For people in public life, there are a lot of embarrassing things you can do these days. You can steal money, or have a secret romantic relationship, or tell an obvious lie. But it seems these days that one of the most embarrassing things you can do is to change your mind. I’m not talking about a little talking out of both sides of your mouth, where you tell one group of people one thing they want to hear and another group something slightly different that they want to hear. That’s still acceptable – in fact it’s almost a job requirement to be in politics, I guess. What I’m talking about is genuinely deciding that you feel differently about something than you did five years ago, or ten years ago, or back when you were in school. If you come out and tell people that, yes, you thought x then and you think y now, you’re a flip-flopper, or worse, and people will do years of research finding out everything you ever said before, to show how obviously unreliable what you’re saying now is. It’s as if, if you change your mind, you simply can’t be trusted again.
We might think that since we’re normal everyday people, we’re exempt from that kind of pressure never to reveal that we have changed our minds. But then we hear this gospel, which seems to suggest that for many of us, there’s some innate human resistance to mind-changing. Those are the two kinds of people in Jesus’s parable today: People who change their minds, and people who are determined not to.
First, there’s the good son, who says all the right things, but doesn’t do what’s right, who wants to look consistent, even though he isn’t. And then there’s the bad son, who refuses to do what’s right, but then changes his mind. But then there’s the real story in this gospel, the one Jesus is really telling us, about the chief priests and the elders, who refused to see that John the Baptist required them to change their minds, and the tax collectors and the prostitutes, who decided to embrace something entirely new in John the Baptist. And it’s no coincidence that the people who change their minds here are a different kind of person from the ones who don’t.
We have to remember that John the Baptist wasn’t so easy to decide to believe in. While he had acquired a certain number of followers and attracted some crowds, he came wandering in out of the desert looking like a radical madman, eating strange food, proposing that repentance and forgiveness is something that everyone not only needs but can get, that God’s kingdom is arriving right now. Tax collectors and prostitutes could embrace John the Baptist because they not only want to hear that news, but because they can’t possibly look worse than they already do. They don’t have to worry about looking odd by believing in this crazy person. No one worries about what they think. But it would take a lot of courage as a chief priest to throw aside your official beliefs about whether people wandering in from the desert can possibly know what they’re talking about. You not only would have to change your thinking, but you might lose your job, your status, your friends, the good opinion of all the people you work with. At best, you’d get strange looks, and have a lot of explaining to do. For a chief priest, it would mean a new life, not just changing your mind. That same resistance they had to upsetting their established life is the same resistance we face, every day.
It’s not that we have to be constantly changing our minds about everything. In fact, we sometimes like to think that as Catholics, we rarely have to do this. You probably know the old joke, How many Catholics does it take to change a light bulb? The answer: What do you mean, change? And it’s true that there’s a stability to what we believe as a church that is reassuring and necessary. But as individual Christians, we don’t have the luxury of not changing. To embrace the message of this gospel, we have to permit ourselves to see something new, especially if that something is pushing us in the direction of seeing God where we were unable to see God before.
This gospel is telling us to be constantly on the alert for the presence of God in the voice we usually ignore, the outcast, the prisoner, the failure. John the Baptist and even Jesus himself appeared on the scene as outsiders, and they point to a constant in our lives, that it might be the person we are quickest to dismiss or even condemn, the person we’ve been guarding ourselves against the person we feel uncomfortable around, who can very easily be the person calling us to change our heart and the way we live. God’s grace is often offered to us in the form of a challenge, to recognize that the way we’ve always felt about some person or a group of people who look like outcasts and sinners isn’t the way we are being called to react to them now.
It’s jarring to change the way we react to and think and talk about people we have formerly dismissed or ignored or avoided. But that is the only thing that can give us a wider field of vision about where God is alive and active, so that we can see God’s presence and love in places and people where we formerly thought it could never possibly be. We don’t always make changes successfully or permanently. But the great theologian John Henry Newman, who was beatified last year, said that to live here on earth is to change, and that to be perfect is to have changed often. Becoming perfect might be hard. But in this gospel, we see one way to get started.