Homily for Friday of the 1st Week in Ordinary Time, 17 January 2025, Mt 19:16-26
I used to react to this saying about it being so hard to enter the kingdom of heaven. Until I realized that it would be easier to get the sense of what Jesus is saying by inverting the statement. Instead of talking about how hard it is to enter into heaven, perhaps we should think about how we are making it too hard for heaven to enter into us. Maybe we should stop thinking of heaven as a place where our disembodied souls will go after death. Could we be missing the point because we tend to think too literally?
What do I mean? Let me explain a little. Once I gave a recollection about heaven and started it by saying, “I do not believe in a God who wants only a few to go to heaven. It does not sound very godly. I believe rather that God wants to welcome everyone to heaven; but the problem is, not everyone will want to go there.”
Another time I put it this way: “I have good news and bad news for you. First, the good news: we will all be welcome in heaven. Second the bad news: we will not all be happy there. And that’s what hell is about. To be in heaven and not be happy, because heaven could not get into you.
On earth, to be satisfied, you feed yourself. In heaven no matter how much you feed yourself you remain hungry. To be satisfied you must feed others. Heaven reverses your life’s direction from self-preoccupation to cooperation with God’s dream of a better life for all, especially the poor—a better world, a better society. After all what he really intended to create was paradise; but we turned it into a valley of tears.
Have you ever wondered why Jesus did not teach us in The Lord’s prayer to say: May we enter into your kingdom? No. What he taught was: “Thy kingdom come!” Meaning, may your kingdom come among us. And it tells us how we can bring that about in the line that follows: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” To work for the fulfillment of God’s will on earth—that alone can make heaven begin on earth. That is what it takes so that we can live life on earth as if heaven has begun.
The statement is presupposing that heaven comes about when God’s will is being done on earth. Did not Jesus once say in Lk 17:20-21, “The coming of the kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the kingdom of God is among you.”?
Maybe that is why Jesus loved to use parables about the kingdom of heaven as something that grows like a mustard seed or makes a mass of dough rise like a little yeast, or a treasure, or a net, or a quest for a pearl of great price. Unlike in this world where the mighty and powerful lord it over, in heaven, Jesus says it is the children who are the greatest.
