Christ the King Sunday

This Sunday’s gospel is Matthew 25:31-46. My homily on it follows:

You’re probably wondering why there are pineapples on the altar this morning. It’s because as I was spending a few quiet moments working on this homily last Wednesday afternoon, I heard a well-known personality talking on the radio about pineapples being a symbol of hospitality, which, coincidentally, is the theme for my homily today. She explained that many homes and hotels in times past had stylised pineapples on wrought iron fences or somewhere on the façade of the building as a sign of welcome.

You see, the people Jesus rewards in the description of the judgment in today’s gospel are not commended for running programmes; rather, they’re commended for their loving hospitality: I was hungry and a stranger and you welcomed me to your table. I was in prison and you came to the prison and sat with me.

At one level it’s easier than welfare programmes; at another its more costly. It’s much smaller in scale, but it may be more significant in impact. Welfare handouts don’t heal people’s lives, they just cushion the blows. Inviting someone to dinner may seem far less significant, but love and hospitality are what heal people’s souls and turn their lives around. It’s no accident that the words ‘hospitality’ and ‘hospital’ both originate in the same idea.

But hospitality won’t work if we’re living our lives along the standard patterns of our society, each hidden behind our deadlocked doors or our paling fences.

Hospitality is a community activity. Sharing food and drink, visiting each other, even when we’re sick or in prison, caring for one another and supporting one another, encouraging and nurturing one another’s growth—these are the basic features of community life. Much of the brokenness and suffering in our society comes not so much from evil oppressors as from the privatisation of life and the consequent loss of these communal values. Though many decry the loss of traditional family values, it may actually be due to the idolisation of the family to the exclusion of the community that has impoverished our lives. The nuclear family is too small a unit to provide an adequate social context for the shaping and nurturing of healthy creative human beings.

The challenge for us is to build on those skills in order to develop the sort of community life that can really welcome those who come to us as strangers, as the poor and needy, as the dysfunctional and unlovely. Next Sunday, for example, is World AIDS Day. Fear of being rejected or stigmatised can prevent people from being tested for HIV, seeking treatment, or from acknowledging their HIV status. People with, or suspected of having, HIV may be turned away from health care services, denied housing and employment, shunned by friends or colleagues, turned down for insurance coverage, or refused entry into foreign countries. In some cases they may be evicted from home by their families, divorced by their spouses, or subjected to physical violence or emotional abuse.

Or another example. In this week’s edition of our Catholic newspaper there’s an article on an organisation that helps street kids. In the article there’s a quote from Scott, a 14-year-old who faced terrible abuse at home. Scott says, “I can handle the cold. I can even handle being hungry. It’s the loneliness that’s hard to take. I just wish I had someone to talk to.” The challenge for us is to continue to develop our care for one another while simultaneously opening it up to the Christ who comes to us in the stranger’s guise and who will one day pass judgment on how we welcomed him into the vibrant nurturing heart of our community.

We’re going to have to explore and experiment together with what it means for us to be a community of radical hospitality at this point in time. This is not a cop out from the gospel imperative for justice and peace-making. It’s in developing among ourselves a sustainable community living a lifestyle of radical communal hospitality that we will best enable others to find a place of liberation and healing, and that we will best model the life of peace and justice, and thus critique the society around us; and, ultimately, it is in such a community that we will best nurture one another for any involvement in bigger struggles.