Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 19, 2016
It is good that we can celebrate together. That we are gathered here after the killings in Orlando, after the assassination of Jo Cox in Great Britain, the murder of two French police agents in Magnanville near Paris. People hate each other, for various reasons: political, racial reasons, because of the sexual orientation of a person, because of their cultural background. In the reading we just heard, St Paul describes the Christians, the friends of Jesus as totally different from these men and women filled with hatred (Gal 3,26-29). So I would like to concentrate on the letter to the Galatians. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" - liberty, equality, fraternity: this was the motto of the French Revolution in 1789. These terms depend upon each other. The concept of equality is the fruit of the period of En¬lighten-ment, but it has its roots also in the Bible. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul speaks about equality: “There are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus“. Something new had come into being: the common faith and the life in one Christian community was meant to abolish hierarchical orders. Each and every one in this community is wished and created by God. All have the same dignity before God. We Christians are convinced that God is a friend of life and that God wants the happiness of all. All are invited to reach the fulfillment of our lives, to become what and who each and every one is meant to be. We are convinced that all human beings have been drawn nearer to God through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We say we are redeemed: we do not need to seek redemption ourselves, but redemption is offered to us. Paul says: “All of you are one in Christ Jesus.“ This is not something very spiritual, but something very concrete: we form the body of Christ here in our world, and we belong to this body by our baptism. We are linked to Christ, and we are also linked to each other. So within the Christian community we are equal. Does this mean that those who are not within the Church are less equal? What about Jews and the so-called pagans? It is absolutely clear that they also can reach the fulfillment of their lives. And what is true for us Christians is true also for them: they can reach the fulfillment of their lives not out of their own effort, but because God wants it, because God loves all human beings with the same love. And the measure for us all is to be found in Matthew: “What you did to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!” This is what Jesus says – independently if the action or the omission is put in a relation to Jesus. In history, the Christian teaching on equality abstained for too long from a political claim. It concentrated on individual admonitions for living together in small communities, in families. Equality before the law was achieved only after centuries of political struggle – often against the Churches. American and French constitutional law from the 18th century led to the formulation of the equality of men and women, and to the inadmissibility of discrimination because of one's sex, one's race, one's origin, one's language, one's faith, one's sexual orientation, one's political views etc. Now these social and political developments influence in their turn the way the Church and the faithful see themselves. The concept of equality is an example how biblical and Christian values migrate into the historical and social evolution. There they grow and mature – and there they are rediscovered one day as originally biblical and Christian. That the official Church is not immediately willing to welcome this concept of equality is a fact, a fact that makes many of us sad. But on the other hand this biblical origin of equality allows the church to address its message not only to Catholics or to Christians, but explicitly to “all men and women of good will“. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" - liberty, equality, fraternity - let us not forget their biblical meaning and let us implement them wherever we live and work.
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ