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Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year C

 In a couple of weeks, we will come up to the anniversary of the late Pope Francis' apostolic visit to Indonesia. It was a remarkable occasion of interreligious dialogue and friendship between people of different faiths, and it was the next in a line of papal acts reaching out to other faiths to affirm our common search for truth, meaning and peace. From John XXIII's extraordinary embrace of the Eastern Primate in 1958, to Paul VI meeting the Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem in 1963, John Paul II praying with the Chief Rabbi at the Western Wall in 2000, and Pope Benedict joining the Grand Mufti at prayer in the Blue Mosque in Constantinople in 2006. Each of these was an encounter with people of faith who may not know God in the way that the Catholic faith does, but who seek God, nonetheless. 

It was extraordinary then to hear faithful Catholics decrying Pope Francis as a heretic when he affirmed, as his predecessors had for more than sixty years, that God is for everyone, and that all people of faith are on a path to reach God. 

It is even more extraordinary when we hear the prophet Isaiah in this Sunday's readings proclaim that people from all nations will come to praise the Lord, to make offerings and even be accepted into God's temple, "The Lord says this: I am coming to gather the nations of every language… those that have never heard of me or seen my glory."

And again, when we hear Jesus say that people "from east and west, from north and south, all will come to take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God." Not just the elect, as the Jewish people that Jesus is speaking to understand themselves to be, and not just the baptised, who were the audience of Luke's Gospel. 

In the context of the past few week's readings, I am reminded once again that just being baptised is not enough. If I have heard the word of God but not heeded it in my life, then it is not other people that will be on the outside looking in when the heavenly banquet is set, it's me. Only God knows the heart of each one, and God can reach into the heart of all people. 

The Church's declaration on its relationship with other faiths states explicitly that one is the community of all people - one is their origin for God has made them all. In a world that remains divided by the willingness not only of its leaders, but of almost all to look upon difference as deficit, remembering that in God's eyes we are all one people is a challenge for us all. 

As a faith community we still pray in holy week for those of other faiths and no faith, that they may come to know the fullness of God in Jesus Christ, but we do so in hope and goodwill, not in judgement. 

We are different, and we shouldn't downplay or resile from that difference. After all, that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life is a truth of our Christian faith. But in dialogue with others, we can seek both to be understood and to understand. Not to embrace heresy, but to sow harmony. To be loved and to love. From east and west, north and south.








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