33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle B 20-21

Daniel 12:1-3 | Hebrews 10:11-14, 18 | Mark 13:24-32

Grant us, we pray, O Lord, our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

We’ve come to the end of ordinary time, and next Sunday, we will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King.  So in a sense, this is the last chance I have to summarize, if I think I can do that, summarize the thoughts of this amazing story of what God wants us to understand and what he wants us to see.  And a funny thing, or not funny so much, but the interesting thing to me is the way the end of each year comes.  It’s always a cataclysmic event that’s like everything is going to be exposed and broken open, and the sky is falling, and the earth is opening up and devouring those who didn’t really produce very much to please God and all of these end of the world kind of images.  And that’s very, very dangerous, because this is not about the end of the world.  It’s about the end of a way of seeing God. 

The New Testament is so radical, so much a departure from the Old Testament that, when one opens one’s heart to it, when one’s opened one’s imagination, what is going to happen is there’s this falling apart of a whole system that we’ve created around us, and that system is fundamentally a binary system of right and wrong, good and evil, saved and unsaved, dividing the world into two parts.  And it’s interesting that the Old Testament is designed and was always designed — well, all of God’s revelations are perfectly timed for where human nature is, and you have to go back 4,000 years ago to get a sense of what the people were like when Abraham was asked by God to call a people together.  It was the Bronze Age, and that Bronze Age was the time when the alphabet, or I should say written language was finally put together so people could write stories and not just have them as oral traditions.  I think the wheel was even discovered during that time, or at least came into use very much.  So human beings 4,000 years ago, when this God began to  reveal to himself who he is.  They were pretty simple people, much like children, compared to the consciousness that we have today.  So it makes total sense that the thing that he would do is create a world in which there would be a kind of simple message that fit their brains, their understanding at the time, and when we’re younger, we understand things in a very simple, binary way.  When you’re two-years-old, you understand that your parents are going to tell you yes or no about what you do, good or bad.  “Good little boy.  You ate your food.”  “Bad little boy.”  Well, you’re not supposed to say bad little boy to children, but anyway, you might say, “You’re starting on chewing on something that’s going to make you sick.  Bad, bad, bad.  Don’t do that.”  So it’s very much a part of the world in which we are evolving and growing in a relationship with a God who was hidden for so many centuries.  There were always gods around, and they were always mean kind of characters that demanded a lot of attention, and I would say not very compassionate. 

So what I think we have to understand very vividly is that, when Jesus comes into the world and describes a world that is based in not binary, black and white, right and wrong but in some kind of incredibly mysterious world that is filled with not so much justice — and that’s one way to talk about binary world.  It’s right, or it’s wrong.  You go to jail, or you’re acquitted or whatever.  No, it’s this new world of mercy.  Mercy, what is that, mercy?  Well, the interesting thing about mercy to me is that it has this quality about it that is so nurturing and so life-giving, and so when I’m thinking about what it is that is so shattering to the world, when Jesus is finally fully revealing who he is, we have that image in the first reading about this work that has to be done for human beings to be freed from sins and that sins are the great downfall of human beings. 

Let me go back to the opening prayer is what I really wanted to say, because that opening prayer is so beautiful when it says, “I am so, so delighted, and it’s so fulfilling for me to work for someone who is so good, so good.”  And as a priest, you perhaps as a parent, as a person who struggles with ideas in their head that are sometimes unacceptable, we fall into the trap of the binary world that is in the way that God is imagined by us where he is judgmental and angry and condemning when we aren’t really fulfilling what we’re supposed to do.  And when you think about that, that is the way the Old Testament is written.  In the book of Deuteronomy, which we looked at last week, there’s that image of God being the God who said, “I want you to love me with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your soul, and then I want you to go into a new land.”  In the next chapter he says, “And this new land is owned by another tribe, and you’re going to get rid of them, and you’re going to get all the things, which they built,” which doesn’t really sound fair.  “And you kick all those people out.”  And then God goes on to say, “And if you don’t, if they don’t leave, then kill them.  Destroy them, because if you leave them and they stay in that particular place, then they are going to infiltrate into your way of seeing me, and they’re going to rob you of who I’m really trying to tell you I am.  And so if you do that, I’ll kill you.”  And to us that sounds so awful, but to the people at the time, that was what gods did.  And so the God of Israel, the God that is, had to reveal himself like the other gods in order to get our attention so that he can slowly, slowly, over 2,000 years, get them ready, from the time of Abraham to the time of Jesus, to get them ready to understand who he really is. 

And he’s the God of mercy.  He’s the God that says, “If somebody strikes you on one side of your cheek, then turn and offer him the other.  If they come in and rob you and take things away, then run after them and say, ‘You didn’t get this also.’”  It’s such a radical change.  That’s why the images in this final times of the church years always is about the sky is falling, and everything is falling apart.  And what it is, is that binary system is being destroyed, and you take away a binary world from people who are living in it — these are the things you have to do; these are the things you should never do — and you cloud that with, “Well, sometimes that’s wrong.”  Well, but what about the intention?  What about the person engaged in this struggle?  What about human conscience?  These are things that a binary world goes nuts over.  In fact, you can look at an extremely conservative religious person, and they have this almost — you get the feeling sometimes, when you talk to them, they’re almost happy when they can say, “Those people are all going to be condemned.  They’re all going to burn in hell, and we’re not.  We’re going to be saved, and we’re the loved ones.  God loves us, because we do everything right.” 

And you know how God feels about righteousness, how Jesus talked about it in the New Testament.  He basically said, “That’s not what I’m looking for.  I’m not looking for somebody that has developed and grown into some kind of perfect person and doing everything.”  Think of the rich man.  When he came to Jesus and said, “Look, I’ve done everything.  I have followed every single rule and every single law.”  And he must have been so confident and so full of himself, and what I love about Jesus’ response to that was he just said, “God love you.  I love you.  I know that you think you’re really doing the best thing possible, but you’re so far from the kingdom, because basically the issue is not in making yourself into someone who is perfect but is being freed of all those external ideals that don’t really have anything to do with the heart that is receptive and open to a presence of God that wants to live inside of you and, through you, offer life, goodness to those who are in the darkest places.”  We are here in this world to do this work of ministering to those who are not achieving greatness and fullness.  Isn’t it funny how you look at the whole focus of the ministry of Jesus went to the people who were in most need of what?  Understanding, compassion, mercy, and you look back at the time that Jesus walked the earth.

And you look at the way the Old Testament had formed them, and it was so incredibly off-center for what Jesus wants people to see.  If you were a believing Jew and you were following all the rules and laws and you saw somebody who was on the side of the road, in trouble, and you knew they were not following the rules and laws, you were obligated not to go near them.  If you were a believing Jew and someone who God really was favoring, you would walk past that person, because they weren’t worth anything.  And it was because God was punishing them.  Everyone who had negative experiences in life were being punished by God.  Well, if you take that system of a punishing God, a God who loves you, who follows every regulation and every rule, and you find comfort in that, and then comes Jesus and starts revealing this message — ad all the negative, horrible things that are described at the end times, they weren’t about — they’re not about the end of the world.  They’re about the end of the binary world of the Old Testament, at the end of that kind of over-simplified division of all things, and what God is saying, when you let go of that, you have nothing.  If that’s the thing that holds your life together, then it’s like the sky is falling, and the light that you thought was so bright and so clear for you is all of a sudden dark.  That is the death that Jesus talks about in the New Testament.  Unless you die to that old system, you can’t find the life that is your inheritance.  Wow, that’s really, really different. 

And why is it that people are so drawn to that binary world?  What is it about it that is so seductive?  And I think it’s simply that it feeds the mind, and the mind works in a binary way.  And so the mind understands either/or, but you know what?  The message of Jesus, this message that I long to share with you week after week is not something that I want you to be listening with your mind.  And there’s nothing wrong with the mind.  It’s an absolutely essential tool.  If we don’t have it, we’d be mush and all that kind of stuff, but no.  But think about it.  It’s the heart that I’m talking to.  It’s the heart that understands this world of mercy, compassion, empathy.  The mind has really a hard time with it, and so what I’m asking you to do and reflect with me at the end of this year, when we’ve been listening to Mark go through his whole memory of this Jesus figure, what he’s really trying to do, what he would want, if you could talk to Mark right now and say, “We’re still listening to your message.”  I think it’s fascinating to think about Mark and the evangelists and who they are, thinking of, “They’re listening to my story again.  Here’s another congregation listening to the story.  I hope they get it.  I hope they get what I meant.”  But what he would want them to know is that I am talking to your heart, not your mind. 

And it’s so interesting when you find someone who is rigidly living in a binary world.  If you bring a problem to them or you ask them to give you some advice, it just always seems so sharp-edged and hurts because in it is always an unconscious condemnation that, “Why haven’t you done it right?”  And the expectation that you and I are supposed to be doing everything right, that we’re supposed to be sinless. We’re not supposed to have sexual drives.  We’re not supposed to have a desire to break a promise.  We’re not supposed to want to lie.  We’re not supposed to want to dishonor people that we should honor.  We’re not supposed to have that?  No, that’s human nature.  That’s who we are, and when you start with human beings, with this kind of demanding a certain kind of rigid adherence to an external law — and that’s all that we’re allowed to be in a relationship with somebody who also is following that law, meaning that, if you’re not doing it, you’re kicked out, just like in the Old Testament.  That’s the way it was considered.  If you were not one of the in members, you were an outsider, and outsiders were valueless, without any value.  That’s so amazing that we could actually get into a way of thinking that, when somebody isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they are of no value.  When it’s New Testament, when you understand the message of Jesus, you understand that his major role, the thing he came into the world to do is to finish and complete the message of the Old Testament.  And the references to him in the Old Testament are so many that you cannot begin to imagine that the story of the Old Testament is not connected to the story of Jesus.  It’s all there.  It’s all predicted.  It’s all there so that, if you’re following the story carefully, you’re seeing this slow evolution of change and growth, and it brings one into the moment where that catastrophic shift is not going to be so impossible. 

I know people today that when you talk about mercy and the individual conscience, the right of every human being that Vatican II so supported to make their own moral choices  when it’s not something black and white, a binary issue — it’s not something you can say, “Well, if I do this, it’s all going to work out.  If I don’t do that, it’s all going to fall apart, or if I do the other thing, it’s all going to fall apart.”  That’s not the way the world is.  It’s always — and I don’t want to just oversimplify by saying it’s the lesser of two evils, but that’s part of it, goes into it.  But when we have that strict, strict binary world, then there’s something, I would say, that’s — what’s the word I want — abusive. Abusive to the dignity and the beauty of an individual who comes into this world and is affected by everything that has happened to them, and they end up being strong in certain areas and weak in others.  It’s not necessary they chose those directions of their life, but when they’re in that situation of growing in consciousness of who they really are, they flourish in an environment of mercy — mercy, not a binary world of judgment, of right or wrong and condemnation. 

So it’s amazing to me that we have so many struggles today, even on every issue where people are divided and separated, and it’s one thing to be divided and separated over an issue, over what we believe, but why is it, along with that in the brain, that we come up with this idea of condemnation?And I think you’d say, “Well, you get it from the Old Testament. ”It’s all over the Old Testament. So we get it in sort of a way that reminds us that is the part of what human nature’s like when it’s not fully developed and not evolved far enough. And if we think that the world should be all fully developed and that this life that we’re called to live as believers in a God who longs to use us to help other people. If we think that’s all supposed to have been done by now, we shouldn’t still be working on all these problems, no. No, it’s always going to be that tension between a binary world and the world of mercy. It’s always going to be there, because we are generation after generation that come into this world. And what a joy that opening prayer says to all of us when it says it’s so wonderful and so valuable and life-giving to work for a God that is good. So when somebody is working for a God that is judgmental and demeaning and demanding and threatening, you know that you’re not in the right place. So God bless this world that you and I have grown to understand, the world of mercy, the world of understanding and compassion, and our challenge is to live it in the midst of judgment and condemnation, not play their game but live as God has called us to live. Amen.