WHO'S THE GREATEST DOESN'T MATTER. HOW YOU TREAT PEOPLE DOES!
TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY
IN ORDINARY TIME – YEAR B
September 20, 2015
Saint Cecilia
Catholic Community
Rev. Dcn. David
Justin Lynch
Wisdom 2:12;17-20
Psalm 54 James 3:16-4:3 Mark 9:30-37
+In the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, AMEN.
Today’s gospel
reading is the second of three “passion predictions” in Mark - we heard the
first one last week. Jesus again said he was going to suffer and die, and like
His previous prediction, the disciples didn’t know quite what to make of what Jesus
was saying. They were more concerned about playing a game of one-upsmanship
with each other, much as human persons often do. Nowhere is that more true than among
Christians.
According to the
World Christian Encyclopedia, over thirty nine thousand denominations of
Christians existed as of the year two thousand seven. Some were born out of
long-simmering and serious theological disagreements. Others were formed
because someone got mad at someone else based on an actual or perceived insult.
What many of denominations have in common is this: they say “our way is right,
other ways are wrong, we are better.” What the world sees in Christianity is an
unfortunate continuation of the argument between disciples presented in today’s
Gospel about “who is the greatest.” Here in Palm Springs, we have Baptist,
Methodist, U-C-C, Episcopal, Roman, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day
Adventist, and numerous small non-denominational protestant churches, to name
just a few. To a non-Christian thinking about becoming one the situation must
be super-perplexing: which one shall I join, when all claim, in one way or
another, to be “the greatest” in comparison to others. Arguments about “who is
the greatest” also permeate the secular world, with debates about such as, but not
limited to, who is the greatest athlete, entertainer, author, politician, or
artist. And this mode of thinking carries over into academia with debates over
who is the greatest student, and into businesses, where employees debate among
themselves who is the best. We live in a meritocratic society, where
rank-ordering has become of tremendous importance in determining who is
rewarded, for what, and how much. “Who is the greatest” however, is really the wrong
thing to argue. The discussion we should be having is, “does it matter?”
For Jesus, it did not matter. What mattered to Jesus was, as we heard
last week, is whether His disciples were able to pick up their cross and follow
Him. Human, earthly definitions of greatness were not relevant to the mission
of Jesus to make the Kingdom of God a reality. What matters, among other things, in the
Kingdom of God, is what is laid out in today’s Epistle, which urges us to allow
God’s wisdom to permeate our lives: above all, a message of peace. Arguments
among people over “who is the greatest” often degenerate into passionate
conflict as one person envies what another has. Those who seek goodness sew peace in place of
jealousy and selfish ambition.
Unfortunately, some of the most passionate arguments about “who is the
greatest” are to be found within churches as people argue about who should
occupy positions of power. These arguments, however, are one colossal time
waste, and detract what we should be doing, which is embracing the cross of
Jesus, embracing sacrifice, humbling ourselves to accept Jesus through the meekness
of a little child.
Just this week, I read a news story about a
twelve year old Muslim boy with dark skin who invented a clock and brought it
to school to show his teacher. As any teacher will tell you, students often do
things to impress teachers. This teacher, however, decided the clock might be a
bomb because it was ticking. The teacher thought that the boy was a terrorist.
The school called the police, and he was arrested, handcuffed, and booked. The
boy was later released and never charged with anything. Really, no school
massacre of which I am aware was committed by a 14-year-old walking into class
carrying a bomb who showed the device to his engineering teacher first. And no
bomb of which I am aware was also an alarm clock. The
national reaction to that story was heart-warming. The media sought him out.
President Obama invited him to the White House. Mark Zuckerberg invited him to
the Facebook Campus. Countless other corporate and educational institutions
responded in a similar, positive manner. Yet the school suspended him for three days
and the local mayor supported the school and the police. The corporate and educational institutions who
praised and embraced the young man responded to him as Jesus wants us to
respond to children. They embraced little Ahmed. Without intending to do so,
they embraced the values set out in today’s Epistle: wisdom from above that is
pure, peaceable, and gentle, from which flow good fruits. They cultivated
peace. They actuated the Kingdom of God, even if they did not intend to do so.
That is the kind of world Jesus wants. Contrast that good behavior with bad
behavior of the mayor and the school system. Their concerns about safety were
entirely without merit based on undisputed facts. Their evaluation of the
situation and their response was completely unacceptable. In calling the police and having this boy
arrested and then suspended, this school continued the Bible-belt’s cultivation
of hostility against people of color and non-Christians, all of which have no
place in a civilized world. They were
not willing to go to the cross to be crucified in the next election. They
thought only of saving themselves. They were unable to accept that doing the
right thing sometimes entails bearing a cross and enduring the insults from a
crowd. They instead embraced a
legalistic view of life, driven by fear and thinking only of their own survival
– unlike Jesus, who willingly gave up His life to conquer death itself. This is
exactly the philosophy that motivates some so-called Christians: make and
enforce laws to protect against those with different faiths and different skin
colors. So many people fear those who are different from themselves and use
that fear to justify abusing others.
What I liked also in this story, is Ahmed’s response. It was very
Christian: as Jesus advocated, he has shaken the dust off his feet and left a
place where he was not appropriately received. He’s off to another school,
probably on a scholarship.
In
telling this story, I am invoking the “wisdom” tradition of our Judeo-Christian
heritage, by looking at the facts and discerning what is just and
compassionate. I am neither looking at divine laws nor prophetic revelation nor
past history. I am looking at the here and now and coming to a common sense
conclusion. Jesus was of the wisdom
tradition in Judaism. He was not one to pronounce ideological platitudes
unconnected to reality and then pass judgments on people and situations in
terms of the platitudes rather than the reality on the ground. Jesus dealt with
life on a pragmatic level based on actual human experience. He was able to do
that because He was fully human. What is the “wisdom tradition”? It is an
approach to finding answers to situations based on common sense, discretion and
prudent judgment. It is the application of experience to life, tempered with
flexibility to comprehend and respond to contemporary situations with common
sense. The wisdom tradition contrasts with other biblical traditions: with the
prophetic tradition, which relies on judgments from God transmitted through a
human prophet; it also contrasts with the law tradition found principally in
the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which analyze situations
through the lens of commandments; and it contrasts with the historical
tradition found in the books of Samuel and Kings where truths about God are
discerned based on events. Certain books of the Bible are designated as “wisdom
books,” like Job, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and the book from which today’s first
reading is taken, the Wisdom of Solomon. Today’s first reading is lifted from a
context of a comparison between good and bad people which explains in some
detail why evil people will never prevail over good people. The complete story
is found in the Book of Wisdom one sixteen through three twelve. The theme of
the story has wicked people condemning virtuous people as an obstruction to
living “the good life” in our short days on earth. You’ve heard the sayings,
“Carpe diem” meaning “seize the day” or “life is short, enjoy it.” That’s why paragons
of virtue are often not popular in the short term, even though that for which
they stand is often vindicated in the end. Imagine someone in a bar not
drinking alcohol in the midst of a drunken mob. Imagine further that this
person suggests to police officers keeping watch outside to start arresting
people for drunk driving as they exit the parking lot into the street. I assure
you, the person working with the police is not going to be a popular person in
the immediate term. She or he will be condemned as a stool pigeon who turned
everyone’s fun evening into anything but fun. But even though that person may
have caused a considerable amount of short term inconvenience to the bar
patrons, that person may have saved their lives. Drunk driving is an evil to be called out,
given the high correlation between drunk driving and fatal traffic collisions. The same is true with Jesus. He called out
those who did evil, and people got mad at Him for doing it and executed Him.
But Jesus ultimately saved all of humanity, including those who harmed Him, by
conquering death to make way for the Kingdom of God. A willingness to sacrifice
one’s own life is what will bring about that Kingdom, not arguing with others
about, “who is the greatest.” That is
what all denominations of Christians must do. They must all sacrifice
their denominational pride by ceasing arguments among themselves over “which
church is the greatest.” Claiming to be the “one true church” and going to war
with other Christians to vindicate that kind of arrogance does anything but
propagate God’s kingdom. Non-Christians look at that kind of spectacle and are utterly
disgusted at the ongoing perpetuation of bad feelings that lead to acts
demonstrating a lack of love and charity. To give you just a small illustration
of what I mean, a Roman priest in Baltimore was condemned and disciplined by
his bishop for allowing a female Episcopal priest to concelebrate a Requiem
Mass with him. Rather than embracing fellow Catholic Christians in the way
Jesus would have us embrace children as a spiritual pathway to the Divine
Presence, the Roman Church continues to argue with Anglicans and other catholic
Christians about whose Holy Orders are better. In so doing, they forget the
overall big picture of what ministry really is: caring for people. It is not
about arguing who has a better ticket to heaven. The fact is, we will never
know what religion or denomination thereof is “the greatest” in God’s eyes.
Thus, the argument over “who is the greatest” is an utter waste of time. What
we do know is that caring for people, and making peace among people, without
considering denominational labels, is more likely to improve the world in which
we live in the here and now than any scheme of exclusion driven by humans
arguing among themselves about “who is the greatest.” AMEN.
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