August 20, 2023
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 20, 2023 – Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Romans 11:13-15, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28
A couple of weeks ago, I found a little article in a news magazine. This group someplace in the Southwest started a charter school. Charter schools are neither public nor religious, they’re private. And they’d just gone to court seeking federal aid for their school. And two bishops of the area had filed an amicus curiae brief in support of their desire for federal aid. The charter for the school says that it’s “open to all children, but we will actively attempt to convert any non-Catholic children to the Catholic faith so that they will not burn in hell.” I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was more angry or sad when I read that because it does not reflect Catholic teaching in any way.
The bishops of the Second Vatican Council issued a large number of decrees, but only one was promulgated as a doctrinal decree, meaning that it required the assent of Catholic people. And that was the doctrine that we call the one on the church, but its Latin name is Lumen Gentium. Beautiful name. The light of the nations. In the twelve paragraph of that document it says that no one is outside the church except those who, knowing for a fact that Jesus is the only Savior of the world, deliberately refuse to believe in Him. That’s, pretty much, people who are insane. So, nobody’s outside the Church.
This was in reaction to a papal infallible doctrine that the church held for centuries that said, “Outside the church there is no salvation.” Four words in Latin, “Extra ecclesiam nulla salas.” And when the council fathers got to work on this problem, which was a terrible problem in a polyglot age, they said, “Well, we know what the word ‘church’ means; we can’t change that one. Uh, we can’t change the word ‘no or none;’ we know what that means. ‘Salvation,’ we can’t change that word; we know what that word means. Let’s work on the word ‘outside.’” And they said that, if you look at different faith groups, for one reason or another they’re really not outside the church. Other Christians who follow Christ as Savior, can’t be outside the church. Those who carry on the traditions of the Old Testament, that gave birth to Christ, can’t be outside the church. People who believe in one God, which was the primary message of Jesus, can’t be outside the church. And on and on they went, including another group and another group and another group, all the way through.
But even before that doctrine was promulgated, the church had a teaching that basically said the same thing. They said there’s three kinds of baptism. The obvious one is baptism by water. Makes you a member of the church. The second one is baptism by fire. If you were caught up in some sort of persecution, even though you’re not a Christian, and executed because of Christ, you’re automatically among the saved. But the third one is baptism of desire. And they defined it this way. If a person lives out their belief in God as they perceive God to be, or lives out their life as a decent human being because they’re not aware of any Supreme Being, or if they specifically reject Christianity because of the faults of Christians or the difficulty of understanding doctrine, their desire to do what is right, even though they may be mistaken about that desire, wins them salvation.
And so, these people, who made this the charter of their school, are so not Catholic, it’s mind boggling. But they are victims of exceptionalism. And that is the problem in all three of our readings this morning. Exceptionalism. Most of the time in our readings it’s Jewish exceptionalism.
The Book of Isaiah is composed of the writings of three different people named Isaiah, who wrote across two centuries. But one of the threads that runs through all three people’s writings is the desire that all people - all people, not just Jewish people - all people should worship together. But the passage we had this morning shows the problem of holding on to that desire. Once the Jews from exile had returned to their homeland and begun to rebuild their city and their society, they decided that they would never again allow Pagans in. And so there’s an uphill battle that Isaiah is fighting. And he tries to solve the problem by saying, “Well, someday all these people will worship with us if they decide to accept the Torah.
In the second reading, Paul’s opening line is, “I am writing to you Gentiles - the non-Jewish Christians in Rome - I am writing to you Gentiles,” and then he tells them all about his problem because the Jewish people, from whom he comes, didn’t accept Jesus. And he goes through this whole convoluted explanation of how it really is okay because, after all, the Jews are the chosen people and eventually they will be chosen again. He’s writing to Gentiles. The Gentiles don’t care about the Jewish problem. It’s Paul’s problem. He is finding it difficult to rejoice in the tremendous success of the Church in Rome because he has this problem.
Then you get to the Gospel, and you have a positively mean Jesus, whose problem is that He only wants to go, or thinks He is only sent to, the fallen of the chosen race. Each one of them is a victim of their own Jewish exceptionalism. Nothing is wrong with the other side. They’ve created a problem for themselves that they now have to solve by some sort of twisted logic.
We live with a lot of exceptionalisms today, don’t we? Right? There’s American exceptionalism; I can understand that to a certain extent. When America first began, people around the world looked with wonder that people were able to govern themselves. And many times, during our history, we rose to the occasion and were a beacon of light. But not always. And, thinking of ourselves as always the best that we could possibly be, blinds us to who we really are. American exceptionalism. Catholic exceptionalism. Jewish exceptionalism. White Protestant exceptionalism. Black exceptionalism. Eastern European exceptionalism. Western European exceptionalism. Asian exceptionalism. There’re all sorts of people saying, “We’re number one.” Exceptionalism is a real problem. How do we look at the temptation to exceptionalism both in our public lives and in our faith life?
There are three things that we might consider, that actually sort of bubble up into the backgrounds of today’s three readings. The first is this: that anything that leads a person to God cannot be not good. The second is: that even though we believe that we have the fullness of revelation, that doesn’t mean that nobody else has revelation. And it also doesn’t mean that one revelation has to cancel out the other. The third thing is: the truth is where you find it. And, according to someone that we have love and have faith for, ”The truth will set you free.”