31st Sunday in Ordinary Time: Cycle A 22-23

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Malachi 1:14b-2:2b, 8-10 | 1 Thessalonians 2:7b-9, 13 | Matthew 23:1-12

God of power and mercy, only with your help can we offer you fitting service and praise. May we live the faith we profess and trust your promise of eternal life. Grant this 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.

The passage from the gospel this morning is taken from a section in Matthew’s gospel, which is a kind of transition from a long tirade that Jesus had in terms of his dialogue with the scribes and the Pharisees, or at least there was so much conflict there that we saw story after story of they trying to trip Jesus up, Jesus trying to teach them, their resistance to Jesus teaching, Jesus trying to make them aware of how far they had drifted from what God had intended them to be. So in this particular passage, we see Jesus turning away from his conversation with the scribes and Pharisees and now talking to the people, talking to them about the scribes and Pharisees. I’m sure you’ve had this experience. I’ve had it more often than I wish, where people come up to me and tell me a story about a minister. It doesn’t matter what religion but some minister who acts in a way that is self-centered or that is, in a way, abusive or harmful to the person. Instead of helping, they seem to hurt, and it’s so common that a person who goes through an experience like that will tell me, “That’s it. I’ve finished with that religion. I refuse to have anything to do with that religion,” or perhaps with any religion. And it’s fascinating to me that, when Jesus talks to the crowds here, when he’s talking to the people, he’s talking about the scribes and Pharisees and talking about how far they’ve drifted, again, from what God wants them to be. And there’s never a statement on the lips of Jesus that said, “So let’s start something like a church without ⎯ or a religion without a church, a religion without institution or a religion without leaders.” He knows that there is something so valuable about a community, a church community, about a leader who is strong and vital and filled with wisdom. He knows how important good teachers are, and he knows the value of community. And so Jesus doesn’t say anything, in a sense, about dumping the structure, but he does say, “Be careful of leaders who have lost their way, and whatever you do, don’t buy into what they’re doing. Don’t take on the burden that they place upon you.”

Now, it’s interesting that Jesus would use a phrase like a burden, because it’s interesting to me that life is difficult. Life is not easy. It’s filled with many struggles, many difficult things, and it’s so sad and so awful to think that those who are in the business of lightening our burden or putting us in a way in this life that allows us to deal with the struggles of this life without becoming depressed or discouraged or without despair, the very people in this world who are to give us a way of sort of freeing ourselves from the things that burden us, when they’re not doing their job, then there automatically is this enormous burden, which is just life itself. You know the scribes and Pharisees had taken the Ten Commandments ⎯ I shouldn’t say just them but the whole system, the institution, typical of institutions take a simple, powerful, pure message and somehow cloud it up and confuse it with so many other things that are not really essential. And because the work, the simple message of God, the simple message of the gospel, the simple message, I think, of every religion has something to do with surrendering to a power greater than ourselves and opening ourselves to this new way of being where we let go of the illusions that our ego so often creates for us, and we become different kinds of beings, not caught up in ourselves but somehow open to something greater than ourselves, open to service, open to life. And that’s such a difficult message for the ego to hear, and so oftentimes the ego, which loves to be the center of attention, which loves to be separate from others, which loves to be better than others, it would love to avoid that message. And so what it tends to do in order to silence the heart of that message is it comes up with all these things that we’re supposed to do that somehow make us better, better than someone else.

The ego is a powerful force inside of all of us, and it’s something that we need, but it needs to be kept in balance. And when it’s out of balance, we know it. You can feel it, not so much in yourselves, but you feel it and sense it in someone else. How often I’ve heard someone say, “God, after talking to that person, they’re so full of themselves,” or someone ⎯ my favorite is someone gets up to give a talk or a eulogy, and they say, “We want to remember our friend who has died.” And then they go on and tell you this long story of their life and how they met this person and what they’ve done with their life and how their life is different than it was because of this person, and you get a few references to the deceased, but it’s all about the person speaking. When you see that happening, it’s usually pretty irritating, but one of the things that we need to look at is that that’s a kind of universal struggle that all of us have. How do we not allow ourselves to be the center of everything? How do we allow ourselves to sacrifice that sense of importance, that sense of being the center and give it over to something? It’s almost impossible to do if ⎯ one of the core issues for us as egocentric people is that we tend to identify, we tend to find our worth and our value in, not just who we are but what we do or what we possess or how people see us, and once you’re in that, once you buy into that, it’s almost impossible to watch yourself carefully enough to make sure you don’t fall into that trap of constantly trying to build yourself up in the eyes of others or present yourself to others as having the things that are really cool or really important and make you look and feel that you’re better than.

So that was the problem with the Pharisees, and it’s a problem that happens to everybody that’s in a position of authority or a position of great talent. Isn’t it interesting that so often people with great talent have such messed up emotional lives. So of the most talented people have tragic lives and short lives, and so you know it’s difficult for our human nature to deal with having great power and strength. It’s not an easy balancing act, and the only way it seems that we are told that we are able to balance it is if we allow some power greater than ourselves to come in and to be the balancing agent. We can’t do this work of life, living a healthy, full life without divine power. That’s at the heart of every religion, every recovery program. You can’t do this on your own. You’ve got to surrender to something greater, and that was the big problem that Jesus saw in the scribes and Pharisees. It’s why ⎯ the word rabbi means the great one, and isn’t it interesting? He’s looking at his disciples, and they call their teachers rabbis, the great one. He said, “Don’t ⎯ don’t fall into the trap of needing to be the great one. Don’t even call anyone great one. Don’t call each other the great one. Don’t call yourself the great one. Don’t call yourself the teacher. Don’t call yourself the father.” All of that is somehow a direct attack on the ego that tends to want to be the center, wants to be the father, the teacher, the best teacher, wants to be the great one. And so Jesus is saying to these followers of his, “Just be careful. The ego is a very, very integral part of who we are, and we all share in its weakness.” And its weakness is it’s so needy and so desirous of being the center that it will do the strangest, sometimes totally unconscious things to try to put itself up there as the best.

Listen to those complaints that Jesus reminds the disciples of when they look at the Pharisees. He says, “You don’t like them, the way they make their phylacteries larger.” Phylacteries are interesting things. If you don’t know what they are, they’re little square boxes, leather boxes in which little scrolls were placed, little segments of the law, and they were hung on the forehead of the rabbis. And it’s ⎯ I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be funny, but it’s such a literal translation of things that are found in the Old Testament where it says, “Keep the law ever before your mind.” So they said, “Okay, I’ll keep the law ever before my mind. I’ll put it in little boxes and hang it on my forehead, and therefore, all I’ve got to say is I’ve got the law before my mind.” But they weren’t able ⎯ their ego was so strong that they weren’t able to let the word seek into their mind, and that’s where the ego thrives, in the mind. It’s all about thoughts. It’s about what I think about myself, what other people think about me. It’s not who we are. That’s a given that is good and marvelous and wonderful, but what we tend to fall into is the thought that we need to be better than just who we are. And so the literal translation, the literal way in which they took that, to put just pieces of the word on their forehead, I think they thought, “Well, now I’ve got that covered. I did that.” So you wonder what else they did that way to say, “Well, I’m a rabbi, so therefore I’m good. I’m the boss, therefore whatever I say is right,” without reflection, without consciousness, without awareness of what they were doing and what effects it had on people. That’s one of the greatest problems with the ego. It’s so self-centered that it never seems to watch or see or understand the effect that it has on other people. That’s one of the great complaints that Jesus had about the Pharisees. They would do things that laid enormous burdens on people, and they didn’t even do a thing to lift those burdens off. That’s not because, I think, they say the people as burdened and didn’t want to do it, as much as it was they just didn’t see anything beyond themselves.

Now, the first reading reminds us of that wonderful ⎯ excuse me, not wonderful. The first reading reminds us, again, of a kind of statement as to what’s wrong with those that are in positions of power and responsibility, and the complaint in this book of Malachi is that the priests were offering sacrifices that weren’t worthy of God. So if you had an animal, you had a herd of animals and you had to give one to God, they would pick the blind one, the lame one, the one that wasn’t very good, and they said, “Here, sacrifice that one.” And the whole theory was, no, sacrifice the best of what you have, but they would sacrifice something not very valuable. It’s a great image of how the ego works. What Christianity and what all religion seems to cry out for is a sacrifice of that egocentric side of ourselves. That sense we have to give up and sacrifice is us in that illusionary state to find our true self. So when you sacrifice a little bit here, a little thing there, a little something over there and say, “Well, I’m doing all this sacrificing,” it’s not the sacrifice that God is asking us to give to him.

And then we look at the second reading, and it’s St. Paul, and he’s describing his ministry and how contrary it is. Remember, he’s a converted Pharisee, and one of the things he does ⎯ it’s so beautiful ⎯ is he said, “We came among you, and we didn’t come among you as great leaders or the great ones. We came among you as a minister who simply wanted to do something for you. We worked ourselves to death. We tried everything we could, and there was great drudgery in what we did, but we wanted you to be free. We wanted you to be free. So that’s what we came to do, and in offering you this freedom, we’re hoping you will see the joy in us as we let go of our need to be the center, and we become servants. And when you see that, when you see divinity working in us, when you see God’s strength helping break that awful egocentric part of us, when you see that working inside of us, then something is conveyed to you.” And what Paul calls it, which is such an interesting image for any of us that are in ministry or any of us that take seriously our role of being instruments of God’s grace to people, what he’s saying is, “What I’m giving you is not me, not my greatness, but I’m giving you God’s word. And it’s at work in me, and when I give it to you, I’m giving you God’s word, and it’s going to be at work in you.” It’s like it’s a power that Paul realizes he’s giving to the people, and what he’s really giving them is an image of an ego that has been supplanted by something more exciting and more fascinating and more wonderful, and that is divinity, the truth, God. And when God becomes the center, and his whole being is about service and love, that means that somehow the ego has to be, has to be in service to something greater than itself. That’s what’s hard. That’s what’s difficult.

We have a zillion examples of it. At least I certainly do in my experience of my life, that so often things come up, and when somehow someone misunderstands me or I’m put down or whatever, I have that kind of chronic problem of griping and complaining and saying, “This isn’t fair. This isn’t right.” And when you see that kind of whining thing that comes up in our spirit, nothing is the way it’s supposed to be, nothing is the way it’s supposed to be, I’m not supposed to have to wait, I’m not supposed to have to be in this traffic jam, all that kind of stuff, we just need to smile a little more at that sort of thing and recognize, “That’s my ego. That’s that part of me. It’s raging right now, and it needs to be shut up and sat down,” much like a two-year-old needs to be, at times, told to just sit down, and you can’t have what you want right now. That’s what the ego always wants, what it wants right now, and what it wants more than anything else is to be the center, to be at the heart of things.

So the challenge of having this story in the scriptures about Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees is so important psychologically, because it’s really the problem that every human being has with that part of them that wants to be the great one, that wants to be the center of everything. And unless we realize how burdensome that is to us and to all the people around us, until we see through it, until we begin to be aware of how it operates and how much it robs us of that authentic thing that God has created in us, that wonderful, initial thing we had in the Garden of Eden where we and God were one ⎯ we had this wonderful, easy relationship with divinity flowing through us, and we just delighted in being, delighted in life. That’s what the gospel is calling us back to. That’s what we’re invited to begin to imagine, and it begins and has to have as part of it the destruction of all that needs to be the great one and the father and the great teacher in us.

Father, we thank you for the gift of this life that you long to see flourish within us. Bless us with the freedom from all that is illusionary that keeps us from that life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.