NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 26 in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time. In today's Gospel we continue directly on from where we were last Sunday. And that's an important point to remember, because as you probably remember, the last thing that happened in last Sunday's Gospel was that Jesus took a small child and embraced him very affectionately in his midst, and told the disciples to receive people like him. In other words, he attracted their center of attention, the focus of their desire, onto this child, and says — basically saying — if you want to be loved like this, this is the sort of person that you must pay attention to. So it's part of this teaching of the disciples: what the true criteria for their following are to be. That's what we're going to be carrying on looking at. Remember always, this small child is still present throughout the conversation which you're going to look at now. Just imagine the visual prop is still there. So John says to Jesus: "Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us." Okay, very clever use of the word "us" there. Remember that Mark is a split-screen Gospel — that we have simultaneously the post-resurrection, post-Pentecost disciples having gone back to Galilee and learning the way of the cross again. So going to Galilee and learning how to follow Jesus. And we have a memory from the first time when this actually happened, Jesus taking his disciples through what they were clearly not able to learn the first time. So this is the split-screen reality here. So this time it's John who's going to get into trouble. Before we had Peter getting it right and then getting it wrong, and now we have John. This is a suggestion also of the way in which the post-resurrection, post-Pentecost Church of Jerusalem — where John was an important figure — might be getting it wrong in not allowing others to function freely as followers of Christ: the beginnings of the mission outside Jerusalem in Antioch and amongst the Gentiles. So the split screen is at work here. "We saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us" — as though we, the apostolic group, are the important people rather than you, Jesus. But Jesus said: "Do not stop him, for no one who does a deed of power in my name" — thus bringing out the notion of the power that came upon them with the Holy Spirit — "will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me." Then he says: "Whoever is not against us is for us." So now he's applying the power that he has given them back to the "us," both including himself but also referring to John and his concern about the apostolic group. And here he comes up with the absolutely key phrase for undoing the scapegoat mechanism, if you like, undoing sacrificial thinking. If you follow sacrificial thinking, it's always: "There is an 'us,' who are out to get me; there is a dangerous other." And he's saying no, you've got to get out of the mentality of there being a dangerous other. "Whoever is not against us is for us." And getting out of the sacrificial thinking, getting out of victimary thinking, is absolutely essential for following Christ. This is one of the things that we will learn throughout this journey to Jerusalem: Jesus teaching his disciples to get beyond victimary thinking about themselves. And certainly St. Luke comes up with the same thing, but he highlights it by having both "whoever is not against us is for us" and "whoever is not for us is against us," precisely so that we stop and think, "Oh, that seems a contradiction," and then work out that we're actually supposed to move away from any kind of sacrificial thinking. And then Jesus brings this out: "For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward." What's this suggesting? This is suggesting that somebody who recognizes, in someone who is being mistreated, someone who is being persecuted, that there is a follower of Christ — the person who gives them a cup of water has perceived the Holy One of God. And of course he'll be given the reward of a prophet, so Matthew actually puts in "of a prophet" when he quotes this. But that's the point: that the people who are starting to enter into a pattern of desire that is getting away from sacrificial, victimary thinking, and therefore is enabling people to become self-giving, putting themselves at risk without fear for themselves — that is the root of discipleship. And of course this passage recalls immediately the passage from Numbers, which is our first reading, where Moses is delighted that the Spirit has produced more prophets who aren't part of the good old boys' club, and says to Joshua, "Don't stop them — would that everybody were a prophet." And of course the coming of the Holy Spirit is in a sense the answer to Moses's prayer: "Would that everyone were a prophet." The Spirit has come upon people so far and wide, people are starting to be able to move beyond sacrificial thinking, and whatever they do, that is how the name is being honored. It's not a question of belonging to the right group; it's a question of being caught up in the Holy Spirit. So this discourse then carries on: "If any of you put a stumbling block" — and remember, he's talking to the disciples here, so this is not a general sort of tough — a set of tough phrases for humanity. This It is a tough phrase for the apostolic group in the presence of a small child on whom their gaze is somewhat fixed, because: why is he getting all the hugs and not us? "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones" — talking about the little ones who believe in me — "it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea." Okay, let's unpack the millstone a bit. Millstones have the mill on the bottom, which is flattish, and then there's a millstone which is carved deliberately to be rough so that it will grind the corn. But after a bit the roughness of the millstone wears off and it becomes useless for grinding corn, and so it's discarded. And if it's discarded, of course it tends to hang around and can be stumbled over quite easily. In other words, it's the kind of thing that you don't want to bump into because it will trip you up. But here's the thing: it does have a convenient hole in the middle of it, where it would fit on the mill, and so you can tie it around somebody's neck. It's very, very heavy. And here's the thing: "throw them into the sea" — actually, it would be quite far from the sea; you would have quite a bit to travel to get to the sea. But what's the point of saying this? This is an exaggerated way of saying: take them out of existence altogether. It would be better if you were taken out of existence altogether, because burying people was actually a way of keeping them — it was a holy thing to do. Casting them into the sea was the equivalent of taking them out of being completely. In the book of Revelation, it's the whore — in other words, Jerusalem at that stage, Jerusalem and its temple culture — the whore that has a millstone cast around its neck and is cast into the sea. It's taken away forever, utterly annihilated. So that's the thing: we have to be utterly annihilated rather than be scandalizing — causing to stumble — these little ones. So this is very, very serious teaching to the apostolic group, and of course to us who have the pretension of being Church. And Jesus then uses these famous hard phrases: "If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It's better to enter life maimed. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out. It's better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell" — well, actually, Gehenna, "where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched." Okay, well, in the first place this is a riff, first of all, on the book of Job and then on the prophet Isaiah, and we'll see how Jesus brings these two together at the end. So the quote from Job, which is from Job 31: "I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a virgin? What would be my portion from God above, and my heritage from the "Almighty on high? Does not calamity befall the unrighteous and disaster the workers of iniquity? Does he not see my ways and number all my steps?" And here we have the references to foot, hand, and eye. "If I have walked with falsehood and my foot has turned to deceit, let me be weighed in a just balance and let God know my integrity. If my step has turned aside from the way and my heart has followed my eyes, and if any gift has clung to my hands, then let me sow and another eat, and let what grows for me be rooted out." And so this is Job 31. And then at the end Jesus adds this quote from Isaiah. It's the famous quote — let me just find exactly the right place — at the end of a long passage in Isaiah 66, in which the Lord has been talking about how he doesn't really need a Temple because he's made everything, and he's going to do something even bigger than a Temple: a new Temple, which is a new heaven and a new earth. And then: "When it comes, the new heavens and the new earth which I make shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your descendants and your name remain. From new moon to new moon, from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me. And they shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me, for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh." So that's the passage that Jesus is actually quoting. What does this mean? He's talking about a pattern of desire. I think it's fairly obvious. What do the foot walking to deceit, the hand grabbing a gift rather than partaking in sharing, and the eye looking ill upon someone — for instance a virgin, in the Job case — what do they all have in common? A pattern of desire that is what we would call, those of us who follow the thought of René Girard, acquisitive mimesis. And it's just in that way that we enter into stumbling with each other and get wrapped up in scandal. Whereas what he's talking about is the kind of pattern of desire which we should learn, which is that of the simple eye that is not wracked by jealousy, is not wracked by envy, and is therefore able to look and see how good the Lord is without trying to grab or deceive from other people. And Jesus is even stronger here because of the use of the word "Gehenna" — he uses the word "Gehenna," which strangely is translated as "hell" in all our modern translations, which I think is deeply unhelpful, because Gehenna referred to something really quite physical, which was the trash heap which was constantly burning outside Jerusalem. So there was a kind of a fiery trash heap outside Jerusalem — and the contrast, which was in a valley — and the contrast was between that: the trash heap with the fire which never went out because it was ever-burning trash, and the Temple up on high with its sacrifices, with salt… where the sacrifices were good things. Except, of course, from the Isaiah quote, what's being brought out is something even bigger than that: the sacrifices on offer are to be the lives of the disciples. And it's at this point that we get the last two verses, which do not appear in our Gospel for the day, but which I've insisted on putting in because they're very important to understand the rest. "For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another." So he's saying, "But everyone will be salted with salt." The whole question is: which way is your salt going to work? Is it going to be the salt of Leviticus 2:13, with which all holy sacrifices are salted? In other words, are you going to be becoming the new temple, the one that is coming down promised in Isaiah, the one for which all will be salted? And you will therefore show that by being able to give yourselves into the midst of a sacrificial world without being run by a sacrificial mentality, and therefore actually able to take part in the bringing into being of the new creation? Or are you going to be part, if you like, of the non-salted conspiracy-theory-mongering, victimary-thinking group, who are in fact going down into the trash, where there's a different sort of burning sacrifice — the wrong sort, the trash-heap sort. It's these two which are being paralleled with each other. He said, "Salt is good." Obviously, this is the Levitical salt. "But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves." So this is, again, for those of us who love the thought of energy, this is this wonderful suggestion that it's the overcoming of victimary thinking in between us that turns us into disciples. The work of the Holy Spirit is actually enabling us to become self-givers-away in the midst of victimary circumstances, rather than dwellers in victimhood and conspiracy. And therefore, "Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another." He's saying that there are two patterns here: the pattern of the victimary heading to Gehenna, and the pattern of self-giving, avoiding victimhood, having your desire purified so that you're no longer grabbing, grasping, planning deceit — and you are becoming the new temple that is promised in Isaiah. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.