The 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24
The 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Ephesians 2:13-18 | Mark 6:30-34
Show favor, O Lord, to your servants, and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, we might be ever watchful in keeping your commands. We ask 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.
I mentioned two weeks ago that I am recording these programs from Tuscany, and yesterday I had an opportunity to go to a place that I love dearly. It’s the monastery of La Verne, about a 45-minute drive from where I stay. And when I got there, there’s still obviously in Italy, or maybe not so obviously to you, but there’s a lot more restrictions still in place because of COVID. I remember reading a statement on the interests of the church at La Verne where it said tourists are not welcome to join us for the liturgies, and it just was oh, ouch. And then there are different places that I like to go and sit, and often the door would be there. A kneeler would be in front of the door, and you could kneel and look into the room, but you couldn’t go into the room. It was weird, and it just felt very strange that this place I love so much had so many regulations and rules about where you could go.
And then I prayed that, in my walk toward the chapel that I love the most, the chapel that’s built on the very spot where Francis received the stigmata, it was open. Instead of the many choir stalls that are there, they were all roped off, and just six seats were placed in the chapel. So a maximum of six people could be there, and I got in and sat, and maybe one or two other people came in. So I was able to be in that spot, and I remember just sitting there feeling, I don't know, disoriented, I guess, a little bit. And I thought, “Well, I’ll be here, and I’ll hear Francis’ voice, and it’ll be wonderful.” I opened my heart to him, and I believe in his ability to be an instrument of bringing anyone that wants to get closer to God closer to him. But I didn’t feel or sense anything much, so I just sat in silence. And that was yesterday, and now today I’m getting ready to do this homily. And I know that one of the things about Francis is he had almost a fixation with the crucifix. He loved it. He was one that made it famous to — or made it a custom rather to have a crucifix hanging in your house — and so he had this love of the crucifix.
And then I get ready to give this homily, and all of a sudden, this crucifixion is the main theme, it seems to me, of this set of readings. And its powerful effect was to change everything. The crucifixion changed everything, and the way its described in this set of readings is there was, at times, two separate things. There was divinity over here and humanity over here, and there was this long history of struggle between the two and animosity and separation and isolation, mostly because of judgment. And when you look back at the Old Testament, it’s really frightening, in a sense, the way you see God treating people. He’s this all-loving, kind, gentle God, but that’s really not his history in the Old Testament. He’s, in many ways, very aggressive. For example, when he was upset that the Egyptian had made slaves of his people and he was trying to get them to release them and he sent all these horrible plagues to them, but the one that was just so horrific, I thought, was the — imagine, the firstborn of every family in that entire country, or that city rather, was murdered one night by God. And think of the pain and suffering in people because God had killed their prize child, and God did that and said, “Okay, now you’re free to go. Let’s go. We’re not going to kill your children.” What? That’s the God we believe in? Well, it’s the God that revealed himself then. It’s the God that was needed in the Israelite people then, but that’s not the fullness of who he is. We don’t get the fullness of who he is until the New Testament, and so it’s interesting. Always in the Old Testament, even through the lives of the prophets and all, there’s always this tension between what the prophets demand and what the people are willing to do. And finally, if they don’t do it, they get punished, and then they change their patterns. It’s not a harmonious gathering of God and his people and guiding them into a new life. No, he demands, and if you don’t do it, he punishes. And that’s the way God first began to reveal who he is to his people, and what it did, it divided his people, Jew and Gentile. Jews were those who followed God. Gentiles were non-Jews, and so at the height of say, about the time that Jesus was coming into the world, there was a great division because of who God is. He had his people that he loved and the other people that he didn’t love, and the people that loved God and God loved them, they were told basically, by their rules and regulations, they shouldn’t mess with the other people. So this demanding, restrictive God created separation, and it’s true.
Think about it. Anybody that gets in a position of power and decides they’re going to make the rules and regulations for how people are going to act, they’re going to be dividing the group between those who do it and those who don’t, the good guys, the bad guys. So it had to change. It had to change. And how did it change? The crucifixion. That’s what changed it. It’s amazing when you think about it. This one act that happened made a radical change, so radical that we heard in the scriptures today that all of a sudden, at that moment when Christ died on the cross, all things were made one. No more separation, no more good guy/bad guy, person you love/person you hate. All that was to go away, because something was reconciled at that moment. And what was it that was reconciled? What I’m about to tell you I’ve never thought of before, but I want to use the word crucifixion for a moment, and it comes from the same word of crucible. You know what a crucible is. It’s a ceramic bowl of some kind in which two metals are put under extreme heat, and they somehow meld together. They don’t work together well except under this great stress and turmoil of the heat, and when they cool, when the tension is over, there’s this stronger, new material that can do things better than it could before. The two things that become one become stronger because of their union. So what was coming together on the cross? Humanity and divinity. What was the division? The demanding God and the weak, frail humanity, and how are these two going to get together? How are they going to work together? And what it is, it happened in a person, in Jesus. What he had to do, when he was asked to go through this powerful experience of crucifixion, it wasn’t — he wasn’t afraid of it because of the pain that was involved in it, but it must have been horribly painful. No, but the agony in the garden, it was not over the pain that he thought he might be coming — that might be engaged in this action, but no, it was, “Father, this is not the plan. This is not what I want. Why are you asking me to give in to evil? Why are you asking me to turn my life, all my work, everything I’m trying to do to save the world — you’re asking me to give in to all my enemies and let them destroy me? You’re asking me to surrender all my energy and all my work and all my desire for the way it’s written? I can’t. Please, no. My human nature is such I want this, because I want so badly to do what changes the world, and I know I can do it if I could just teach them. Let me teach them. Don’t destroy me at this point. I’m just getting started, three years.” And God said, “No, no. You have to do this. You have to do this. This is the way it’s written. I want you to do this.”
What is God then? What’s his part of this struggle? Well, the part of God’s struggle in this crucifixion, what’s going to have to change in God is his demanding nature where he’s demanding that people do what they’re called to do before he will love them. He’s got to give that up. Now, that sounds weird. It’s not that he has to change, but what he is now ready to do is reveal the part of him that was hidden in the beginning, that he is a lover, and he does not want to punish. And so he, God the Father, is going through this transformation of coming out of this crucifixion with a heart that’s always been there but is finally fully, fully revealed. He is now the lover that does nothing but forgive faults. Nothing that you do, no evil action that you would ever come up with that would break the laws of what God tells you, you must do, none of that will ever separate you from his love. Now, think about that. It wasn’t so much that God had to go through a painful experience. That doesn’t fit, but in this moment, when humanity was surrendering to the way that God has created the world, and the way that God has created the world is now revealed in his loving, forgiving nature, human beings are now capable of living in that kind of relationship. They’ve evolved enough to live in a relationship with God where he never punishes — never punishes. Where’s punishment come from? It’s the result of all our stupid, short-sighted decisions, but God is revealing himself fully as he is. And this is the strongest, most important thing I think you can say, because we hang on to that old image of God. And we who believe in him feel justified when we live in an Old Testament way as God did, and so when somebody does something evil to us, we want to do something evil back to them. And that creates division and separation and isolation, and that’s the antithesis of what the crucifixion was intended to create, no longer any division. All is one. There’s unity. There’s acceptance. There’s forgiveness. There’s compassion. There’s empathy.
I don't know why, when you think of the way religion works — I love that image in the first reading when there was a complaint against the bad shepherds, and one of the symbols that the shepherds weren’t very effective is that everybody was afraid. They were kind of broken. Obviously somehow these were demanding shepherds that didn’t care for their flock at all. They just demanded performance, and that’s a shadow of religion. It’s a shadow of love. If I love you, I want you to be who I want you to be, and if you don’t do what I tell you or become who I want you to be, I will punish you by separating myself from you. I’ll cut you off. That’s all part of that old, old system, and unless we can embrace the new, this incredible thing that you see so beautifully represented in Jesus who, when he sees his flock, even though he’s exhausted in the gospel, he can’t help but help them.
Jesus is God, and he’s revealing God for the first time fully for who he is, and it had to be in this crucible moment when you’d have a sense of these two powerful forces, forces of perfection, of divinity and the weakness of humanity. And Jesus, the thing about Jesus that’s so hard for us to remember, when you look at the life of Jesus, he was not a perfect male figure as a good Jew. He lost his temper with the people in authority. He ranted and raved about things, and most especially he showed his humanity when he didn’t want to do what God had planned for him to do. When you have this image of Jesus as the perfect God demanding perfection of people, that just doesn’t exist in reality. He’s never been a perfect human, performing everything just the way God wanted. In fact, it’s pretty clear that, when finally God said, “This is what I’m going to ask you to do. I want you to give up every shred of pride and self-worth that you have in your work and let me expose you to the world as a failure. Trust me. If you can do that, if you can endure that, you can die, that egocentric part of you. You will do that for all of humanity.” I don't know how that works when one man can do it for everyone, but that’s what happened. He died to his ego. He died to that need to be successful. He died to all of that for all of us, which means we have the capacity to do it. It doesn’t mean we’re going to do it automatically, but we have the capacity to do it. What an incredible moment in history.
No wonder Francis was overwhelmed by it when he could see what was happening in that moment was the end of all the division and separation that rules and regulations and judgment create in the world. And that’s why he was just such a loving, loving figure. In fact, many people say that the theology of Francis is nothing really that new. It’s not unique in some special way. It’s the gospel. It’s just simple gospel truth, good news. We humans, as we are, are 1,000 percent accepted by God just as we are, and this God of ours, who in the past has been so demanding and, in some ways, harsh and cruel on those who don’t do what they’re supposed to do, he’s no longer in that mode anymore. He had to be for that time, but now he’s what Francis became. To the integration of humanity and divinity in that moment, the two becoming one united everything in the world. What an amazing moment. No wonder Francis knelt at the crucifix and just cried over what was done for him, for those that he loved, and I pray what’s been done we too can see what’s been done for us and know that the world that is divided between good and bad, right and wrong, that’s all an illusion. It’s been destroyed by the integration of these two most beautiful, made-for-each-other experiences, to be both living in divinity, God in me, and living in myself fully as I am.
Father, we struggle with our own faults, with the faults of others.We struggle with reconciliation, not holding things against others or not hating ourselves for things we’ve done that are wrong. All of that is the past. You have given us a new grace, a new power, a new strength that, if we believe in it, trust in it, surrender to all that it’s asking us to become, we will find this unity and this peace that is our inheritance. You have taken down the wall that divides the world. In its place, you give us peace, unity, community, love, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.