Ep 106 - Empty Enough for Grace?

What does it mean to be “empty” enough to receive God’s grace?

In Episode 106 of Brother from Another Father, I return to last week’s McDonald’s analogy to explore Jesus’ parable of the two sons and the surprising people who were entering the Kingdom of God ahead of the religious leaders.

The problem wasn’t that God was giving some people more grace than others. The problem was that some people had filled themselves so completely with their own importance that there was little room left for God.

We look at the tax collectors and prostitutes who recognised their need for God, St. Augustine’s honest prayer, and ultimately Christ himself, who “emptied himself” and took the form of a slave.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether God is giving us enough grace, but whether we have made enough room to receive it. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello and welcome to episode 106 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the 26th Sunday in ordinary time. I'd like to begin by drawing on the example I used last week because I think that it will help us to understand what is going on in today's gospel. If you recall, last week I used the metaphor of the Kingdom of God as a MacDonald's restaurant and suggested that the Kingdom of God is the place where we all get the Big Mac combo meal with large fries and a bottomless soda, because that's just who God is. God gives God's self to us 100% all the time to everyone. But you might respond and say, yes, but if that's the case, then why are there such huge differences between us? Why are there some people who clearly seem more filled with God's grace than others? I would suggest to you that this is not because we each receive different amounts of God's grace, but because we have different capacities for receiving the grace that God gives to us. God gives us all an equal share of God's grace. To return to the metaphor of the Big Mac Combo meal, even if we all get the same meal, it does not mean that we will all have the same appetite for it. Some will have enough appetite to consume it all, while others will not be able to finish the meal. In an analogous way, in order to be able to receive God's grace, we have to be hungry for it. If we go to MacDonald's already having eaten a sandwich at home, we will not be hungry enough to finish the Big Mac Combo meal. We can only receive God's grace if we are empty. I think that this analogy can help us understand why Jesus tells the chief priests and the Sadducees in today's gospel that prostitutes and tax collectors are making their way to the kingdom of God faster than they are. The Sadducees and Chief Priests were full of their own importance. So it was hard for them to find space to receive God's grace. Before coming to God's meal, they had already filled themselves up with the bread of their own self-importance. When we are filled with our own self-importance, it is easy for us to fool ourselves into thinking that we are serving God when really we are only serving ourselves. This is why Jesus tells us, this parable, to disabuse the chief priests and the scribes of their fake and false notions about themselves. The chief priests and the Sadducees had taken the view that in order to preserve the glory and relative autonomy of the temple and the Sanhedrin, it was necessary to collaborate with the Roman occupying power and to adopt the dominant Greco-Roman culture that came with this occupation. This meant that the young upper class Jewish men received a Greek education, often at the expense of learning about their own culture. Greek had replaced Hebrew in prayers and Aramaic in everyday conversation. Some chief priests went so far as to relinquish their Hebrew names and instead adopt Greek names drawn from Greek mythology. The elites, because of their influence and official status as guardians of the faith, managed to convince themselves and others that their collaboration with the Romans was not a betrayal of their covenant relationship with Yahweh. They convinced themselves that in deciding to collaborate with the Romans, they were serving the best interests of the nation of Israel. In fact, all they were doing was propping up their own power and serving their own interests instead of being real shepherds to God's people. In this way, the chief priests were like the son who said he would go to his father's vineyard, but did not go. When John the Baptist came along preaching a message of repentance, they could not accept his message or his baptism, because to do so would have put themselves in the firing line of the Roman authorities who would have regarded John the Baptist's popularity as a threat to their own power. Unlike the chief priests and Sadducees, the tax collectors and prostitutes did not have the luxury of pretending that their own collaboration with the Romans was part of protecting the covenant with the Lord Adonai. Their collaboration was out in the open and not done behind closed doors, and they were hated and despised by the other Jews and branded as the worst of sinners. The social exclusion that they experienced impressed on them their own unworthiness. They had no space to be self-important. They were hungry for God's grace, hungry for something that would redeem them and set them on the right road. They found that what they were looking for in John the Baptist's preaching about a repentant return to covenant relationship. John the Baptist's preaching struck a nerve in them, and they had repented now and become some of the most faithful workers in the Lord's vineyard. Even when the chief priests saw this, they remained adamant and stuck in their ways that they were only hastening the decline of the Lord's vineyard, and leaving God's people as sheep without a shepherd. During his conversion, Saint Augustine is famed to have said the following prayer Lord, give me the grace of chastity, but not right now. He was honest enough to know where he was saying no to God, and this helped him to ready himself one day to say yes to God. If we are not honest with ourselves about where we are saying no to God, we will miss the opportunities that God sets along our way for repentance. We will be like the son who says yes to his father when he is asked to work in the vineyard, but then he ends up not going. It's far better to be like the f the second son, who says no, but then thinks better of it, and then ends up going to work in the vineyard. This is the case with the prostitutes and tax collectors, who had originally said no to God, but then repented and decided to say yes to God when they accepted John's baptism and then listened to Jesus' preaching. Does this mean that we all need to become egregious sinners in order to be able to know our need for God, like the prostitutes and tax collectors? No, not at all. We have a much better model than prostitutes and tax collectors for emptying ourselves of our own self importance. That example is Christ. Saint Paul in our second reading gives the example of Christ's self-emptying. Saint Paul tells us that although he was in the form of God, Jesus did not counter quality with God a thing to be grasped. Instead, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. The word that is translated here by grasped at is harpagmos, which means to snatch or to rob or to take by force. In using this word, Jesus did not snatch or rob or take by force equality with God. Paul is setting up a comparison with Adam, the first man, who did attempt to snatch at divinity and become like God by eating the forbidden fruit. In sharp contrast, Jesus, who was God, who was divine by right, chose to empty himself of it. It is interesting that Paul should choose such strong language by telling us that Jesus took the form of a slave. In Roman law, it was only slaves that did not have rights. Every other person on the social ladder had some form of rights. Here, Paul is trying to convey the idea that Jesus wanted to empty himself so much of what was his by right that he went to the other extreme of becoming a slave, of having no rights. We can only receive God's grace if we are empty. Even if, like Christ and unlike the chief priests, we have a valid course to think of ourselves as morally or intellectually superior to those around us, we are called like Christ to empty ourselves of our superiority. We are called to be humble so that we might be filled up with the grace of God. Have a blessed week.