Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Imagine Hope

Lectionary Readings:

• Wisdom 18:6-9. A remembrance of the night of Israel’s departure from Egyptian bondage
• Hebrew 11: 1-2, 8-19. Faith is confident assurance concerning that which we hope for. No matter the extant of human weakness, God’s promises are fulfilled; no matter how precious our gifts, we die to receive something still greater.
• Luke 12: 32-48. Let your belt be fashioned around your waist and your lamp be burning ready. The Son of Man will come when you least expect him.

Thoughts for your Consideration: By Fr. Stephen Dunn, CP

Why was the little parable in today’s Gospel important to St. Luke?  It would seem that he was not primarily concerned with any moral flaw that provoked the servants into getting “out of control.”   Rather, he highlighted their failure of imagination regarding the future.  Whatever they were making of the unpredictable timing of their master’s return, it did not translate into appropriate “waiting … so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.” 

What the servants in the parable experienced on a domestic scale, Luke could see reflected on a larger scale as his young Christian community coped with the frustrations of shaping their life of faith half a century after the Resurrection.  At that moment, there was great disappointment in the realization both that the Second Coming had not occurred immediately and was not likely to occur any time soon. 

The other two readings of today’s liturgy seem to propose a spiritual remedy for them: look back to your ancestors in the Faith and learn the robust attitudes with which they confronted their future.  It was not just a matter of passive waiting for Divine promises to be fulfilled, but active engagement in re-orienting their lives through perils such as family uprooting as well as challenges to deep loyalties, even that of parenthood (Abraham / Isaac). That is how we will learn the art of looking ahead with hope.  On the one hand there was the totally trustworthy promises spoken by God.  On the other hand, there was always a test of the strength of that trust.  Luke seems to have wished this lesson to take root in the midst of the post-Resurrection crisis of his community.

Accustomed as we are to two thousand years of Christian history, we do not feel the particular tension that Luke’s community felt when it looked to the future. But the Gospel story and the grouping of passages from Scripture in the liturgy today have a point to make for us as well. Our second reading from the Book of Hebrews asserts: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. The very essence of faith is to expand our imaginations in hope. We must look to the quality of the imagination we bring to that task.  Are we looking for clarity about the ‘things unseen’ or are we creatively learning to trust?  The return of the master – the imagined future realized – is determined by the master, not the servant.

We do not lack for our own ‘ancestors’ in this quality of faith; to be “alert when the Master comes and knocks”.  The theologian Fr. John Coleman remembers an encounter with Mother Teresa in just that way.  He was in Calcutta for a month to experience work at the ‘house of the dying’ — part of the discernment of his future in ministry.  This is his account:

On the first morning I met Mother Teresa after Mass at dawn.  She asked, “And what can I do for you?” I asked her to pray for me. “What do you want me to pray for?” …“Pray that I have clarity.” She said no. That was that. When I asked why, she announced that clarity was the last thing I was clinging to and had to let go of. When I commented that she herself had always seemed to have the clarity I longed for, she laughed: “I have never had clarity; what I’ve always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust.”

This, Fr. Coleman remarks, put her squarely in the number of those “who had conviction about things unseen”. Trust does not function from clarity, but creatively waits for the ‘return of the master’.

If I were to name an ‘ancestor’ to whom to turn, it would be Pope John XXIII.  His “conviction about things unseen” was such a great inspiration to me because he audaciously summoned the Second Vatican Council.  It opened the windows, as he put it, for the Christian community of our own day, to breathe in the challenge of renewal and participation in the future of the world at large. It was so exhilarating that it seemed very easy to espouse. There were many partners in that exciting vision of a community learning the creativity of hope: great theologians and thinkers; committed and energetic lay leaders; teachers, students and inspired laity.  So many of them in the intervening years have become actual ancestors to us. 

Now, like St. Luke’s community we find ourselves about fifty years later, pondering the message of this parable. How creatively have our imaginations coped with the not-yet-arriving “things hoped for”?  As with the Exodus from Egypt, an unseen desert lay ahead.  It seems, like St. Luke’s community of old and the servants in the parable, our imaginations too need the example of our ancestors to face this challenge of absence. 

The liturgy today asks us whether our attitudes of disappointment or frustration (or even possibly more unruly ones) about half a century later are due to our need to mature in trust in ways we never dreamed of when our ‘conviction of things unseen’ was exciting but still not tested in any desert pilgrimage.  Like those in the parable, faith now summons us to learn the appropriate imaginative ‘waiting …so that we may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks.”