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 thinking that Scar actually had some good policies, or 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 love for them, his will to save them.
And we’d start to think that we need to distance ourselves from them,
because they’re bad and 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 say, “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. It’s interesting to note how many things they
believed that were minority positions amongst Jews of the time, but that
represented common ground between them and Jesus, and have now become almost
universal teachings amongst Christians and Jews: That the prophetic books of the
Old Testament are holy and inspired just like the first five books; that angels
exist; that God gives us eternal life. But maybe most important is the life-giving
message they proclaimed amongst an occupied people: that God calls all of His people
to holiness, not just a few religious elite, a teaching that in many ways the
Second Vatican Council tried to call us back to by refocusing our attention on
the universal call to holiness.
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 holiness wasn’t the exclusive preserve of the Temple. 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 in the midst of city life, 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’; but it’s true, and 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 was a little unsure how you
would go about purifying a bed, but I looked into it, and apparently you’re
expected to first to the bed apart.
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 what we heard from the letter of James gives 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. Sin and nails will not pollute him; he’ll
transform them. 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.
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.
It’s a call to
be first fruits, as James put it. 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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