Tag: Ched Myers

George Will: Pope Francis Is UnAmerican (Sunday Homily)

George Will

Readings for the Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time: NM 11: 25-29; PS 19:8, 10, 12-14; JAS 5: 1-6; JN 17: 17B, 17A; MK 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48

Since the pope’s arrival in the U.S. last Tuesday, it’s been all Francis all the time on television and in the newspapers. He’s charmed us all, and even somehow inveigled Republican lawmakers to applaud ending capital punishment, protecting the environment, opening borders to immigrants, and ending arms sales of all kinds.

Washington Post columnist, George Will, however is holding out. On the eve of the pontiff’s arrival, Will called the pope an over-the-top consumer, distant from the poor, flamboyant, sanctimonious, unscientific, wooly-headed, reactionary, and un-American. He isn’t smart or honest enough, Will suggested, to know that the capitalism he criticizes has pulled the masses from their poverty, extended life expectancy, and has the power to clean up the environment without burdensome regulations. Fossil fuels have saved the world. Without it we’d all be starving. The wealth is indeed trickling down.

So the pope is wrong when he speaks of “the excluded.” Capitalism-as-we-know-it is blameless and excludes no one. We need do nothing but forge ahead (like lemmings), intimated Will, an ultimate Beltway insider.

I bring all of that up because this week’s readings are about insiders and outsiders and how the Judeo-Christian tradition, like Pope Francis, stand firmly on the side of those insiders feel compelled to protect themselves against. Unlike Will, the readings say, the Jesus tradition stands against the rich, and on the side of the poor – especially children. The tradition calls us to transformation, not defense of the status quo.

In Will’s defense, however, it must be said that he stands in good company. Like him, the very disciples of Moses and Jesus were exclusivists. As they show in today’s readings, they too felt compelled to protect their privilege and turf and to turn away those they perceived as threatening interlopers.

On the other hand, both Moses and Jesus are like Pope Francis. They take a Big Tent approach to matters of the Spirit, wealth distribution and protection of the vulnerable. Both recognize the Divine Spirit of prophecy and healing wherever they are effective. Where that Spirit works, the rich are denounced as in today’s reading from the Letter of James.  Meanwhile, the poorest of the poor are defended in uncompromising terms – as happens at the end of today’s Gospel.

Consider the content of the readings themselves.

In today’s first selection from the Book of Numbers, Moses’ chief of staff, Joshua, is jealous when he hears that Eldad and Medad claimed Moses’ Spirit. They did so even though they had “missed the meeting” where that spirit was conferred. “Tell them to stop!” he demands of Moses.

“What are you talking about?” Moses replies. “They’re on our side. No one can control the gifts of God.  I wish everyone could share my spirit of resistance to oppression.” (That’s what the Spirit of Moses is in the Jewish Testament.)

Evidently, Mark has the Numbers account in mind when, in today’s Gospel reading, he structures a dialog between Jesus and his “beloved disciple,” John. (Only, John doesn’t come out very loveable in this story.) Mark parallels Joshua and John, Moses and Jesus perfectly.

John complains to Jesus that an exorcist who “does not follow us” is casting out demons in Jesus’ name. He wants Jesus to stop the fraud.

(John’s remark itself proves interesting. That is, by Mark’s account, none of Jesus’ inner circle really “follows” Jesus. Actually, they understand almost nothing of what Jesus says. They just don’t get it. They argue about who is the greatest, completely missing Jesus’ point about leadership “from below.” And they even prove themselves unequal to the task of casting out evil spirits.)

Like Joshua, John is jealous of an exclusive position and of powers that don’t really belong to him – certainly not in Jesus’ eyes.

So, like Moses, the Master replies “Let them be,” he says. “Whoever is not against us is with us.”

Other contents of today’s readings clarify the polarities Jesus refers to. According to the selection from the Letter of James the rich are against Jesus; exploited agricultural workers and little children are with him.

As a result, James predicts that the rich will soon be reduced to tears and misery. Their crime: living in the lap of luxury and pleasure while building up personal retirement funds at the expense of the defenseless field workers the landlords have underpaid.

For their crimes, the wealthy will see their gold and silver rot away. It will devour their flesh like a searing fire. They’ll end up wearing moth-eaten rags worse than those of the people they’ve exploited.

In the Gospel reading Jesus has even worse things to say about those who mistreat the absolute lowest of the low in the first-century Mediterranean hierarchy, viz. children.  As scripture scholar, Ched Myers, points out, for Jesus’ contemporaries children were victims of a “circle of contempt” within the family. They were treated as worse than slaves – as absolute non-entities.

Mark has Jesus contradict that culture in shocking terms. In fearfully poetic language he says that those who mistreat children will be treated worse than James’ exploitative rich. Jesus talks about amputated hands and feet and plucked-out eyes. His words cannot contain his rage.

In the end, George Will’s words barely contain his own rage in the face of Pope Francis embodiment of the Spirit Jesus exhibits in today’s gospel. In this the columnist mirrors would-be “followers” of Jesus — churchgoers who understand nothing of what their masters taught them. They are the rich who would have us ignore and despise the cries not only of children in general but of their own grandchildren and of their own Mother Earth.

In the end, it is they who are the over-the-top consumers, distant from the poor, flamboyant, sanctimonious, unscientific, wooly-headed, reactionary, and un-American.

George Will was more correct than he knew when he finished his screed about Pope Francis saying, “Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.”

Yes, we are called to change!

Women Show the Way to Fullness of Life (Not to Heaven)

Readings for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Is. 53:10-11; Ps. 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22; Heb. 4: 14-16; Mk. 10:35-45 http://usccb.org/bible/readings/102112.cfm

Marcus Borg, the great Jesus scholar, talks about his list of the “Ten Worst Contributions of Religion to Human Culture.” Topping that list, he says, is popular Christianity’s belief in the afterlife. When asked about the other nine, Borg says he can’t remember what they are. . . .

Second on my own list (perhaps even first) would be the idea that God has designated men to be rulers of the world and church, while women are to be seen and not heard. Today’s liturgy of the word addresses both of those items in Religion’s Worst Ideas.

Take that first one about heaven and hell. Borg sees belief in the afterlife is so harmful because it has led to a law and rule-based Christianity that centers on “going to heaven” as a reward for “keeping the commandments.” Such quid pro quo thinking, he says, is a complete distortion of Christianity.

Borg reminds us that the afterlife is not at all the focus of Christian belief – nor of Jewish “Old Testament” faith for that matter. In fact, ideas about life after death didn’t surface in Judaism till well after the Babylonian Exile six centuries before the birth of Jesus – probably as a result of contact with the Persians.  And the first unambiguous biblical reference to meaningful survival of the individual after death comes only in the book of Daniel which was written about 150 years before the birth of Jesus. That means that Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and none of the prophets were motivated by desire for heaven or escape from hell. Those ideas were simply not part of their mental landscapes.

Instead, for those tribal people, faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was about land – the Land of Canaan which was celebrated as God’s gift to his favored People. The word “salvation” then meant a Palestine free from occupation by imperialists, be they Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans.

With that in mind, consider today’s readings and their references to “long life,” “fullness of days,” and “greatness” for the “Suffering Servant” who is “crushed” and loses his life on behalf of others. The words are reminiscent of Jesus’ pronouncement that sacrificing one’s life was the way to save it. Conversely, trying to “save one’s life” was the sure way to lose it.

Those are mysterious words. What might they mean: by giving one’s life for others, one actually achieves long life and fullness of days? How can one have long life and fullness of days when he or she is dead? (You can see how that question would lead subsequent generations of Christians to adopt the “afterlife” hopes of Greco-Roman, Persian and Egyptian cultures to answer that question.)

Given Jesus’ centralization of God’s Kingdom, the answer of Jesus (and that of Second Isaiah) seems to have been that self-sacrificial non-violent resistance to all forms of imperial domination provides such a powerful example and inspiring force that the community rises with new energy, life, and fullness of life when the suffering servant is inevitably killed by imperial forces.

For Mark’s community, that had proven true in the case of Jesus; its members experienced Jesus’ presence more intensely and more meaningfully following his execution than before. For us, we can see the same truth illustrated in the cases of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, and Rachel Corrie and Karen Silkwood. After their deaths, and arguably because of their deaths, they exercise more influence on us today than they did while they were alive. That’s the mystery Jesus gestures towards in today’s reading.

What can this mean for us? For one, it calls us to recommit ourselves to non-violent resistance of the anti-kingdom forces among us. That’s our political task as we live out our lives in the belly of empire’s beast here in the United States.

But Jesus’ words about servanthood show us that such resistance should permeate our lives at the domestic every-day level as well. (And here’s where the point about women comes in.)  In both cases, the political and domestic, the kingdom is not brought on by exercising the kind of “power over” that characterizes empire, and that apparently motivates the request of the Sons of Zebedee in this morning’s Gospel. The Zebedee boys have a typically patriarchal approach; they’re asking Jesus to let them exercise “power over” others.  This typically male idea sees force and violence as the solution to most problems.

Instead, the approach of “servanthood”—of putting the needs of others first – is typically feminine. And in Mark’s Gospel from beginning to the end it is women who are referred to in servant language. In the beginning of Mark (1:31), the first act of Peter’s mother in law upon being cured by Jesus is to serve food to her benefactor and his companion. And at the end Mark (15:41) Mary Magdalene along with another Mary and Salome are identified beneath Jesus’ cross as “those who used to follow him and provide for him when he was in Galilee.”

All of that suggests, as scripture scholar Ched Myers has said, that Jesus here is proposing the notion of “servant leadership.” It suggests that the practical content of that concept is typically embodied not in men, but in women.

In fact, I think, it suggests that in a patriarchal system like ours (politically, domestically, and in the church) the only ones fit to exercise leadership are women. Typically, they are the ones who shed light on the meaning of “servant-leader” and of fullness of life. And they do so in ways that those bad ideas of heaven and “power-over” simply cannot.   What do you think?

(Discussion follows)