There Is No Need to Find the God Who Has First Found Us
15th Sunday of the Year
Almost five years ago now, I was living in the city of Bogota when Pope Francis came to visit the people of Colombia. During a meeting with bishops from Central and South America, Pope Francis gave the following warning: I went on to mention the ever-present temptations of making the Gospel an ideology . . . At stake is the salvation that Christ brings us, which has to touch the hearts of men and women by its power and appealing to their freedom, inviting them to a permanent exodus from themselves and their self-absorption, towards fellowship with God and with our brothers and sisters.1 The claim that Pope Francis makes is that ideology threatens to separate us from Christ, and I think that our Gospel today helps us to make sense of what Pope Francis wants us to understand.
The scholar of the law in today’s Gospel is a scribe and he is an ideologue. He is a victim of ideology. What does it mean to say that the scribe is a victim of ideology? It seems to me that the scribe has created for himself a vision of how the world is and how the world ought to be, and the tension in the Gospel follows from the fact that Christ does not fit into the scribe’s worldview. As far as the scribe understands reality, Christ does not belong. In our translation of the Gospel we are told that this scholar of the law “stood up to test Jesus.” But the original Greek of the Gospel makes an even stronger statement. The scribe does more than test Jesus: this scholar of the law tempts Jesus. The Greek word used here means: going to improper measures which exceed appropriate boundaries and pushing the one tested beyond reasonable limits. The Greek word used here is the same word that is used to describe the experience of temptation that Christ faces in the desert. So, the scribe in today’s Gospel tests Christ—he tempts him—because the scribe desires to see Christ fail. The scribe wants to exile Christ from his vision of reality.
The problem with ideology is that our chosen beliefs and our chosen worldview close us off to truth and to goodness and to beauty. That is what happens in the Gospel today: this scholar of the law is closed off to Christ—the Christ who is himself all truth, all goodness, and all beauty. There is another way to say this: to fall victim to ideology is to decide for yourself what is true and good and beautiful about the world. I think that what we see in the scribe from today’s Gospel is the incurvatus in se—the turning inward upon the self—that St. Augustine describes as a consequence of original sin. In our brokenness and our frailty we become so focused upon ourselves that we even start to establish for ourselves our own understanding of how the world is and how the world ought to be. Our own self-regard closes us off from reality and risks severing us from the truth and the goodness and the beauty of Christ.
I think the scribe is exactly this consumed by self-regard. When I first read the Gospel for today, the verse that most captured my attention was the statement that this scholar of the law “wished to justify himself.” What does that mean, to tell us that this scribe wanted to justify himself? Well, here the original Greek is helpful again. To say that the scribe wished to justify himself is to say that the scribe wished to be the cause of his own justification; the scribe wanted to be the cause of his own goodness. What we see here is a man who has built his sense of self-worth upon the foundation of his own knowledge . . . upon the bedrock of his own understanding. This scholar of the law is convinced that he possesses a clear vision of how the world is and how the world ought to be. The scribe is convinced that his knowledge of reality is the cause of his own justification; the scribe is certain that the goodness of his life follows from his own understanding of what is true and good and beautiful in the world.
The tragedy of the Gospel today is that this scholar of the law fails to see in Christ the source of all knowledge and truth . . . the origin of all goodness and beauty. The scribe—like so many others in the Gospels—meets Christ but at first rejects the possibility of growth and conversion. And what gets in the way of his conversion are his own ideas about how the world is and how the world ought to be. I think that this is why Christ responds to the scribe with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The scribe—much like the robbed and half-dead man in the parable—is in need of healing. And the Good Samaritan is the one who reaches out in mercy and compassion to heal the brokenness and the woundedness of an injured man. The Good Samaritan is the one who sees a person in his or her poverty and does the work of restoration. The Good Samaritan is Christ, and it is only Christ who can heal the wounds and the brokenness that threaten to sever us from a relationship with God.
There is something of a paradox found in today’s Gospel; two truths that seem to contradict one another are nonetheless both true. Here is the first truth: the wounds of ideology that separate us from God and from one another are only healed through Christ. The response to ideology is Christ. For the Christian, our understanding of how the world is and how the world ought to be can only come from Christ. And here is the second truth: that which threatens to separate us from Christ is ideology. The very wound that we need Christ to heal in us is the wound that always threatens to prevent our being healed. I think that this is why Pope Francis describes the danger of our turning the Gospel itself into an ideology: there is always the risk that our convictions about how the world is and how the world ought to be—even when grounded in the truth of the Gospel—will prevent us from opening ourselves up to the Christ who alone will heal us and restore us. The life of faith—real, authentic, genuine faith—demands a radical openness to Christ.
And I think that here is the key to overcoming the threat of ideology in our Christian lives: a radical openness to Christ that comes from keeping close to Christ. I love the description of our human lives that Moses gives us in our first reading today. Like the scribe in the Gospel, there is a part of us that will always desire to go out into the world on a search for meaning and for truth. We are possessed by a desire to cross the sea or ascend into the heavens in order to find out for ourselves the answers to the questions that most consume us in our lives. Here is another way of saying that: each of us experiences the desire to create a worldview for ourselves.
But there is no need for us to journey across an open ocean or to climb our way to the heavens in order to discover the meaning of our lives or the truth of our world. Everything that we could ever need—everything—is given to us in Christ. There is no need to find the God who has first found us . . . we need only allow Christ to work on us. This passage from the Book of Deuteronomy tells us that to do the work of living the commandments only requires that we remain open to the Christ who himself lives so near to us. We must keep close to the Christ who alone can heal us and restore us. And that kind of closeness to Christ is—as you will hear me say again and again and in so many different ways—that kind of closeness to Christ is found through the life of the Church. The life of the Church is where we meet Christ: in the sacraments, in our living tradition, and in the relationships that are formed with the fellow members of his body.
What threatens that kind of proximity to Christ is good old-fashioned self-regard—that turning inward toward the self— through which our own convictions about how the world is or ought to be close us off from the Christ who heals us and restores us. The scribe in the Gospel today allowed conviction to separate him from Christ. Until the moment that Christ heals him. Because the only response to the threat of ideology is Christ himself: a living relationship with the Good Samaritan who heals us and restores us through the Church.
Pope Francis, Apostolic Journey to Colombia: Encounter with the Executive Committee of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). September 7th, 2017.
Homily preached July 10th, 2022 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Baltimore.