Isaiah 50:5-9a | James 2:14-18 | Mark 8:27-354

 Look upon us, O God, creator and ruler of all things, and that we may feel the working of your mercy, grant that we may serve you with all our heart. 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. 

In getting ready to reflect on these readings with you, I was thinking about the amount of time that I have spent in my life going over these same stories over and over again.  It’ll be almost 55 years that every Sunday I’ve been working on a gospel, the first reading and an Old Testament reading, trying to figure out what is at the heart of this incredibly powerful book.  It has two parts, an old part and a new part, and all we know about these works is that they’re packed with a certain kind of wisdom that, for centuries, people have gone to this source and have said, “I know there’s a truth here.”  And if you know the scriptures well, it’s in a way always hidden.  You have to dig for it, work for it, try to get to the heart of what it’s saying, because it doesn’t make it that clear in a sense.  It’s almost like it’s there, but unless you find it yourself, you’ll never own it.  You’ll never live it, and so there’s a wisdom in this second reading that I’m so drawn to.  And every time I go back into these stories, I see something I didn’t see before, and I say to myself, “If you’ve done this for that long, you would think by now you’d say, ‘I know exactly what this one’s about.  This is exactly — I’ve got it down.’”  No, every time I go to one of these — and I think you feel it if you’ve been listening to me for a long time — is that together, you the listener, me the speaker have been working toward digging into these stories and finding what’s hidden.  When we see it, when we know it, it’s not because it’s been told to us that we should believe it.  No, we know it, because it makes sense on some deep, deep level.  This is the truth.  We’re made for that.  We’re made to live in the truth. 

In fact, I love the phrase in the Responsorial Psalm that we live in the land of the living — the land of the living.  What does it mean to be alive?  It means we’re a seeker.  We’re trying to figure it out.  We’re working always on this idea that we’re here for some mysterious reason, and we’re here for a purpose.  And the more we enter into the fullness of that purpose, the richer and the more potent our life is going to be in terms of experiencing life and sharing life with other people.  

So in this reading from James, we hear this idea that there’s something about how you believe and how you live, and he’s saying a person’s belief is going to affect how they live.  If you believe in the world as, say, a place where you’re called to be, by your faith — and this is a shadow that I certainly found in the early years of my life, living as a Catholic, that Christianity was calling me primarily to be sinless.  So I had to do everything I could to be better, and the way I chose to be better was a combination of control — I will not give into that desire that I have — and also, in a way, presentation to other people so that I could kind of get some feedback.  And if they’d say, “Oh, you’re such a wonderful person,” then I’d kind of work on that image and present that to the world.  But I noticed how self-centered that all is.  If Christianity is calling you to be a better person and to be less engaged in things that are offensive to people or, let’s say, that harm people or whatever, it’s — if you’re doing it just for the presentation value of it so you’ll look good, you’re really not living out of the faith that you should be living out of.  You’re living out of a faith that says perfection is the goal. 

So what is the goal of Christianity?  What have I discovered?  What have we discovered together, hopefully, about it?  It’s not about being better in that sense of more perfect, more sinless but being more authentic, more yourself, more alive, more vital, more connected.  If there’s anything about Christianity that we learn from this set of readings and so many other places in scripture, it’s that this whole thing is about the way we relate to other people, and the way that we relate, if we believe in the God that has created us, he said it has everything to do with intimacy, which has to do with compassion and empathy.  We care deeply about the darkness and the pain in other people’s lives as we do with the same kind of concern for the darkness in our life, and darkness to me is separation from who you are, from who somehow you deeply know you are.  But you’re addicted to something that isn’t really you, and you know it, and it keeps you up at 3:00 in the morning.  And it is a kind of death, and we’re in a land of living.  We’re in a land that we’re called to understand with our hearts.  In the opening prayer, understand with your heart this message, and the heart is the place of empathy and compassion.  Where the brain is more about understanding things, the heart’s all about connection.  

So if we are living out the faith that is, the faith that God has invited us into, we are going to be the kind of people that James said we should be.  If we see someone who has no food, who has nothing to wear, what’s our reaction?  Our reaction should be, “We want to help you.  We want to sustain you.  We want to be there for you.  We want to help whatever it is you need.”  Now, that implies to me that there’s an understanding at the heart of our faith that we are here for a reason, and let’s go back to the image — I love it — not perfection but authenticity, to be who we’re called to be.  

And if you look at then who Jesus is, we’re going to see in this God filled with divinity the model of what it means to be a person who is authentic, authentic to who God created us to be, and so in the Old Testament, when we listen to prophecies — just a side note.  Whenever you go to the Old Testament — I used to think that was the old story, the story that we no longer pay attention to.  Now we’ve got a new story.  The new story is the New Testament.  No, the wisdom found in the Old Testament is essential for you to understand the New Testament, and there are 300 references to who the Messiah is going to be.  It’s so interesting to me that the Pharisees, who are supposed to be absolutely grounded in their understanding of the Old Testament — they should have understood that Jesus represented, in a most perfect way, what was being prophesied about who the Messiah would be.  It’s a little frightening for me to think that there were those who did understand that Jesus really was, and because he was going to turn the world upside down, especially the world of the Pharisees, then they rejected him, because they realized he was the one.  That would be even more scary, but this Old Testament, if we understand it clearly, it’s going to enrich our understanding of who Jesus is, therefore who we are and why we’re here.  

There’s a series of beautiful prophecies in the book of Isaiah.  In fact, most of the prophecies about Jesus are in Isaiah, and one is the suffering servant.  So we have that in the beginning, the first reading of this set of readings, where you listening to the suffering servant figure, and he’s saying, “I have this task to do, and I know that God is there with me, but my life seems to be in constant tension with the way the world thinks.  And so I’m sitting here as one who speaks a truth radically different than the world is living out of.”  The truth of the world in the past would have been, again, some kind of self-centered world.  It’s all about me.  The suffering servant takes on all the pain and all the suffering.  It happens in a culture and in a world where there is no compassion, no understanding, no connection with other people.  Everyone is out for themselves, and so the suffering servant, in some mysterious way, said, “I want to take away that pain that’s in people who are not loved and cared for, and I’ll take it on, and I’ll allow that pain to be my pain.  And in doing that, I’m going to heal the world.”  And that still to me sounds strange.  How does that work that he takes the sins of the world upon himself and therefore he changes the world?  Well, I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to say it clearly enough.  So listen as attentively as you can, because I’m always working out of my — I don't know — this weird place that I go to, when I’m preaching, where I don’t really know what I’m going to say next, but it’s something like this:  When there is suffering in the world, there is some kind of justice that’s demanded.  If somebody is imposing pain on someone else, it creates this place of darkness for those that are being afflicted, used, abused, and somehow when Jesus takes all that pain on himself, what he’s doing is somehow equalizing the world so that this negative energy is stopped by somebody saying, “I’ll take it on myself.  I will surrender to it and not return revenge.  I will stop it.”  When a pain is inflicted upon you, there’s a way in which you are angry, and you want to get back at them.  And what Jesus is saying is, “No, I’ll take all that pain on, and I will not try to punish the people who have harmed me.”  And what he’s saying is, “That’s the model of who you’re supposed to be as a representative of who I am in the world.  If you want to follow me, you’ve got to understand that you have got to not return evil for evil.  You’ve got to allow evil to happen to you in the world, and you have to say, ‘I will take it on.  I will suffer it, and I’ll learn from it.  I’ll be changed by it, but I will not return evil for evil.’”  And that’s the image of the suffering servant.  “I take it all on, and I sit there without any resistance.”  Wow, that’s amazing.  

Think of how many things you and I resist, are angry over, because the world isn’t there for us, being what it’s supposed to be for us, taking care of us.  We’re going through a pandemic.  We’re going through something that the whole world is having to deal with.  Think about the way we’re dealing with that.  When things are not the way we want them to be, we’re often depressed, angry.  “It’s not fair.”  When people aren’t pulling their share of what they should do, we want to attack them, and is that really the way we live out this faith?  It’s like we have compassion and understanding for the people who are not who they should, and when we — I don't know how this work, but when you somehow will not go back against them, you will not attack them back, that changes the world.  And you’re authentically living the world that Jesus teaches us to live, a suffering servant, allowing things to be as awful as they are, enduring it, recognizing it, learning from it, developing a kind of strength inside of you because of it, but you will not return evil for evil.  That’s who the suffering servant is.  That’s who we’re supposed to be, and when you don’t have anger and you don’t have this feeling that you’re being abused and you somehow see value in this entire crazy world we’re living in, there’s a peace that you cannot describe in words.  Somehow it’s all okay.  Everything’s going to work out, and somehow, if I’m patient in enduring all that isn’t what I want it to be, I’m living out my faith in works.  

Father, you have created for us a challenge to open our hearts to the wisdom that we find in this God/man Jesus. Bless us with an open heart that we might be able to see what he’s teaching us and what he’s inviting us into so that we can be a participant in saving the world from darkness and inviting people into a life of light and peace and goodness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.