The 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24
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.
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 aWe’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.nd 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.