Sunday, November 8, 2015

Jesus shows us hope – Mark 12:38-44, Heb 9:24-28, 1 Kings 17:10-16

OT, Yr B, Week 32; Farley Hall, Notre Dame.

Have you ever seen one of those optical illusions which are two pictures in one?  There’s one where it could be either two faces looking at each other, or a cup.  There’s a moving one (and I’d invite you to google this one now [people got their phones out to look at this]): the spinning dancer illusion.  Who thinks she’s rotating clockwise?  Counterclockwise?  It’s apparently called a kinetic, bistable illusion.  That means that once you’ve seen it one way, it’s really hard to see it any other way.  Now, in this case, that’s not really a problem.  There’s no moral reality that one way of seeing it is better than the other way, or even that flexibility with these kind of illusions is really a virtue.


But, in life, it’s different.  In life, it’s also true that once we’ve started seeing something, or someone, one way, it’s really hard to see them another way.  And that can be a huge problem.  So God, through his prophets and through Christ, disrupts our preconceived notions of how things really are.

The widow of Zarephath has looked at her situation and made a pretty clear judgment: it’s fatal.  She’s convinced, there’s no way out of this drought for her and her son, they’ll have one last meal, and then they’ll die.  I wonder what it is that makes her stop and listen to this wandering foreigner, who seems to be even more down on his luck than her.  Maybe considering herself a dead woman walking has given her a new freedom, having nothing left to lose, she’ll stop and hear anyone out.  Whatever moves inside her, she opens up.  She lets the prophet disrupt her perception of the situation, and finds in his words that God commands life.  Out of what quite rationally seems like certain death, God brings new life, because the insistent rationality of death is not what gets the final say in our world.  I wonder what we consider futile, deadly, worth giving up on?  I wonder how God is breathing life into it, even as we speak?

What about that other widow from our readings, the woman in the Gospel?  No one seems to have noticed her.  They’ve done what’s even worse than jumping to a snap judgment of someone; they haven’t even noticed her.  They’ve tacitly judged her, without even realizing what they’re doing, as not worth paying attention to.  There are all these rich people putting in huge sums, which is impressive and genuinely good (Jesus doesn’t deny their generosity).  Think of looking at a red carpet premiere where the cameras focus on the well-dressed celebs waltzing in, and it never occurs to anyone to photograph the movie’s head electrician or catering manager.  These people don’t get noticed; but Jesus notices, and Jesus acts to disrupt his disciples’ blindspots, to make them look again at the feature of scene that most impresses him.

It impresses him, leaves an imprint on him, because in that woman, he encounters someone else who makes God known by her life.  What he did perfectly, she does powerfully, and, if we let him, Jesus will keep directing our attention to people who can show us what God is up to.  The most obvious way in which she demonstrates something properly divine to the world is in her generosity.   She gives everything, her whole self, just like God who gave his only Son for our salvation, God who doesn’t just give us a gift fallible and forgetful like ourselves, but gives us his very self, including daily in this Eucharistic feast.

But it’s not just her generosity that Jesus wants us to see.  It’s also her poverty.  She is also an image of God in her poverty.  Because God doesn’t come to earth to dazzle us with superhuman power, but to love us with poverty and frailty.  God, the almighty, the creator all that is, came to earth as a weak defenseless baby, walked as a homeless man, a member of a conquered people, and died pierced by sin.  To the casual observer, Jesus’ death was a colossal defeat, a shameful slaughter.


But that can’t be how we see.  What we see in the shedding of Christ’s blood is the taking away of sin, the conquering of sin and death, the ultimate victory, the ultimate triumph of love.  Once we’ve started to see a broken body as the source of true wholeness, our patterns of seeing anything and everything else are shattered.  All is charged with hope.

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