Year: 2019

That you may know

Know what? Today’s readings make it abundantly clear that there are things which Jesus wants us to know. They are the things that belong to our being known by God, to the being of our life with God and in God. The idea of the ethical, of the Good, informs and shapes our thinking and our doing. This is one of the great insights of the religious and philosophical traditions of the world and something which we do well to reclaim. It is, perhaps, the only real counter to the ways in which we manipulate nature and one another and which are so destructive of human personality, the human community, and our world. And that is where these readings come into play; literally, we might say, they are about death and resurrection in and through forgiveness.

In the reading from Ephesians, Paul speaks directly about what we have learned in Christ that is transformative in terms of our behaviours and actions. “You have not so learned Christ,” he is saying, if you remain “in the vanity of [your] mind,” in “the darkness” of your “understanding,” in “ignorance” of God, in “hardness of heart,” in hedonism, in “all uncleanness with greediness.” Not a bad summary of the compulsions and challenges that all of us confront in ourselves and in our lives. What is wanted is to be “renewed in the spirit of [our] minds.” How? By virtue of “the truth that is in Jesus” and what follows from that, namely, the qualities of Christ alive in us. It means putting off “the old manhood” and putting on “the new manhood” which is nothing less than Christ in us. Paul here provides some very specific situations or conditions of soul that capture us all in the negative,  only to then provide the antidotes to encourage us all in terms of the radical meaning of our life in Christ.

“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice,” he says. Isn’t that only too true? Especially the part about  “all malice,” that dreadful feature of wanting the injury of others? But then, he opens us out to our life in Christ. “Be ye kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” These are not empty platitudes of mere moralizing. The Gospel shows us the radical significance of forgiveness.

Forgiveness. This is what Jesus, above all else, it seems, wants us to know. It is what Paul, too, has grasped. Jesus is the forgiveness of sins without whom we cannot forgive one another. Forgiveness is a divine quality realized in our human lives through the grace of Christ. It is transformative. It is touching and powerfully moving as we see in the Gospel. A paralyzed man is brought by his friends to Jesus. It is as if he were dead, unable to move. They seek the healing of their friend sensing something powerful and divine in Jesus. “And Jesus, seeing their faith,” speaks to the man who is paralyzed. His words are astounding. “Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.” Words of forgiveness. The greatest problems of our humanity are found in our souls.

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“He had answered them well”

An intriguing and difficult Gospel, it signals the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the one who is the fulfillment of the Law, the one in whom the love of God and the love of neighbour is perfectly realized. But that turns on another important point, namely, the idea of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, the anointed one of God. Both are the strong truth claims of the Gospel about Jesus as Lord. It is worth unpacking them a bit in relation to one of the scribes who engages with Jesus respectfully and intelligently, so much so that Jesus will say that “thou art not far from the kingdom of God.”

One of the scribes “having heard them reasoning together” perceives that Jesus “had answered them well.” Who was reasoning together about what and with whom? The “reasoning together” is really a disputation, an examination of matters of contention. Jesus is engaged in a dispute with the Sadducees about marriage and resurrection. The idea of resurrection was a matter of debate within late Judaism. The Sadducees were a group within Israel who, as Mark puts it, “say that there is no resurrection.” They undertake to entrap Jesus about the law regarding “levirate marriage” in the Law of Moses: the idea that the brother of a deceased man is obliged to marry his brother’s widow and raise up children for him. The term “levirate” simply means ‘a husband’s brother.’ The concern, I think, is about a way of providing for the care of the widow and for the continuation of the family line. The Sadducees manufacture a complicated ‘what-if’ scenario of a series of seven brothers who one by one take the first brother’s wife after his death only for each of them to die without a child. The question they put to Jesus is “whose wife will she be in the resurrection since the seven had her as wife?”

At issue is an understanding of the Law and a question about the resurrection. Jesus’ response catches the attention of one of the scribes who has overheard the exchange. Jesus says rather bluntly the Sadducees are wrong because they “neither know the scriptures nor the power of God.” He points out that in heaven they “neither marry nor are given in marriage” so the whole scenario is moot. He reminds them about the burning bush where God says to Moses that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, patriarchs whose lives and deaths are noted in Genesis. His point is that the revelation of God to Moses assumes that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are raised up and are alive. “He is not God of the dead but of the living” Jesus says and, once again, adds “you are quite wrong.”

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