Snobs

October 09 , 2005

Noel Coward, some years after World War II, learned that his name was on a list of men and women in British public life whom the Nazis intended to kill. The list included some – to him – quite dodgy characters. “Darling,” he wrote to an actress friend who was on the list, “the people we would have been seen dead with!”

Snobbery takes many forms and perhaps the most common form is the least reprehensible. A Conservative minister, when asked what he thought of his reputation as a snob, replied, “What is a snob? Someone who looks up to his social superiors and down on his social inferiors. What could be more natural?” (He had the grace to add, “Of course, as a Christian, one tries to rise above the merely natural.”)

Snobbery like this seems almost innocent, being so blatant. But are we not ourselves snobs? Do we not pick and choose over the years and with ever-increasing refinement the company we keep? Do we not become by “granny steps” and perhaps unknown to ourselves socially exclusive? “When you give a party,” Jesus tells his disciples, “do not invite your friends or the well-to-do; invite rather the crippled, the poor.” Do we do that? Jesus brought his own reputation as a teacher and man of God into disrepute among the religious people of his time precisely because he kept company with the disreputable. “This man eats with sinners,” they said. This goes beyond keeping table-fellowship with the handicapped and the “deserving” poor. This is keeping “bad company”. And, after all, we are judged by the company we keep, or so we have been taught since childhood.

In today’s Gospel, the Kingdom of God is compared to a royal banquet. Those who were originally invited have lost interest; they make excuses; they even kill the king’s messengers. He sends messengers out yet again to scour the land in order to invite everyone they can find, “good and bad alike”. What! Can there be bad people in the Kingdom of God?

When I worked in Scotland, a kindly woman said to me once that she didn’t mind that some people seem to have a worse or a better life than others, since “God looks down on everyone equally.” Of course, she didn’t really mean that God looks “down” on us, but that he loves us all and cares for us from above. In fact, when we think of Jesus as “God in the flesh”, then we see that God almost looks up to us. And not “equally”, since Jesus seems to favour the un-deserving, the disreputable, the bad. This astonishing favour – this totally unmerited, gracious outpouring of the Divine Mercy – is so complete that it is sealed forever in the covenant of his blood. Look at Calvary See the three crosses there. See the ones He has chosen to be seen dead with.

Farm Street SVP