Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

We have spoken many times of how Isaiah’s prophecies emphasize the inclusiveness of God’s love. By the time of Jesus this was a message that his people had again lost track of. Jesus once more reemphasized it, only to have his church again lose the plot over the years that followed.

Isaiah’s view may be attractive to us, but it did suffer from some serious problems. Isaiah was not unaware of this. If God’s love encompassed all people, to the ends of the earth - how could this be when very obviously the great majority of people were unaware of this God who loved them? The European church of the period of the great explorations of the 17th and 18th centuries faced a similar challenge - how could all these people, who had no possibility of knowing the God of the Israelites, be saved?

Isaiah had a simple answer, as set out in the reading we hear today (Isaiah 45:1, 4-6). God could guide even those who were completely unaware of him. The case of Cyrus was a particularly extreme one since, even in his time, he was recognized as a unique figure who used his immense power in a way which so clearly reflected the values and aspirations of the Jewish people so that they could not regard him as an alien, as an outsider - but equally clearly he was.

Isaiah comes down firmly on the side of Cyrus being a servant of the Lord even though he “knew him not”. After all the horror and tragedy of the suppression of heresies, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the “Holy” wars and the Reformation, the Catholic Church eventually rearrived at an understanding similar to that of Isaiah. The Second Vatican Council in 1964 in its extraordinary decree “Lumen Gentium” (Light of the Nations) laid out that understanding, both old and new - God’s salvation was not restricted to certain people, those who accepted certain views or teachings, but was dependent on their individual, internal, orientation toward the good, the holy, the Godlike.

This teaching is profound and more than we can hope to explore in a short reflection. But, to provide a pointer to the deep reorientation it requires, we can note that Lumen Gentium replaced the view of belonging to the church as a matter of acceptance of a framework which was defined by Jesus, by a view of the church as a mechanism for God to reach out to the whole world (as Isaiah had foretold). The church participates in God’s outreach to all people, it does not stand in glorious perfection at the center of the world and invite or force people in. It goes out to find them wherever they are and seeks to display the love of God - just as Jesus did. In this way the church remains the body of Christ active in our world. So the church does the work of God, leaving the concerns of power and money to the Caesars of whatever time we live in (Matt 22:15-21).