January 29, 2024
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B) on January 28, 2024, at the Paulist Center in Boston, MA. 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.
Even though we’re only on verse 21 of the Gospel of Mark, already Jesus has been baptized, has spent time in desert, and called the first apostles. Today, Jesus gets down to business, with his first act demonstrating that the reign of God is at hand.
But right now, we need to say something about our startling second reading, which sounds as if Paul is disparaging married life. No! That’s not Paul’s intent. This passage is in the middle of Paul’s 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. Ideally, marriage is not a distraction from the love of God; it’s one of the best ways to discover the love of God!
Today is a great day to live out God’s love and mercy! Let’s take a moment to celebrate that.
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 concerned themselves with performing rituals to appease those spirits. Even the prevailing form of Judaism in Jesus’ time was rooted in the belief that God would rescue people from the evil spirits surrounding them.
Today, many of us use science and medicine to explain away most of these bad phenomena described in the gospels. But the unclean spirit in today’s gospel passage is a phenomenon very much present in our world today. It seems as if everyone is shouting all the time, on the airwaves, at political rallies, on the internet, at school board meetings, and on university campuses. We’re heading further down into what seems to be an endless abyss. We all sound like the demon as we wail against our enemies: “What have you to do with us?” At the same time, we’re isolating ourselves from the people who disagree with us. Rather than arguing with them, we’re shouting louder and louder to the people who already agree with us about how horrible the people are on the other side. Politicians unabashedly speak with a vitriol in public that would have shocked us just a few years ago. Whenever we have the temerity to suggest rolling back the diatribes, our friends recoil, “Have you come to destroy us? We’ll never ‘win’ unless we’re as nasty as the other side!”
One of my friends who’s a Methodist minister tells me that the Greek 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. 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. So many of the jokes people have told for generations serve to heighten stereotypes. Even though we know that differences between people regarding race, gender, nationality, age, financial position, physical or mental ability, and religion do not deny our common humanity, the sins of racism, sexism, colonialism and the countless other “isms” try to convince us that we’re better than those who are different from us. Sometimes the demon whispers, and sometimes it shouts: “What do we have in common? What have you to do with us?” We’re living in a time when hateful rhetoric is affecting our families, our schools, our domestic politics, and the geopolitical situations in Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan, and Korea.
What can we do to reverse this trend towards greater hatred? Even when we feel powerless, there are small things we can do. For example, I don’t think we ever should call anyone a “nut job” or a “snowflake.” Whenever my elected representatives in the past decade — be they in Tennessee, Texas, or Massachusetts – use the adjective “radical,” I am quick to write to them to remind them that the word is not supposed to be automatically attached to the name of every person or every policy that they disagree with.
At the end of January each year in the days surrounding the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, we celebrate Paulist spirituality, not only of us Paulist priests, but of all the people who collaborate with us, worship with us, support us, and try to emulate the best of our spirituality.
The Paulists and our Associates and our collaborators are not perfect, but let me tell one story of a creative way they confronted the demon of division. A few decades ago, an African-American couple moved from a Paulist parish in Memphis to an all-white neighborhood in another part of the country. When one Paulist heard that the couple was having a hard time meeting their neighbors, he used his own vacation time to go across the country to visit them for the specific purpose of mowing their lawn. While this white man sweated away in the hot sun, the black couple invited their white neighbors to stop by to share a beer or a lemonade. This act went a long way into integrating the neighborhood!
That Methodist minister friend of mine who knows ancient Greek so well – says that the phrase 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. I believe that our souls are crying out for us to make reconciliation an essential part of our identity. We are not just to wait for others to reconcile with us; we are to actively work to reverse the hatred around us.
Four times in the last 8 years, I have had the privilege to pray at the site of the synagogue where Mark tells us Jesus performed his first miracle, the casting out of the demon of division. None of us, as individuals, have the authority that Jesus had to banish the unclean spirits. But together, we are Christ’s body, called to reconcile the divisions in our world. And according to the Gospel of John, this very spot was also where Jesus gave his “Bread of Life” Discourse that is so essential to our faith, to our identity as Christians.
When we receive the Bread of Life during communion, we recognize that we have common bonds with all people, whether or not we agree with them. Our “Amen” in the communion line, and our ingesting of the consecrated host into our very bodies, are our pledge to join together to fight the demons who wish to separate us from one another. Our weekly sharing of the Word and the Eucharist continues to bind us closer to one another and to our God, the God who is perfect unity.