Year: 2015

“It came to pass that as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,
Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret”

“It came to pass.” Something happened. It seems almost like the beginning of a fairy tale ‘long ago and far away,’ or ‘once upon a time,’ as it were. Yet this is no ordinary event but something extraordinary communicated through the quotidian, every day events of human lives. This story speaks wonderfully and directly to the deepest concerns of our contemporary world and day, namely, the sense of nothingness, the meaninglessness of our lives, what is properly called nihilism. The nothingness of life.

“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism,” the American writer Flannery O’Connor observed. It is “the very gas you breath,” whether you are “religious” or “secular” as the publishing venture “Interventions” notes in promoting works aimed at providing an alternative to the nihilisms of our day theologically and philosophically through a thorough-going and “genuinely interdisciplinary” approach. The challenge and the task is about rethinking everything, we might say.

Such an approach might be said to have a kind of Scriptural beginning with this Gospel story along with the Epistle from 1 Peter. We read these anciently appointed readings this year in what is traditionally and anciently known as Petertide, referring to the Feast of St. Peter to which is also added the figure of St. Paul. Both were martyred in Rome albeit at different times and buried originally at different places. Their common commemoration arises from the translation of their remains to a common place of burial during a time of persecution in 258; subsequently, their remains were returned to what is thought to have been their original places of burial.

As Fr. Park reminded us at his 30^th anniversary celebration of his ordination to the Priesthood this week, both Peter and Paul were missionaries and both Peter and Paul spoke to both Jew and Gentile communities alike. There is an intercultural engagement that belongs to the emergence and the development of the Christian Faith. Add to the picture that their joint commemoration has very much to do with Rome, with the way in which, through both, the Gospel of Jesus Christ engages the Graeco-Roman world of law and philosophy, and one begins to see the necessary nature of the interdisciplinary and intercultural aspects of our thinking and believing.

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“And thou, child, shalt be called the Prophet of the Highest”

And yet “more than a prophet,” Jesus himself will say. There are two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Christian Church: The Nativity of Christ, of course, and the feast of The Nativity of St. John the Baptist on June 24^th, a celebration which coincides with the week of the summer solstice and so points us even in the measuring of time to Christ’s holy birth, itself the source and origin of Christian life and faith.

This ‘summer’s’ birth points us to the ‘winter’s’ birth of Christ, whose greater nativity signals all the summer of our lives in the grace of God towards us. In a way, that is the point of John the Baptist. He points not to himself but to Christ. The Nativity of John the Baptist signals the preparations which God makes for his coming into our midst as the Incarnate Lord in the Nativity of Jesus Christ. The summer solstice is just past; the long march to winter, yes, even to Christmas, begins! And yet, it is all about Christ within us.

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“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”

This morning’s reading continue the underlying theme of the Trinity season which is about the relation between knowing and doing, between things intellectual and matters moral. Jesus commands us to “be merciful as your Father also is merciful”. But what happens if and when we turn our backs on the mercy of God revealed in Jesus? What happens if we fail to act upon what we have been given to see in Jesus? “And he spake a parable unto them,” the parable of the blind leading the blind.

I cannot hear this parable without being reminded of Brueghel’s marvelous painting of a troupe of blind beggars all in the process of falling into a ditch, the leader having his cap pulled down over his eyes, not only blind but doubly blind, almost willfully blind. And in the center of the painting there is the image of a church from which we have turned away. It suggests the disconnect between what we are given to know and what we do which goes to the issue of hypocrisy signaled in the Gospel. Such forms of blindness belong to a wisdom that is both ancient and modern.

In Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus thought that he knew who he was and thought that his form of reasoning, that of the being a solver of riddles, of problems, was the only form of knowing. He comes to learn, paradoxically through his reason, that the blind prophet, Teiresias, actually knew the truth of Oedipus even when Oedipus didn’t; in other words, there are other ways of knowing. Oedipus comes to know who he is, namely, the man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. He learns that he didn’t know what he thought he knew. He was blind to the truth about himself. He had eyes but saw not. But Teiresias, who was blind, knew. He had no eyes and yet he saw. Oedipus, in this moment of realizing who he is, puts out his eyes. He is now literally blind and yet now he knows. For the Greeks, he is “the paradigm of fate”. The one who didn’t know who he is provides the example of the importance of knowing yourself and your place in the world. The forms of his blindness, first, the presumption of thinking he knew what he didn’t know and thinking his form of knowing the only form of knowing, and, secondly, his becoming literally blind, are lessons for the culture. At the end of the play, he is no longer king and is led out of the city, no longer its leader, no longer the blind leading the blind.

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