28th Sunday

28th Sunday

Our lives are gifts to us

Is. 25.6-10a;Phil. 4.10-14, 19-20; Mt 22.1-14

A little note about this familiar parable from Matthew. It is part of Matthew's program throughout the whole gospel to depict the great contest between the Jews who accepted Jesus as the Messiah and the Jews who did not. He took a regular Jewish metaphor for the kingdom of God, namely a banquet, and pointed out that the Jews who were invited originally – representing those Jews who didn’t’ see Jesus as Messiah - didn't come. In fact they killed everybody, like the prophet Jesus, and thereby opened up the kingdom to everybody. But it's interesting to look at, this mysterious figure in the end of the parable. What was his problem? Or what was the King's problem? I think it's possible, especially in the context of the holiday tomorrow (and other reasons too) that what Matthew was trying to get at was the matter of ingratitude. Here this man had received this gift of an invitation but did not properly respond. If we were all first century Semites, I think that that significance would be much clearer.

So we're talking about gratitude in that reading and in the first reading as well as the second, where Isaiah is promising to the people of the southern kingdom - who had been conquered by the way and were basically a captive people - that God was going to restore the base of gratitude. Namely God who is faithful, was going to wipe away every tear and even death, was going to be overcome.

Now, the whole biblical notion of the career of human beings can be understood as the working out of the question of gratitude. As the Genesis text has it, creation is a gift. Our lives are gifts to us. It is we who have so distorted the world that gratitude becomes very difficult for us. And not just us. We who are ungrateful, raise kids we are ungrateful, and they go on to have kids who are ungrateful too, because the base of gratitude seems not to be in place. So I want to somehow spread all of this out.

The fundamental human problem according to the Jews, of course, is that we are all self-encapsulated. That great line from Martin Luther...that human being is curved in on itself... Homo in se incurvatus. That we live in a world where we don't trust anybody else, or we are afraid of everybody else. Therefore we are continually covering our backside. Self-preservation, is the fundamental law of human existence. And the way the Jews see it, is that we have mucked up, and continue to muck up those people that we deal with. WE thereby make gratitude very difficult if not impossible. But, to repeat, the Jews say that the absolutely foundational religious stance of the human being in their life is gratitude. So we have this terrible problem: we're supposed to be grateful and yet because of our real experiences gratitude is extraordinarily difficult. And we have to be really careful here because there are numerous problems. There is the philosophical problem, of course, that we are self-conscious beings. I am aware of myself. I do not live in anybody else's head. In fact, I find out who I am by seemingly separating myself from other people.

And so this would seem to make gratitude, in the biblical sense, difficult. Again the biblical understanding of gratitude is not some kind of transient thing, as when somebody opens the door for you, or doesn't run over your dog when he could have, or a whole variety of things like that. Thanks! Thanks a lot! Thanks! It's nothing peripheralan, epiphenomenal response to life. But it's supposed to be an absolutely foundational one. The absolutely foundational one. But as I said, precisely as conscious beings we are aware of our separateness. We are aware of our separateness all the time. However that philosophical problem is aggravated by far, by the ethical or moral quandary that we find ourselves in. Namely, that we are raised in a world where fear, the fear of the other, is the hallmark of our life. For instance I would love to have raised my kids so that they would be fear-free in regard to me. I would love to have been raised that way by my parents so that I didn't have to be afraid of who I was, to feel shame for myself in any number of ways. But unfortunately it is that way. And it is, as Nietzsche said, that greatest of injustices that we all work on each other: to make the other ashamed of himself or herself.

And therefore gratitude in the biblical sense, which is precisely the awareness that my life is received, that I'm essentially in my deepest reality connected to God and to be connected to everybody else, is very difficult.

And if we don't have that sense, then gratitude is going to be some kind of trivial, superficial, transient kind of thing. Thanks! Thanks a lot! All the best! Thanks! And I know that for me, even at my advanced age, the toughest thing is to really understand myself, at my deepest level, not simply as a solitary consciousness, but as essentially having received my existence, as connected with my divine source, and as forming a community of people who have all received their existences from that same source, so that can be open - and must be open - to each other, to be related, in a way that is not menacing, not fear-inducing. And that, as far as I can see, is why gratitude is so difficult. It's counter-intuitive. Life is dog eat dog. It's a jungle out there. But as long as that is our base consciousness then gratitude is not going to be possible. It's simply not going to be possible.

But, we can go back to this very thing that seems to isolate us, namely our separate self-consciousness, and find therein one of the elements of coming to gratitude. Because I am self-conscious I can come to know myself as interconnected with everybody else. To know myself as a self, and also enables me to know myself as one with all other selves, the way a platypus, an elephant, a caterpillar cannot.

But then the ethical problem intervenes and that's of course why Jesus is so significant a figure for us. Jesus can be understood, in a word, as a totally grateful human being. There's a lovely phrase in the book of Revelations, of all places, that speaks of Jesus as the "great Amen to God." Jesus simply says "yes" to God. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So where do we stand? I think we stand in the light of Jesus, knowing that we are ungrateful in the most profound and most constitutive sense of ourselves and knowing why, at least to some extent, we are ungrateful. But standing there, we are able to hope that we will come to gratitude. And to believe in Jesus is precisely to hope that the basic gift reality of my life, the world, other people. So that I can fully appropriate and constitute myself as grateful.

So here we are at Thanksgiving. Great day. An extraordinarily important day. Complicated day. Difficult day. But that's why being here on this day before Thanksgiving is so important. To hear from Isaiah. To hear from Paul who could say while he was in jail ready to be executed "I know how to have a little and I know how to have a lot." That's the statement of a grateful man. And so he will attribute that capacity of gratitude to his being in Christ. So, again I'm repeating myself, that's why being here with each other in this setting is so crucial. Because I don't know of anywhere else where I could even begin to think seriously about this, much less try to work towards being grateful.

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