Today’s readings: Isaiah 55,6-9; Philippians 1,20-24.27; Matthew 20,1-16

The God we imagine and the God who actually comes our way are not always the same, and sometimes they differ considerably. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a God whose ways are not our ways, and Jesus in the gospel gives an insight of how God can shake our certainties. We are comfortable with a narrative of life on earth that ends in a division into two camps, the saved and the damned, heaven and hell. Whatever ventures outside this divide confuses us.

But is God so predictable, so straitjacketed, so bound to our logical way of thinking? This undoubtedly is one of Christianity’s most important themes. David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion, has recently shown in his book That All Shall Be Saved how Church Fathers in the 4th century, like Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, offer different perspectives. God’s generosity is scandalous. It triggers in today’s parable the complaints of those irked by the behaviour of the landowner in this case personifying God. God’s mercy without boundaries confuses us because we feel more at peace with a God who is just according to our scale of justice. We want to believe more in a God with zero tolerance of evil.

What we expect of an all-powerful God is that He intervenes to do something about what goes wrong. His silence and passiveness are intolerable and incomprehensible for us. We even put ourselves in His shoes and would venture at times to suggest how things should be and how the world needs to be managed.

The context of the reading from Isaiah is the people’s exile in Babylon and their dream of reconstituting their old identity on returning to their homeland. Isaiah indicates that in new times a new and different response was called for. On a similar wavelength and through the parable of Jesus, Matthew addresses the resistance of those who staunchly could not take newcomers added to the first Christian communities.

These two parallel texts trace a road map for today’s Church, which is called to read the new times and to respond accordingly. A pastoral conversion is overdue since Vatican Council II and we are still projecting the wrong vision of God, of the Christian faith, and of the Church that our changed context needs.

Understandably it is always challenging to respond to new situations from the standpoint of a consolidated culture of certainties. It is in our nature to think logically that the rules of the game are there for all to see and apply indiscriminately. We even think of God as a static being and it seems that we have created a God in our own image rather than the contrary.

Author A.N. Wilson, in his masterpiece God’s Funeral, narrates the tragedy of the 19th century Church of England, which in spite of its being so rich, so politically and socially powerful, could be pronounced spiritually empty, however full its pews might be on Sunday. It was the time when God was declared dead and the Church had essentially become an edifice empty of faith.

This same feeling of being spiritually empty in our local brand of Christianity is gaining ground today. Many still exchange folklore for faith, and think that what is mostly at stake nowadays is the ethical ground which in a post-Christian era we seem to have lost. But deeper than that, our make-or-break issue is God, whether we still seek Him and our possibilities of finding Him. Even against the backdrop of religiosity, as believers we live in exile, and it is only in the footsteps of the prophets and mystics that we can find our way back home.