NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 31 in Ordinary Time, Year B

The 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time. This Sunday our Gospel jumps. You remember that last time we left Jesus heading towards Jerusalem, followed by Bartimaeus and the disciples, and on what was going to be the first day of what we now call Holy Week. So we've jumped on Sunday; we've jumped the cleansing of the Temple; we've jumped the great teaching, the parable of the vineyard and the parable of the wedding banquet, in which Jesus showed by what manner of means he was going to die and what it meant. And immediately after that we have three pillar teachings in which Jesus discusses, either in the Temple or near the Temple, key aspects of his teaching. He discusses very complex issues which have been brought down to us in the forms of three questions. The first: paying taxes. The second: is there a resurrection? And the third: what is the first commandment? Each of these is given us in the mouth of a different group of discussants, so it's worth just having a quick consideration of that. The first group, the Pharisees — think of them as the ancient equivalent of modern evangelical pastors and the kind of political backing that they would have in any of our societies. The second group discussing the resurrection is the Sadducees — think of them as Catholic cardinals and the kind of political backing they typically have in most of our societies. And then the third group, represented by the scribe, they are the mixture, I would say, of the legal profession and the press, the literati, if you like, of the society. All three of these groups, of course, shared the fact that they were Jewish; they were discussants within the Jewish barrel, as it were, of ideas, of culture, of discussion and argument. Jesus had resolved the first question about paying to Caesar with the understanding that God is not in rivalry to any form of human power or structure, including the taxing power structure. When talking with the Sadducees, who didn't believe there was a resurrection, Jesus reveals that God has nothing to do with death, and that therefore the resurrection life is beyond being run by death and its concerns, and that this is what he is going to bring out — and he does so by reference to the Maccabees, whom the Sadducees had brought up as their example to question him. And in this third section he's going to talk about the relationship between God and neighbour. So each one of these three pillar teachings of Christianity. And today we have the third one of these. The scribe comes up to Jesus. "One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another." So in other words, He's listened to the whole discussion, the discussion with the Pharisees and the discussion with the Sadducees, and seeing that he answered them well. In other words, this member of the literati knows a good argument when he hears one, and he appreciates how Jesus has answered. He's also aware that all of this is taking place in the Temple, in the context of Jesus having enacted the bringing to the end of the Temple and announced that day the coming in of the new Temple. So there's a considerable discussion in the background of what Jesus is doing, what right he has to do it, and how all that is related to this teaching. So now it's the turn of the scribe, a friendly questioner, to say which commandment is the first of all. Now it's interesting that in the other Gospels, like Luke's, it's not someone else who asks Jesus this, but Jesus who asks someone else. Jesus asks the lawyer in Saint Luke's Gospel, in response to the lawyer's question about who is my neighbor. But this is the Mark version, in which the scribe is curious to know how Jesus answers this question. And we'll see why. So Jesus answers: "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'" Now we think, oh splendid, yes — Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy, the passage which we have as our first reading. Let me just call that up, which contains of course Moses instructing the people and then the famous instruction, the Shema: "Hear, O Israel." To this day an absolutely vital commandment — the Shema, the great phrase, "Hear, O Israel, your God is one God." Okay, but the interesting thing here is that Jesus actually starts by quoting Deuteronomy, the Shema. He says, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one." But then he doesn't carry on quoting Deuteronomy. He quotes Joshua's version of the same commandment. Joshua, shortly before he dies, gathers the people of Israel together and gets them to repeat the Shema, as it were — gets them to repeat Moses's instruction to them. And Joshua repeats it to them but with a slightly different word: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." The mind turns up in Joshua's version; it's not in Moses's version, in the Deuteronomy version. We'll see why that's important in a second. But first let's concentrate on the Shema. The first commandment, curiously, is not love. The first commandment is listen. "Listen, O Israel." It's the collective listening. That is something which Jesus is indicating is the first and major commandment. We usually immediately go to the "you must love God" and… your neighbors as yourself. But as a good son of Israel, Jesus knows that the first commandment is listen. It's being audibly under the voice of God, stretching your hearing together with others, constantly trying to listen to the voice of God. That's at the beginning of the first one. There's no loving God without that. The whole point of loving is not: "Okay, you've told me what to do, now I must get on and do it" — that's our problem. No. In order to be able to love, you have to undergo listening. That's the first command. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." Absolutely vital understanding for Israel, because the oneness of God guarantees the oneness of Israel. It's the twelve tribes. What holds the twelve tribes together? The oneness of God. The oneness was understood from the time of the book of Joshua as being absolutely what keeps Israel together. So then Jesus goes on: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these." Okay, Jesus is quoting Leviticus 19.18: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." In Leviticus 19.18 it appears to refer to other members of the tribe of Israel, other members of the group. But you don't have to go very far in the same passage of Leviticus — Leviticus 19.33, if I remember correctly — when it says, "and the alien who is resident among you, you shall treat him as yourself." In other words, the alien is your neighbor. The tendency of Leviticus is outward-moving; it's universalizing. So Jesus is interpreting it in that sense. There's no love of God that is not also a love of neighbor. I just want to ask us to stop and think about that, because at least psychologically, for me, that's always been a tough one — knowing how you say you love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and strength. What on earth does that mean? I understand, you know, pushing a trunk uphill with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind and my strength — it's something that I can feel myself doing. I have no idea what it means to love God with all my heart, my soul, my strength, and my will, because God is not a trunk or an equivalent thing. God is not a stock exchange, or a house, or a boyfriend, or a girlfriend. It doesn't seem obvious how you fulfill the command. And yet the criterion is now given. The criterion is your neighbor as yourself. In other words, it's exercising all the qualities which are referred to God, with your neighbor, without rivalry. There is no rivalry between the loving of God and the loving of your neighbor. On the contrary, the loving of your neighbor is the criterion for loving God. That's the absolutely central linking of these two, which is again one of the pillar teachings of Christianity. But attention: we know that in part because we know the other Gospels, where they bother to put in the part about the other people who weren't part of the in-group. Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan to make the same point in Luke's Gospel. But here the universalizing tendency is more subtle and brings out more than we can guess. And we know this thanks to the scribe. So the scribe then says to him, "You are right, teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and beside that there is no other." So the scribe is completely on board here. "And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself." In other words, he understands that this is coming from the Joshua quote. "This is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." And so we think, aha, yes, he's referring to the famous phrase from Hosea, "I want mercy and not sacrifice," which is of course the meaning that is given to this in Mark and in Luke. It's Hosea who's quoted there. But curiously, the scribe is onto something else, because he quotes them in this order: burnt offerings and then sacrifices. Now the place where that word order comes is also in Joshua. Here's the thing: after Joshua has gathered all the tribes together and blessed them and made them swear to obey the Lord, they then go back to their separate lands. Here's the thing. Reuben and another tribe — I think Manasseh — have been given territory on the other side of the Jordan. So they're physically removed from the rest of the people of Israel. And in fact, that's the area that Jesus has been through on his way here. That's an area which is now full of non-Jewish people. And sometime after they go back, they start building a big altar. And this really shocks the rest of the people of Israel, because they know that there should only be one big altar for worshipping the Lord. So they think, aha, Reuben and company, they're building another altar. That means that they're letting go of worship of one God. That means that they're going to be under the curse of God, who has said that if you follow me, you'll be blessed, but if you leave me, abandon what you have promised, you will be cursed. So they say to Reuben, "We're really alarmed about this, we're really alarmed about it. We're going to have to cut you off if you are building an altar to worship another god." So they go to visit Reuben and they accuse them. This is Reuben who is, remember, their neighbor — but as one of their tribes, as a neighbor. And Reuben, the members of the leaders of the tribe, said, "Oh no, you've got this completely on. We are not building this temple because we are setting up a rival altar to yours, because we're abandoning God. We have no plans to offer any sacrifice, any burnt offerings or sacrifices, hence that phrase, to any other god. On the contrary, we've built this altar here because we're on the other side of the Jordan, as a copy. Because we don't want you to forget us because we're on the other side of the Jordan. We're frightened that you'll forget us and think of us as foreigners and not part of who you really are. So we're putting this up, a copy of yours, not because we're worshipping anything else, but just to show that we're worshipping the same thing. So at that stage, the leader of the rest of Israel – I think he's called Phinehas – says, "Okay, we get that, that's fine, you can go in peace, all is well." In other words, you have been acting in a friendly way, and this altar is a witness to brotherhood, it's a witness to togetherness, it's a witness to a loving neighbour. Well, I hope you can now see why the scribe was so pleased, because he understood perfectly well that Jesus had answered the question with relation to the one God, and with relation to the cleaving to him and how one worships him, with relation to the neighbour, in such a way as to say: yes, I may have threatened – indeed prophesied – the collapse of the Temple, but I'm not here to set up another temple. What I'm going to be doing is going to be done as a witness to you for how you create neighbourhood, neighbourliness, fraternity, siblinghood, we would now say. That's what I'm going to be doing. In other words, you don't need to be frightened that what I am coming to introduce is another temple, a different sort of burnt offering. It's not a burnt offering at all. I'm going to be giving myself in creating the temple not made with hands that will in fact enable us all to become neighbours and all to worship the God who is one. So this is why the scribe goes away happy. When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." After that, no one dared to ask him any questions. Very interesting. Why didn't they dare? Well, he had given the three pillar teachings, and in each one he showed himself to be absolutely loyal and central to the faith of Israel, absolutely understanding of the central texts of Israel, and absolutely determined to create neighbourliness without rivalry in what he was planning to do. In other words, those who wanted to get rid of him would have to do so by false accusation. They couldn't take anything that he had said. And that is the end of their formal attempts to trap him in the first place. But later, as in the case of the scribe, to begin to see that here was something really interesting and something not to be frightened of. So the scribe was able to go away having been blessed – rather as when Phinehas blessed the people of Reuben, they were able to go away blessed. Non-rivalry between God and neighbour is going to be introduced fully in line with the faith of Israel. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.