NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 28 in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Today we continue in Mark's Gospel exactly from where we left off last time. Last Sunday, you remember, Jesus finished by putting children in the presence of the disciples and saying that these were the criterion for what it is like to receive him. Receiving them, you receive him. That reception is going to be from those who are the smallest, least important. In other words, discipleship and following him is always going to be a learning of unrivalry and of listening to apparently unimportant voices. We continue on the journey today. But first a very quick point about this journey. Remember, in Mark's Gospel we're always dealing with what I call the split screen. That's to say that we have simultaneously present the narrative of Jesus going to Jerusalem up to his death, and the narrative of what the disciples lived after Jesus had told them to return to Galilee after the resurrection, and they were actually learning what they hadn't got right the first time. This split-screen reality is very important because it means that everything that people get wrong the first time is given to them not to blame them, but so that they can be penitent and learn to get it right. It's, if you like, a screw-ups account of how I failed the first time and began to understand the second time. That's why this split-screen thing is so important. We'll see that here. So Jesus is setting out on his journey, he's starting movement, and a man runs up and kneels before him. Now, if you are moving forward and someone kneels in front of you, they are blocking you. They are literally a stumbling stone in your way, a stumbling block in your way. They've stopped you. Peter, remember, was told to get behind Jesus because he was a stumbling block at an earlier stage. But this man has literally come before him and addresses him as "good teacher." In other words, he wants to stop him and get something from him. And it's really quite interesting, the dynamics of movement in this passage. So Jesus has agreed to be stopped. He says, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" My question is so important that I can stop you. Jesus says to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." And of course many people have taken that as a way of saying that Jesus is deflecting divinity, that Jesus is saying we're going somewhere else. I suspect that it's rather more Jesus saying to him: what's your notion of goodness? You have stopped me. When I tell you the notion of goodness, you will see it's to do with following me. We're going to get to that in just a second. But meanwhile he's going to give the man a little class on the oneness of God. And in fact this passage, quite cleverly hidden, is all about the oneness of God. and therefore the oneness of desire of anyone wanting to be part of God's life. Mark shows this in several ways, because our translations hide this, but he says, "as he was setting out on a journey, one came up and knelt before him." So it doesn't say someone came up, it doesn't say a man came up, it says "one." Then: "would teach, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Then Jesus says to him, "why do you call me good? No one is good except one, the God" — is what it actually says. Our translations say "except God alone," except what it actually says is "except one, the God," harking back to Deuteronomy 6: "the Lord your God is one God." Then Jesus says, "you know the commandments." Now, he doesn't give the first commandment — the commandment that's to do with the oneness of God and how you shall worship the God. That is what's being enacted here: how you worship one God. And the answer is not by stopping a teacher and getting an answer. That's how you get stuck with relation to God. So Jesus then quotes not the God-related commandments but the commandments related to social life: "you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not defraud." He gives a slightly different version of the commandment which we usually translate as "covet" — "you shall not defraud." "Honor your father and mother." So the social commands rather than the divine commands, the commands concerning God. So this person then says to him, "Teacher, I've kept all these things since my youth." All these things — he says, in a somewhat dismissive way. But the interesting thing is he says this phrase "since my youth," because of course that is the whole point of the law ever since God decided to have mercy on the earth after Noah's flood. God says — and this is from Genesis 8, this is after Noah offers the Lord a pleasing sacrifice — the Lord says in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth, nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done." "Evil from youth" — this was understood by the rabbis to be that the purpose of the law is, if you like, to put a fence around our evil inclination, to prevent us from turning bad. That's the purpose of the law. So what this young man is saying is: "Yep, I'm in the whole package of fencing up my evil inclination by the law since my youth." It says Jesus, looking at him — and that's going to be important, because Jesus looks at someone else later in today's Gospel. He looks at him, loves him; it says he loved him. The word may just mean love, or it may mean a gesture like caressing him. I've seen both in different translations. It says "you lack one thing." Again the word "one." "One you lack." The Greek is "one is lacking to you." So we immediately think of one thing. What's the one thing? Well, it's to go and sell everything. I think it's more subtle than that. I think he's saying you haven't got the oneness of God. For you to have the oneness you need to have a single desire. To have a single desire you need not to be trammeled by all sorts of other desires, as shown in your property. "So you lack one thing. Go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven." In other words, at that point your heart will be with the one — that will be the actually to inherit eternal life. "Then come follow me." In other words, for you really to have one you will need a following. That's what the good Lord, whom you have recognized when you called me a good teacher, but you didn't realize that you were actually speaking to the Most High. That's how you are to find your way into my heart. It's by following me, so that you come to be me as well, so that you come to have my heart. That's how you're going to inherit eternal life. So the oneness becomes practical. The oneness of heart and the following of God in Jesus becomes practical. When this man heard this he was shocked — as our text says here, actually the word is strong — it's appalled, and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. And Jesus then looks around — so his disciples are not in front of him, they were behind him, they were presumably watching this scene — and he looks around and says this to his disciples. He clearly liked the man; he didn't wish him harm. He said: "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God." And the disciples were perplexed at these words. Yeah, astounded, but astounded in a troubling way. But Jesus said to them again: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God." So remember, he's taking them back to the image of the child who could receive first. That's the… he's taking them back to that learning place. "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God." He then uses a children's pun. My knowledge of Hebrew, let me confess here, is not great, so I'm getting this in as far as I understand it from my late friend Professor Durette, but in as far as I can understand, as I say… There is a series of puns going on in this phrase. So it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich — tentative, thinking of God. Well, many people have said that there was a certain very narrow city gate in Jerusalem that people could squeeze through, and a thin camel could probably squeeze through. But, and here's the important thing, a camel that had saddlebags couldn't possibly squeeze through. If you were the camel of a rich man and you were carrying the rich man's wealth, the camel would have to be stripped of its bags because they make it too fat literally to go through a narrow door. So the only way for the camel to go through is if it has been unluggage, if it's dispossessed itself of its riches. That's the image — I feel like that's the obvious image. But also there are puns here for children, as part of learning the Hebrew alphabet which, as many of you know, begins with aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, which would roughly correspond to A, B, G, D in ours. But the letter gimel can sound quite like "camel," which is gamal. But the letter looks towards the door: D stands for daleth, and stands for a door which is closed. In the alphabet, remember that the Hebrew alphabet started as pictograms and gradually was developed into the scripts, the runes that we now know as the Hebrew alphabet. But as part of the teaching of children, the alphabet was said: "Remember, the camel looks at the door." Gimel, the daleth. Actually, sometimes the gimel was written with a little hump on top so it looked like a camel — but that's another matter. So this is a children's exercise. But there's also the fact that "camel" and "rich man" were used as a metonym of each other. Like we say someone or other is a "sacred cow," they might say such a someone is a "camel," meaning a rich man — it would be a metonym for it. What do the camels have to say? Like, what does Wall Street say? What do the camels have to say? This would be a pun of the time, because gamal and gamal — the words for "rich man" and "camel" — are very similar. So it's worth knowing that there's a pun in the background to all this, a pun and something to do with children. It then says they were greatly astounded. This is wonderful. They've been told to be children, they've been told something very, very hard to do with dispossession and the oneness of desire, and they realize that this dispossession is going to affect all of us. Then, who can be saved? Jesus looked at them — it's exactly the same verb as when he looked at the man who was kneeling before him, when he loved him. He looked at them; before he looked around at the material, he looks at them and says: "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible." meaning that actually the purpose of this is to encourage us, not to discourage us. We are going to be able to learn how to become dispossessed. We are going to learn how to make the right sort of rupture from our possessions, from the ways in which we can't get through a single door in a single way because we're too weighed down with our baggage. It's going to be possible. These things are not so as to make our life complicated, but in as far as we learn, this is part of bringing us joy. God can do this. God can enable us to enter into flourishing, to have a singleness of heart and to flourish. And then of course we get Peter, who begins to say to him — remember Peter, he of the stumbling stone — he had occupied that space before, saying to him, "Look, we've left everything and followed you." Mark is very clever: it says Peter began to say to him. In other words, Jesus's reply is cutting Peter off before he gets to say anything too silly, because this of course is the split-screen one. This is Peter saying, "We've left everything and followed you," even though those engaging in this process in split-screen two know that they all ran away and abandoned him. So in that sense, the man who just wandered off grieving and appalled was merely more honest than they. But here they're willing to have another go. They're able to come back. That's the point of the Gospel. It doesn't matter how much you screw up, you can come back and have another go. And then Jesus gives a little sense of what is being offered as part of the fruit of having a single heart. If you have a single heart, if you're not engaged in holding on, grasping onto possessions, being encumbered by things — "There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age: houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children and fields, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life." So rather than responding to Peter's "What about us? I mean, we're the good guys here" — this is for everybody. The whole point of what I'm offering you is the possibility that you will be able to let go of your own comforts, and because of that you'll be able to step out of these formative things that wear you down, and instead — the equivalent of being able to leave for a foreign country as Abraham did, as we saw discussed with the leaving of the house of father and mother — be able to receive vastly more. Of course, you will have persecutions as well, because those who are single of heart are naturally much less defensive and therefore more liable to get caught up in the wickedness of others. Other people will be able to play them for fools. There is something about being single-hearted, or trying to be single-hearted, that means it's better to be to be fooled than it is to be too clever. So that's the kind of thing that's going to happen. It's not religious persecution we're talking about here; it's the kind of persecution that the simple-hearted happen upon because they are striving to keep their simpleness of heart. And please notice that people leave brothers or sisters, mother or father, children or fields, and house for his sake and for that of the good news. So, following Jesus directly, trying to become a preacher of the Gospel — well, what will you receive? You will receive houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, but not fathers. It's terribly important. Matthew brings this out more clearly, but Mark as well. One of the things that leaving behind the paternity of this world means is not having any fathers. We've all become intergenerational, intra-generational sisters and brothers. But — and this is a rather amazing thing — Jesus does regard motherhood as not merely a biological attribute. It's clearly something that we can have more of. There's a cultural aspect to motherhood which is a good part of our shared lives together. People mothering each other is something good. Fathering: very dangerous. Mothering: good. And I think this is part of the life of the Gospel — finding that in fact you do have sisters and brothers and mothers and houses and a sense of belonging. Maybe it's a weaker belonging than you were accustomed to when you were grasping on, but you are being held by this new crowd which Jesus is bringing into being, which is called the Church — however poorly our institutional model holds that up. But nevertheless, over time we do find that we have found these things, along with the persecution. Then the age to come is unlike — because this is what God is doing. God is bringing into being the possibility that we can let go of things and we can start to share, not out of some desire to punish us or make us feel wicked, or as if we were somehow being evil. No, it's just that you can have more. You can have more when you're not holding on to it. That's how God gives you the singleness of heart, and giving the singleness of heart, he enables you so much more access to belonging, to being, to having — that is not grasped at, but given. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.