15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C July 10, 2022
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
What is your cosmic vision? When you mentally zoom out to consider everything that exists, how do you make sense of it? Because the way you answer that question can tell you a lot about what you really believe and what motivates you.
And the reason I ask you that is because so much of what I challenge you to do, what the Church urges you to do, what Jesus Christ asks of you is going to be directly affected by this worldview, this cosmic vision. The more your view of existence diverges from the truth, the harder it will be for you to make sense out of what our faith asks.
Consider last week’s challenge to embrace poverty and simplicity. Or the week before, when we reflected on the fact that real freedom actually comes from giving up your freedom for the sake of being committed to the right things. To most of the modern world, these things don’t make sense. They look at the world and see that everything is changing and temporary, so they cling to whatever good things they can: power, pleasure, and wealth. When Christianity asks us to give up all three of these, many people don’t even register it as possible because their worldview, their cosmic vision doesn’t have room for it.
What does that have to do with today’s readings? Everything. For starters, this is the reason St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians starts with this almost poetic expression of complex theology. “Image of the invisible God… in him were created all things… in him all things hold together… in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell… through him to reconcile all things… on earth or those in heaven.”
Paul is laying out a cosmic vision, a worldview – the true cosmic vision – that makes our whole religion possible, accessible, reasonable. Without this foundation, it just seems like a collection of contradictions and inhumane expectations… a doorway to pointless suffering.
Moses in the first reading has a lot of this vision. So do the Israelites he’s talking to. So does the scholar of the law who tests Jesus. They don’t yet see how Jesus is at the center of it, but they do recognize God’s role. This is why Moses can say the commands he’s giving are “not too mysterious and remote.” When you can see that all that exists is rooted in God’s design and His love, it’s really not hard to see how obeying him is good for you, even when it means sacrificing power, pleasure, and wealth. Once you see how Jesus fits into that as the eternal Son of God, the Word-made-flesh, it’s perfectly reasonable to trust his teachings about love of enemy, radical trust of God in the midst of poverty, and the freedom that comes from obedience.
But do we really see the universe that way? Honestly, have we even seriously reflected on just what our cosmic vision, our worldview is? If the Gospel registers with us as a burden or an impossibility, then we need to adjust this vision, the view of creation. How?
Music. Art. Stories. The scholar of the law who talks to Jesus has spent his life readings the stories of scripture, telling them and retelling them. The human mind needs a story, a narrative. Even when we sleep, our minds seek out stories, telling them to us in the form of dreams. The stories we hear and tell start to shape the way we look at the world. The songs we sing and listen to do the same. That’s why I called our second reading “poetic.” It’s most likely an ancient Greek hymn sung by early Christians. Some of our great Doctors of the Church – theologians – are recognized in part because they wrote great hymns to teach theology and shape a world view.
It’s why the music we allow at Mass matters. It’s why what you listen to anywhere matters. It shapes your mind. And the shape of your mind is going to affect your ability to even hear the truth. Our cosmic vision, our worldview makes decisions for us before we even really process what we’re being told.
Why am I saying all this? Because I want you to be able to receive the truth of the Gospel in all of it’s cosmic implications. The parable of the good Samaritan, like so many parables, rests on this basic idea that loving our neighbor is how we love God. And loving God matters because God offers us eternal life. The life we have now is not eternal. The worldview of the dominant culture can’t even imagine what eternal life is. That’s why so many people believe in reincarnation – they can only imagine doing the same thing over and over. They can’t grasp how life can change and become a place of permanent, unconquerable happiness. Their cosmic vision is limited to change, locked into the assumption that evil and weakness will always be a part of us.
But eternal life is real and it’s something available to us. How? That’s what the scholar of the law wants to know. He knows enough to cite the great commandment: love God and love neighbor. But, for all his learning, for all that his cosmic vision gets right, he still doesn’t understand. He wants to justify himself. His cosmic vision gets this wrong: he thinks eternal life is something he can earn.
Don’t get me wrong. Our actions matter for eternal life. What we do can absolutely affect our eternal fate. We can lose eternal life, but we still can’t earn it. This parable serves a double purpose. On the one hand, it is a straightforward lesson that all human beings are our neighbors. It’s a reminder that the cosmic vision of God as father over all makes all of us siblings called to love each other, even when it’s not being returned. On the other hand, it’s a lesson in humility.
For all his learning, this scholar is no better than the robbers’ victim. He is in just as much need; more, because at least the victim knows he needs help. We need help. We need to be continually immersed in stories based on the correct vision of the world. And a major piece of that vision is this: we need help. The scholar, me, you… we’re all the victim on the road. Christ is the Samaritan who helps us at great cost to himself, the one who treats us with mercy. And his point is simple: if we want his mercy to truly heal us, we have to accept it. Then, we have to do likewise. So, go and treat others with mercy; Not as the world defines it, but as Christ does. How do we know the difference? By shaping our cosmic vision to match his. He is the image of the invisible God. Keep looking at him and his true story, then go and do likewise.