26th. Sunday (Year B)
(Numbers
11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9:38-43,45,47-48)
Something of the beauty of Moses’ character can be seen in in
our first reading today.
The people of Israel had been very troublesome to Moses and
the Lord had accepted his prayer for help, and told him:
I will come down (in the
cloud over the tent) and speak with you there. I will also take
some of the spirit that is on you and will bestow it on seventy of the elders of Israel, men you
know for true, that they may share the burden of the people with you.
You will then not have to bear it by yourself.
When a young man told Joshua son of Nun -- who from his youth had been Moses’ aid -- what was happening, Joshua rushed to Moses and said, “My lord, stop them.” But Moses answered him:
Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all
the people of the LORD were prophets! Would that the LORD might bestow His
spirit on them all!
Moses had no thought whatsoever about
his own prestige or standing with the people, he was quite satisfied, indeed
totally content, with the sublime privilege of being at one with God and of seeing
God glorified in and by His people.
We have more of that fulfilling joy
in God brought out in the Gospel passage today, where Jesus strives to guide the
Twelve into an awareness and appreciation of the wondrous beauty and special
dignity of their own relationship with Him as His Personally chosen disciples-cum-Apostles:
after all, hadn’t three of them just witnessed His Transfiguration on Mount
Tabor, hadn’t they heard Him speaking there with Moses and Elijah!
John and his brother James had been
indignant about, and probably somewhat jealous of, an unknown person drawing
attention to himself by performing apparent miracles:
John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone
driving out
demons in Your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.”
demons in Your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.”
Whereupon, Jesus replied:
Do not prevent him. There is no one who
performs a mighty deed in My name who can at the same time speak ill of Me. For whoever is not against us is for us.
John and James had been concerned
about someone apparently stealing their thunder. Of course, they could excuse their
displeasure and explain-away their annoyance as zeal for the honour of Jesus
and, no doubt, that would to a certain extent be true, since they did indeed
love Him. Nevertheless, John and James
were not called ‘Sons of Thunder’ for nothing, and something of their naturally
fiery temperament had been stoked up to streaming-point by the unknown and,
above all unauthorised, worker-of-wonders.
Let us take close note of Our
Blessed Lord’s wisdom, patience, and goodness in His reply. First of all, with regard to their concern
about His good name:
Do not prevent him. There is no one who
performs a mighty deed in My name who can at the same time speak ill of Me.
Notice, then, how He deals with
their personal disturbance and exasperation:
Do
not prevent him, for whoever is not against us is for us.
What wonderfully chosen and beautifully
phrased words, able both to restrain and correct whilst at the same time giving
comfort and offering encouragement!
In our first reading Moses had been fully
content with his lot as a servant acceptable to and appreciated by the Lord his
God; Joshua had, on the other hand, been most solicitous for Moses’ prestige in
the eyes of the people. Now, in our
gospel passage, John and James -- like Joshua -- had not thus far reached the
spiritual heights of Moses; they did not as yet fully appreciate and treasure
their relationship with Jesus above all else, they had not thus far come to recognize
the transcendent worth and beauty of the grace and truth to be found in Him as
would St. Paul later:
I consider everything as a loss because of
the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For His sake I have accepted
the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain
Christ and be found in Him, not having any righteousness of my own based on the
law but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God,
depending on faith, to know Him and the power of His resurrection and (the)
sharing of His sufferings by being conformed to His death. (Philippians 3:8ss.)
The supreme value of oneness with
Jesus, so esteemed and longed for by Paul, was not fully appreciated by the young
Apostles and today, that failing, in a most exaggerated and pernicious form, is
widespread in Mother Church among so many frail and/or nominal Catholics who have
been brought up in a world become excessively aware of merely human rights and
dignity, privileges not understood according to the Gospel of Jesus, but as
defined and established by worldly, totally secular and political, authorities.
Such vulnerable ‘followers of Jesus’ consequently find themselves unable to truly
appreciate the privilege of friendship with a transcendent God, in-and-through
the Person of One Who is both God and man, Jesus of Nazareth, uniquely beloved
of God and uniquely devoted to the salvation of mankind.
Our world and indeed the whole
universe is God’s creation: it is wholly from
the God of infinite goodness, it silently witnesses to God’s unimaginable and endless beauty, it unceasingly
praises God’s sublime majesty; moreover, it is also for the whole of mankind. But
for those who can only recognize human values, God’s sublimity is both shocking
and challenging for human pride, and friendship with Him in and through the God-made-man-for-us
can seem a frightening responsibility. Such fear and fright easily lead such
vulnerable disciples to begin to question not only God’s majesty and presence in
the physical world around us but, even more, His healing and saving power -- in
and through His Church -- for human society and for their own individual lives
in particular. Quiescence in such a
state can only lead to Jesus’ saving grace and His promise of eternal life and
fulfilment, becoming not only side-lined and gradually ignored, but even being denied
and ultimately hated: all in total compliance with the world’s yearning for pseudo freedom to be what they want to be and for pseudo love to delight
in whatever pleasures and pleases them.
In such a situation it behoves us to
return to Our Blessed Lord Jesus again for guidance, comfort, and
strength.
He understood fully the Zebedee brothers’ feelings for Him and for themselves, and so, He lovingly and most humbly opened up for them a beautiful insight into the possibilities of their relationship with Himself by His use of one tiny word, ‘us’. Jesus did not speak to them of what they had been privileged to see on Mount Tabor because the ‘sons of thunder’ had had their nose put out of joint (as the common and somewhat vulgar phrase has it) by the fact that this stranger had DONE something himself, and in doing something he had shown himself to be a somebody whereas they, James and John, had done nothing, they had merely SEEN something taking place before them. The fact is, dear People of God, those two ‘sons of thunder’, though called to become Apostles, were still potentially proud, and actually very self-centred. But, for all that, notice how Jesus so patiently, so compassionately, deals with these two! He draws their special attention to one, tiny, word, minuscule in size but full of, capable of embracing, endless possibilities of the deepest sensitivity, most startling beauty, and totally self-forgetting power of commitment and peace:
He understood fully the Zebedee brothers’ feelings for Him and for themselves, and so, He lovingly and most humbly opened up for them a beautiful insight into the possibilities of their relationship with Himself by His use of one tiny word, ‘us’. Jesus did not speak to them of what they had been privileged to see on Mount Tabor because the ‘sons of thunder’ had had their nose put out of joint (as the common and somewhat vulgar phrase has it) by the fact that this stranger had DONE something himself, and in doing something he had shown himself to be a somebody whereas they, James and John, had done nothing, they had merely SEEN something taking place before them. The fact is, dear People of God, those two ‘sons of thunder’, though called to become Apostles, were still potentially proud, and actually very self-centred. But, for all that, notice how Jesus so patiently, so compassionately, deals with these two! He draws their special attention to one, tiny, word, minuscule in size but full of, capable of embracing, endless possibilities of the deepest sensitivity, most startling beauty, and totally self-forgetting power of commitment and peace:
Whoever
is not against US is for US!
The anonymous miracle-worker is not included in the embrace of that one
word ‘us’ as used by Jesus. And having
said that, Jesus had no need to say more …. the Spirit was at work in His few
words and His disciples now humbled hearts.
Although that unknown man had been
immensely privileged to work wonders in the name of Jesus – works far beyond
his own natural abilities, John and
James were now being called to recognize and treasure the ‘pearl beyond price’
in the Christian experience of life before and with God … that is, oneness with
and love for Jesus, a pearl so graced as to able to burn away all thoughts of
self and self-interest in a furnace of total love for and commitment to One
supremely and sublimely beautiful, holy, and true.
It is the same for Catholics and
Christians being persecuted openly or deceptively in our world today; and the
question before each of us is that put to James and John, and ultimately to
Peter and the whole Church:
Do you love Me more than yourself
and the world? Do you truly want to love Me?
Dear People of God, for all of you
who can humbly and sincerely answer that last question with a ‘Yes’ there is
only one further question, and that is inevitable:
Are
you therefore willing to work on and try
to develop your desire to love Me.
‘Yes’ to that question, is the life’s
work and joy of all true Catholics and Christians.
