October 9, 2008
Few
Pentecost 22/23A Mt 22.1-14
“For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Mt 22.14).
The Japanese name for Korea is “Chosen.” The U S Marine veterans who fought there in that mid-twentieth century misunderstanding rightly call themselves, “The Chosen Few.”
Now that I’ve got that homiletic spin out of the way, what on earth was Matthew talking about that Jesus was talking about? How has the Chosen Few, an aphorism that has stood so well and so perplexingly down through the ages, attached to the story of a desperate and fickle king like that told in today’s gospel?
Maybe it was because Matthew was a bit fickle, himself, and was throwing his evangelical weight around. Maybe it was a hint to is neighbor Luke not to take himself so seriously. Frankly, one may wonder, as some authorities do, whether Jesus ever said it at all. But there it is as plain as mud in the scriptural canon for all time. One reason I believe it has is that the Holy Spirit has a lot to do with what is said there, including what Jesus says there, and with how the church interprets what is said there and, unlike Luke, we’d best take it more seriously than not what is said there.
“For many are called, but few are chosen.” One dare not overlook that what we do with our lives and the choices that demands are at the very core of our Baptismal Covenant. Surely there are no more important concepts about the life in Christ than vocation and choice. The Greek word for church is ekklesia. It means something like “those who are called out.” The very characteristic of what it means to be a human being is not only to be called, to have a vocation, but also and perhaps even more distinctively, the capacity, the freedom to choose that calling — or to refuse it. This is what it means to be created in the image of God. This is what God means by imagining us into being.
Jesus realized that God had a special calling for him when he confronted Satan out there in those early forty devastating days in the wilderness. He was still wrestling with that calling as late as Gethsemane where he sweated blood trying to get it straight blood about God’s will for him. We must never overlook that he said Yes, and that that Yes may be the saving act, itself, part with the cross. Vocation and choice.
“For many are called, but few are chosen.”
Maybe that means that God calls a lot of us, maybe all of us, to be his church. Maybe it means not that God chooses only a few, for, after all, he’s called us all, but that only a few of us exercise the freedom to choose or not to choose his calling, actually and which probably means whether or not we choose to be human as God has imagined human to be. Let us understand the church, the called, to be where we work out that vocation and perfect it, where we follow through on it and become not only the chosen few, but, as well, the few who choose.
Maybe all this is homiletic license, one of which I have as do you for better or worse.
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