Who Can't Be Saved?
25th Sunday of the Year
A rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks him what must be done to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to observe the commandments. He even singles out six commandments that deserve special attention. But the young man wants more—he wants certainty of his salvation. He tells Jesus that he has observed all the commandments, but he knows that there is something that is still missing from his life. “What still do I lack?” he asks Jesus.
We’re talking about perfection at this point, the desire to live a perfect life, and so Jesus gives him the answer: if you desire to be perfect, go sell what you have, give to the poor, and follow me. The rich young man hears these words and goes away sad because he possesses much wealth.
Jesus then uses the encounter with the rich young man to give the disciples a teaching: it is difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. In fact, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples can’t believe what Jesus is saying.
“Who can be saved?” they ask. Now it is Christ’s closest followers, his friends, who want to know about salvation.
Jesus gives an answer to the question that seems to talk about the salvation of anyone, everyone, and not only the rich. He tells the disciples: with human beings alone, salvation is impossible, but with God, all things are possible. You can’t save yourselves, Jesus tells them. But God can save you.
Now Peter is upset. He says to Christ: “We have left everything to follow you. What then will there be for us?” Peter wants to know if he will be saved. And he makes a case for his salvation that hinges on a comparison with others, even other people who follow Christ. He says to Christ: Look, not everyone who follows you has changed everything about their life to become your disciple, but we have, we have left behind everything about our old lives, and we are following you, following you better than anyone else, so is that enough for us to be saved? We are better Christ-followers than anyone else, so will we be saved?
The answer that Christ gives to Peter, really, is the parable that we hear in today’s Gospel. We can’t understand the teaching of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard unless we understand that the teaching Christ gives is meant for us, for you and me, for those who follow Christ but become obsessed with concerns for our own salvation and try to justify ourselves by making the case that we are better Christ-followers than the people around us. We want certainty about the quality, the goodness, of our lives, and we use judgment and claims to justice as the tools we need to justify our belief that we deserve salvation more than others. Maybe I am not the best person, we tell ourselves, maybe there is more that I could be doing with my life, but I know that I am better than that person over there—that person over there does not deserve salvation, and I am better than them, so maybe I do deserve it.
Maybe you don’t have these kinds of thoughts often in your life, but my guess is that most of us would find ourselves disappointed or upset—or at least sadly surprised—to get to heaven and discover that some terrible person was there to welcome us. There is a good thought experiment for you: what person, if you arrived in heaven and found them there before you, if God had found a way to get the job done and help the worst sinner to repentance, maybe at the last possible moment of life, who would break your heart to discover that they had been saved? You can go ahead and pick someone from history, maybe the Hitlers and the Stalins or any other monster from past centuries of human depravity. You can go ahead and pick someone from the world today who you see as the root of the trauma and confusion that afflicts our world, maybe our President, or our former President, or some advocate for the worst kind of evils in society. You can go ahead and pick someone from your personal history who has harmed you, done you injustice, hurt you, someone who you just can’t forgive and don’t want to forgive and of whom you are certain is just not a good person.
Who, if you arrived in heaven and found them there before you, would break your heart to discover they had been saved?
What is at stake for us with these kinds of questions, I think, is more than a concern for our own salvation. Talk about salvation also fills us with a kind of envy. Remember the words of Peter: We have left everything to follow you. What then will there be for us? What Peter really wants to know is: If salvation depends on God, and not on us, then what is the point of me leaving everything behind to follow you because my life is hard—I have sacrificed and I am suffering and I am trying to get life right—and now you are telling me that someone who does not follow the commandments and someone who has not left everything behind to follow you just might be saved and now I want to know what is the point of my life. Why am I doing this at all?
How does Christ respond to Peter? He gives the Parable of the Laborers of the Vineyard, and with the Parable he exposes two faults in how we think about salvation, the Christian life, and those who do not live good lives.
The first fault is the sin of envy, and the envy that Christ exposes is the worst kind. It is an envy within us for those who live evil lives but might still get saved. The envy might look one of two ways. First, there might be a desire within us to sin and get away with it. Well, if that person over there can sin and still make it to heaven, then there is no real point to what I am doing with my Christ-following and my sacrificing and my suffering, so I wish I could sin and make it to heaven—life would be better if I could just do whatever I want right now and repent later—I want what they have. Or maybe I do not exactly want to sin myself, but I absolutely do not want that sinner over there to be saved while I am over here struggling to live the good life, so now I am envious of the fact that they can sin and get away with it. My heart is filled with sorrow for their salvation. I do not want them to be saved.
What kind of love or charity is there in those kinds of thoughts?
The second fault that Christ exposes with the Parable is that we focus on the wrong realities in life. What do you see while you are laboring in the vineyard? For many of us, maybe for most of us, what we see is our labor in comparison with the labor of others. I have been breaking my back in this vineyard for years, decades, we tell ourselves, and I have labored much harder than others, some of whom just showed up yesterday, and you’re telling me that we’re all getting paid the same wage at the end of the day? We focus on our work, on the quality of our life in comparison with other Christians, and we get envious, and we get angry.
What Christ reveals to us with the Parable is that we need to keep our eyes focused on the landowner who runs the vineyard. The landowner goes out five times in the Parable to find laborers to work the fields. The landowner is working harder than any other laborer for the good of the vineyard, going out from dawn till dusk to find people to work in the fields. But no one sees how hard the landowner works. None of those laborers who started their work in the morning and now in the evening are complaining about their wages are looking to the landowner and comparing the quality of their labors to his.
No one works harder for the good of the vineyard than the landowner, which is to say, no one works harder for the good of the kingdom of heaven than Christ. Maybe, instead of comparing our labors to those of the people around us who seem to work easier, fewer, hours, we should compare our labors to those of Christ and just be grateful to be in the kingdom of heaven at all.
Just before Jesus teaches the disciples the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, he tells them that there are many who are first who will be last, and many who are last who will be first. That is a hard teaching for us who are first. There are people who are going to show up to the vineyard late in the day, and there are people who will just not work as hard as us once they get there, and at the end of the day we will all receive the same wage and that reality will challenge our sense of justice and maybe cause us to doubt why we worked so hard in the first place but the question Christ places before us is simple: will we rest in gratitude for our salvation, or will our hearts fill with envy before the generosity of God?
Homily preached on Sunday, September 24th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary