23rd Sunday of the Year

“By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus. ”Small of stature, rocklike in faith, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was entrusted with the mission of proclaiming God’s thirsting love for humanity, especially for the poorest of the poor. “God still loves the world and He sends you and me to be His love and His compassion to the poor.” She was a soul filled with the light of Christ, on fire with love for Him and burning with one desire: “to quench His thirst for love and for souls.”

The whole of Mother Teresa’s life and labour bore witness to the joy of loving, the greatness and dignity of every human person, the value of little things done faithfully and with love, and the surpassing worth of friendship with God. But there was another heroic side of this great woman that was revealed only after her death. Hidden from all eyes, hidden even from those closest to her, was her interior life marked by an experience of a deep, painful and abiding feeling of being separated from God, even rejected by Him, along with an ever-increasing longing for His love. She called her inner experience, “the darkness.” The “painful night” of her soul, which began around the time she started her work for the poor and continued to the end of her life, led Mother Teresa to an ever more profound union with God. Through the darkness she mystically participated in the thirst of Jesus, in His painful and burning longing for love, and she shared in the interior desolation of the poor.

22nd Sunday of the Year

Confidence is something that Jesus never lacked; in this Sunday's gospel, we see him cheerfully going for one of the "disastrous dinner-parties" with which Luke adorns his gospel. The host this time is "one of the rulers of the Pharisees — and they were watching him". So we know that there is going to be trouble. As indeed there is, for Jesus heals a man with dropsy, but for some reason the compilers of our lectionary have omitted that bit. Instead (and would you invite Jesus to one of your dinner-parties?) the first thing we encounter is Jesus criticising his fellow-guests for wanting the best seats at the party, and encouraging them instead to go straight to the worst seats, on the perhaps slightly cynical grounds that it is better to find yourself summoned upwards from there. Then, in case things had not got quite uncomfortable enough, he turns on his host, and attacks him for inviting his friends. "Don't", he says, as we groan with embarrassment, "invite your friends or brothers and sisters or your cousins or your wealthy neighbours — otherwise they'll invite you back". Instead, it seems, the people we are supposed to invite to our parties are all the wrong people (those with whom Jesus was nearly always to be found): "the destitute, the crippled, the lame, the blind and then you'll be happy, [precisely] because they have no way of repaying you: for you'll get your reward at the resurrection of the just".

We feebly try to imagine what the mood was like around the dinner-table after this speech; but if you are making a mental resolution not to put Jesus on your guest-list, then just ask yourself: suppose it is really true that we are happiest if we make a priority of those whom society ignores? Suppose that we are dealing with a God who prefers those on the margins? Can we cope with this unexpected God of ours?