The Church is not immune to jargony-buzzwords, and the hottest buzzwords of the present moment are "synodality" and "accompaniment" which both mean "walking together." But walking together is only helpful to us if we're clear about the destination: Jesus walked with sinners - tax collectors and prostitutes - but he was not indifferent as to the direction of travel. He wanted to liberate them from sin, not leave them to wallow. We, like Christ, have to keep our eyes fixed firmly on the destination as we seek to accompany the spiritually poor on their journey. Our destination is heaven, and heaven is obtained by allowing Christ to transform us from sinners into images of himself.
We seem to be living in the age of the buzzword, nonsensical little pieces of Jargon that get overused until they lose all meaning; how many of you working in business have been bored to death by a corporate suit droning on about synergy, or cyber strategy, whatever those words mean? In my childhood in the 1990s almost every pub seemed to be rebranding itself as a gastropub, as if a slightly nicer pie and mash than usual made it something other than a pub with pretensions of being a restaurant. Now the latest trend among millennials in the workplace is quiet quitting, which means only working your contracted hours and giving the minimum amount of effort at work.
Whenever anyone so much as sneezes in a novel way, there’s a journalist, sociologist, politician, or social media “influencer” ready to pounce on it and turn it into the latest and most buzzy of buzzwords.
The Church isn’t immune from this either, and the hottest buzzwords of the moment are accompaniment and synodality. One cannot come across a document from Rome which doesn’t instruct priests, or the Church more generally, to accompany people in some way or other. The buzziest buzzword of the moment, synodality, has become such a meme that the Church is on the cusp of holding a two-year synod of Bishops discussing it and trying to decide what it means.
Both accompaniment and synodality are about walking together. At least that’s what the over-users of these buzzwords tell us. But, with all the focus on the walk, we can sometimes lose sight of the destination. To where, are we being accompanied?
Jesus is often confronted about his association with sinners; tax collectors and prostitutes. Other than lepers, there were no people more despised in Jesus’ day than tax collectors or prostitutes – they were the lowest of the low and were treated accordingly. Yet, in spite of this, Jesus sat down to eat with them, he spoke with them, and they followed Him. This upsets the pharisees, the priests, and the elders, that a Rabbi of such high repute could associate with these people; his accompaniment of the lowest of the low repulsed them.
In Capernaum, Jesus was confronted about his association with lowlifes, and answered the physician comes for the sick, and not for the healthy. In today’s Gospel, He is in Jerusalem, and he tells them the parable of two sons asked to work in their Father’s vineyard: the first son says no, but feels guilty and eventually does go out to work, the second son says yes, but then does not go out to work. Which of these did their Father’s will?
The tax collectors and prostitutes were sinners, they were doing something objectively and absolutely morally wrong. In the parable they are the son asked to go and work who initially said no; they chose sin rather than holiness. Yet, in all their sinfulness they knew that something was wrong. They were despised by their own people, isolated from any company except other sinners, and miserable because sin never brings true happiness. They were trapped, not having any way to redeem themselves but deeply unhappy with their lives. So, when St John the Baptist appeared on the scene preaching repentance they leapt at the chance. When Jesus came saying the physician comes for the sick, they knew he had come for them. Not just to walk around aimlessly with them, to allow them to continue in sin, but to heal them and restore them to their people. The pharisees and chief priests and elders didn’t realise that they too were sinners, they had fooled themselves into believing they were holy. They did not listen to John the Baptist, and they would not follow Jesus, because they did not see how sick they were. They are the Son who said yes, but then did not go out to work in their father’s fields.
Walking together is all very well, and our Lord Jesus Christ wants to accompany us on the journey, but our Lord is not indifferent as to the direction of travel. He wants us to be freed from Sin, he wants us to repent – not to wallow in our own mess and claim to be fine where we are. His purpose is our salvation: getting us to the kingdom of heaven. He came to transform our lives and free us from our sins: not in the abstract, where we get to live our lives exactly as we did before but claim to be “forgiven”, but in the way we live our lives each and every day – He has come to transform us, if we let Him.
The Church, then, his body on earth seeks out the spiritually poor, those who are trapped in sin, and walks with them. But, like Christ, we have the destination clearly in mind. We walk with people from the swamp of sin and the dark night of error, into the green fields of holiness and dazzling the sunlight of the truth. That walk is not easy, that walk means making sacrifices, that walk means being humble enough to admit that we are sinners in need of being saved, but that walk leads to the Kingdom of Heaven.
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