21st Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C

Isaiah 66:18-21
Psalm 117:1, 2
Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13
Luke 13:22-30

The academic year is gearing up again, to the mixed delight and dread of students, parents, and teachers. The standard exchange of questions and answers between the Lord and His followers hearkens to the Greek Socratic method, a typical dialogue format of philosophy employed in the ancient world that long preceded our modern schooling system. 

However, Christ comes to us not as some type of Semitic Confucius. He is not just Teacher but Truth. He intends to communicate Himself.  The matter at stake by far surpasses all conventional intellectual inquiry; they ask, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” While we often speak with Him about material needs, health concerns, and our struggles with virtuous living, the ultimate concern that contextualizes everything else must focus on the one eternal one: our salvation.  

As any good professor would, Our Lord leads His listeners, including us, on a progressive path toward full proficiency over this most crucial material. Instead of the simple revelation of the answer, as though it were some problem to be solved, He encourages us to exert our best efforts to meet demanding ideals. At times, His voice in the explanatory parable becomes quite stern: “‘I do not know where you are from.  Depart from me, all you evildoers!’ And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth when you see … you yourselves cast out.” What an exacting and strict instructor!  

This phenomenon signals God’s love for us: “Do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines.”  This pivotal lesson described as “the exhortation addressed to you as children” that Hebrews invokes can be found both in Proverbs (3:11-12) and in Job (5:17-18), as well as resurfacing in I Corinthians (11:32) and Revelation (3:19). All reaffirm the same idea: the maturation process requires suffering and struggle. “Endure your trials as ‘discipline,’” we are encouraged.

Being a disciple, the Biblical word for student, consists essentially in being disciplined in both its senses of punitive and virtue-building. There must be clear correction that will build self-mastery. “At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.” Like so many common elementary Scriptural insights, we seem to forget this one repeatedly right when we need it the most.

We usually find learning a distressing process rife with wrong answers, forgotten facts and even failures. Those who are so naturally gifted or previously educated and know the material ahead of time don’t have to engage the rigors of study and can thus hardly be properly considered students; however, those don’t exist in the classroom of holiness.

Each of us must run the gauntlet of pain, that is, the Cross, to be corrected, to become truly grateful and to be conformed to the crucified Teacher. Through the predictions of the prophet Isaiah, the Lord indicates what the content of this revelatory lesson will be: “they shall come and see my glory.”  Indeed, the full grandeur of the Lord’s love is shown forth in the academy of Calvary.

The scope of this salvific message is intended to be universal, a concept latent in the Old Covenant and then lived out as the New began and the Apostles made their missionary journeys to the ends of the earth: “They shall proclaim my glory among the nations.” The Responsorial Psalm reiterates its familiar theme addressing “all you nations … all you peoples!” and its refrain, which is in fact taken from Mark’s Gospel, likewise extends the mandate: “Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.”  Christ promises that the message will have magnetic and even Eucharistic force: “People will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.”

To return to the Lord’s response to the original inquiry about salvation from His student-disciples, when it comes to the proverbial “narrow gate,” Christ rigorously warns us: “Many, I tell you, will attempt to enter but will not be strong enough.” As a masterful sage educator, the Lord asserts, “I know their works and their thoughts.” Only out of love for us does He regularly test us, like schoolchildren, to challenge us ever higher to the next level … in this case, the everlasting one. The discipline of discipleship will be arduous, but it will make us His disciples.

Related to: The risk of searching for Christ