“Knock and the door will be open?” It seems such an archaic concept. This dawned on me recently when I went to visit someone’s home. Instead of knocking at their door, I texted them on the cell phone to let them know that I was there. Is knocking becoming obsolete? Or again, if we really think about it, how often do we knock on our neighbor’s door? I remember as a kid my mother would send me up the block to Old Lady Lucy’s house. That’s what we called her anyway. I would run up the rickety stairs of her old white house on the corner and ask for a cup of sugar. Old Lady Lucy, well, she was as sweet as the sugar. Then there was also Grampa Wolf who lived across the street, the chain smoker he was, we would often head across Lansing Street to have him when we were in need of cleaning a school of rock bass and perch that we had just hauled in. We always knew we could knock on the back door. I remember knocking on the Sewernce’s door once with my nieghborhood friend Seth. We were selling day old news papers so we could make $1.25 to purchase nachos and cheese at the Hole ‘n One gasoline station. That was before they were called convenience stores.
The point being that perhaps in the past we may have knocked more often. Now it is much different. It is the pre-arranged pick-up point, the multiple text back and forth hammering down a time and a place. A voice message telling so and so to meet us here or there at a determined time. The spontaneity of the knock has been lost in our culture. So much as changed in so little of a time that it seems difficult to really relate with Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading, “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” To ask, to seek and to knock all entail a vulnerability that we would no sooner avoid both in our daily lives of interaction with others and in our own spiritual lives.
Asking, seeking and knocking carry within them an antiquated form of living that we have rather left alone and it is called humility. Asking for something opens us up to the possibility of making others aware that we are in need of something. Seeking is an admittance that we don’t have all the answers to something. Knocking is the awareness that in order to receive what I don’t have, I must do something about it. But how often in life do we allow the opportunities that behold us slip away from the fear of asking for the help we need. And on the flip side of that, in today’s world how sad it is that when asked for help, when we indeed knock, seek or ask we are rejected and turned down by the other because it is all but and inconvenience. We have battened down the hatches, we have retreated into our hobbit-life existence in order to preserve a perverse and distorted sense of security. At the heart of it all lies a deep seated fear of the unknown and the inability to make ourselves vulnerable and open to the lavish gifts that God would like to pour out upon us if only we would ask.
It would be good here to quote again from Francis, “...we continue on our way, it’s none of our business; and we feel fine with this. We feel at peace with this, we feel fine! The culture of well-being, that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others, that makes us live in soap bubbles, that are beautiful but are nothing, are illusions of futility, of the transient, that brings indifference to others, that brings even the globalization of indifference. In this world of globalization we have fallen into a globalization of indifference. We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn't concern us, it’s none of our business.” We have indeed become indifferent because we have lost the vulnerability of the cross. Our fear as vanquished the love it takes to reach out to our neighbor and we no longer go out to seek, to ask and to knock.
Vulnerability means placing ourselves in harms way. It means continually taking the risk to love someone because that is what Jesus Christ has done for us. Certainly, we can not do this if we ourselves do not comprehend the wonderous love of God that he has come first to knock on our own hearts. That Jesus Christ, himself has come to seek out our lost, abandoned and forlorn souls that we don’t even care to admit are those things in the first place! That Jesus is asking of us today to make ourselves vulnerable like himself on the cross. Yet our neighbor, our brother and sister in need is alone because we have not knocked on the door of their hearts, we have not sought them out to console or help them. We have not taken the risk to ask them how they are doing and really mean it. Our pitiable state has isolated ourselves from one another and fear is running rampant.
Why would we think that if we ask for a bit of sugar that we’ll get a slap in the face from Old Lady Lucy or if we ask Grampa Wolff to help us clean fish that he’ll stamp out his cigarette on the ground in front of us and slam the door on us? What makes us think that if we make ourselves vulnerable by asking for help that it makes us any less of a man or a woman? Asking for something is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of one’s understanding of vulnerability and solidarity with Christ. As Christ himself says, “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?” No, our retreat into our own selfish lives and calculated “risks” have spiraled us into this vanity of indifference. Even those brothers and sisters in our midst who are in need of something, we are completely unaware of because of our self-engrossed life-styles of comfortable control and complacency.
“Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me.” Sure he did. Many times it is easy to begin to think that God is not answering our prayers. That he is silent and still not heeding our distress calls for help. When we are in this vein of living, we are living in the field of self-pity. We are falling into the temptation of the mentality that, “woe is me. Poor old me.” There is an old adage that one must sometime pull themselves up by their own boot-straps and while this verifiably has some merit, the truth is that that only one to pick us up is Jesus Christ. Abraham petitioned God several times before God finally gave him the answer. We usually stop at one or don’t even get to one. Our perseverance in prayer is continually undermined by the fear that God is going to hold back from us, that he is not a lavish giver and lover, abundant in his generous outpouring of mercy and love. We then in turn, pull back from relationships and others in order to secure what we in fact don’t have and it becomes a black-hole of self-remorse and isolationism. Jesus says, “I tell you, if he does not get up to give the visitor the loaves because of their friendship he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence.” Let’s not pass the blame on someone else or some external situation. We are are not the victims, Christ is! He became like a lamb led to the slaughter for our own sins. He is the one who continues to knock, to seek and to ask. He is the one going door-to-door of our souls not with the phone in his hand in a psuedo secure digital world, but the one who has made himself vulnerable for us. He is rapping on the doors seeking to see if anyone indeed is willing to be open and become vulnerable to him. We miss Jesus because we somehow inherently know that if we acknowledge him that life will be messy and complicated and we don’t want that because that means the cross for us. Listen again to Pope Francis and what he just proclaimed at WYD on the 25th, “I would like us to make noise, I would like those inside the Dioceses to go out into the open; I want the Church to be in the streets; I want us to defend ourselves against all that is worldliness, comfort, being closed and turned within – Parishes, colleges and institutions must get out otherwise they risk becoming NGOs, and the Church is not a Non-Governmental Organization”.
It comes down to Saint Paul exhortation to us in the second reading, “We were buried with him in baptism. We were raised with him through faith in the power of God. Even when we were dead in our transgressions, he brought us to life. He has forgiven us all our transgressions. He has obliterated the bond against us. Jesus has nailed the legal claims opposed to us to the cross. If we truly believe what we do, then we will not allow the darkness that keeps us locked inside from going out to our neighbor once again. We will begin to realize that the God who has sought us, who daily knocks at the door of our own hearts. The Christ who delivers us asks us to become vulnerable with him once again. And we respond with a resounding AMEN. Yes Lord, I will take the chance again because you have for me. And mind you, this is the sweetest, the whitest and purest sugar we can ask for.
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