The 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

Deuteronomy 6:2-6 | Hebrews 7:23-28 | Mark 12:28b-34

Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift your faithful offer you rigxht and praiseworthy service, grant, we pray, that we may hasten without stumbling to receive the things you have promised.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever. Amen.

It’s so interesting to me how that piece of music, that was written for this show, has a way of enabling me to put together the thoughts that I have after listening to the different readings and hopefully have something life-giving to share with you.  There are two major themes in this set of readings that strike me.  One is the image of a promise in the first reading and something about understanding in the gospel, understanding the promise.  From the time that God created human beings, he established a relationship with them.  It’s clear, from the story of Adam and Eve, that God did not create human beings and then set them off on their own but rather started by having an intimate relationship with them.  They lived together in a garden.  Adam and Eve were naked as they walked around, completely comfortable with who they were, yet he had something he was asking from them.  And the thing I think is interesting about the things that God asks from us, because in some ways it sounds like he’s always asking us to do something we don’t really want to do, and if we do what we don’t want to do for him, it shows we love him much more than we love ourselves, but it’s much more complex than that.  No, because the one thing from the very beginning, if you know the heart of God, is it’s fully revealed from the very beginning to the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles.  You’re going to find that this God, this wonderful God, has one intention, and that is we become who we’re intended to be, not slaves to a law or rules but engaged in a relationship with him where we understand who he is and what his role is in our life and what he’s asking us to participate in with him in this world. 

So it’s important to go back to the beginning then, in a sense, and see that, when God began his relationship with us, the first thing he asked us to do is to be careful with our judgments, the judgment of right and wrong.  There’s something so clear about this early story of God’s relationship with human beings that human beings were at a certain period in their own evolution, and the thing they really understood, much like a child understands, they understood right and wrong.  Do this; that’s right.  Don’t do that; that’s wrong.  It’s called a binary world where everything is divided.  Even if you look at the creation story, God divided the world up into two parts.  There was darkness, and then there was light.  There was earth, and then there was sky.  There was water and earth.  It’s an easy, simple way to understand this mysterious thing we call life on this planet with God engaged in a relationship with us. 

And so in that early, early test that Adam and Eve were put through, one of the things they were exposing to themselves, as God always puts us in situations where he doesn’t have to teach us about ourselves.  We discover, sometimes with pleasure, because we see we’re stronger than we thought, or we see we’re weaker than we thought, whatever.  But basically, he’s always revealing to us, through the events of our lives, who we are and who he is, and what Adam and Eve realize is that they had this over-simplified notion of what was right and wrong.  What they gave in to was something that seems so natural to human beings.  They gave in to what was best for them, even though it wasn’t what God wanted, meaning it wasn’t the journey that God was asking them to go on with him.  They chose to be like God from the very beginning.  That was the temptation.  The devil simply said, though he isn’t the devil — I think it was human nature — said, “All right, I’ve got two choices: obey God and do what he says, or don’t do what he says.  And the promise of not doing what he says is that we will be autonomous, strong.  We will be like him.”  And that attraction to being as good as you can possibly be and to be pleasing even to God, to present yourself as perfect, you know what that feels like.  We all have that.  We’re given the option of following a rule that you didn’t quite understand why you weren’t supposed to follow it or becoming great.  Yeah, I think we’d all choose, “I’d like to be great.  I would even like God to see me as the greatest I can be so he’ll love me,” because that’s what we all ultimately want, to be loved by God, by others.  So interesting.

So you take that beginning of the relationship, and it sets a tone, that God said, “All right, this is not the way you’re going to please me, by becoming perfect.  You’re going to please me by a very different process.”  And that’s what the promise is, and the one thing I would say he likes more than anything else, if you want to say, “What is it that would please God more than anything else that I would do for him,” pay attention to him and let him in your life and let him work with you, in you, for you.  He wants intimacy, and when Adam and Eve chose to perform for God instead of allow God to enter into them and help them to grow and change, they wanted to become already what God and only God can help us become, then they had to leave the garden.  They had to go and figure this out, and so when Adam and Eve left the garden, it wasn’t because they were so much punished by God, but they chose to live on their own.  And so God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom and love, said, “Okay, humans.  We’ve set the stage for this entire salvation history story, and you’re going to go off, and you’re going to be autonomous.  And you’re going to work for me, you think, by doing everything you’re supposed to do and doing it as well as you can and getting a reward.” 

And in a way, you see, as the evolution of the story of salvation continues, we see then God eventually calling the people together and saying, “Look, I want a relationship, not with just one of you but with you as a community.”  So Abraham called the people together and said, “I want you to be my people.”  It’s so interesting, that whole notion of God’s favorite people.  It seems to fly in the face of the fullness of who he is, that he loves everything and everyone he’s created, sinners, saints.  In the beginning, he revealed himself as one who wanted a certain group of people to be attached to him in some close, intimate way, and there were many, many gods at that time.  So the God of Israel, the God who is, had a hard time convincing these people of who he was, and he is the only God.  And so the whole story begins with that intention of God to create an intimate relationship with human beings, and so he decided he would do it by being on their side when it came to dealing with the one thing, at the time, 4,000 years ago, that everybody lived in total fear of, and that was enemies.  Enemies, if you had an enemy, that was — everybody, I guess, had them.  People were attacking each other.  When one community would grow and develop and another community would see them and see they had more than they had, they’d come and pillage their place and take everything and drive them out.  It was a rough world, a tough world, and so if God could be the source of their strength to overcome enemies, that would be a very attractive thing for any human being to believe in that particular God.  And so that’s how God began to reveal himself.  “I’m the God that will conquer your enemies, and I want you to love me for it.  I want you to be my people.  I want you to forget about all the other gods that you’ve known and all the other gods that people will try to seduce you into believing in.  I want a relationship that’s exclusive with you.  You’ll be my exclusive group, and I’ll be your exclusive God.”  Interesting.  And that kind of created a very interesting community, because when you listen to the promises that God makes in this first reading, he’s saying, “I want you to fall in love with me because of what I do for you, and I do conquer your enemies.”  So love is the key to this.  “Love me, love me, love me,” but the love that God is talking about there is just a mere shadow of what it ultimately will become in the New Testament, because that love is more allegiance.  And listen to the way God describes his relationship with human beings, nothing like is revealed in Jesus, but you go to the next chapter in Deuteronomy.  What you’re going to hear is God talking about the Israelites’ enemies, and he’s saying, “Now, when you go into their places, their cities that they’ve already built, and they have streets and buildings and cisterns.  Go in there, and drive them all out.  And if you don’t, you can’t get them to leave, then destroy them.  Murder them, and then be sure they’re all gone when you take over their city.  And when you’ve taken it over, if you leave them there and they start infiltrating and robbing you of your commitment to me and drawing you to other gods, then I’ll kill you.”  It’s not a very warm, loving God.  It’s a God of justice.  So when he says, “I want you to love me with all  your heart and all your mind,” I think it’s when he’s saying, “I want you to trust me, and don’t ever doubt me.”  And that’s different.  

So there’s an evolution in this whole process of understanding who God is, and so many times we live in the Old Testament where the God that is, is the God that demands us to follow rules and laws.  And if we don’t, we’re falling short, and the only way he can love us is not so much that we just have allegiance to him, but allegiance to a misunderstanding that we’re supposed to be perfect, we’re supposed to be without sin.  That’s the killer.  That’s the one that gets in the way, and so what you see in the whole evolution of this beautiful salvation history story is you see this God over the centuries through the prophets and patriarchs and prophets and scribes and priests and sacrifices and temple.  All he’s trying to do is lead us to a person, a man who absolutely was fully human, who’s also a God who is fully God.  That right away says there’s something about this that we’ll never fully fathom with our binary brains, but this man/God comes in and reveals a way of working with human nature where it’s not about demanding justice or following rules and laws that can be violently negative to other people.  No, it’s about learning something about this mysterious power that is best described as the power that happens to a human being when they allow divinity to enter into them.  There is something more than allegiance to a God because he’s going to punish me if I don’t follow him.  No, there’s this deep desire to be like this God/man Jesus.  That’s our challenge, to fall in love with him.  God in the Old Testament is easy to be afraid of, and it’s easy to be motivated to do what he says, because he’s very quick to say, “If you don’t do what I ask you to do, I’ll kill you.”  And then you have this invitation to see God in the flesh, in the New Testament, and he’s the one who says, “If you have an enemy, love him.  Don’t do any harm to him, and if he does harm to you, he slaps you on the face, well then, turn the face in the other direction and let him slap you again.  If he steals from you, offer him more.”  Think about how radical this incarnate, loving God is compared to the Old Testament, and the reason I want to stress that is because we so easily fall back into the Old Testament, not simply because we remember those stories of God’s punishing people who don’t do what they’re supposed to do.  Not because of that so much, but because it’s our human nature.  We’re prone to that.  That’s the part that is more natural to us, and you look at the evolution of human beings throughout the history of the evolution of human beings from the beginning.  You’ll see an amazing transformation of an ability to be beyond the need to be, let’s say, in control and in power. 

There’s a movement in human nature that moves away from autonomy and perfection into a kind of neediness, in a healthy way, for God to be in us, enabling us to be the source of life and strength to other people.  And that happens in each human life.  That’s what’s so fascinating to me.  We come into the world, and we need a God image, a parent image that says no, no to that and yes to this and no to that.  Yes and no, that’s what a two-, three-year-old has to live with, and that’s because that’s who they are, and then they evolve slowly and begin to understand the thing that’s more important than being told what to do and what not to do is to be loved.  And they understand and begin to feel what it means to be loved, even though they do bad things, and after they’re punished by their parents, they’re held and kissed and loved.  And then they learn, by being loved, that they can love other people, and there’s some joy in that.  And that joy awakens something in them that is their talent, their gift.  And as you mature and get older, you have this gift inside of you, and you want to develop it, and you want to use it, and you want to give it away to people, because the joy of seeing someone grow and change and enjoy something that you’ve created is greater than anything you could do to get attention to yourself.  That’s our story, and that’s the story of God revealing himself to us over these centuries.

So loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and loving your neighbor as yourself, adding that last part, even though it’s mentioned somewhere in the Old Testament also that way, but think about it.  It’s not just loving God and doing whatever he says no matter how painful it is for other people.  No, if you love God, then there’s no way to be in love with God without feeling his love in return, and when you feel that love in return, it transforms you.  And your love is not simply for God but also for every other human being, and most especially there’s love for you, love for yourself.  It goes in the same direction.  The more you love God, really love him and feel him in your life as he really is and feel the energy and the life that comes to you through his love, you’re going to find a way of loving yourself beyond anything you ever imagined.  And loving yourself is the key to being able to love other people, and so the mystery of redemption, we always think it’s the way that we finally get into heaven.  Well, redemption is not that you can live a terrible life and finally still be saved.  No, it’s being saved from the kind of selfish separation that sin creates between us and with God.  Redemption is being able to love and understand the fullness of what it means to be loved by God and to love God and love your neighbor.  It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to be engaged in that process, and that’s what I pray we do together in this program.  Sunday after Sunday, ponder these stories.  Try to enter into them more fully and engage in this incredible, exciting process of transformation, evolution until we can feel the oneness that is beyond our imagining.  It doesn’t take away pain, but it takes away that awesome, awesome fear that we’re not enough or that God isn’t the one who he says he is.  He’s a lover, and we have nothing to fear.  Amen.

Father, we are your children. We remain children our whole life. We keep growing slowly, and we think we reach a certain level, and then there’s another level, and then there’s another level. So give us the energy and the strength that we need to continue to evolve and grow and change. It’s not easy for us as human beings. You know that, but all you ask is that we long for the gift, and the gift is you inside of us. So bless us with the consciousness of this great gift that you pour into us. Let us believe in you, and reveal to us who God really is. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.