September 20, 2015

25^th Sunday in Ordinary Time B

Wisdom 2: 12, 17-20; James 3: 16 - 4: 3; Mark 9: 30-37

What am I living my life for? This is a question I can respond to with little thinking or it’s one that I can reflect on with the intention of discovering wisdom for continued living.

What is important to me? Is it family and friends? Is it success and accomplishments? Is it providing for and caring for those who depend on me? Is it realizing God’s closeness and His gifts bringing me to my eternal home?

The Book of Wisdom was written about 100 years before Jesus. The author was a member of the Jewish community in Alexandria, Egypt. His faith community had experienced much suffering and cruelty from Jews who had turned away from their religion. So he responded by writing about God’s wisdom and the wonderful events of the Exodus coupled with God’s mercy and the ridiculousness of idolatry. Today he presents two contrasting viewpoints about life in the world: one, placing God above all else in life and the other pursuing worldly values because they think there is nothing to be gained by placing all one’s trust in God. As a result those apostate Jews are attacking the righteous even condemning them to death saying there is nothing God can do for you. Life is measured for them only by this world. They can’t see that God fashioned people for immortality. How close this is to the remarks against Jesus on the cross in Matthew 27: 41-44: “”Likewise the chief priest with the scribes and elders mocked Him and said, ‘He saved others; He cannot save Himself. So He is the king of Israel! Let Him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in Him. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if He wants Him. For He said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ The revolutionaries who were crucified with Him also kept abusing Him in the same way.” So the ‘just one’ in Wisdom isn’t simply killed, but publicly shamed in an execution, trying to reduce the person to less than human. I can see so much loneliness and isolation…and when I see this in my own life, where does trust in God come in?

The second reading is taken from the Letter of James and it also focuses on the wicked but it’s really the wickedness within myself. James zeroes in on the depravity of jealousy...were I am not satisfied with what I have nor do I realize my own gifts but I am ‘angry’ at another’s gifts. He brings out selfish ambition…emphasizing it’s all about me and what I want and even how I get what I want. So what happens as a result of these ‘drives’? St. James tells us that they lead to wars on the big level and on the individual level. He summarizes this well, “You covet but do not possess. You will and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do not ask. You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” In the Greek the word, ‘passions’ is better translated as ‘pleasure’. There is nothing wrong with my pleasures, but is life all about myself? The next verse (v4) in James ties this together, “Therefore, whoever wants to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” And three verses later he adds, “So submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” So am I working on my own relationship with God? What do I do when the temptations come to bypass God and think only of me? These will come, many times in torments, until the day I die.

Jesus predicts His passion and resurrection three times in Mark, today’s reading focuses on the second of these. In each prediction, the apostles misunderstand what Jesus is saying, necessitating a further teaching from Jesus on what discipleship means. Today, not only do the disciples not understand but they don’t even care enough to ask for some clarification. They are way too concerned with themselves: ‘what’s in this for me? What ‘position’ of power/authority am I going to come away with? I’ve given up so much, I really need to be compensated big time.’ Maybe they are wondering since Jesus is dying, who is going to take His place, who is going to take the lead? And Jesus responds on leadership: who is a leader? What are the qualities of a leader? Jesus says, ‘The leader is one who serves!’ He uses a child as His ‘poster’. The child represents for the disciple of Jesus the vulnerabilities, fears and doubts that I experience and what others experience. And the child reminds me that to help, I have to take up the work of reaching out to those who are overwhelmed by such anxiety and gloom. Am I doing this? This is what I am called to do. There is not option in this; it is why God created me…am I listening?

Fr. Ronald Rolheiser in The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality gave a wonderful example of ‘a life worth living’. “In a talk given a few years ago at the University of Notre Dame, the activist and poet Fr. Daniel Berrigan talked about his ministry at the time at a New York hospice for the terminally ill. Each week, he told the audience, he would go to spend some time sitting by the bed of a young boy who is totally incapacitated, physically and mentally. The boy could only lie there. He could not speak or communicate with his body or in any other way express himself to those who came into his room. He lay there mute and helpless, by all outward appearances cut off from any possible communication. Berrigan then described how he would go to sit by the boy to ‘hear’ what the boy as saying in his silence and helplessness.

For Father Berrigan, the way this child lies in our world, silent and helpless, is the way God lies in our world. To hear what God is saying, we must learn to hear what this child is saying. God’s presence in our world is like that of the boy: It does not overpower anyone or anything. It lies quietly, at the deep moral and spiritual base of things. It does not overpower with strength, or attractiveness, or brilliance, or intelligence, as does the speed and power of an Olympic athlete, the physical beauty of a model or movie star, or the gifted speech or rhetoric of the brilliant orator or author. While we can behold God in strength and swiftness and beauty and brilliance and harmony, God first reveals Himself in the silence of humility and simplicity and peace – in the silence and vulnerability of a child.” And I am called to ‘get out of myself’ and see and hear and love and care and forgive. So I reflect on:

• ‘If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” (Mark 9:35) Where am I missing the mark?
• Respond as if this was a personal question from Ernest Hemingway, “He was a success at everything except life.”
• One of the earliest accounts of Saint Francis, the "Legend of Perugia," quotes him as telling the first friars that "You only know as much as you do."

Sacred Space 2015 shares: “The gospel reveals the disciples as slow and dense: they do not understand the implications of following Jesus. Fear deters them from asking the core questions. Instead, they are preoccupied with false ambition, self-seeking, and rivalry.” How much are these a part of my life? Where do they creep in? When do they creep in? Can I hear Jesus in this?