An Unclean Spirit, Part 2

Rejection of Jesus was not unusual in his day, as the gospel of Mark reminds us,  and it’s not unusual today. Today, however, it’s influenced by some different factors.

For example, our western world resists the idea of Jesus as a unique Savior and Teacher. We live in a pluralistic society, and so when we say Jesus is a unique Savior and Teacher, we seem to deny the truth in other religions and religious teachers.

What about the Dalai Lama? What about Buddhism, Hinduism, the religion of native Americans? Don’t they teach the truth? When you claim that Jesus is unique, you seem to deny there’s truth in other religions and religious teachers.

In answer to that, we can say that we believe there is a human search for God that has been going on from the beginning of the human race. The human spirit is always searching for God and its search has been blessed by wisdom and spiritual insight. Other religions have been blessed with truth.

But the uniqueness of Jesus comes from the fact that God approaches us.  He sends us his Son. Jesus is his Word to us. His revelation is something we couldn’t arrive at on our own. We didn’t earn it. “This is my beloved Son, hear him,” God says from the heavens as Jesus is baptized. God takes the initiative and calls us into friendship with him, eternal friendship. It’s a promise beyond what we could dream of.

And Jesus not only promises new life, but he takes away what hinders us from enjoying a life with God. He takes away sin.

There are other factors today for people rejecting Jesus, particularly in our western world.  Many  fear that following him will cause them to lose their own personalities and dreams. He’ll take over our lives and impose on us a mold of his own.  We don’t like losing our individuality–not at all.

There’s a fear too that a code of morality will be imposed on us that will deaden our lives and make us scared to love and to live. For many Christianity appears to be a religion of cold moralism,  but it isn’t.

In the synagogue of Capernaum, Jesus drove out the unclean spirit from the man.”Quiet! Come out of him!”
The unclean spirit convulsed him and with a loud cry came out of him.

He has to drive out our demons too.

An Unclean Spirit

Our gospel reading this Sunday is from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark.  Jesus  has come from his baptism in the River Jordan; he’s gathered disciples and now he’s living at Peter’s house in Capernaum along the Sea of Galilee.He enters the synagogue in the town and amazes people with his teaching. They’ve never heard anyone like him.

But a man in the synagogue who has an unclean spirit challenges him.  I’m not sure what an unclean spirit is. Certainly the man reacts violently to Jesus. Listen to him shouting out:
“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

In other words: “Keep away from us; you’re only going to bring us trouble.” The man just wants to be left alone. Even if Jesus is from God, the man just wants to be left alone. “Get away from us!” he says.

That strong reaction was not limited to the synagogue in Capernaum. It continued as Jesus made his way to Jerusalem. Mark’s gospel insists that others rejected Jesus, sometimes strongly, sometimes by simply ignoring him, and he calls their rejection diabolic.

However wise his teaching, compassionate his healing, loving his words, some rejected Jesus in his lifetime. In the end, his enemies killed him.

We believe the gospel repeats itself, and so it’s repeated today as we relive and experience it.  “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Can we reject Jesus too?

Doesn’t he stand in our synagogue today, in signs and in faith?

Belief in Jesus Christ is at the heart of everything. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty…I believe in Jesus Christ…I believe in the Holy Spirit.” Believing means hearing Jesus, listening to him, offering ourselves to him, entering into friendship with him, hoping in his strength, waiting patiently to receive what he promises.

Belief is not something we do once; we believe day by day. We’re always dangerously close to losing sight of Jesus. “Leave us alone,” we say, “You want to destroy us.” How easily we prefer isolation to communion with the One God has sent.
Perhaps an unclean spirit is not rare at all. If it’s a spirit that’s cloudy and dark then, when it takes hold of you, you cannot see the Light at all.

Deliver us, Lord, from an unclean spirit.

Jews and Christians

“We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works. We should not stay away from our assembly, as is the custom of some, but encourage one another, and this all the more as you see the day drawing near.” Hebrews 10,24-25

That was in our first reading at Mass yesterday. I think about it today because in bad times like ours, people not only come together but split apart. The letter to the Hebrews seems to be addressing people splitting apart.

Reading Martin Goodman’s “Rome and Jerusalem” makes me more aware of possible reasons for the split between Christians and Jews in the latter part of the 1st century.

Before the Jewish wars that began in 65 AD and ended with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Jews enjoyed a rather good relationship with  Rome. Jews did not have to pay a yearly tax for the upkeep of Rome’s religious institutions; they supported the Jerusalem temple instead. The Romans were tolerant of Judaism, though bemused by their strongly held rituals, especially circumcision. Jews had some powerful friends at the Roman court. For the most part, the Romans left them alone.

The Jewish revolt changed the relationship. Jews were forced to pay the Roman tax supporting religion, they were suspected as possible revolutionaries and they lost much of their influence with the Roman government.

Did this cause Christians to distance themselves from their Jewish roots, to become more Roman?

Did it cause some Jewish Christians to back away from Christianity because of their loyalty to their Jewish tradition?

The latter part of the 1st century for both Christians and Jews was a time of alienation, rather than open persecution. They weren’t sure where they stood. That’s probably how we feel today, alienated, unsure, fearful of what is happening, and not understanding much as our world shifts.

So the reading quoted above may be appropriate for today as well as for then. I think so.

The Last Templar

For a while now, I hoped that someone would critique TV programs that touch on religious history, but that may not happen. They’re usually too boring to stay with.

I watched The Last Templar on NBC the last two nights.  Just about got through the first night and fell asleep halfway through the second.

The DaVinci Code revisited. Conspiracy theories sell, with a little sex, violence and archeology thrown in, I guess.

Too bad, because religious stories have material you would love to see some good screenwriter explore. They’re human to the core.

Take Peter the Apostle, for example.  He left home–wife, mother-in-law, kids, a fishing business–to follow Jesus.  Did he just pack his bags and walk away?

He was not well-educated, probably spoke Greek or Latin badly, if at all. How did he get to Rome and communicate with people so different from himself ?

How did he get along with the Jews there? Paul had a hard time in some synagogues he visited. Did he get along with Paul?

Where did he live?  One tradition says he lived with a Roman senator in his spacious house on the Esquiline Hill.  Some change from Capernaum.

What was it like to get caught up in Nero’s dragnet for suspects after the fire that burned down most of the city in 64 AD?

But maybe we shouldn’t blame screenwriters for shallow religious dramas, maybe we should take a look at ourselves. Do we depend too much on learned scriptural commentaries and careful scholarly theologians and not enough on our own imaginations?  Not that we should neglect them, but don’t we have access to our religious history too? Why not let our minds roam over our religious stories.

Maybe we need a revival of ordinary meditation?

God’s Greatest Gift

God’s gifts cannot be numbered, St. Basil says in the reading for today. The blessings God gives us cannot be named or understood. They are more numerous than everything  in this world of ours.

Yet, one blessing stands out  to be kept in mind: God’s mercy.
Mercy is God’s surprising gift, a gift that lifts us up from failure. God never abandons us, even when we fail him and persist in our failure. His mercy is beyond our expectations.
The cross is a sign of God’s mercy, for it brings us to life. “Nor was God content  merely to summon us back from death to life;, he also bestows on us the dignity of his own divine nature and prepares for us a place of joy that surpasses all human imagination.”
Yet, the saint confesses, he easily forgets this unforgettable gift. He’s overcome by trivialities.
How can we prevent being overcome by trivialities?

Bread and Wine

When you read anything from St. Irenaeus, especially his Adversus Haereses, it’s good to be aware of  views he is reacting against. Irenaeus opposed the gnostics of the 2nd and 3rd century.

Some scholars today want us to think the ancient gnostics were broadminded, creative people–rather like themselves– who thought more progessively than the plodding, conservative people of the “great church”– as Irenaeus called it.

In fact,  the gnostics made the world smaller than it is. They did so by making much of the world evil; only a portion of life meant anything at all. Forget about the rest of it.

All creation is God’s, Irenaeus replied. “With God, there is nothing without purpose, nothing without its meaning or reason.” Embrace it all.

He used the Eucharist as a sign of this. The bread and the wine we offer represent  all creation. When we offer them to God, we thank him for all there is and embrace it in love as he does.

These are no small gifts, though they seem so small. This is not common bread, it is not common wine. These signs encompass all.

Through Jesus Christ, who became our high priest by becoming incarnate and therefore part of all creation, we offer these gifts to their Creator. Jesus takes them in his hands, he makes them his own,  to offer them to his Father and our Father.

You can see this  belief represented in the prayers and rites of our Mass. They helped  Ireneaus think about faith and about life. They can help us too. We live in a big world; we shouldn’t forget it, we should embrace it.

Who are Priests?

“When we speak of Christ’s priesthood, what else do we mean than his incarnation?”

Fugentius of Ruspe, a learned bishop from 5th century Africa, touches on a truth we easily forget. Christ is a priest because he became flesh and part of creation, which he then represents before the Creator.

He does not represent creation from a distance, untouched by it, or partially, hesitantly, protected,  but he became fully one with it, emptying himself and taking the form of a slave. “He humbled himself even accepting death.”

Being a priest, therefore, is not to become a person apart, but someone incarnate. That’s true for all those baptized into Christ and share in his priesthood, as well as those ordained for a ministry in the church.

“The living, the living give you thanks, as I do today.”

Coming Together

The inauguration of our new president the other day brought people together in an unusual communion. Something good happened, I think.

I noticed in a letter of St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians his insistence on that same thing: People have to keep together.”Try to gather together more frequently to give thanks to God and to praise him.” Satan’s powers are undermined and peace is promoted when you do this, the saint says.

The division Ignatius was trying to counter came, at least in part, because the church in his day–early in the 2nd century– faced a vacuum caused by the death of the apostles. The great figures who unified the church were gone, and new figures were emerging, some of them divisive.

New leaders were needed, true. New institutions had to be created. But just as important, people had to come together.

In crucial times, that’s what we all have to do.

“I have a dream”

Some commentators on television yesterday were asking where President-elect Obama got his oratorical gifts. Spike Lee said he got it  from listening to black preachers, like Doctor Martin Luther King.

Probably true. He’s  listened to some good preachers in his lifetime, as so many other great political orators have. It’s a connection you don’t hear much about, but the preached word can finds its way into many places, into political speeches and political discourse, even into ordinary human conversations and people’s private thoughts.

An article in the New York Times today indicates that Barack Obama reads widely from classics like the Bible, Shakespeare, St. Augustine and from modern poets and novelists as well. He obviously appreciates the power of words.

Today we honor Doctor Martin Luther King, who also knew the power of words. A new book “King’s Dream”  reviewed in The Times yesterday analyzes his famous “I have a dream” speech which he gave at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963.

The “I have a dream” part of the speech was extemporized. It repeated a theme that ran through many of his sermons before, but was not in his written text that day.

Yet today it’s what most people remember  and the words are etched into our national consciousness. King’s  wife Coretta thought it ” flowed from higher places.”

Sermons, homelies, words. They’re so important. At their best, they make the Word known and call for his kingdom to come.

Barack Obama’s  inaugural address tomorrow will be the nearest thing we have in politics to a sermon.

Believe God Speaks

2nd Sunday B
We may think our relationship to God is a personal affair, not too dependent on anybody else except ourselves, but the scriptures today are a reminder that it’s not so. Others often lead us to God. In our gospel reading, see how John the Baptist points Jesus out to some of his disciples, and Andrew brings his brother, Simon, to him. More than we know, we’re often led to God by others.

Instead of a lonely journey, we know God together. Another way of saying it is that we belong to one body, a church. So much of our knowledge of God comes from others and, in fact, the lonely believer is an impoverished believer.

In today’s first reading, the young Samuel hears God calling in the night in the temple but doesn’t know how to answer or what’s happening. The old priest Eli doesn’t help him much at first. He tells the young man there is no one calling, go back to sleep.

Finally, the old man recognizes that God is calling the young man. This is not the first time someone from an older generation doesn’t understand someone younger. Then, the old priest gives the right advice: “Go to sleep, and if you are called say ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’”

It’s wise advice. Believe God speaks. Listen humbly as a servant, without letting your own ideas intrude. Become a listener and hear what God wishes to say.