We are approaching Advent and the beginning of the new liturgical year, so there is a deliberate theme of endings to the readings now, and Jesus is clearly marking the end of His teaching ministry as well, here in the temple of Jerusalem, the place built for God the Father and the Old Covenant. As he concludes his teaching in the Temple, Jesus sits down opposite the treasury — the thirteen large trumpet-shaped receptacles in the Court of the Women, nine for the receipt of what was due (payment for wood, incense, pigeons and so on), four for voluntary donations. When he is recorded as sitting down it is usually either to teach or to pass judgment (often the same thing). Watching rich people putting in their contributions, he draws the disciples’ attention to the woman whose mourning dress presumably reveals her status: ‘Truly I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury, for they all contributed out of their abundance but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living’ (12:43-44). Thus far, so much we know. We are familiar with the ‘Widows Mite’ as it has come to be known and we have maybe heard people saying that she is some kind of example of generosity.The question is: Was Jesus commending the widow and recommending his followers to imitate her generosity — or was he passing judgment on the Temple, for its power to exploit her innocence?In his judgment the Temple was certainly doomed. The entire structure of religion had fallen prey to thievery and malice and the physical structure is soon to fall as well. As Jesus leaves for the last time, a disciple cries out: ‘Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!’ — to which he angrily replies: ‘Are you looking at these grand buildings? There will not be left one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down’ (13:1-2). Then, seated again, ‘on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple’, this time clearly in the judgment seat, Jesus delivers the lengthy address to the inner circle of the disciples, telling them about the signs of the coming end of the world, which leads, as St Mark tells us the story, into the Passion and the symbolic destruction of the Holy of Holies (chapters 14-16).In donating her ‘whole living’ to the Temple, the widow is often seen as summing up the story so far and foreshadowing what is to come. Her act of total self-impoverishment is taken as both exemplifying the kind of radical abandonment to God that Jesus calls for, and also anticipating, figuratively, his own coming self-sacrifice. The widow’s mite was equal to about one sixty-fourth of a day’s wage for a poorly paid labourer. She gives her little, which is her all. And, since it is all she has, its value in Jesus’s eyes infinitely exceeds what the affluent worshippers put into the treasury.That’s one way of taking the episode. It focuses on the figure of the widow. What about the Temple and its holy men, however? Remembering the context, is the poor widow to be seen as heroically and even absurdly generous — or is she, rather, the ultimate innocent victim of a predatory system? Jesus concludes his teaching in the Temple by proclaiming that the scribes would ‘receive the greater condemnation’ — not only on account of their jockeying for privileges and faking lengthy devotions, but also because they ‘devour widows’ houses’ (12:40). They are condemned precisely for exploiting widows financially? Are we really to assume that Jesus could go on immediately to praise the poor widow for rendering herself destitute in order to help to fund these corrupt men and this doomed institution? By placing himself opposite the treasury as he leaves for the last time doesn’t Jesus focus on the Temple, not as the holy of holies, the sanctuary for the divine presence, partly indeed dependent on the charity of the worshippers, but solely as the great financial enterprise, which it also was, the principal industry in the city, and as prone to corruption as even great religious institutions have always been? Like Ezekiel or Amos isn’t Jesus raging against an institution that was so corrupt that, instead of protecting the most vulnerable, like the widow, it could deceive the likes of the widow into voluntarily supporting the very system that devoured their living?In short: doesn’t the power of the Temple have to be broken? ‘When he gave a loud cry and breathed his last’, in the end, ‘the curtain of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom’ (15:37-38). Forty years would pass before it was actually razed to the ground but judgment had already been passed on the Temple. One lesson for us, alas, is that there are institutions in our own day which repeat this same pattern of deceiving innocent and generous people into willingly supporting them — long after the pretentions of such organizations should have been torn in two.
Today we are blessed to have Joan Marston preaching at the two morning masses. Joan is a lay Canon of Bloemfontein and Blackburn cathedrals and is a very welcome guest in the Parish for a few days. These are a few thoughts that I also have about the Gospel today.We are reaching the end of the liturgical year, and the end of the narrative of the ministry of Jesus, which this year we have been hearing from the Gospel of Mark. As the Jewish and Roman authorities also realise that the ministry is coming to an end by Jesus’s getting closer to Jerusalem, it is not surprising that they want to know what is the basis of Jesus’s authority. After all, in cleansing the Temple he had challenged the symbol of their authority. Jesus, like Jeremiah before him, had attacked the way God’s law had been carried out by the Jewish priests–with sacrifices and holocausts in the Temple–but ignored in the way that so many of God’s people were treated with disdain and injustice. The temple, instead of being a place of prayer for all nations, had grown inward-looking, excluding the Gentiles. These religious authorities suffered from what we might call today a polarised mind, which the Liberation Theologians in more recent times also tried to call out.In the Gospel today, the latest person in a line of people trying to catch Him out speaks, and it is the turn of a scribe to address Jesus. No doubt we have already pigeon-holed him and expect him to pose an aggressive question to Jesus. But, no, the scribe is fair and open-minded. He has listened to Jesus’ wise replies to the other leaders and seems genuinely interested in wanting to know how Jesus would answer what had become a familiar question among lawyers. With 365 prohibitions and 248 positive commands in the Torah, was there a basic principle behind all this detailed legislation which could interpret it well? So he asks, “Which is the first of all the commandments?’”Jesus answers by quoting the Shema which we read in the first reading from Deuteronomy. “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” Love of God comes first but it is not enough. No doubt aware of our human tendency to polarise, to separate the divine from the human, the earthly from the heavenly, Jesus quickly adds another command taken from Leviticus 19. “You must love your neighbour as yourself.” These two together are the key to true interpretation. These two commandments existed separately in Judaism. It is apt that Jesus, who unites both the human and the divine in himself, should bring the two together.But Jesus (and I hope we also) do not expect theory without practice. Throughout his ministry he has shown what the love of God means, and as he goes to Gethsemane and Calvary he will show what the love God and doing his will means. He will accept the cup which the Father gives him. But that sacrifice is also an expression of his love for neighbour for he gives his life “as a ransom for many.” The Incarnational Son shows in practice what it means to love God and neighbour at the same time.So how is Jesus’ teaching received? The scribe does not immediately debate aggressively with Jesus as so many of the other religious leaders had done. He can acknowledge the truth in what Jesus says and recognise that the one universal God they worship has no place for exclusion and separation. And he also picks up the prophetic criticism Jesus had made of the Temple which did not recognise that loving God with all one’s strength and one’s neighbour as oneself is far more important than holocaust and sacrifice.The detailed legislation of the Torah has been replaced by Jesus’ double command to love. And in the same way the Temple has been rendered ineffective and replaced by the new temple with Jesus as its corner stone. The Church now becomes the place where Christians are called to put into practice Jesus’ double commandment to love.The Church today is always in danger of being riven by polarising tendencies where groups are fixated on one idea and will not give room or listen to others’ views. We need to see how Jesus brings together rather than separates; makes love of neighbour closely linked to love of God. And then, we can admire, too, the scribe of today’s Gospel. He was not imprisoned with his own rigid views but was willing to listen carefully to and approve what Jesus said. Even a scribe could change and enter the Kingdom of heaven. What Jesus said to us of the Good Samaritan could also be said of the sympathetic scribe: “Go and do likewise.”
The Gospel today is pretty shocking, and typical of the grammatical style of Mark. The events and teachings recorded by Mark are meant to frighten us. True, the Gospels are Good News, and comfort; but nothing in them is meant to make us complacent. If there is a danger of that, we should work hard to let them make us uncomfortable, and so discover the ways in which they truly comfort us – remembering that, originally, “to comfort” meant “to strengthen” rather than “to soothe”.Jesus leaves Jericho with his disciples and a crowd. These people have seen his miracles; no doubt some of them have personally benefited from his healing power. They have been delighted by what they have seen, and they want more. After fifteen miles or so, they are going to call out for wonders: “Hoshianna!” – “Please bring salvation!” – “Reveal your victory!” But before they have even gone one mile, they are faced with the possibility of a striking miracle: Bartimaeus wants Jesus to restore his sight. Whereupon a lot of these people who want more miracles, try to prevent a miracle! By some perverse instinct, they tell Bartimaeus to shut up. Do they begrudge Jesus’ generosity? Do they have their own plan for what the day is to bring, so that they are unwilling to let a small miracle delay the uphill journey to Jerusalem where a great victory is imminent?This Gospel reading is about a beggar who was blind being instantly healed and he overturns the expectations of the crowd of king makers following – or maybe attempting to guide - Jesus. It was enough to lift him out of such total destitution as we can hardly imagine today. And Bartimaeus uses his healing to make a decision – to follow Jesus on His way to the cross, standing apart from the crowd around him. Bartimaeus hears the crowd passing by and is told that Jesus is at the centre of it, and his desperation made him bold, demanding, imaginative. He shouts aloud, so rudely that people try to hush him as we heard – although the crowd shouting for miracles are allowed to call out as they wish, but there is often one rule for the righteous is there not. He is also saying something — ‘Son of David!’ This might have been dangerous. It was almost like saying, ‘Your Majesty!’ Jesus was to die at the hands of the Romans for even allowing thinking and talking like this. ‘King of the Jews’ was hung accusingly and contemptuously as his title when he was executed. The fact that the crowd are about to say the same seems of no point to them – they want to be the Kingmakers and maybe sit at each side of the new King when He overthrows the Romans, not this blind man. So they tell him to shut up.What is the significance of blindness, and Christ’s healing of it, in today’s Gospel. Clearly, there would be plenty to say about the particular miracle and its context, but the words of Our Lord spoken as he restores Bartimaeus’ sight suggest that this episode can be understood also as a image of his work of salvation. He does not say, ‘your faith has given you your sight,’ or something like that, but rather, ‘your faith has saved you.’Blindness is not simply the inability to see. We do not say that rocks, or plants, are blind, although clearly they do not have a sense of sight. Rather, it is the lack of a sense of sight in the kind of being that, ordinarily, might be able to see. When Christ gives Bartimaeus his sight, he doesn’t endow him with a unique superpower, but restores to him something which belongs to his life as a human being. Similarly, to speak of our salvation in Christ is to say something about the restoration, not the unnatural enhancement, of our humanity: we were made in God’s image and likeness, made for friendship with him, and in saving us, Christ is restoring to us the possibility of enjoying that friendship.For Bartimaeus, the restoration of his sight is a clear and urgent desire. He is able to come to the healing, the salvation, which Christ tells him his faith has wrought because he had a desire which, through faith, he believed Jesus could fulfil. Likewise, if we do not recognise that there is something we lack, if we do not desire for the wounds of sin to be healed, then we will not be able to recognise in Jesus the saviour in whom to place our trust, for the notion of salvation will be meaningless.Bartimaeus saw the need to follow Jesus to Jerusalem, where Jesus was to bring salvation and reveal – indeed, enact – God’s victory over hatred and cruelty, over Satan and death. As we move from hearing the Gospel reading to celebrating the Holy Eucharist, we are called to “follow Jesus to Jerusalem” and witness his Sacrifice. The Consecration of the Eucharist brings home to us Jesus’ giving of his Body and Blood on the Cross, and charges us to imitate what we celebrate, to live sacrificially. We are asked to see what Bartimaeus saw, the need to enter into Jesus’ Sacrifice. And we who are nourished by his Body and Blood may be filled with the Holy Spirit, who can push, or prompt, or – most often – gently accompany us on The Way, even when people tell us to shut up. Indeed, maybe mostly then.
Adam sounds just like a teenager when God introduces him to Eve:This is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh. ‘We were made for each other! We’re a perfect match.’It’s the experience of falling head over heels in love, no thought of difficulties to come, of the many compromises that have to be made if a relationship is to survive, and rightly so, love is, we hope, blind – although now that everyone under the age of 30 seems to have identical clothes, teeth and plastic surgery be they men or women, presumably there are other indicative factors that people look for in each other! But love is the theme of the readings today, especially it seems the first and second.But then Mark’s gospel brings things down to earth with its talk of divorce. It touches on the pain of falling out of love, on the sense of betrayal and deception — often self-deception as much as being deceived by one’s partner — that sometimes follows in the years when that initial excitement dies away and the love that was promised is no longer alive and the blind love that attracted two sets of shiny new teeth and Botoxed lips in the first place seems to turn to thoughts of law courts, writs and divorce papers. As it was in the beginning, so it is now. Legalism takes over love.Most people are turned off by legalism. Laws, rules, and regulations can bog us down. They can curtail our freedom. There are times when we want to do something, and can’t see any wrong in doing it, but we are told that it is against a regulation, a rule, or a law. It is attractive to think that we can do away with a lot of laws and legalism.If we use our imagination, however, it is difficult to see how a society or organisation could work without any rules. People would drive along whatever side of the motorway took their fancy. There would be no such thing as property, and so there would be no such thing as theft — you could simply take what you liked. You may have a personal moral code to live by, but you would have no recourse against someone who lived by a different code. Too much law, however, is stifling. We are then often not allowed our rights, and we can even be stopped from fulfilling our obligations. The spirit of the law should encourage us to claim our rights and fulfil our duties, but too many rules, or the wrong rules, can have the opposite effect and so it is in the church, our rules, our laws have to come from Christ or they are vanities, and they have therefore to be rooted in love and the ability of all people to flourish in love of God and therefore each other.When God created man, as we are given to understand in the book of Genesis, he saw that it was not good for him to be alone. (Gen. 2:18) And so he created woman. In that brief account, at the very beginning of the Bible, of an essential part of God’s creation we learn of God’s wisdom, compassion and love in forming the first ‘marriage’. The continuation of the human race exists thanks to God’s willingness to allow men and women to play a vital role in the continuation of his creative process, giving them a prime function in sharing God’s re-creative power – so it is undoubtedly that the human race, God’s people – have been born and continued. This is no sensitive subject, but divinely appointed procreative biology, but it is not all the story, as we are reminded by Christ himself on numerous occasions.Perhaps no issue has been greeted as being so sensitive to Christian faith, as the issue of how the Church deals with all these issues in the 21st century. We are indeed conscious of the diversity of views held in conscience by so many followers of Christ; and equally conscious of the anguish and pain that can be caused by a perceived reluctance on the part of the Church, to put into practice the compassion and forgiveness that is shown by Christ himself.Hebrews takes a very different tack. Its focus is on Jesus as the source of our happiness, the goal of our search for the fullness of life. In Him is our eternal bliss that transcends our mortal nature. Christ is the high priest, whose violent death in a fallen world is a perfect sacrifice of loving obedience to the Father. What all the previous sacrifices of Israel had gestured towards, now find their fulfilment in Him. Only through His Passion, and the grace which flows from the Risen Christ, may we now find forgiveness of sin and be made holy by a share in Christ’s glory. So, the family is transcended in the greater ‘family’ of ‘brothers’, men and women who in Christ are the adopted heirs of His Heavenly Father.You should be able to tell Christians by their realism and by their founded belief that God is greater than any uncertainties or questions that we may have. It is fashionable to say that we are all sinners. True enough, but this is only part of the truth. We are also repentant sinners, and we seek the grace of deeper conversion during the whole of our lives, however we live, whoever we are, we are all in need of forgiveness, grace and love, and the readings today call us clearly to show that to each other, more perfectly modelling the Body to which we belong, as it has been, as it is and as it shall be in the future. Love is His command, and love is why He died and rose again to share His body with us.Adam sounded like a teenager, but we are heirs of a new covenant and our voice is a different one, honed by his experience and brought into the light by the Son of God, who we are called to imitate.
