many Jews have accepted Jesus (Rom. 11:7). Second, even this partial rejection of Jesus is only temporary (11:22-24, 31-32). In the end, Paul says, all Israel will one day accept Jesus because — and this is the third part of Paul’s answer — “the gifts and call of God are irrevocable.”

          What does this mean? It means that God has not rejected the people he first chose for his own just because some of them did not recognize God’s Son when he came. In Jesus’ day Jews were already scattered throughout the Mediterranean world. Many never even heard of Jesus Christ during his lifetime. Of those who lived in Palestine and knew Jesus, many did accept him. Jesus’ mother, his apostles, and Paul himself were all Jews. Pope Benedict says that Jesus’ condemnation was the work of small group of religious and political leaders, not of the Jewish people as a whole, even those in Palestine. And both Jesus himself, and his first followers, said that they acted in ignorance (Lk 23:34; Acts. 3:17; 1 Cor. 2:8).

          This background helps us understand the statement of the Second Vatican Council: “Neither all Jews indiscriminately at [Jesus’] time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crime committed during his passion. ... The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from Holy Scripture. ... The Church deplores all hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews. The Church always held, and continues to hold, that Christ out of infinite love freely underwent suffering and death because of the sins of all men, so that all might attain salvation” (Nostra aetate 4, emphasis supplied).

          How will God’s plan be fulfilled, that all of Jesus’ own people come to accept him as God’s Son? And when will this happen? We do not know. We do know, however, that every kind of Christian anti-Semitism is an obstacle to God’s plan, and a sin. It is a monstrous perversion of our holy faith to say that God does not hear Jewish prayers. The Council, commenting on Paul’s statement in our second reading, that God’s call is irrevocable, says: “The Jews remain very dear to God for the sake of the patriarchs, since God does not take back the gifts he bestowed or the choice he made” (loc. cit.) The first of the patriarchs is Abraham.   Our first Eucharistic prayer calls Abraham “our father in faith.” Every year, on Good Friday, Catholics all over the world pray, in the Church’s public liturgy, “For the Jewish people, the first to hear the world of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name, and in faithfulness to his covenant.”

          That prayer expresses the Council’s teaching, “The Jews remain very dear to God.” We need to take that statement to heart. There are a number of synagogues within our parish boundaries. On Friday evening and Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, we see many people walking: Orthodox Jews observing the strict Sabbath rule which forbids riding in a car. How many Catholics would come to Mass on Sunday, if we were required to walk?

          Let me conclude with two quotes from Pope Benedict XVI. Commenting on the cry of the crowd which called for Jesus’ death, “His blood be on us and on our children,” the Pope writes in his book Jesus of Nazareth: “The Christian will remember that Jesus’ blood … does not cry out for vengeance and punishment; it brings reconciliation. It is not poured out against anyone; it is poured out for many, for all. …Read in the light of faith, [the words] mean that we all stand in need of the purifying power of love which is [Jesus’] blood. These words are not a curse, but rather redemption, salvation.” (vol. 2, p. 187)

          The second quote is from address given by Cardinal Ratzinger (as he then was) to a group of rabbis in Jerusalem in the late 1990s.

          “Already as a child ... I could not understand how some people wanted to derive a condemnation of Jews from the death of Jesus, because the following thought had penetrated my soul as something profoundly consoling: Jesus’ blood raises no calls for retaliation but calls all to reconciliation. It has become, as the letter to the Hebrews shows, itself a permanent Day of Atonement of God. ...

          “Jews and Christians should accept each other in profound inner reconciliation,” Pope Benedict says, “neither in disregard of their faith nor in its denial but out of the depth of faith itself. In their mutual reconciliation they should become a force for peace in and for the world. Through their witness to the one God, who cannot be adored apart from the unity of love of God and neighbor, they should open the door into the world for this God so that his will be done, and so that it becomes on earth ‘as it is in heaven’; so that ‘his kingdom come.’”