Just when you think you know someone.

This applies for most all of us with a person or two in our lives.  Just when we think we know someone, after years of knowing them and spending time with them, they say or do something that surprises or even shocks us.  “Where did that come from?  I didn’t know that about you!  Do you have a twin sibling I don’t know about?  Is this really you, or someone who looks like you, pretending to be you, but is not you?  What sort of game are you playing here with me?  C’mon, where did they hide the real you?”  And so on.

Just when you think you know someone, you learn something about them that surprises you. I remember a couple in one of my past parishes married for about 25 years. The wife in this couple – couple that knows each other rather well – said something to me one day (which I cannot recall), and her husband’s sheepish reaction was priceless:  “I didn’t know that about you.”  I can’t tell you how hard I laughed inside.  He thought he knew everything there was to know about his wife.  But somehow, some way, she sneaked this knowledge about herself past him.  Unintentionally and innocently, of course.  There is no duplicity in the person I speak of.  She’s as honest and good as they come.  Anyway, it made my day to witness firsthand how a husband of 25 years in the most loving relationship with his wife discovered something new about her after all these years.  For a priest, there’s a humor to be found in a husband who thought he had finished the crossword puzzle of his wife’s life, putting all the pieces together, to find out he had at least one piece missing.

What may be less humorous is what we hear proclaimed in the Gospel this week about knowing the Lord Jesus.  While a couple being together for decades on end not knowing everything about the other spouse’s life can reveal a side of humor, not knowing the Lord Jesus when we thought we did has no humor because of the potential result, at least according to Jesus, which is all that matters.  In this week’s Gospel on the all-important topic of salvation, Jesus tells someone from a town he is passing through that many will claim to know him when the judgment day comes, but he will answer,  “I did not know you. Depart from me, all you evildoers!”

These shocking words are meant to ring the bell of our souls.  And loudly too.  They are cause for some serious reflection in the lives of many folks in every generation, including the present generation, (in fact, I would say every person alive) on the truth of who Jesus is, and not who we make him out to be. And where we find the truth of who Jesus really is, as well as where we do not find it.

It’s been preached in recent homilies how we live in a time when Jesus is defined in ways that are so far away from the truth of who Jesus of Nazareth truly is.  Many Catholics have fallen into this muddy trap, as well as much of our world, most notably in the area of morality and ethics. Too many folks continue to make false excuses for sexual choices and behavior with the line, “God loves me just the way I am.” Quite simply, this is a dangerous, false, relativistic understanding that leads to God being formed and shaped into the likeness of human lives that are sinful every day to some degree.  “God loves me just the way I am” waters down to a minimal level our internal Divine spark that is meant to carry us through this world and into the next everlasting world of peace and joy.

Quite simply again, God does not love the way we are if we make choices that offend Him through sinful actions in all areas of human living, but maybe especially today in the prominent area of gender and sexual choices that seem to dominate the landscape.  To say “God loves the world the way it is” equates to our world not being in need of a Savior, when God knows we need one pronto.  To recognize our personal shortcomings, our personal sins, personal vices, our communal sins and communal vices, and our need for a Redeemer is to be on the correct track of knowing our Lord Jesus Christ.

God loves us the way we are when we come to understand the truth of who Jesus is, and not misrepresent him for our personal whims and gains, or  to satisfy our selfish desires.  How can any person who supports the killing of unborn children at any stage in their mother’s womb say to Jesus, “Lord, open the door for me and let me in,” and expect the door to be opened wide with a warm welcome to accompany it?   God is not a fool.  And he will not be fooled by human wretchedness.

God loves us when we seek holiness in our lives, imitating the pureness, goodness, and sacrificial ways of his Son, and not twist something that is unholy, and transfer it through our own made-up power into calling it holy because “God loves me the way I am.”  Those who do so, in my professional opinion, are bound to hear the words, “I do not know where you are from.  Depart from me, all you evildoers.”

The Gospel this Sunday is what we can rightly call “a wake-up Gospel,” as many of them are.  But this one really hits home in a way that other Gospels may not.  We are beckoned to wake up to the truth of our Lord’s words that teach us the gate we go through to eternal life is narrow.  It’s skinny.  Almost anorexic.  No one on earth is powerful enough to force our way in, including any Superhero invented by Marvel Comics.  Those who protect the door to heaven will thwart any soul that seeks to sneak in through the back door, or any person who arrogantly thinks they can talk their way in through the front door.  “Depart from me.”

This Gospel is a wakeup call to anyone willing to call themselves “a devout Catholic.”  Thankfully, there are many devout Catholics, and they would be the first ones to tell us they fear for their own salvation. This is what genuine humility looks like.  But out there in the public sphere is this self-professed term of “devout Catholic” bandied about by people who have no right to use it - people who are living in open and obstinate disobedience to fundamental Church teaching, notably in the area of morality.  They may claim devout status, but I find it hard to believe that Jesus knows them and loves them just the way they are.  The Lord certainly knows them, but since the Garden of Eden, the same God has rejected disobedience to Divine teaching.  And sadly, some disobedience is also found in the higher pockets of Rome from Shepherds who are leading the sheep down a path away from knowing the true Jesus.

The surest way to know the Lord Jesus is what St. Paul calls “obedience of faith.”  For those who question faith, the proper way of doing so is to have the intention of learning our faith more accurately, striving to understand and accept why the Body of Christ, the Church, teaches what it does and why.  For those who question faith telling Mother Church she is wrong here or there, such are walking the path of not knowing Jesus, waiting for the words, “I do not know where you are from.”  This is a hard truth flowing from a hard Gospel we bypass at our own risk, but one in need of being spoken.  Trusting in our Catholic faith, rather than trusting in the ways of sinful humanity, is the surest path to being skinny enough to walk through the narrow gate.  The wise believer is the one who takes Jesus at his word without making false and soft excuses for the hardness of his teaching.  Rather, we do our best to live them and share them with a world in dire need of his words.         

HOLINESS
The holiness of the Church, then, is not some abstract quality that adheres to it but the actual presence of this love within its assembly.  The Church has a formal holiness in that it possesses the word of God and the sacraments, which, founded on Christ, are holy despite the ill uses made of them or the unworthiness of their ministers.  Furthermore, the members of the assembly are a people set apart by God who participate in the priesthood of Jesus Christ.  Finally, in every age there are persons who are conspicuous for the generosity of their response to God.  They act as signs of the possibility and reality of holiness.  They are the saints, as we now understand the term.

The place of the Saints in the Christian tradition can be variously understood.  In the first instance, they are eschatological signs in that they possess what we still look for: fulfillment in God.  Second, and closely related to the first, they are part of the Church who are our intercessors before God and, as such, are invoked in the liturgy.  Third, they testify to the potentialities of the gospel.  As Karl Rahner once wrote, the saints show us that it is possible to be a Christian in this particular fashion.  They do that in one of two ways.  Some saints demonstrate in their lives that the perennial values of the gospel are still pertinent for a new age; thus, for example, the traditional piety of Mother Teresa of Calcutta demonstrates the perennial value of unrestricted charity.  What she and others like her do is essentially no different from what Vincent de Paul did in his age.  Other great saints show new and unexpected ways of being holy as responses to the culture in which they live.  Saint Francis of Assisi, for example, was a saint for the urban culture of his time, when the cloistered life of agricultural Europe no longer touched people in large numbers, just as Ignatius of Loyola provided a mobility for the religious life when the more static forms of the vita regularis showed themselves inadequate to the needs of post-reformation Europe.  The saints, in short, serve both as icons of the Gospels and blueprints for new ways of gospel living.                                                                                                                                                                     
                                                      From The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality