The 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

The 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 2:2-5 | 2 Corinthians 12:7-10 | Mark 6:1-6

Oh God, who in the abasement of your Son have raised up a fallen world, fill your faithful with holy joy.  From those you have rescued from slavery to sin, you bestowed eternal gladness.  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.

One of the most interesting group of people in the Old Testament and New Testament are prophets.  Prophets are essential to the way in which it seems that God has intended for people to learn and to grow, and a prophet is never necessarily a popular person among the masses, because generally prophets are there to talk about how things are not the way they should be.  They’re there, in a way, to correct errors and illusions and half-truths and bring people back to something that is truthful, that is real, that is effective.  And it’s interesting that, when you look at the evolution of human beings, there’s just always been needs for prophets, and there will always be, because what happens, when a system is functioning as a religion does, it brings people to a certain level of consciousness and a certain level of understanding.  And then it tends to get caught up in all kinds of egocentric stuff and institutions that are serving themselves rather than the people, and it drifts from the truth.  And the combination of drifting from the original truth and also the evolution of human beings changing and having a greater potential perhaps to hear something new and different, that’s exactly the spot where the prophet walks in and does his work. 

And Ezekiel was one of the big ones, and the interesting thing that he started with, which is sometimes what prophets do start with — he started with a realization that there was something negative going on.  There was a real problem with people losing a sense of who they were, and somehow, if evil was able to destroy the temple, it meant there was some weakness in the temple that God was not pleased with.  And so the first part of Ezekiel’s message was doom and gloom.  “The temple is going to be destroyed.  It’s going to be awful.  There’s going to be a really tough time.”  It’s like he was just sitting there telling everybody, “Get ready for some dark days.”  And those days came, and then in a way, perhaps you would say that the prophet then became more believable.  And then his message would come after that that was probably the much more important message, and in Ezekiel’s case it was saying, “All right, the old order was destroyed, but something new is coming, something different, something that wasn’t there before.”  And he came up with this really beautiful image.  So let’s just imagine the temple was filled with people who weren’t really functioning as they should.  They were empty of life that the temple was there to instill in people.  They were like dead men’s bones.  And so Ezekiel is talking about there’s going to be a renewal, and he’s saying all these figures that are not life-giving are going to end up — I’m going to use the image of the bones, and soon they will have tendons and muscles and flesh and then hearts.  It’s like he’s saying a new generation will come about, one that is more attuned to the truth.  They will have not just a new way of understanding or knowing things that they’ve heard but a deeper sort of evolution step towards who God really is, and that’s a new heart.  And the heart is always the place of compassion and empathy.  So though this horrible time of destruction and everything falling apart, Ezekiel is the one that announces, “Something new is now able to come, and you all have been changed, and what you’re now ready for, you weren’t ready for before.  But there is a promise that God has been making from the beginning that’s now unfolding in a new direction, and you are going to have a new capacity for understanding and compassion.  You’re going to have a new heart.”  And Ezekiel was also a prophet that he knew that the Spirit of God was the source of everything for him.  He knew that Spirit entered into him and called him to be a prophet, and so what he’s really setting up, without maybe even realizing it, that the fullness of what Jesus reveals is that he himself will come and dwell in our hearts.  Ezekiel knew that, maybe, in a sense, but what he was doing was creating a beginning of a way of seeing that would be fulfilled in Jesus.  And that is — I think it was in Hebrews that the writing of Hebrews said, “What happens is that God now speaks to your mind, but also he writes on your heart.  He writes on your heart.  You will know what’s right.  You will know what’s true.”  It’s a beautiful image.  So you see, the role of prophet is going on all the time.  It’s the person in the room who sees what’s really been sort of out of balance.  He names it in a way, hopefully without a log of judgment but certainly with clarity and then announces that whatever pain we’ve been in because of this is going to be the source of our transformation.

Now look at the next reading.  It’s St. Paul.  I love Paul.  He’s so human, but here’s — he was a persecutor of religion.  He was participating in the destruction of those who believed in Jesus.  He never met Jesus.  He felt him.  He felt a vision of him, but he knew his heart had been radically changed.  So he too had gone through this radical change, and what he was seeing and what he was understanding was brand new.  And the thing about the Old Testament and even — I go back to my beginnings as a Catholic.  It seems like years ago, and then certainly centuries ago, there was this image of God is so pure and humans are so impure that the two really have a hard time coming together, that divinity and sin, it’s almost like they’re like — they will not match.  They won’t get together, and so anybody that was sinful was considered to be without God.  And so here’s a sinner, Paul, who has been called to this wonderful place of being filled with wisdom that he couldn’t have ever figured out. And of course, anybody that’s really speaking the truth, there’s a certain audience for that kind of person, and they hold that prophet in high esteem.  And so he was always kind of caught up with himself, I think, Paul was.  He would always talk about, “I’ve run the good race.  I’ve fought everything.  I’ve done a great job.”  But here we see Paul in a beautiful, kind of human way of saying, “I have this problem that I can’t get rid of.  I have this thorn in my flesh.  An angel — a messenger of Satan has put it there.”  I love that.  “It’s not me, but it’s in me.”  But what it is, it’s some weakness, some addiction that he had that, in his own religious, sort of, sense of the division between divinity and our human nature, feels that, “It’s inappropriate for me to have a sin that I can’t control if I’m up here talking about people turning away from sin.  It makes me a hypocrite.”  And so when he prays and prays and prays that this thing will go away, the most interesting thing is the answer that Jesus gives to his prayer, and he said, “No, no.  No, I’m not taking that away.  No, my mercy, my grace, my unmerited love will take care of you.  You’re not going to be in trouble with me over your sin.  But if I take that away, you’re already a little on the proud side, and I don't know what’s going to happen to you, but I really think you’d better stay grounded in your humanity, because that will help you more than anything in being compassionate and understanding to your brothers and sisters.”  And it worked for him. 

It was beautiful, and the thing that I think it’s teaching us — and let me just say one other thing, because I think it’s interesting.  When Paul is saying, “Okay, I have this thorn in the flesh, and I’ve accepted it, and I’m doing it.  So I can put up with my sinfulness.”  But then he goes off — on to say, “And I can — I have to put up with being mistreated and laughed at and scorned, and I can handle all that.”  He’s like me.  He’s like you, that part of us that always wants to be better than we are or at least tries to present that sometimes, and that wonderful line from that reading — it’s only when you’re weak, only when you know your humanity, that the real power that God has given to you, which is not you but is coming through you, has a much better chance of coming across as it was intended to be, a truth, an objective truth and not an opinion that, “I’m going to get a lot of reward and compliments and maybe cash.”  A lot of people get up there and preach and get a lot of money, but it’s not about that.  It’s just about God using a human being who is as ordinary as anyone else to speak a truth, and when it comes through them without their attachment to it, their ego attachment, it works so much better.

And then we get to Jesus in the gospel, and the thing that’s so beautiful about Jesus in this gospel is he’s, in a way, in a similar place that St. Paul was.  But here’s the thing, Jesus — I’ve always been fascinated by Jesus in terms of his hometown, where he lived, Nazareth and what did people think of him.  And there’s a lot of theories out there that in a small town — someone once wrote that it was probably not bigger than 2[00] or 300 people that lived in Nazareth at the time.  And the women would always meet at the well in the morning to get the water for the house, and I’m sure they chatted about things going on in the village.  And when this young woman, Mary, was somehow rushed through a marriage and ended up having a baby in record time, I’m sure there were people that thought, well, very likely Jesus is in the class of people that was considered to be one of the lowest classes, an illegitimate child.  And so many think that he lived in a kind of culture that looked down upon him, and he was considered to be an outcast, which would make a lot of sense psychologically that he was so compassionate to the outcasts, to those who weren’t understood, to those who were thought to be something they’re not.  So we have, in this beautiful passage, Jesus coming back to his hometown, and he is already pretty famous.  He’s been preaching and teaching publicly, and the biggest thing about Jesus that made him so incredibly mysterious and wonderful was his power to heal, drive out demons, open eyes so they could see, ears so they could hear, tongues so they could speak, hands so they could do work, legs that would get people to where they needed to be.  All of that was happening already, and he goes back to his hometown, and he probably had been preaching in his hometown before.  So he gets up, and he starts talking to them, and they don’t like it.  They can’t stand it.  They are angry, because, “Wait a minute.  Anybody that’s being used by God, anybody that’s a prophet has got to be a person who is perfect, has got to be somebody who is flawless and without fault, and we know this guy is anything but flawless, sinless.”  And then they kind of say, “He’s just one of us,” at the same time, which is kind of wonderful, saying he’s not that special.  But Jesus being a human being was witnessing not that he was God but that he was a human being filled with divinity, and that’s the point, not that he was divine in the full sense of what we now know he was.  But he was so receptive and open and capable of allowing the power of God to flow through him that his ability to do the things that God called him to do were so effective, so powerful.  And I love the fact that he says to us always — I say to you always, because I think it’s such a great line, that mystical power that Jesus had in his ordinary, middle-class, carpentry, shadowy background life is the same thing people around you and around me have, the same thing, this gift of power flowing through us from God. 

I’m talking now about all these very important prophets, Ezekiel, the preaching of Paul, Jesus himself, but one of the things that’s so interesting to me is, when you see Jesus working as this God/man, and yet he came from such an ordinary background, it strikes me that there’s some truth in this that we need to look at.  And that is that we might always think that we have to go to the experts, the few super-, super-intelligent, awesome, the educated experts to find the truth, and what I realize more and more in my life is that the issue is not sinlessness that God is calling us to but truthfulness.  And truthfulness is different than sinlessness.  Sin is to me a weakness that we can’t always control, and it’s based usually on illusion.  But it’s not about getting rid of the sin by disciplining yourself, but usually we outgrow a sin when we see through it as if it is really not what we think it is.  It’s not going to produce what we hoped it would produce, and so truth is the best way to get out of a place of addicted behavior that’s sinful.  So that truth can come, yes, through great experts and great preachers and teachers but also comes consistently through the most ordinary people in your circle of friends, and it’s usually not going to be in some dramatic pronouncement.  But there’s always this incredible promise that God, who dwells in the hearts of all people, is going to speak through that heart and do it in a way that’s really effective for those who are destined to hear exactly what they’re saying.  And it’s not going to be in some major pronouncement of a truth, but it’s going to be probably more often in a witnessing that they are engaged in, where you’ll watch them do something that is so extraordinarily right on in terms of truth or compassion or understanding.  And it really penetrates your heart, your mind, and you see something you didn’t see before.  That’s exciting to me, to think that we live in a world — and certainly Vatican Council open our hearts to the fact that the laity is the church, and we’re not always having to turn to experts to find out how to live or what to do.  But sometimes the most ordinary relationships, the friendships that we have, the experiences that we have together can be such incredible, prophetic voices to us, and I guess the difference is whether or not we can imagine that God will work through someone who perhaps we don’t even like or perhaps you don’t even trust.  But just if you’re open, if your heart, if your mind is open to truth, you’ll receive it wherever it is, but just don’t limit the way in which God is going to plan to use it, because if it’s his plan, if it’s his power flowing through somebody who doesn’t seem worthy to you, it might be the most effective, powerful way you can come into this great gift of truth.

Father, give us patience with our humanity, with our weaknesses, with our sins, but never let us be deluded into thinking that they are not harmful to ourselves or to someone else. So give us patience and understanding as we open our hearts to the many ways in which you will speak to us, awaken us, encourage us, enable us most especially to be the men and women that you are longing for us to be, witnesses, prophets, ordinary people doing extraordinary work that only you, God, can do. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.