Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

We like to make the Gospel safe and comfortable. We like to keep its demands at a distance, so that it has plenty to say about other people and very little to say about us.

And that is easy to do today. We hear Jesus confronting the chief priests and elders, and we treat it as somebody else’s argument from two thousand years ago. He exposes their refusal to repent, even when tax collectors and prostitutes do. And we feel comfortable, because we have already decided that we are on the side of the underdogs. We are the good guys in this story.

But that distorts the message. We are not always the good guys. Often, the very point Jesus is making is that we are on the wrong side, and we need to repent. He tells us elsewhere that he came to call sinners, not the righteous. If we refuse to recognize ourselves among the sinners, then we refuse to hear the call.

So, to hear this Gospel honestly, we have to stop automatically identifying ourselves with the people who repent. We have to recognize ourselves in the religious insiders who hear God’s word and refuse to change. We know the faith. We know what God asks. And still we do not do it.

In this moment in the life of our Church, that is not hard to see. This past Easter, a record number of people entered the Catholic Church here in East Tennessee. I have spoken to many of them across the Diocese of Knoxville, and their stories are deeply moving. Some have lost all their friends. Some have been rejected by their families. Some have even been thrown out of their homes. All because they dared to seek the truth. All because they desired the kingdom of God more than the comfort of the lives they already had.

Some who entered the Church this year have given up almost everything to seek Christ. They are the underdogs in this story. And their sacrifices ought to make the rest of us examine our lives.

Many of us were born into the faith or have been in it for many years. And we make no sacrifices for it anymore. We would not lift a finger to help the Church in any meaningful way. The Church is there when it is convenient for us.

We plan our trips and vacations, and mass is an afterthought. We do not volunteer for anything because it would be oh so inconvenient. We bring our children for the sacramental preparation years and abandon their formation outside those years. We hold on to relationships that lead us into sin, and we would not dare let them go.

The truth is that many of us have grown so comfortable in the faith that we will sacrifice nothing for it. We are the very people Jesus is confronting. We have heard John the Baptist preach. We have heard Christ call us to repentance, year after year in the Gospel. And we ignore him. We write it off. We say, “I’m good enough. My few flaws cannot keep me out of heaven.”

Meanwhile, people who stood outside the Church have heard the call and changed their lives. Some have given up almost everything to be here. And if we persist in refusing to repent, Christ’s warning is clear: we will watch them enter the kingdom while we remain outside.

That is what is at stake. The son who says yes to his father and never goes to work has not done his father’s will. Neither have we, if our yes to God never becomes obedience.

No one enters the kingdom of God without sacrifice. No one enters while insisting on keeping everything that makes life comfortable. No one enters without committing their whole of life to Christ: repenting, giving up sin, letting go of whatever holds us back from the love of God, and following him.

That is the only sure and certain way to eternal life. God is showing us mercy and giving us time to repent. We cannot keep treating that time as permission to stay exactly as we are.

We have said yes to God. Now we have to do what he tells us.