It is painful to be excluded. Being involved in youth ministry over the
years I often had a heart for the kids that did not quite seem to fit in. They were the last to be picked for an
activity, they often did not have a partner when our program called for it, and
they sometimes found themselves awkwardly alone. The
situation was even sadder when I would find out that people were being excluded
because of the exclusivity of the group.
For arbitrary reasons, kids were deciding that others should be left
out. And so they were.
Lest we think we are much better though, we all know that in
society arbitrary exclusivity has wreaked havoc on many lives: women were excluded from voting, blacks were
excluded from being fully human, and Jews were excluded from being human at
all. And in the Church we have not been
much better at times; we all know what it can be like to go to a new community
week after week and never be acknowledged by anyone. Worse, many people feel that in the Church they
simply cannot find a home: whether
because of their past, their family, or because they have been hurt.
Now
all of these kinds of exclusivity are an abomination and need to be overcome at
all times, especially by people of faith.
If we are to be an evangelizing community it is our job to be
hospitable, especially keeping an eye out for those people who seem to be
excluded by false notions of exclusivity, those people on the margins of
society.
With this being said, I think it is important to mention the
other side of the coin: I think that
perhaps in our efforts to overcome exclusivity, we—meaning modern society—have
taken inclusivity too far, and this has been detrimental to our faith. So priests give homilies in order to not
offend anyone, people place aside parts of the Tradition in order to make
others a bit more comfortable, and theologians even work their best to prune
the particularity, the exclusivity of Christ, so that he becomes just one more
good historical person, but certainly not a savior, and certainly not God.
Yet
I believe this is truly detrimental to our faith. For as we see in the scriptures today: our faith is grounded exclusively on the
exclusivity of Jesus being the Christ, and it is the uniqueness, the
inimitability, the exceptionality and the particularity of Jesus that allows us
to truly be a inclusive community. We can
only be loving, we can only be hospitable, we can only be inclusive, because of
who Jesus is.
And so who is this Jesus? In the first
reading, we see that he is the one who offers healing. When the crowds were amazed at the healing of
the crippled man, Peter had one answer for them that should be the same answer
we speak today: It was in the name of
Jesus Christ the Nazorean, whom God raised from the dead: in his name this man stands before you
healed. And healing comes from no other
place, even today. When we are sick and are
plagued with problems and struggling to survive and filled with horrors and our
soul is bogged down: It is in the name
of Jesus Christ the Nazorean where we can be healed. It is in no other name. And it
is because we have been healed, in body and soul, that we can extend that
healing to others, to love the sinner, recognize the goodness in others,
welcome the stranger, and be the inclusive community that we are called to be.
But who else is our savior? In the second
reading today we see that he is the one through which we can all be called
God’s children. Lest we forget the
reality of sin, that once we were all far off, that once we rejected, over and
over again the hand in covenant that God has given us, that once God became man
in order to unite us with himself once and for all—and we rejected him. Lest we forget that even though rejected that
same God-man took to the cross, died and rose again to set us free and unite us
once again with the Father. No other
person, deity, god, idol, religion, system, philosophy can offer us this: It is in Jesus Christ that we can now be
called children of God. It is in no
other name. And being children of God means that we are all connected, that we are
all drawn together into one family as the People of God: and therefore the
exclusive adoption that comes exclusively through Christ is what constitutes us
as an inclusive family, as brothers and sisters.
But who else is our savior? In the Gospel
we see that he is the Good Shepherd.
Like that ancient icon painted on a wall in the dark dungeons of the
catacombs in Rome, Christ has from the beginning been our Good Shepherd. When each of us is that ‘one sheep’ who goes
astray he leaves the 99 in order to seek us out. When we are un-deserving of his mercy and
stink with the filth of sheep he sets out in search of our souls. When we run
from him to carry out our own will, when we think we are autonomously
constituted, when we move onto the wrong path and follow the broad way, he is
there with his crook and his staff to bring us back to his embrace. And he alone is the good shepherd, for he
alone had the ability to lay down his life freely for his sheep, and he alone
had the freedom to raise it up again. It
was in him and only him that we who were once far off were brought back to his
love. And it is only because of him, that we too can search for lost sheep to
bring them home to God’s inclusive love.
It
is true that there can be elements of truth in goodness outside the visible
structures of the Church. Yet they are
derived from only one source. It is only
in the exclusivity of Jesus as the Christ, the savior, that truth, goodness and
beauty are once again made available to the world. So when asked by skeptics and hopeful
secularists and zealous haters of religion how it is possible for all of
humanity to be gathered together in one inclusive family, hopefully we have the
courage to say as Peter did:
There
is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven
given to the human race by which we are to be saved. Only in Jesus can we be saved.
