Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

"Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me." (Ps. 138)

     I recall one of the stories of the Desert Fathers in which a young monk asks his spiritual father, his abba, why his prayers are so ineffective; he prays, but rarely gets what he asks for. The monk asks his disciple to take an old, dusty basket and bring him some water.  The disciple obliges but gets no farther than a few steps before the basket leaks the entire contents of water out, and so he must return to refill it.  He does this several more times and soon realizes the futility of using the old basket to carry water.  He returns, sullen, unable to accomplish his abba's request.  He explains his great effort to try and keep the water secure, but that the basket will not hold the water.  His abba nods in agreement. He asks the disciple if he noticed anything different about the basket since he took it to the river.  The disciple says "Yes, it is now clean."  The abba says "Yes, it has been cleaned by the water passing through it while you were filling it. God answers our prayers by first purifying our hearts, not granting us our desires. Only a pure heart can say with faith, "Your will be done."
     What we usually mean by "God does not answer prayer" is "I didn't get what I asked for." For some Christians (and anyone in a fix), prayer can be little more than a spiritual ATM.  Not to discount the need to ask God for those things we need, and we desire, but all prayer should be with the proviso Jesus used in the Garden: "Not my will, but your will be done"(Luke 22).  If Jesus, who was in perfect communion with the Father, humbly submitted to his Father's will when scared, anticipating a gruesome death and feeling abandoned, how much more should we be willing to pray under the condition that it is God's will.
     In today's gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is asked how we are to pray, and Jesus follows up with the "Our Father"--a prayer not invented by Jesus but passed along from John the Baptist who taught his disciples a prayer from the wilderness. The Our Father can be used not simply as a text for our prayer, but is a small catechism on how to pray:

"Father hallowed be your name."
Prayer begins with acknowledging God as Father, or more accurately, Jesus uses the word abba---" daddy" to bring into sharp focus the intimacy with which we can approach God.  God is both supremely holy, but through Christ and the Holy Spirit, supremely accessible to us; we should begin every prayer not only with the awareness of God's holiness but with the great gratitude that we are, as St. Paul says,"heirs of God", God's children (God has no grandchildren).

"Your kingdom come."
Other gospels add "your will be done, etc..."  To first pray for God's kingdom is to honor Christ's central mission, to make the kingdom realized by his disciples, and to spread this grace to all. We must, as Thomas Merton wrote "will the will of God"; our prayer must first raise our consciousness to seek first the Kingdom before all else.  It is, as my spiritual father said many years ago to me, necessary "to pray for the Kingdom of God to come, not the Kingdom of Todd"!

"Give us each day our daily bread."
The "bread" is understood by biblical scholars to point to the Messianic banquet, the eschaton, the final culmination in history of the establishment of the Kingdom for all eternity.  The prayer asks for that realization to be daily; the eschaton isn't only historical, it is eternally present and accessible by grace. We should earnestly pray for this spiritually sustaining need as we realize the need for physical nourishment.

"Forgive us our sins for we forgive everyone in debt to us."
This part of the prayer isn't so much a quid pro quo as it is an admonition to be mindful of the need to avail ourselves of God's mercy so we can extend it as part of building up of the Kingdom.  We need to continue to seek God's merciful grace, not as a reward for forgiving others, but we need to seek God's grace so that we can forgive others. If we live in the gratitude of God's mercy to us, forgiveness can be genuine because it is an extension of the divine forgiveness of God. If this dynamic was working perfectly, I doubt we'd need to include it in our prayer, but it isn't, and we continue to find forgiveness tough at times; so, our focus ought to be seeking God's mercy for our lack of mercy towards others.  The "Jesus Prayer" is a great help: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".  This ancient prayer, far from being self-abasing, abounds in the awareness of God's great mercy and our constant need of it.


"Do not subject us to the final test."
The Greek word used for "test" is peirasmos, which suggests the trials of the Messiah; the afflictions of the mission of Christ; it isn't suggesting that God is the source of our temptations (God never is the source of temptation--James 1:13).  We pray to be fortified in the life of trials for the sake of the Kingdom and that we might not "be subject"...or perhaps a better word would be "subjugated" to the final test---be overcome by our struggles.  Make no mistake, anyone seriously considering confronting the evil of the world would do well, to begin with, the evil in one's heart.  Satan rejoices in the self-righteous protester who can use an agenda of "social justice" to embitter the heart, and render it lifeless in the pursuit effectively hating one's enemies, but for a "good cause".  Real spiritual combat takes place in the recesses of one's heart, not on the street facing one's enemies.  Do you want to destroy your enemies?  Love them! Where is the enemy now?

The second part of the gospel sets up the short narrative of one who, because he was persistent in appealing to his friend got what he needed.  So "For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened". We need the persistence in prayer to cleanse our hearts like the water sifting through the dirty basket; it takes a lifetime of seeking and knocking to realize whom we sought was always with us, and the door has always been open.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

"Mary has chosen the good part."

     Both the parable of the Good Samaritan (last week) and today's story of Martha and Mary are unique to the Gospel of Luke. Preceding both these sections is Jesus' encounter with the scholar of the Law. In this encounter, Jesus' response connects us immediately to the scholar's question, "Who is my neighbor?", and provides the foundation for further meditation on the nature of Christian service in today's gospel account of Mary and Martha.  

     Luke's gospel uniquely combines "Love the Lord your God..." with "Love your neighbor" to be a single expression of what is the greatest commandment; it is the great Commandment of Love.  In the other two gospels, "Love your neighbor" is appended to the first admonition "Love the Lord your God..." as being like the first; Luke makes them identical, which is characteristic of Luke's gospel ethic of loving the least and the last as manifesting the Kingdom.  The parable of the Good Samaritan clearly develops this theme, but on its heels comes the story of Mary and Martha, which attenuates the missionary zeal of "good works" with the realization that the Kingdom made manifest develops from the Kingdom within.  In short, true hospitality begins at the feet of the guest rather than in the kitchen.

     What does hospitality have to do with justice? Too often those dedicated to the pursuit of justice for the poor proceed with hatred rather than love and seek to define the needs of the poor rather than first listening and understanding the needs of the poor. It is easier to organize a march for the poor than to listen to the poor; experiencing the poverty of my neighbor does not lead me to hate the rich, but should lead me to understand the one I am seeking to serve.

    Jesus doesn’t admonish Martha to stop what she is doing, but avoiding being contemptuous of Mary, who has “made the right choice”*: first, listen to the one who is being welcomed.  Genuine hospitality is connected to justice because before "restoring" what has been lost, the true servant endeavors to discover what the guest needs.  William Sloan-Coffin, a great Christian and proponent of social justice, remarked that "The Bible is less concerned with alleviating the effects of injustice than in eliminating the causes of it."

   Christian action must, necessarily, spring from a profound connection to a sense of personal grace experienced as an encounter with the Word, Jesus Christ. Our non-profits, acts of charity and political action committees must spring from this core reality of orienting ourselves as servants towards those we serve first, or we risk becoming jaded do-gooders whose mission to accomplish something worthwhile is done on the backs of those we deem impediments to our mission statements.

     If we truly desire to serve the poor and seek justice for the oppressed, it cannot begin on the streets with signs, but it should start at the foot of the Christ, in the heart of Mary, the listening servant.

*Luke Timothy Johnson Sacra Pagina suggests this is a better translation than the traditional “Mary has chosen the better part” because it is couched in the rhetoric of a moral choice.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Faith is being grasped by the power of love"--William Sloane Coffin

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the Bible’s most popular stories. The phrase to describe a person willing to help the stranger, a “Good Samaritan”, is widely recognized. Given its popularity, it is easy to miss the power of choosing a Samaritan as the protagonist in Jesus’ parable.

The parable is situated as the development of the question posed to Jesus by a “lawyer” about what was necessary to obtain eternal life. Jesus responded with the traditional joining of passages about the love of God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love of neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). Jesus then poses the question as to “Who is my neighbor?”; in essence: Whom should I love? Jesus then relates the story of The Good Samaritan.

For Jews of Jesus’ time, the Samaritans were despised. The Samaritans descended from the tribe of Joseph (one of the 12 tribes corresponding to Jacob’s(Israel’s) 12 children) and lived to the north of Judah, which worshiped at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans had their temple on Mount Gerizim too; however, they did not worship on Gerizim as in Jerusalem. Also, they were despised by the Jews because they came to accept intermarriage, only believed the Books of Moses (Torah) to be authentic holy scripture, mixed pagan, and Jewish practices, and opposed the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. There are other reasons as well. For us, this is all very academic, but for the Jews of Jesus’ time, it was visceral.

For us, the parable comes down to Jesus asking us to decide whom we despise on a visceral level, and to love them as our neighbor. Let’s give it a try by renaming the parable:

The Good Isis Terrorist

The Good Mass Shooter

You get the idea. Jesus isn’t suggesting that the Samaritan is good because he is a Samaritan, any more than anyone would accept that someone is good because they are a mass shooter. Rather, we are being asked to consider the possibility that someone so despised could also be good. Can we envision our enemies doing good? Can we envision ourselves doing evil?

The first step towards our ability to harm our enemies is to objectify them; in other words, make them less human than ourselves. It is quite easy to see a suicide bomber as the incarnation of evil, and by doing so deny them their humanity. One could easily reply that such behavior is outside the definition of human. I would suggest that humanity is capable of great evil and that we, given the right circumstances, could perpetrate evil deeds as well. What makes us human is our great capacity for love, as well as our great capacity for evil. Jesus is asking us to love the person capable of both.

Jesus asks us not to call our enemy simply our neighbor, but to love our enemies as we love those we regard as close to us, our “neighbors.” Jesus poses the challenge: If you want to inherit eternal life, love those you despise in how you act towards them. Love is not a noun, as the saying goes, it is a verb; it is a commitment to act in a loving way towards our enemies. Anything less is less than Christian.