2025 Aug 24 SUN: TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Is 66: 18-21/ Ps 117: 1. 2/ Heb 12: 5-7. 11-13/ Lk 13: 22-30

I remember, from about 20 years ago, being at a meeting with a number of non-Catholic Christian pastors and I was explaining to them what the Second Vatican Council had to say about the possible salvation of people who've never heard of Jesus Christ. And Vatican II, in the Constitution on the Church, says that such people, if they are seeking what is true and good, they can be granted entrance into the heavenly kingdom. And I remember one of the pastors objecting to this. He says, "That's universalism." Universalism traditionally has been the idea that everybody is saved. And I suppose that it kind of tore at his idea of religion. I guess he had this idea that there are winners and losers. I don't know. But we have this question posed today. It says that someone asked Jesus, "Lord, will only a few people be saved?"

Well, Jesus does not give an answer -- a numerical answer. He does tell us that we need to pay close attention because this is a relationship we are talking about. A relationship into which every one of us has been invited. He says it isn't enough to say yeah we knew you, you taught in our streets, you should know us.

That is not sufficient. We are called to cultivate a truly personal relationship with the Son of God who came among us truly human as well as truly God -- in order to bear on our behalf all that we find ourselves having to bear in this often painful mystery of our earthly existence. Saint Teresa of Avila wrote that Jesus is our best friend precisely because he chose to take upon himself what we find ourselves having to suffer in a sinful world.

The pastor I remember from 20 years ago could be confronted today with what we hear from just about the very end of the prophet Isaiah. There is universalism being expressed here. You heard all those unfamiliar place names. In fact there's one in there that is so unfamiliar that nobody can identify it with anything. They don't know which nation Isaiah is talking about but they are converging from the east and the west and from the north and the south.

And those are Jesus' words today in the Gospel. Yes, there is something universally offered. We have the responsibility of really accepting this gift of the God who became one of us and we hope that, by the way we live our lives, many others will be attracted to this Kingdom of God announced by Jesus.

Of course we might talk about these things in ways that do not open themselves to relationships. We've heard it in the news over the past week about people reflecting and worrying, I guess you could say, about whether they would get to heaven. And that's a very American way of putting things. We can find it if we pick up a great American novel, Huckleberry Finn, and discover that Huck is being taught about the "good place" and the "bad place." Well, it's not so much a place; it is a relationship. It is coming to love the God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who first of all created us and then recreated us through the sacrifice of Jesus. So Jesus, when he speaks about the narrow way, is talking about what the Letter to the Hebrews is illustrating. Yes, we find ourselves disciplined, but this is so that we may be strong. He refers to our hands and our knees. Hebrews is saying you can keep traveling this path because you are on a path in which you discover that you are being healed.