21st Sunday of Year C
As the football season reaches towards the Finals emotions are mixed. For the supporters of those teams that meet the Finals there is a great deal of excitement. For others, our teams have not met our expectations. We think, well next year things will be better, but we know that we are not promised such a guarantee.
Whether it is for our sporting teams, or in many other aspects of our life, we want the best that is possible, and this expectation begins to infiltrate most dimensions of our lives. For example, in our relationships we can easily be led into thinking about how we might achieve the best partner, or the best marriage. We can even subtly begin to look for the perfect partner, the perfect family, the perfect friendship, the perfect career, the perfect parish, the perfect government – and become very disappointed when we don’t think we have found it.
Of course, what we do find is always something or someone that is imperfect and limited. Every one of us is limited. Our partners are limited, our parents are limited, our children are limited, our sporting teams are limited, and our governments are limited.
All of us are flawed. It is not the absence of limitations in each other that makes a relationship work but the way in which these limitations enable each of us to grow that makes the difference. As Pope Francis reminded us in his letter on families, “We encounter problems whenever we think that relationships of people ought to be perfect, or when we put ourselves at the centre and expect things to turn out our way.” (Amoris Laetitia, n.92). Particularly in our relationships limitation is not a deficit but the very means by which we learn the true nature of love. Only when we truly and deeply accept the reality of our own and each other’s’ limitations – rather than just our giftedness – do we truly begin to grow in our relationships.
Faith, itself, is a relationship. As with every other relationship, it, too, learns along the way that the acceptance of limitation is a key to its growth and to its vitality. Part of this learning comes in the way we accept the Church itself – a motley group who, at best, stumble and stutter along, never quite getting it right. If we applied the logic of ‘the perfect’ to ourselves as Church, then we would certainly despair because so often we are confronted with the stark reality of ours and each other’s limitations. In fact, we could go further and say that ‘the perfect parish’, ‘the perfect Church’, is never something for which to even aim.
Our aims should be about something different than what the notion of perfection will admit. In other words, in our life together as Christians we are not to seek a perfect vision but rather, we are to enter the paradox of both limitation and possibility, never one without the other. The acceptance of the presence of this paradox, not as a deficit to be overcome but a means by which we learn the true nature of both ourselves and of God, is the narrow gate about which Jesus speaks in today’s gospel. We cannot, as it were, glory in Christian principles and ideals unless we are first prepared to accept the confronting reality of this paradox and to enter it, often confusing, ambiguous and messy as it can be. But then there is never any new life, as our mothers can testify, without a great deal of uncertainty and confusion. We can’t have the possibilities without the limitations. This is true of our relationships, generally. It is also true of our life together as Christian disciples.
This is the paradox which our life of faith presents as a great but indispensable mystery to us – the paradox of the narrow gate about which Jesus speaks. We can’t have the idealism without its opposite. Or as an old outback Queensland shearer once said – and I think it is a great parable for all our relationships including our faith – “anything perfect is never beautiful.”
