February 2, 2021
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B) on January 31, 2021, at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 95; 1 Corinthians 7:32-35; and Mark 1:21-28.
This is the 9th anniversary of my public ministry, which means that this is the first set of Sunday readings which I’m approaching for the 4th time. The other times, I’ve been able to dodge our second reading.1 It is a startling passage, and it is not closely related to the gospel passage on which I’ll be preaching.
So here’s a quick thought on the second reading: no, St. Paul is not disparaging married life. This passage is in the middle of a longer treatise on how we should live the lives to which God calls us. God has called some people to marriage, but God has called other people to single life. No one should feel pressured to marry if they think that that is not what God is calling them to. Also, this is centuries before the Church recognized marriage as a sacrament. Ideally, marriage is not a distraction from the love of God; it brings us closer to the love of God!
Our gospel passage is from Mark, the action-packed gospel. Even though we’re only on verse 21, already Jesus has been baptized, has spent time in desert, and called the first apostles. Now, he gets down to business, with his first act demonstrating that the kingdom is at hand. Today is a great day to build up God’s kingdom of love and mercy! Let’s take a moment to celebrate that.
We live in a time when it seems as if many of our politicians shout across the aisle and across the airwaves, “What have you to do with us? Have you come [to Washington… or to Austin] to destroy us?”
People in first-century Judea lived in a world that was filled with spirits, and they considered the vast majority of those spirits to be evil. The pagan religions of the time were all about performing rituals to appease the spirits. Even the prevailing form of Judaism in Jesus’ time was rooted in a belief that God would rescue people from the evil spirits of the world. Today, many of us use science and medicine to explain away most of these bad phenomena.
But the unclean spirit in today’s gospel passage is a phenomenon very much present in our world today. Jo Fisher-Kretzler, a local Methodist minister, tells me that the Greek idiomatic phrase used by Mark, literally translated as “What to us and to you, Jesus Nazarene?,” can also be translated as, “What do we have in common, Jesus?” When we insist that we have nothing in common with someone else, there’s a temptation to treat them with contempt.
We can’t help ourselves from noticing how we’re different from other people, but it’s a very small step from identifying differences to claiming that we’re superior to others. We all know in our souls that Catholics are not better than Methodists, that Americans are not better than Europeans, that Christians are not better than Muslims, that Caucasians are not better than people of color, that men are not better than women, and so on. Yet, the unclean spirit is always trying to separate us from one another.
When we recognize that we have common bonds with the people we disagree with, we tend not to treat them as harshly. For example, foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman maintained for years that two countries would always turn to diplomatic solutions, not military ones, to resolve their differences if they both had McDonald’s franchises. 2 More subtly, our implicit biases lead us to make character judgments about people based on their clothing, hairstyle, or body art – we unconsciously think that people who look like us are more trustworthy.
Any discrimination – discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, physical ability, mental ability, or financial status – gives voice to the unclean spirit that says, “What have you to do with us?” That’s why I stopped telling jokes based on race, gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or hair color years ago. (It’s also why I tell so many music jokes.) Whether or not these jokes are intended to be malicious, to me, the stereotypes promote division. Whenever I used to give in to the temptation to tell a joke based on stereotypes, I unleashed an unclean spirit into the world. Suddenly, friends I’d known for years who’d never told a joke of this kind suddenly told a string of them. I always regretted telling those jokes.
Our politics seem to be getting more divisive and more extreme for a whole host of reasons. This is not an exhaustive list of why, but I’d include gerrymandering, the rise of cable news and social media, the FCC’s abolition of both the Fairness Doctrine and the Broadcast Station Cross-Ownership Rules, the cost of political advertising, and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
For those of us in the moderate middle, we’ve been repeatedly forced to choose one bitter end or the other of the political spectrum. Most of us sit slightly closer to one end than the other, which means that the callous language on one end seems worse to us than the other. The fact of the matter is, I don’t think we should ever call anyone a “nut job” or a “snowflake.” We shouldn’t use the words radical, leftist, Nazi, or fascist unless they factually describe what we’re talking about. As I’ve told my congressman and one of my senators multiple times this month, the adjective “radical” is not supposed to be automatically attached to the name of every person or policy they disagree with.
We have each been baptized into Jesus’ ministry to build up the kingdom of love and mercy. Do we believe that God continues to fulfill the promise to raise up prophets among us? Can we find common bonds with everyone?
Paulist spirituality may be a good starting point. Paulists are known for welcoming a diversity of people to Church. St. Austin’s may not be perfect, but our parishioners come from a diversity of ethnicities, economic levels, age groups, and political positions. Many of us here don’t feel overly threatened by people who are different than us. If people ask us why we value certain things, we deliberately try not to get defensive. We’re willing to recognize the gifts that others bring to the table, and if we don’t have the answers, we’re usually willing to say, “I don’t know; can I get back to you on that?”
Our God is a god of love, and Jesus declared that the way to prepare for God’s in-breaking kingdom was to repent, to change our ways. Maybe one form of repentance is to change the ways we speak of others and to challenge our friends and representatives to do likewise. By our fruits we will be known.
My friend Jo says that the original Greek translated as Jesus “teaching… as one having authority” is actually more vivid – it’s the idea of fulfilling what a person was born to do, crying out from their soul. None of us, as individuals, have the authority that Jesus had to banish the unclean spirits. Together, however, we are Christ’s body. We join together to fight the demons who wish to separate us from one another. Our weekly sharing of the Word and the Eucharist – whether we attend in person or online – continues to bind us closer to one another and to our God, the God who is perfect unity.
Notes:
- Since I was first meeting the people of St. John XXIII Parish and Catholic Center in Knoxville, TN on the weekend of January 29, 2012 I said: “I chickened out. I’m not gonna talk about the second reading. But… if you remind me far enough in advance, I will preach on that in three years.” On the weekend of February 1, 2015, the diocese asked priests to play a recording promoting the Annual Bishop’s Appeal, instead of preaching. On the weekend of January 28, 2018, I was enroute to leading a Paulist Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. ↩
- Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” – first presented in a column in 1996 – was joltingly disproven by Russia’s invasion of the Crimea in Ukraine in 2014. Also, both India and Pakistan now have McDonald’s. ↩