Journey's Weekly Homilies
25TH
SUNDAY, YEAR B
SEPTEMBER 21, 2003
Homily by SAM
WISDOM 2:12,
17-20
JAMES 3:16-4:3
MARK 9:30-37
When I was in Baptist Bible School as a teenager I memorized hundreds of Bible verses. We would be graded on these verses every week, five points off for each word missed, two points off for punctuation. We supposed that even the commas and periods were divinely inspired.
On occasion these passages rise from deep within me in the elegant language of the King James translation of the Bible as I first learned them. In response to our readings today a passage from the prologue of the Gospel of John keeps coming back to me like a familiar song. “He came unto his own but his own received him not. But to as many as received him gave he power to become children of God, even to them who believe on his name, who were born not of blood, not of the will of flesh, not of human will, but of God.”
Our first reading from Wisdom suggests that the just person presents a profound threat to the ways of this world. “She is a reproach to us”, they say. “Her manner of life is unlike ours and her ways are strange. She considers us base and avoids our ways as unclean.”
In the book of Wisdom justice does not come naturally to people but comes from God. When the messenger of wisdom lives and preaches justice she will be tested by insult and torture, condemned to a shameful death to see whether she is will be true. And so it is with Jesus. Today he announces, “The Heavenly One will be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed he will rise again.” His followers are quick to change the subject.
The death of Jesus is a central theme in all four Gospels and a challenge to followers like us. What did Jesus say or do to warrant such an extreme response? If he really was good and inspired by God why wouldn’t people accept while he was alive? And is following Jesus in our time equally disturbing to the way the world operates? Should we expect the same treatment he received?
I want to begin my explanation of Jesus’ death with a poem by James Patrick Kinney:
In dark and
bitter cold;
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story’s told.
Their dying
fire in need of logs,
The first man held his back.
For of the faces round the fire
He noticed one was black.
The next man
looked across the way,
Saw one not of his church,
And couldn’t bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third man
dressed in tattered clothes,
Then gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be given up
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man
sat back thinking of
The wealth he had in store,
And how to keep what he had earned
From going to the poor.
The black
man’s face bespoke revenge,
While fire passed from sight.
Saw only in his stick of wood
A chance to spite the white.
The last man
of this forlorn group
Did nothing but for gain.
Give only unto those who give
Was how he played the game.
The logs held
firm in death-stilled hands
Were proof of
human sin.
They died not from the cold without
But from the cold within.
The cold within us runs deep because we see people in terms of nation, race, class, or simply our own self-interest. And when a prophet reminds us of our common humanity we are embarrassed by our narrowness and bitterness. We will reject the prophet and bear the cold on our own rather than draw together in the warmth of our common humanity. Every time the fire dwindles another prophet rises up for us to accept or reject.
In Homer’s ancient epic, “The Odyssey” we see another parable of this. Odysseus and his companions return from a bloody war that has devastated their country. As they cross the stormy Agean they come across an island. On this island are beautiful women who sing a beguiling song. Passing sailors are so entranced that they always draw near until they crash on the rocks which are in plain sight. Odysseus, the wise leader has his friends lash themselves to the masts of their ship lest they suffer the fate of all those who have gone before them.
The lure of nation, class, and race, the siren song of envy, greed, jealousy, and bitterness are irresistible to us. Almost every day as I examine my own attitudes I find some new form of prejudice that has led me to see another person as different than myself and less worthy of consideration.
Pagan spiritual teacher and Holocaust survivor Starhawk describes how she learned to accept the oppression of Palestinians who were displaced by Jewish settlers like herself.
She says, “We were not told to kill Arabs or hate them. Rather we learned a more subtle discounting, a not-seeing, as if the Palestinians were not full human beings but a minor obstacle to the fulfillment of a dream, something to be moved aside, that didn’t really count. We were taught to be proud of brave Zionists settlers and pioneers, the idealistic youth who fled the ghettos and pogroms of Europe to build a ‘new land’”.
“We said, ‘The land is ours by right. God gave it to us’. The Palestinians who lived there wee an impediment. So we began a long litany of justifications: the land really didn’t belong to them; they weren’t doing anything with it, had not made the desert bloom or drained the swamps as we were doing; and above all we said they hated us with an irrational, implacable, and unchanging malice.”
Of course, at the same time Starhawk was being taught to hate and abuse, Palestinian children were being taught the same thing about Jews.
We all learn this subtle discounting of the humanity of others. We all learn to not see. We become so entranced by self-interest that we see others as minor obstacles. Nation, class, race, and religion are simply the most popular ways to rationalize it.
Jesus healed the sick, embraced the poor , and ate with sinners. When someone like him tries to wake us up from the cold world we have created we ignore that person or turn on him with all our fury.
Rachael Corrie, like Jesus, tried to wake people up. She was an American human rights activist who tried to stop and Israeli bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian home. She literally climbed on top of the rubble the bulldozer was pushing. The driver calmly looked into her eyes and slowly crushed her to death.
This callousness may seem extraordinary to us but the reasons behind it are not. The letter to James reminds us, “Where selfishness and ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice . . . You desire and do not have; so you kill. You covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.”
Two millennia ago Gospel writers tried to explain what was most essential about Jesus. And today we try to understand what is most essential to follow him. The answer is the same.
Jesus was a prophet who revealed the humanity of those we do not see, blinded and deafened by our own selfishness and narrowness. If we would follow him we must listen to the prophets of our time and notice the people whose lives are under our feet. We must examine the ways we distance ourselves from each other. We must look the stranger in the eye and see that she is us. We must become a company of prophets in our own community grieving the oppressed and taking action to bring about justice.
This path is hidden to those around us. Prophets are treated as traitors, cowards, lunatics, or worse. It is a lonely road and we will not survive on our own. Journey exists for those who follow the prophetic path of Jesus. We must ask the hard questions, support each other, and proclaim justice together.
Today we are asked to follow Jesus knowing all that it will entail. Who among us will be son bold? “He came unto his own but his own received him not. But to as many as received him he gave the power to become the children of God. Even to those who believe on his name, who were born not of blood, not of the will of flesh, not of human will, but of God.”