Many great
actors say that they relish playing villains.
Some stories create much of their delight and intrigue by making us root
against someone. If you come out of the
movie theater feeling sorry for Scar, or thinking that Darth Vader wasn’t such
a bad egg after all, you’ve kind of missed the point of those movies. But that way of engaging narrative, seeking
out the baddies… that can lead us dangerously astray when we apply it to the
gospels, or to our day-to-day lives for that matter. Because if you look at this gospel trying to
find the hero, that’s clear and right; we find Jesus. But if we look for the villains, we’d be
tempted to find the Pharisees and scribes.
We’d start to read this thinking that Jesus is out to vanquish them, and
miss his will to save them. And we’d
start to think that we need to distance ourselves from them, because they might
defile us… too much contact with them might make us impure. And then the gospel turns its head on us, on
the judgments that rise up within us, and Jesus would sadly smile at us and tell
us, “No, nothing that comes from outside can defile.”
We often talk
about the Pharisees as if they wielded great unearned power and held people
captive; but they were a popular lay movement; the only authority they had,
came from their charisma and the power of their message. Amongst an occupied people, they had a life-giving
message: that God calls every Jew to holiness, not just a few religious elite. While Roman occupiers controlled so much of
went on in the Temple (and many Jews thought it was as good as destroyed, so
passive was it to the stance of occupation), they proclaimed that you didn’t
need the Temple to be holy. They didn’t
say you had to abandon your daily life and go out into the desert (as some had done). They inspired people with the idea that you
can draw close to God and achieve holiness, the kind of holiness that many had
thought was reserved for priests, and seldom attained by them. It’s important that we understand how
exciting a message that was and how much truth there was in it. Because Jesus offers us even more. The Pharisees’ message is a pale reflection
of Jesus’; it’s true; but if we can’t understand how it gave light to people in
darkness, we’ll never encounter the true brilliance of what Christ has in store
for us.
The Pharisees
were convinced that the way for all people to pursue holiness was to shun the
taint of uncleanness. Their world was a
world of being occupied, of violence, and not just human violence, but a
demanding and harsh natural environment, where so many barely subsisted and
lived in a fear of a potentially fatal harvest.
The world seemed scary. And scary
things are dangerous and can pollute.
So, their vision of holiness involved tithes and cleansing, lots of
cleansing. I don’t even know how you get
about purifying a bed, actually: I guess you need a really large expanse of
water!
Christ dares us
to look at the world differently. Christ
dares us to look at the world with a posture of wonder; of awe and
gratitude. He doesn’t spell out the
reasons, but we find the letter of James giving us what are really the
footnotes to Jesus’ pronouncement. All is
gift. The world is gift, and is gift of
goodness. God gives us goodness. And goodness does not pollute. Goodness is not unclean. Now the world is fallen, there is suffering,
he’s not going to deny any of that; in fact, he’s going to embrace it. Jesus is going to show us with his life that
a life spent embracing the world in its goodness and in its pain leads us to
resurrected life. Sin and nails will not
pollute him; he’ll transform them.
And he invites
us to join him. He invites us to join
him in not looking at the world in fear, worrying about what might pollute us,
but looking at gift, looking with the kind of trust and gratitude that will
free us from the greed and arrogance and folly that truly have the power to
defile.
This is the
attitude that lets us see all of our study as forming out hearts for union with
God; not just theology but any study of the humane or natural world, that is
conducted with the assurance that we’re delving into and exploring a great gift
from God. It’s the attitude that can
make us bold in taking risks, in listening to the voices that challenge, and
challenging the voices that degrade. It’s
the attitude that means we don’t grudgingly do others favors out of our
largesse, but in awe of all we’ve been given, accept the greatest gift of all:
the gift God gives us of being givers. God
gives us our gifts to be used in reaching out in love, not in retreating in
fear. James calls us to care for widows
and orphans, but the call resounds much further than that.
It’s a call to
be first fruits. To be food for the
world, offered sacrificially, offered knowing that the world God gives us to is
good. Here at this Mass, we become what
we receive. As recipients of so great a
gift, we see not a scary world, but a scared world; not pollution, but
hunger. And so, fed, we feed.
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