A Homily for the Third Sunday after Pentecost

+ Saint Benedict detests murmuring: that malcontent muttering whispered conspiratorially in corners, or that arises in the heart and takes control of the mind and that propagates suspicion, distrust, hatred and division. Murmuring, alone or with others, is a cancer that eats away at the charity and good zeal (cf. Rule, ch. 72) that should ground and rule a monk’s every act of perseverance and obedience and that will, if it goes unchallenged, eventually kill his vocation. Not without reason does Saint Benedict insist: “Let not the vice of murmuring show itself in any word or sign for any reason whatever.” (Rule, ch. 34) He goes to great lengths to insist that his sons should not be put in a position where murmuring might be considered justifiable (cf. ch. 35, 41, 53) for even then this cancer, if it is not rooted out, is a spiritually terminal disease.
 
The murmuring of the Pharisees and the scribes in the Gospel of this Holy Mass is no different. It seeks to slur the Saviour Himself: “This man receives sinners and eats with them,” they complain. Rightly do we reject this. Sinners are welcome; indeed “all are welcome in God’s house” as one particularly trite contemporary piece of religious music insists. Those who reject the Church’s teaching on faith or morals, or who are in situations where they believe they cannot live up to them, are not despised by Almighty God. He sent His Only Beloved Son to suffer and die so that they might have the opportunity to find the forgiveness of their sins and eternal salvation in Him. The scribes and Pharisees may wish to reject sinners as irredeemable, but Jesus Christ does not, and His Church may never do so without forfeiting her fundamental mission. This is crucial. The Church must receive sinners and eat with them just as Our Lord did. Otherwise, we are no better than the murmuring scribes and Pharisees and deserve “the punishment due to murmurers.” (Rule, ch. 5)
 
But it is important to read the whole of this morning’s Gospel. Because if we do not we can fall into the error of thinking that receiving sinners and eating with them is an end in itself. We can become caught up in so-called “dialogue” that never ends, in accompaniment without purpose, in an acceptance that is in fact acquiescence in evil. We must not be misled by the mantra that “in the Church there is room for everyone…just the way we are” and thereby find ourselves blessing sin tacitly or even explicitly.
 
This is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ! This is not what Our Mother the Church teaches us in the Gospel of this Holy Mass! For Our Lord Jesus Christ did not receive sinners and eat with them in order to accept, celebrate or bless their sin. He did not seek to affirm them just the way they were. No. The Eternal Son of God took the scandalous risk of leaving the ninety-nine righteous sheep and going after the one that was lost in its sin in order that it might return to the sheepfold, in order that it might repent and leave behind its erroneous and destructive life of sin and find new life, life without end, in the flock of the Good Shepherd Himself.
 
How many times do we hear this in the Gospel? Our Lord caused upset by calling the corrupt tax-collector Zacchaeus to conversion at his own table (cf. Lk 19:1-10); He sensationally forgave the woman caught in the very act of adultery, enjoining her to “go an sin no more” (cf. Jn 8:1-11); He allowed a woman with a sinful reputation to wash and anoint His feet at the meal in the home of Simon the Pharisee, forgiving her “many sins” because of her “great love” (cf. Lk 7:36-50); and He taught the great parable of the two sons in which the return of the desperate, profligate youth is celebrated with almost immodest joy (cf. Lk 15: 11-32).
 
None of these people were left as they were. Our Lord did not condone their sin. His encounters with them called them to conversion, to leave their sin behind and to come and live as sons and daughters of God anew—not as ‘second class’ citizens with some past moral fault slurring their character, but as beloved sons and daughters over whom heaven rejoices because they were once dead in their sin, but are now alive, because they were lost and are now found. (cf. Lk 15:32) With poignant and instructive emotion the Church sings of this reality in the Communion antiphon of this Mass as her repentant children process to receive the Body and Blood of Christ!
 
Murmuring has no place in a monastery because it has no place in Christian life. No Christian, let alone a monk, can risk contracting this cancerous, prideful terminal disease that can so quickly turn us into those Pharisaical “whitened sepulchres” so rightly and so clearly condemned by Our Lord. (cf. Mt 23) So too, no Christian can forget that the “Son of Man came to seek out and to save that which was lost.” (Lk 19:10)
 
We can never endorse error or lead people into it by complicit silence—doctrinal, moral, ecclesial or liturgical. Yes, we should receive sinners and eat with them, for if we do not they may never otherwise have the opportunity to convert their lives and live. But we must be clear that sin is sin and that we must each convert from our erroneous ways.
 
For the necessary grace of conversion and for the humility and the courage that are necessary to become instruments of the conversion of others, let us now beg Almighty God at His altar. +