26th Sunday in Ordinary Time

          There is probably no better passage in all of Scripture to demonstrate why we don’t read the Bible – or at least all parts of the Bible – literally.  “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off…if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off…if your eye causes you to sin…pluck it out.”  Were we to take this literally, we would be a church of the blind and the lame!  Now, I don’t want to spend my whole homily on this, but since this is where this passage leaves us, I feel like I have to say something on this.

          Jesus is, obviously, using hyperbole here.  That is, He is exaggerating in order to make a point.  But there is always a risk with this kind of approach of getting lost in the hyperbole – of getting distracted by the exaggeration – and forgetting the real message that is being presented.  After all, Jesus isn’t saying these things just to be shocking, much less for comedic value. He really is make a point and a deadly serious one at that!  Listen again: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.  It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to enter into Gehenna.  And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off.  It is better for you to enter into life crippled that with two feet to be thrown in to Gehenna.  And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.  Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna.”

          This is really a lesson in prioritization.  It is so easy to become fixated only on the “here and now,” when our eyes and our hearts should be set on the eternal, on that life with God that will never end.  This is not to say that we ignore the “here and now,” but rather that everything that we do in this life is somehow with a view to that life that will never pass away.

          Jesus is also making the point that we should let nothing get in the way of this greater purpose for which we are created – namely, union with God.  I am reminded of what Saint Ignatius of Loyola calls “The First Principle and Foundation,” from the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises, in which he states that we are made to “praise, reverence and serve God our Lord,” by this means to save our souls.  All other things are created to help us in attaining this end.  Therefore, Saint Ignatius says, we “must make use of [these things] in as far as they help [us] in the attainment of [our] end, and [we] must rid [ourselves] of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to [us].  He goes on to say we should be, in a sense, “indifferent” to all created things, preferring only that which most helps us most toward our final end.  “Therefore,” he says, “we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life.  The same holds for all other things.  Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created.”  What is this but another way of presenting this sense of radical prioritization that we find in the words of Jesus in the Gospel? 

The second reading reinforces this, again very vigorously, as Saint James reminds readers that, in the end, wealth rots away, clothes become moth-eaten, gold and silver corrode, but doing what is right and just endures.  We can “live for today” if we like, but today is very short compared to eternity.  Unfortunately, it seems that it always takes some sort of tragedy, a disaster of some sort, an illness or, an unexpected death to “shake us out” of this very worldly sense of priority.  It shouldn’t take this – if we would but listen to words of Jesus today.

          I told you that I didn’t want to spend my whole homily just on this point, so I do want to turn to one other (I think) very important aspect of this passage from Mark’s Gospel.  And it is in this exchange between Jesus and John.  John complains to Jesus that someone else, not among their group, was driving out demons in Jesus’ name, and so they tried to prevent him.  Imagine his surprise when Jesus responded, “Do not prevent him…For whoever is not against us is for us.”

          This mirrors beautifully that episode we heard about in our first reading, from the Book of Numbers.  In which the spirit of God came upon Moses and the elders and even upon two men who were “outside the camp.”  Joshua objected to Moses and begged him to stop them.  But Moses replied, “Are you jealous for my sake?  Would that all the people were prophets!  Would that the Lord might bestow his spirit on them all!”  What’s going on in both of these incidents?

It would seem that in both cases God is pouring out extraordinary power, extraordinary grace, on these individuals –to whomever He wills – to do His work.  This is no small thing.  The elders in the time of Moses are given the gift of prophesy and the disciples of Jesus are given to share in Jesus’ own power to heal and to drive out demons.  But what begins to creep into their thinking is that this “power,” this extraordinary grace is somehow theirs – that they “possess” it, that they are the exclusive recipients of this power, or even perhaps that they are perhaps the origin of this power.  They forget that they are merely instruments of this power that is really God’s.  And so, in both cases they become jealous when it seems as though God has bestowed this power also on others “not among their number.”

          As human beings we are so accustomed to thinking in terms of material possession – what is mine, what is someone else’s, what I don’t have that I want – that I think we extend this way of thinking even to the spiritual, to that which most properly belongs to God.  But this is not how God see things.  God bestows His gifts on whomever He wills – and we should rejoice in this!  Yes, we can and should rejoice in our own particular gifts and ministries, and yet we must never forget that these are not, in a sense, truly “ours,” or at least that they are not for our “exclusive” use and benefit.  Rather, they are given for others.  Saint Augustine has a wonderful line in one of his homilies in which he says, “With you I am a Christian.  For you I am a bishop.”  He recognizes, in other words, that he is first a fellow Christian with his people and, secondly, that even his own particular ministry within the Church as a successor of the apostles is in service to them – those from among whom he was chosen and who are entrusted to his spiritual care.

          In our tradition we speak of the one priesthood of Jesus Christ, expressed in two different and yet related ways.  There is first the “common priesthood” of the baptized, in which all who are baptized share.  And, then, there is the “ministerial priesthood” shared in by those who have received the sacrament of Holy Orders.  But the Second Vatican Council and the Catechism of the Catholic Church remind us that the ministerial or ordained priesthood exists for the service to the priesthood of the baptized.  And both the “common priesthood” of the baptized and the “ministerial priesthood” of the ordained are a sharing in the one priesthood that belongs ultimately to Jesus Christ, the “high priest.”  In that sense, for example, I can never really speak of “my priesthood,” but only the priesthood in which I am privileged to share – first by baptism and then by ordination and always for the service of others.

What I think is so scandalous about the clergy sexual abuse crisis – in addition, of course, to the crimes themselves and the neglect or even the deliberate concealment of those crimes – is that these men, priests and bishops, seemed to forget that their office was at the service of others.  At some point it became about power or prestige or privilege or access or saving face, rather than about drawing souls to Jesus Christ.  They lost a sense of the “end goal.”  They got mired in the “here and now.”  They forgot that they were called to be instruments of God’s grace.  This is the essence of “clericalism.”  But at its heart is this notion that the gifts of God are “ours” or “for ourselves,” and this attitude is nothing new.  It is as “old as Moses,” and was present even in those first disciples of Jesus.

And so as the world in all its turmoil continues to swirl around us and as the expectations of the semester mount, let’s not, my brothers and sisters, lose sight of what is most important and let’s not forget that we are called to be God’s instruments for the healing and salvation of the world.