SEPTEMBER 9TH, 2018: TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY OF THE YEAR Isaiah 35:4-7a James 2:1-5 Mark 7:31-37 Counter to popular wisdom, gospel miracles aren’t supposed to prove Jesus is God; the evangelists provided them to us to convince us what kind of a God he is. If the communities for whom the gospels were originally written weren’t already convinced this unique Palestinian carpenter was God, they wouldn’t be reading the gospels in the first place. Just because someone believes in God, he or she might not believe in the kind of God the gospel Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed. There are all sorts of images of God. For instance, during the movie Silver Linings Playbook the Bradley Cooper character throws his copy of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms through his closed bedroom window, abruptly waking up his parents and the neighbors in the middle of the night. Like so many other people reaching the end of this famous book, Cooper doesn’t agree with the vengeful, destructive concept of God Hemmingway provides. He wasn’t expecting that kind of ending based on the God he’d heard preached in church. This “God-imaging” thing goes beyond gospels. First-Isaiah engages in it in today’s first reading. Unlike Jeremiah, who at one point refers to Yahweh as a wadi – a dangerous, undependable stream of water – Isaiah has only good things to say about God in this passage. She/he vindicates our cause, offers salvation, gives sight to the blind, ears to the deaf, new legs to the lame and provides us with constant, life-giving water. Certainly a person you’d always like to have around. Mark’s Jesus continues with part of that imagery in our gospel pericope by restoring sound and speech to the handicapped man he encounters “in the district of the Decapolis.” Notice how often all the evangelists paint a picture of Jesus curing a deaf or blind person. They seem to revel in reminding their readers that they follow a Jesus who helps us see and hear things which others never notice. For people of faith, seeing and hearing is now on a different level. This is especially the case in our James passage. The author demands we look at the poor through the eyes of the person we’re trying to imitate. No longer do we notice just a person “in shabby clothes.” We now see someone “rich in faith and an heir of the kingdom.” Though we normally zero in on a rich person’s “gold rings and fine clothes,” and give him/her a place of honor at the community’s gatherings, people of faith no longer classify people based on those distinctions. This reminds me of a well-known Thomas Merton quote I recently posted on my Facebook page: “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” After reading it, one of my “friends” reminded me that Pope Francis has said something similar. “When we encounter a beggar, it’s our place to give generously; it’s their place to spend it wisely.” Whether we like to admit it or not, in the gospels we encounter a God in Jesus of Nazareth who often reminded his followers that the God he follows causes it to rain on good people and bad people alike. If we had our druthers, we’d most probably reward the good and punish the bad. Why should we give bad people good things? It takes Christians like Francis, Merton and James to remind us that we often find a different image of God in the book we employ during our liturgies. If we weren’t taught in our grade school catechism classes that “desecrating” holy objects is a sacrilege, I presume a lot of our homes would have battered bibles in their front yards, and broken windows in their upstairs bedrooms. Maybe Bradley Cooper wasn’t that far off.
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