Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

 

Take a Leap

"I know God will not give me anything I can't handle.  I just wish he didn't trust me so much."
--Mother Treasa of Calcutta

Faith is a tricky thing it seems.  Sometimes one who claims to be acting on faith is simply avoiding the responsibility to apply any rational effort to see the truth; other times, Christians feel that acknowledging mystery is a throwback to the Middle Ages and superstition.  Like most extremes, the wisdom of faith and reason is more like a dance than a recipe.  It is helpful, I think, to see the foundation of our belief in God, in the mission of Jesus as the Christ, our salvation and resurrection, and other essentials of Christianity as matters of faith rather than logical constructs that have a beautiful internal consistency; Christianity makes, I think, a rather shabby philosophy with all its demands on a passionate belief based on an encounter with a  person rather than theory.

We have two such personal encounters in today's gospel reading: one with a "synagogue official named Jairus" and the other with a woman afflicted with "hemorrhages".  Jarius wants Jesus to heal his daughter; the woman also seeks Jesus' healing while he was en route to his first appointment.  What both these stories have in common is the linking of faith to healing, and of healing to salvation.

Jesus' life on earth was one of preaching and healing, full of passionate encounters and the revealing of the kingdom as a kingdom of restoration and grace.  In the first century, disease and death were all "unclean" and associated with sin.  Jesus' announcing the Good News brings an end to sin and death through healing and grace; these were lived experiences, not propositional arguments made by Jesus.  The woman, pushing through the crowd, touched Jesus' cloak and became "aware at once that power had gone out from him".  Jesus did not willingly give his "power" of healing to the woman, but she received it because of her faith, her bold determination to associate her healing with touching Jesus, or failing that, at least his cloak.  Jesus declares "Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction." 

Faith is also associated with the healing/salvation of Jairus' daughter.  Jesus doesn't anoint her or say prayers, he simply told her to get up after declaring to her anguished father "Do not be afraid; just have faith".  Jarius' faith, like that of the hemorrhaging woman, was faith in desperation.  They had nowhere else to turn.  Jesus was their last hope.  They knew they did not merit the healing, but sought it anyway because they had nowhere else to turn.  If logic were applied here, we would question Jesus' declaration of adequate faith.  Faith borne of desperation for many is not faith at all; it's simply the last chance.

Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk, made famous from his writing from his Cistercian vocation penned this prayer:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.  And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road although I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

That Merton came to understand most vividly in his life as a monk was that all of our spiritual life was lived on the edge when faced truthfully.  Faith doesn't sprout from a certainty; it springs from profound, experienced uncertainty.  Like the woman plowing through the crowd of Jesus' entourage, we have to plow very often through the "faithful" who surround Jesus.  Sometimes, it is not enough to follow those who follow Jesus; we must somehow make it up to the master's robes and touch them ourselves if what we desire is salvation.  But even if we trip and fall, the master knows our effort and our direction; we never need to make it to the cloak to receive healing.  Our faith drives us because at the root of our faith is passion.  It could be passion born of profound gratitude, or of desperation and fear, but what is important is that our faith drives our will to trust.  To trust not in the all too fallible institutions, not even in those who are pointing the way, but to the destination of our yearning: the person of Christ, himself. 

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

 “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”

How long does it take to have faith that God will spare you from the ravages of a storm? What reason did the disciples have to think they would be spared? Jesus had not saved them from such harm before.  What does it take to have faith that would face the wind, rain, and choppy seas with serenity?

I have always taken issue with Jesus’ rebuke and wish one of the disciples would have stood up and said, “Hey, we have left everything and followed you. You heal the lame, feed the thousands with only a few fish and loaves of bread; you are an amazing guy, but who wouldn’t be afraid of being swamped in a small boat in the middle of a storm?”

We have no such comment (at least not one recorded), and should perhaps look more deeply to find the truth the gospel writer was trying to reveal in this story of terror and faith.

Mark’s story is in a long tradition of Old Testament stories where prophets still storms. The focus of the story is to reveal Jesus’ identity as one “whom even the wind and sea obey”. The story is meant to establish Jesus’ association with God. The disciples’ faith is not yet fully developed and won’t be until Jesus’ crucifixion and subsequent resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit.

Yet, we who have the great advantage of hindsight, and the great gift of the Holy Spirit, often are stuck in the boat without the strength of faith. What excuse do we have?

From the Letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, of things unseen”. Trust engenders hope, and hope, faith. Father Henry Nouwen wrote, “The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good…in some way, we cannot see”(Turn My Mourning into Dancing). Nouwen makes this crucial connection between trust and hope in writing that a “person in difficulty can trust because of a belief that something else is possible. To trust is to allow for hope.”

We don’t hope because of what God has done, but what God can do. We live within this relationship made real and present by the Spirit such that whatever happens to us, God is always present, not as a spectator, but as one who is with us, Emmanuel.  He is with us in and through the stormy weather. Our hope is not that every anxiety is assuaged, but that our connection with God is never broken. Our faith may not quell the storm, but it will allow us to see through it.

Third Sunday after Pentecost

 Losing Control and Finding the Kingdom

We have a lot of baggage associated with the word "kingdom".  On the positive side, King Arthur comes to mind with all of the associated virtues of chivalry and knighthood; on the negative, we see feudal oppression, paranoid brutality, and hedonism.  For the Jews, kingdom meant one thing:  God's reign on earth in the line of David. The reading from Ezekiel is a prophetic utterance in exile.  As a priest in exile, Ezekiel cannot offer sacrifice at the Temple, which is over a thousand miles to the west, but Ezekiel does become God's voice to his people promising them a return and a vision of the future in which a messianic ruler will unite God's people again and usher in a new age of prosperity. The image of Israel's new life from a cedar branch becomes "a majestic cedar.  Birds of every kind shall dwell beneath it, every winged thing in the shade of its boughs."  In Mark's gospel, Jesus picks up on this imagery in describing the mustard "tree"(it is more of a bush) that "'becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade'".  For Ezekiel, cedar grew from a single branch; for Jesus, a tiny seed. 

Jesus' kingdom, though, wasn't to be realized through the establishment of a theocracy (this was a constant source of tension among his disciples).  Jesus' kingdom is a people who are directly animated by God's Spirit and called to a high ethical standard (love your enemies, justice for the poor, etc..).  The branches in Jesus' kingdom go out rather than up, and it would be a mistake to associate (as many have and do) the Church with God's kingdom.  While the institutional Church is part of the kingdom, we still pray "Thy kingdom come".  In John's gospel (unlike Mark, Matthew, and Luke), Jesus announces "My kingdom is not of (from) this world" when questioned by an anxious Pilate about the nature of Jesus' "kingdom".  This is echoed in Luke's gospel when Jesus replies to the Pharisees "the kingdom of heaven is in the midst(among) of you".  Jesus' presence defines kingdom while he walked the earth, and we have inherited this presence at Pentecost with the sending of the Holy Spirit.  The "branches" that have sprung are not royal lineages, but the profound ethic of sacrificial love.  The sacrifice of Christ made real and present at each Mass, becomes the "mustard seed" of our faith that finds roots among ourselves initially, but then branches out to the world.  We also find seeds of faith in prayer and reading of sacred scripture, each seed sprouting and growing in many different and splendid ways.

This image of the sprawling tree/bush can be complemented with what we usually do in response to wild, vegetative growth; we want to manage it.  In a world that has fallen in love with control, this bush breaks out of its fences, defies pruning, knocks down walls, and seeks to embrace the world.  I think of women religious who are struggling against Rome's heavy-handed treatment, and the response of a particular sister who was referred to in an essay quoting a lay worker: "The Eucharist will live only if we find a way for it to live outside the Mass."  Spot on. Jesus' parable is one of distributive, expansive justice, of inclusion set prophetically against the "kingdom" of royal lineage, palaces, and "trickle-down" justice.  Ezekiel's prophetic vision of a greater, supreme kingdom arrived with the birth of Jesus and continues in its many "royal" lines at every baptism when the candidate is given the powers of priest, prophet, and king by the Holy Spirit.