Twenty eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 10:17 – 30

There was a little girl sitting in church on Sunday. When you are little services seem to last forever. She colored in her coloring book. She crawled around under the pew. She tried to take a nap but it didn't work. Finally she tugged on her mother's arm and in a loud whisper, asked, “Are you sure this is the only way to get to heaven?” Today we hear Jesus answer that question.

We've heard this story so often, because Matthew and Luke tell it as well, almost in the same words. And Matthew calls the man “young” and Luke calls him “rich” and as you noticed, Mark just calls him “a man”. And if you are like me, when you hear the story you see a rich young man. And only in Mark do we hear the words, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” There is one more interesting bit. When Jesus talks to his disciples about how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, only in Mark does he address them as “children”. And I think these little differences might be a clue as to how Mark wants us to take the story.

First, in Mark he is just “a man”. If we make him rich or make him young, well, most of us are not rich or young, so it becomes a story about someone else, and we can sort of sit in judgment. And that is even more obvious in the Greek, because the one who runs up to Jesus is referred to as “one”, not “a man. So Mark wants us to identify with this one, he's talking about you and me. Mark makes sure we know that Jesus loved this one. And I think that tells us something as well. This is a good person, someone who not only keeps the commandments that Jesus lists, but probably all the commandments. As you've probably heard, the rabbis and pharisees eventually identified 630 commandments, and to a good Jew, eating pork was not different than adultery; every commandment of God was to be kept. And there were lots of commandments about taking care of widows and orphans, and welcoming strangers into your midst, and treating foreigners like natives before the law. Tithing of course was a commandment. So Jesus is looking at this person, who has been trying since he was a child to keep the commandments out of love for God who gave them to Moses.

But the person's joy is short-lived. Here he figured he had it made. He'd been doing everything right. But Jesus says “You lack one thing; go, sell all you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me”. Now I have to pause and give you a little bible history. You probably remember that Saint Jerome translated the bible into Latin. In those days, the Gospel of Matthew was considered the “real gospel” and Matthew was considered more reliable because after all, he was there, he was an apostle, and Mark and Luke weren't. Modern scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, know now that the Apostle Matthew did not write the gospel, at least what we have today. So Jerome left out some words in his translation of Mark because they weren't in Matthew. Those words were “take up the cross” and follow me. Many modern translations from the original Greek include those words, but others don't. I think Mark meant to include them because Jesus tells us in other passages that we will have to take up the cross.

The person's face fell and he went away because he had many possessions. He could not part with them; Jesus is asking way too much.

Now if you were reading the gospel of Mark in a continuous way, instead of only hearing a little bit on the weekend you would remember than only a few verses ago the apostles were trying to keep children from approaching Jesus, who told them, “let the children come to me” and he added that you had to become like a child to enter the kingdom. Now Jesus calls the apostles children and he points out that people who trust in riches simply cannot enter the kingdom that way.

That is why the apostles are astonished. After all, as everyone knows, if you are rich, it's either because you are dishonest or because God favors you. And God would favor you if you keep all his commandments, right?

But Jesus goes on to say that even if it's impossible for man, with God all things are possible.

And Peter picks up on this. We have left everything to follow you, he says. And Jesus says, “You've got it. The only way to heaven is to follow me, to take up the cross.”

You know, we human beings spend the first halves of our lives getting stuff. Almost everything we do is rooted in that instinct. We get stuff; we work hard to get stuff, most of us try to find someone to spend our lives with; we want children, a car, a house, a flat panel TV set, and stuff leads to more stuff. We may not be rich, but what we have we want to keep. I visit a lot of people who are shut-in's and sometimes you see evidence that they are hoarders. But being a hoarder is just an exaggeration of our instinct for stuff. And stuff gets in the way of a relationship with Jesus. Jesus wants to give us himself, and he will not hold back his gift. Every time we receive His Body and Blood in the Eucharist, we are reminded that he is always offering himself to us. But we can't receive his gift without getting our stuff out of the way. Do we have to sell all we have and give it to the poor? If so, we are all in trouble, even the Franciscans over at Saint Stan's, because they may not technically own anything, but they have stuff – clothing, a bed to sleep in, a computer to use, a television to watch.

The little girl finally went home and got out her dolls and her stuffed animals and a little table and set everything up for a tea party. Then her father walked through the door and held out his hands and she dropped everything and ran over and jumped into his arms, abandoning all her toys. That's what Jesus wanted from the person in the story. And that's what he wants from you and from me. Because that is what makes a little child different from someone who is attached to stuff.

Twenty seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 10:2 - 16

A young couple decided to get married. The future groom went to his father and said, “I know I want to marry her, but my feet smell so bad she won't want to come near me. The father replied, “Just wash them with soap and water twice a day, and keep your socks on when you are in bed. The future bride went to her mother and said, “When I wake up in the morning my breath is so bad; I'm afraid he won't want to be in the same room with me.” The mother replied, “First thing in the morning before you open your mouth go to the bathroom and brush your teeth.” So the young couple got married and everything was going fine until one day the new husband woke up in the middle of the night and noticed he was missing a a sock. His wife woke up and asked “What's wrong, honey?” The husband looked at her with horror and said, “Don't panic, but I think you swallowed my sock.”

Today we hear Jesus echoing that passage in Genesis. I looked at several translations, and it's interesting that in all of them Jesus does not exactly quote Genesis. If you look at the first reading, it says “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and the two then become one flesh.” Here the reason is that God made woman from the body of the man and Adam recognizes that they are part of the same substance. Of course the first couple disobey God by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, and this unity which existed before the fall is ruptured. God asks Adam why he disobeyed, and Adam replies “This woman whom you gave to me, she gave me the fruit, and I ate it” Now there is a wedge between Adam and Eve. She then says, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate it.” Eve drives a wedge between humanity and nature. And the consequences are grave; nature will suffer, women will bear their children in pain, man will have to wrestle with the earth to keep himself alive, and ultimately all will die, death has been introduced into the world. And one consequence can be seen in the Book of Deuteronomy, where Moses decrees “When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out from his house.” The relationship envisioned by God is completely disturbed and ruined. In Jesus' time there was a great debate about divorce; some rabbis thought that any reason was reason enough, while others thought that there had to be a very good reason, like adultery. Jesus, however, calls their attention back to the beginning, but uses slightly different words: “God made them male and female, and for this reason a man shall leave his mother and father and cling to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Now that original sin has entered the world, becoming one flesh is a process, not something that instantly happens.

My wife and I have been married for more than fifty two years. I think we have a happy marriage; she is pretty close to perfect and one quality that I really like is that she has poor taste in men. But we are not really one flesh, not yet. There is still in each of us an essential loneliness, we will never know each other completely, nor will we be known on this side of the grave. Every loving relationship is the same; a mother never completely knows her daughter; two friends never completely fill up that empty space. And children can grow apart from their parents, and friendship can cool down, but married couples cannot easily call it quits; they've made public vows, they have children – and there are two ways married couples deal with this; the first is that they struggle for dominance, they struggle to make the other into the ideal. And when the other doesn't change enough it can lead to mental and physical abuse, or to indifference. Like the young man who approached his father with the news that he was planning to divorce his wife. “Why, son, why?” said the father. “I guess she just doesn't make me happy,” replied the son. The father said, “Don't be a fool son. Your mother and I have been married for 50 years and we've never been happy.”

The other approach is to forgive each other – forgiving him or her for not being the person that completes you, that fills up all your empty space, that completely relieves your loneliness, that is the missing piece of the puzzle. Forgive the other because you are not yet one flesh, but still are in the process of becoming. As Father Ronald Rolheiser said, “We cannot not disappoint the other”. Because of original sin, because of the fact that we are real people with our own egos, our own personalities, our own pattern of sinfulness, and mostly because, as Saint Augustine put it, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O Lord.”

Marriage is an icon of the Trinity, where three persons love so perfectly that they become one. Marriage is an icon of the love between Christ and his Church, where He lays down his life for his Bride, and she joyfully submits to his headship. But marriage is also an icon of all loving relationships between human beings, which are meant to partially and incompletely answer those longings that will not be truly satisfied until we raindrops dissolve into the ocean that is God, as Saint Jane Frances de Chantal said.

And if we forgive, if we accept that we cannot not disappoint the one we love, we can move on from that point with our lover as we both seek to join our souls with Jesus himself.

Jesus ends his discussion by pointing out that unless you become like a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Little children, of course, have nothing of their own and are completely dependent on others just to live. And yet to them everything, however imperfect, is gift. And when we recognize that our loving relationships, especially if we are married, are sheer gifts, we will begin to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 9: 38-43, 45, 47-48

The world was a different place when I was growing up. Republicans and Democrats got along and generally worked together. The place you found conflict was among Christian churches. Of course that was not nearly as bad as it had been in the past where people were put to death, often in extremely unpleasant ways, because they chose to believe differently than the more powerful majority. In the 1940's and early 50's at least in Montana we tolerated each other. But still … we were told that it was a grave sin if you sent your kids to a public school assuming there was a Catholic school nearby. Mixed marriages were frowned upon and my grandmother, who married a Mormon, was married in the Church rectory because you couldn't get married in the church proper. And although my teachers, members of the Sisters of Charity, allowed that it was possible for non Catholics to get to heaven, the -- analogy was that for them, it was like finding their way through a jungle whereas for good Catholics, it was like driving down a superhighway.

Things have gotten better. In much of the world we have learned to tolerate each other. Live and let live, we say. But Jesus has something even more radical to tell us today.

First, a language lesson. Skandalon is a Greek word which originally referred to a stone which you had stumbled over and now cursed. Can you picture it in your mind? Someone who is walking down the road, stumbles, turns around and yells at the stone. Another Greek word we encounter is sin. The Greek word means “to miss the mark” or to not get the point. Finally, Gehenna, which we often think means “hell” refers to a place outside of Jerusalem where people burned their garbage. What you threw in Gehenna was less than useless.

Now we can look at our gospel. John says, “we met a man casting out demons in your name, so we tried to stop him”. Jesus says, “why did you try to stop him? Isn't it a good thing to cast out demons? Isn't that what we are doing?” And then Jesus sits everyone down and says in a very earnest voice, “When you tried to stop him you put an obstacle in front of someone who was doing a good thing, and it would be better to be cast into the sea with a millstone around your neck than to do that to someone. And then Jesus goes on to say, “If your hand causes you to miss the mark, to lose sight of what you are supposed to be doing, to be distracted from what really matters, cut it off. It's better to live maimed than to be tossed into the garbage pit with both hands. And the same with the feet and the eye.

So Jesus has the same thing in mind as Moses in our first reading. Two elders were prophesying and Joshua was alarmed and asked Moses to do something. And Moses wished that all of God's people would have God's spirit.

So what does that mean to us today? We have a lot of people in our world who are trying to change the world for the better. When we watch what is happening with the supreme court nomination we see what should be a thoughtful deliberative process turned into an irrational hate fest and character assassination. And that seems to be the level of political discourse today. And we see the homeless, the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the children living on the streets, and the newspapers tell us that all these groups are getting larger. And though we all know better, there seems to be no solution to the ongoing pollution of our planet, which really means to leave the next generations, our children and grandchildren, impoverished. And of course I could go on, you could go on.

We mean well, and so do the people down the street at Saint Andrews or First Church. All of us Christians want to change the world for the better, that's what Jesus means by entering into life. If we are Christians we want to be like Jesus and do all in our power to make sure all of our brothers and sisters who have a spark of God's life in them, who are made in his image, are healed, have their demons cast out, and are raised from the dead. But we all like to be where we are comfortable. So we do our thing, the Christians at Saint Andrews do their thing, the Christians at First Church do their thing – when maybe what Jesus is saying is that we should be working together to solve the problems he wants us to solve. Oh, there are real differences in the way we worship, in the theology we embrace, and those things are important – but you know, we aren't going to change that until the time the Lord comes again. When I was very young I was told that someday everyone would be Catholic, and all those other people who belonged to other denominations or other religions would see the error of their ways. Maybe so, but not in my lifetime or yours.

John was upset because a few passages ago we heard how Jesus had given the apostles the power to cast out demons. John is upset because being able to cast out demons makes him special, and someone who hasn't got the license, the training, the special power from Jesus just has no business in the field of demon casting.

I believe we Catholics have the truth. Vatican II says that Christ's Church subsists in the Catholic Church. But it goes on to say “...it is possible, according to Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church, on account of the elements of sanctification and truth that are present in them.”

Jesus told his disciples to teach all nations, baptizing them, even to the ends of the earth. Maybe to actually achieve what Jesus wants, to transform the world, requires that we work closely with other Christians, even when we disagree about fundamentals. Jesus wants us to see the absurdity of the man who is walking down a road, stumbles, and turns around and curses the rock he stumbled on, and thus loses sight of his original goal. You and I always have to keep our eye on the road and not the stumbling blocks.

Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 9:30-37

The Reverend Bill Macelvaney was a famous civil rights leader; but he was also the president of the St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, a major Methodist seminary. When the search committee was seeking a president they had narrowed down the list to five persons, and couldn't seem to settle on one. They had a brilliant idea. They sent representatives to the institutions of these five, who were to find out what a random janitor thought about the candidate. In Macelvaney's case, the janitor raved about him, because whenever he would pass him in the hall, he would stop and ask after his family and spend a few moments in conversation. The other janitors questioned only knew of their bosses.

My mother came from a large family – ten kids. Most of them had kids as well, and so I am one of thirty cousins. If you had asked, I think most of us would have identified a favorite uncle, and it would probably be my Uncle Will. In our extended family at various get togethers we would segregate ourselves – the women with the women, the men with the men, and the kids with the kids, usually further divided by age But Uncle Will was the first to notice an unhappy kid, and would always stop to talk to us, even when we were very young. His interest in his nephews and nieces continued right up until he passed away. Of all my uncles and aunts he was the only one who wrote to me when I was in college. With Uncle Will, you knew you were accepted.

I tell these stories because they shed light on today's gospel. First of all, Jesus and his posse are headed for Jerusalem. Jesus has been predicting that he would go to Jerusalem and be put to death and rise again on the third day. Today's gospel takes place after the Transfiguration, so it's possible that at least Peter, James and John who witnessed this, now believe Him. And perhaps that was the subject of their argument about who was greatest. Who would take over if, God forbid, Jesus' prediction came true. If you were to read this same story in Matthew, the disciples ask Jesus who is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven? But here, it's right now. Jesus asks them what they were arguing about and they remain silent. In the gospel of Matthew we have that famous passage that says you have to become like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven. Here, Jesus says :”If a man wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.” Nothing about the kingdom of heaven. And Jesus illustrates this point by taking a child and saying, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives not me, but the one who sent me.”

Why a little child? Our imaginations are always hampered by pictures we've seen. The little child in the pictures is always a boy who looks about ten or so, standing politely in front of Jesus. But we don't know; it could have been a screaming baby or a four year old girl, it doesn't say. Little children, in Jesus' time were seen very differently than they are today. They were loved by their parents, of course; but other than seeing to their necessities, nothing was expected of the littlest ones. When children reached an age where they could learn how to run a household for the girls or pick up a trade for the boys, then people outside the immediate family began to take an interest. This was reflected in the fact that orphans, as they do today in some countries, lived on the streets. The scriptures frequently point out that widows and orphans have a special claim on God's people.

So for Jesus, the little child who had nothing to offer, who was totally dependent on others, represented all of those at the margins, all of those who society saw as a burden. And as he does elsewhere, Jesus identifies himself with these, and makes the claim that if you receive one of these, it's the same as receiving God Himself.

So how does that translate in practical terms? First, a quiz.

Who won best supporting actress in the recent Emmy awards? [Alex Borstein]

Who was the Superbowl MVP in 2016? [Von Miller]

Who is the current secretary general of the United Nations? [Antonio Gutterez}

If you could answer all three without too much effort, give yourself an A.

Now three more questions.

Name your favorite grade school teacher.

Name someone who really influenced your life in a good way.

Name someone you would turn to for advice in making a life-changing decision.

I think most of us could answer those three questions very easily.

The point is that the answers to the first three questions identify people of great accomplishment – but their moments in our memory fade quickly. The ones who really had an impact, the ones we will never forget, are the ones we recalled in the second three questions.

The janitor who knew Reverend MacElvaney will never forget him. I and my cousins will never forget my uncle Will. And the child who Jesus accepted probably always remembered that moment when he was welcomed instead of ignored, by the teacher who attracted crowds and worked miracles.

And to be great in Jesus' eyes is to be a person who will be remembered for making a difference in someone's life.

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 8:27-35

Last Tuesday we remembered 9 – 11, when four jetliners were seized by terrorists who piloted them into the twin towers and the pentagon. It was a terrible day for America, and most of us still can recall the anxiety as we wondered what would happen next. But a good thing came out of this. For a brief moment we had a spirit of unity; we'd forgotten all the petty things that divided us. It didn't last long. Today we seem to be in one of the most divisive periods in our history. And our politicians and publications keep throwing gasoline on the fire. Even in our church, as we hear about the scandals i the clergy and the cover-ups by our bishops, some clergy are calling for the resignation of Pope Francis, who is supposed to be the one who is the very symbol of the unity of the Church.

There is an interesting book I'm reading It's called “In Good Faith – questioning atheism and religion”. The author contends that tribalism is the main source of disunity for humankind, , and the natural tendency for any group of human beings is to define who is Us and who is Them. And the dearest definition of us and them includes us being good and them being bad; as we divide, we also see moral differences. Something becomes an idol that has power over us. And isn't that obvious? The people who oppose President Trump have decided that those who work for him should not be allowed to live normal lives, should be shouted and spit upon in public, should be denied the right to eat among people who hate everything about Trump. And it goes both ways. Our natural state is to be in tribes. In tribes we feel safe, we have peace. But when we are forced to live alongside other tribes, expect trouble. Many of the countries in Europe are ethnically uniform and got along well, developing social policies that increased equality, made health care universal, brought about other good things for the citizens. But introduce a new tribe, Muslim immigrants, and all of a sudden these social democracies are threatened by a rise in the political power of the nationalist anti-immigrant parties.

So what does this have to do with the gospel, you ask, shaking your watch to make sure it is still working. Most of the time when this gospel is written we emphasize that Jesus is disclosing himself for the first time as the Messiah; or we challenge ourselves to answer the question Jesus poses, “Who do you say that I am?” And those are good topics. But I think another area we should pay attention to in this divisive age is the last part of the gospel passage: “whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me, forever who wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will save it.”

Down through the ages people saw that a remedy for tribalism, for Us vs Them mentality, was to create a larger “Us”. We used to pride ourselves on being a “melting pot” where nationalities from all over Europe became Americans. The English language, the idea that anyone could succeed with hard work and determination, all the other elements of so called patriotism made us a larger tribe. Of course. And when you think about it, that's what is going on in China. They are trying to make a stubborn minority of muslims into Chinese by forcible re-education. Us vs. Them becomes Us and Them, and there is peace for a while. My daughter tells me that in Germany all those immigrants that have been admitted have got to learn German and take classes in citizenship if they want to take advantage of the benefits of society; in fact those who don't assimilate are threatened with eventual expulsion. More Us, less them.

But that is where the radical nature of Jesus shines forth. He lived in an Us vs Them society; Pharisees vs. Herodians, Jews vs. Pagans, and among the Jews many more divisions. Saint Paul even took advantage of this when he was on trial before a Roman judge and stated that he believed in the resurrection; his accusers immediately began arguing among themselves, to the point where the judge called off the trial. Jesus in the last statement we hear in this gospel, proposes that his followers be Us for Them. In other words, to follow Jesus means that we consciously step out of tribalism, and through our actions choose to live a life which recognizes the universal brotherhood of human beings. And this is so contrary to our nature that it is possible only with God's help. And yet it can be done. I think a great example was Mother Theresa, who strongly and passionately identifed as a Roman Catholic religious sister, but saw everyone – religion didn't matter for her view, wealth was unimportant, age had nothing to do with it -she was for the unborn just as much as the elderly – she had reached the point where she was living an Us for Them life, and tried to actualize that in the order she founded.

Where are your dividing lines? What are the boundaries of your tribe? Remember, having a tribe is natural, it's in our genes. But Jesus indicates today, and as you well know in many other places, that the goal of the Christian is to overcome this natural instinct – and through God's help, our goal is to become Us for Them people. Is it easy? Of course not. It's a cross, a cross that Jesus recognizes. But if we take it up, we overcome death, and as we become this new people, those around us will say, “See how these Christians love one another!” and they also will want to live this new way. That is how Jesus wants to overcome the world. You and I, God willing and through our cooperation with his grace, will be part of that revolution.

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 7:31 - 37

Most bible scholars think the Gospel of Mark was written about sixty to seventy years after the birth of Jesus. Matthew and Luke came ten to twenty years later. Both Matthew and Luke follow the general outline of Mark, and sixty percent of the gospel of Mark is found in Matthew; its appears that whole sections of Matthew were copied from Mark. For a long time Matthew was the gospel we used most in the liturgical cycle; we hardly heard from Mark.

To me, though, Mark is one of the most interesting writings in the New Testament. People who know Greek say that his style is very unusual. They used to think he might not have known Greek too well, but now it seems as though he deliberately wrote in this way, to give a sense of movement, of haste. Mark also is always having Jesus tell those who observe his miracles not to tell anyone about them, but they do anyway. We still don't know why this is – it doesn't happen in the other gospels – if Jesus doesn't want the news of his miracles to be spread far and wide, and it happens anyway, why does Mark keep emphasizing the so called “Messianic Secret?” Some people think Mark is writing for a community, probably in and around Rome, who are under persecution, and he's reminding them that they know something their persecutors don't.

There are many other things in Mark that are puzzling. The miracle stories are often worth thinking about. Today, we hear a story that is not in the other gospels – and that in itself is interesting. If Matthew and Luke were reading Mark, surely this story would have seemed worth copying down, but Matthew skips over this and the previous miracle story and kind of sums it up with the sentence “Jesus healed many people”. But Mark really elaborates on this one story, so I suspect he wants his readers to think about it and perhaps see something about themselves in the story.

Think for a minute how isolated this man must have been. Not only could he not hear, but he couldn't speak very well either. People who are deaf from birth don't have the feedback necessary to pronounce words well and some never learn to speak. In our day, the deaf can learn a very sophisticated sign language and can communicate well with each other. In those days, though, this man was probably the only one in the village who had the problem and must have had a terrible time communicating more than basic thoughts.

Think about how he must have felt as his fellow villagers brought him to Jesus and asked that Jesus lay his hands upon him. Did the deaf man know what was expected? Probably not – but the point is that he trusted his friends.

Then notice the Jesus does not lay his hands on the man. Instead, he takes him off privately and puts his fingers in the man's ears and groans, saying “Be opened” and then spits on his tongue. Healing miracles in the other gospels most of the time have Jesus simply commanding something to happen. Only in Mark do we find Jesus doing these kinds of miracles, which have overtones of magic about them. Some people think that Jesus did work his miracles like this but later writers left out all these details because they were trying to emphasize His divinity. But I like another theory, which seems more consistent with Mark's point of view. In another part of Mark's gospel he writes that Jesus could not work many miracles because of their lack of faith. For Mark, faith on the part of the person being healed is a very important part of the miracle. So Jesus uses sign language to indicate what he intends to do, and that allows the deaf man to understand and believe.

So where does that leave you and I? I don't know about you, but I think I have a sort of spiritual deafness. My faith tells me that God is always communicating with me, but I don't hear much of it. I'm distracted, I'm selfish, I don't want my orderly life to be shaken up. If I want to hear God, I've got to train myself to listen better. He speaks through the scriptures so I better read them. He speaks through the events in my life, so I need to ask what he is saying. All of this means that I need quiet and freedom from distraction if I'm going to hear God.

I'm also deaf to the people around me. When I ask “how are you”, do I really want to know? If I say “do you need anything,” am I hoping you will not? And that of course is if I ask at all. And yet Jesus told us that if we wanted to be great in the kingdom of heaven we had to serve each other. The only way to get into the habit of service is to find some way to serve on a regular basis, and once we take up a life of service, we will eventually hear the cries of the poor.

The second thing I think the story tells us is that if we want Christ to make us whole, we have to increase our faith. I'm reminded of the man who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” We all have room to increase our faith and part of that requires prayer. The stronger our faith, the more we will be able to accomplish in our mission as Christians to bring about the kingdom of heaven. We associate strong faith with miracles like healing, and of course that seems to be the case. But there are other kinds of miracles – and we think perhaps of Mother Angelica who founded EWTN depending all the while on God and God alone. We think of so many other remarkable things the saints did, and we realize that like the deaf man, God will multiply our weak human efforts if we have strong faith.

And perhaps the third thing is that in this story Jesus is there, not like some genie in a bottle granting a wish, but being very human, touching, groaning, giving his all to make us whole. And that, of course, is the whole point of the Eucharist, which is the ultimate sacrifice on Calvary played out in sacramental form.

So Mark is writing to persecuted Christians. He is telling them through this story that Jesus is there in the midst of their struggles, and this is no time to give up. Because he will open our ears and give us the words we need to say, and ultimately make us whole if we but trust him, if we let him do so.

Twenty - second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When I was growing up in Montana, we used to observe “Ember Days” which came around four times a year. The name came from from the Latin term Quator tempora, which means “four times”. Each set of Ember Days consisted of a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, in memory of the betrayal of Judas, the crucifixion of our Lord, and his time in the grave. You were supposed to fast on those days, which meant eating only three meals, and refraining from meat except for one meal on Wednesday and Saturday. You couldn't eat meat on Friday anyway. The winter set was in thanksgiving for the olive harvest, which provided the oils we use in our sacraments. The spring set was in thanksgiving for the flowers, which fed the bees who produced wax for our candles. The summer set celebrated the wheat harvest, which provides the raw material for the bread which becomes Christ's body. The fall set celebrated the grape harvest which provided the material that becomes His precious blood. Catholics began celebrating the ember days before the third century. In the tenth century Pope Gregory VI ordered that they be celebrated throughout the whole church.

But today, if you wanted to know when the ember days were, only the Farmer's Almanac keeps track. You don't find them mentioned in our missalettes or catholic calendars.

What happened? During Vatican II, the church fathers ordered that the Church review its traditions and see whether they were serving the purpose for which they had been instituted. The ember days clearly were not, since no one was observing them anymore, and no one remembered why we observed them. So this age old tradition, older than the Tridentine Mass, was eliminated as a universal practice in the Church.

Our readings this Sunday should be looked at together. We have Moses telling the Israelites, including Jesus, not to add or subtract a single thing to the commandments God that he put before them. One of the reasons to keep the commandments was to show the world the way a great and just nation behaves, a nation that is so close to God that God listens to them? Now although Moses received ten commandments on Mount Sinai, there are many more commandments attributed to Moses in the first five books of the bible. In fact Deuteronomy has several, including one which says that if you come across a bird nesting on her eggs or chicks, you can take the eggs and chicks, but not the mother; and if you do this things will go well and you will have a long life. The rabbis ultimately found 630 separate commandments, and of course the most Orthodox Jews try to keep them all, for no other reason than their belief that they came from God.

So then we get to James, who tells us that the essence of religion is to care for widows and orphans, and keep yourself pure and unstained by the world. So much for 630 commandments. And Jesus, of course, condemns the pharisees for pointing out that Jesus' disciples ate without washing their hands. Some of my grandchildren would be in big trouble.

Like the tradition of the ember days, the traditions the Pharisees were so adamant about, all the purity laws, for example, had lost their original meaning. The ritual washings, the detailed way to keep the sabbath holy, the dietary laws, the laws governing clothing – keeping these laws had become the essence of being Jewish, and you could measure how holy someone was by how well he kept the laws. Saint Paul even bragged about how diligent he had been when he was a Pharisee. But Jesus might have said to the pharisees, “why did Moses give you these laws?” And they would have to answer, “so that through them we would give evidence of our wisdom and intelligence and justice – and closeness to our God? Clearly the traditions of Moses weren't doing that anymore, if they ever did. The laws had become a way to keep the Israelites from interacting with the world; to the extent that you kept them, you became more and more isolated from the people for whom you were to be an example, the people who should have been so impressed that they too would want to follow that God of the Israelites.

Jesus is not against tradition, nor should we be. Jesus himself even uses a traditional mode of argument – to quote a prophet. That would not have been helpful if he had been arguing with Pagans. Jesus in fact, according to John celebrated the Passover with his apostles, and probably the other feasts of the Jewish people. But here he tells us how to look at traditions.

First, where did the tradition come from? Many of the laws attributed to Moses were no longer followed in Jesus' time. If you executed your son for talking back to you, the Romans didn't look kindly on that. If you stoned a blasphemer to death, best do it as part of a crowd, since it was against Roman law, but they couldn't pick one person to blame if a whole crowd was involved. And if your brother died you might not marry his widow so you could raise up children who would be legally those of your brother – again, because in addition to being impractical, monogamy had become the norm in Judaism as well as most of the Roman world. God may have given the laws to Moses, but they had to do with a particular time and place, and were never intended to be forever and ever.

Second, tradition means “handing down”. If the tradition no longer carries the message from generation to generation, it no longer has a purpose. That's the ember days. They were a good idea back when most people lived on farms and most people practiced Catholicism, but for a world wide religion a tradition rooted in western European agriculture didn't mean anything anymore.

Finally, even if traditions are harmless, if they aren't moving their practitioners to the kind of religion James talks about – a religion in which charity toward the poor and abandoned is foremost, and striving in our own lives to overcome our faults and failings and become more like Jesus, then maybe we need to find something else to do with our time, or at least remember how the tradition helps us in these areas. Jesus wants us to look carefully at our traditions – are they helping us or standing in the way of our spiritual journey?