“When Jesus heard that John had been
arrested…” That’s how Jesus’ earthly
ministry starts in Matthew. Jesus’ earthly ministry starts with tragedy, the
arrest of John the Baptist. Jesus gets baptized by John, then he goes through his
forty days in the desert (our lectionary moves that reading out of sequence, so
we read it at the start of Lent), then he waits an unknown amount of time,
until this moment, “John had been arrested.” Matthew doesn’t tell us how Jesus
felt. Was his reaction something like frustration? – John was meant to be
preparing his way, and he wasn’t done yet (we’ll see throughout the gospel how
unprepared his way is!), but now he’s gone and got himself arrested so Jesus
will just have to start ministry anyway. Maybe it’s fear? – if they arrested
John, what will they do to him? Maybe there’s some grief, pre-emptive grief
knowing what’ll likely come next for John, with all the weird mix of sadness and
anger that entails.
Matthew doesn’t tell us how Jesus feels,
but he does tell us what he does and what that means. He retreats. He goes to
Galilee, a backwater kind of a place, in which Jews were a minority. I wonder
if we might look at this as the fourth temptation Jesus endures. He refuses the
devil’s first three temptations: to turn stones into bread when he’s hungry, to
throw himself off a building and summon angels to catch him, to rule all the
kingdoms of earth as Satan’s vassal. Now, there’s another temptation. With all
that power that even Satan knows that Jesus has, how tempting must it have been
to use that power to get back at Herod who had arrested John? To overpower him,
maybe rescue the holy man, maybe shock and awe and humiliate Herod? But, no he
withdraws. He came to rescue us from sin and death, but not through
orchestrating prison breaks. He withdraws, and in a place of darkness, a place
where death glooms large, he dares to be light. Light to those who dwell in
darkness. Not a more powerful form of darkness, with the best of intentions and
even good results. Something radically different. Light.
And what does that look like? In the first
place, it looks like surrounding himself with people. We don’t know what these
fishermen saw in him, but there was something, some movement of grace by which
they could tell that this man was different. That when he called, he was worth
following. Jesus surrounded himself with disciples from the beginning, not out
of need, because nothing he did was out of need, but out of a willingness to be
a light that’s not hidden under any bushel basket, to known and be known, to
enter into genuine human relationship, with all the fragility and realistic
chance of getting let down that that entails.
They’re disciples now, they’ll be apostles
later. Their role now is to be with Jesus, to bask in that light. Later, they’ll
be sent out, they’ll be sent out to say to those who dwell in darkness that the
light has arisen, that while we long for the fullness of day, we live in dawn’s
first light.
We too are invited to be with Jesus, who
longs to know and be known, who dares to pierce any darkness with light. And we’re
invited to let other people know of this light by which we walk. Sometimes it’s
in the darkness that the light is easiest to see. The bishops at Medellín
talked about how it’s when poverty tries to dim and defile that light that is God’s
Spirit implanted in each one of us that we see that light is inextinguishable.
Contact, real human, sacrificial contact, with people in poverty is often where
our faith can be built, where we see Christ’s light that we forget to stop and
recognize when we’re walking in easier and sunnier climes.
I often think back with gratitude to the
two years I spent teaching math inside San Quentin prison. In a place of such
darkness, of violence and dehumanization, I encountered inmates who knew what a
difference education could make in their lives, who had a spirit of conversion
that was contagious (contagious enough to start me asking questions about what
I was doing with my life). I saw classmates who started caring about each
other. I saw the light more clearly because of the darkness around us. And I
delighted in it, and in the privilege that it was my role to fan those sparks.
And that was where I first really felt the tug, to be able to name for people
the grace that was around us, to say that the light had a human face, was Jesus
Christ, and to act sacramentally to focus his light. That was where the call to
priesthood really crystallized for me.
We stand now, in our civic calendar,
between two events that might speak darkness to us: after Martin Luther King
Day, when we might be led to think of his slaughter, and of the racism he
called attention to that still brings gloom today; before the anniversary of
Roe v. Wade, when we mourn for lives lost, and an exaltation of indifference,
that doesn’t seek to actively love a pregnant woman enough to concretely help
her choose life, but callously says that being indifferent is loving enough. In
the midst of this we have a new president, whose presidency does bring fear to
a lot of people. In all this, we need to see that light that Christ is shining
in this. We need to see the courage of a prophet who denounced the sin of
racism, the tender care of those who do minister to those in crisis pregnancies.
We need to see the light, be set aflame by the light, and then be the light,
and call others to walk with us.
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