Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 31, 2022 – Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12:13-21

Those of you who grew up in my generation and the generation just after mine, probably were prejudiced in our lives and experienced prejudice in our lives. We referred to other people with expressions that are no longer acceptable in public discourse, and we were called those kinds of names ourselves. And, to a certain extent, those things rolled off our back and nobody took all that much umbrage in what was being said by us or to us. But now we live in a binary culture. Partly because of the wonderful gift of computers and infinite technology, we tend to think in on/off, yes/no, good/bad, white/black. And the spaces in between are beginning to disappear from our public discourse.

If you paid close attention to the second reading, it sounded very much like Paul was trying to convince the people of Colossae not to be prejudiced. But is that really what was going on? First of all, you have to understand the context of much of the New Testament writing. Both the gospel of Luke, which we just heard, and most of the letters of St. Paul, the writer’s presumption is that the world is going to end. Jesus is coming back in their lifetime. And those who are baptized are an exclusive group, the ones who will be saved. The rest of the world is going to hell in a handbag. And so it was very much a binary attitude toward the world. It’s us and all those other people. So, when St. Paul talks to the Colossians, he’s talking about people within the Christian group who are very disparate, one from another. That’s why I asked you to pay close attention to the dichotomies he expresses - Jew/Greek, circumcised/uncircumcised, slave/free, Barbarian/Scythian. In another letter he says exactly the same thing, including in those dichotomies male/female. He’s saying all of us are one because we all follow Christ.

But that was not the experience of many of the churches. In many of the churches there was ugly division. Jewish Christians were the ones to whom Christ had come, and they claimed superiority in this new Jesus movement, because Jesus came from them and Jesus was the fulfillment of all they had hoped for in their scriptures. Gentile Christians were entering the church in great numbers, especially around the Mediterranean basin. Even though Rome was the controlling power in all of the near east, and all of southern Europe, the prevailing culture was Greek. That’s where all the literature, and the philosophy, and the geometry and mathematics, that’s where all that came from. The Romans just took it over as their own. So, when you wanted to talk about non-Jews in a Jewish society, you referred to them as Greeks. Jews and Greeks. They were the uncircumcised, the unwashed, the goyim. The Jewish Christians didn’t live them very much. In return Gentile Christians took umbrage, “We all share the same belief in Christ. Why do you think you’re superior to us?”

Many of the Gentile Christians came from the slave echelon of society, the slaves and the military. They were looked down upon by the gentility, the rich folk. They’re all together in the same church. Paul is trying to get them all on the same page. But the key to this story is one of the groups. It says, “Barbarian/Scythians.” Who the heck are the Scythians?

Ok, a little geography. Picture in your mind a map of Europe. There are basically three big peninsulas. There’s the Iberian peninsula of Spain and Portugal. Move over a little bit to your right, there’s the Italian peninsula. Move over a little more to your right, there the Greek peninsula. On the other side of the Greek peninsula is modern-day Turkey. Back then, there were a great number of individual city-states right there. One of them was Colossae. Those are the people to whom Paul is writing, the people who live in Colossae. If you look up the map, right above Colossae, a couple of hundred miles, what’s there? The Black Sea. What’s on the other side of the Black Sea? Ukraine - very much in the news today. The Scythians were the most terrible Barbarian horde of the first centuries before Christ. They swept across Turkey into Eastern Europe until they hit the Carpathian Mountains. You know who lives in the Carpathian Mountains, right? Dracula lives in the Carpathian Mountains.

That gives you an idea of the quality of terror of the Scythians. I cannot describe, in polite society, what they did to their enemies and their captives. But they created a fear and a terror that lasted for centuries. Therefore, the Scythians and the Colossians would have been avowed enemies. The Colossian people would have had in their stored memory, the terrible things that Scythians had done to the people living in and around Colossae in the centuries before Christ and right up to the time of Christ. And the very idea that they could get along with the Christian people of Colossae was anathema to the people to whom Paul was writing. So Paul is saying, “You’ve got to get on the same page with people whom you fear and hate and who despise and have cruelly treated you for years.”

A little footnote about the Scythians. Just to give you an idea of how terrible they were, they were the first people to use pot. They used cannabis in all of their religious ceremonies.

So, the question is, is this reading something that is locked in time because we’ve gone beyond the expectation that the world was going to end in our lifetime. You know, this is how theology works, how it evolves. St. Paul, in his own mind, thought the world was going to end in his lifetime. And he talked about getting along with other people only in terms of getting along with people inside the church, having no regard for those outside the church except those willing to convert. That time is gone. Can we take today’s reading and apply it to today’s interracial challenges. There are many of them in our culture because we are so binary toward each other.

There was an interesting phrase in today’s opening prayer. This is how it went. “That You may restore what You have created, and keep safe what You have restored.” I’ll repeat that for you. “That You may restore what You have created, and keep safe what You have restored.” The key to what St. Paul is saying is the very last line of the reading. He says that, “Christ may be all and in all.” Even though he didn’t realize it when he wrote that, he was talking about something much wider than the situation of the people in Colossae. That Christ may be all and in all. Paul bases his whole teaching about brotherhood or community within that community on the idea that, when Jesus surrendered Himself on the cross, and offered Himself to the Father, He was redeeming the whole world for all time. And so the idea St. Paul presents is much wider than St. Paul’s use of it. And that’s how we look at it today. That it is the whole world that Christ redeemed, and Christ is in all. He lives within all human beings for all time. He lives in us in a special way by sanctifying grace, but He journeys with the entire human family. And therefore the entire human family is sacred to Him and, if we are baptized into Christ, then the entire human family has to be sacred to us.

The takeaway of today’s second reading is really that Catholics, and Christians in general, cannot be a binary people.