So what do you think? Are you more of a ‘keep the commandments’ sort of person or a ‘go to Mass’ sort of person? Do you gravitate toward the worship life or the sacramental life of the church? Or do you gravitate toward the way of life that we propose for people? Today's readings land heavily on both sides of that question.

We’re going to look at the second reading first, simply because it's the more complicated. The situation that prompted the Book of Hebrews - which is not really a letter, but an essay - was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. All Jews, including Jewish Christians, who lived in that area, continued to go to the temple for the great holidays and to offer sacrifice in the temple. And they would gather in people's homes for Eucharist. The elder, the person we now call the priest, would gather in a large public space - some rich person's hall or courtyard - and the dinner would be held there. During the dinner, the elder would take the bread, speak the words of consecration. Take the chalice, speak the words of consecration. And then this is the dinner. And they truly believed that Jesus was present, body and blood, soul and divinity, as we would say today, in that transaction. But it wasn't apparent to them there was a sacrifice.

So, it looks as though Facebook has gotten itself into a bit of trouble. An internal memo has revealed that the company knew its algorithms were targeting teenagers, especially teenage girls, in such a way as to create controversy and havoc. And, pursuing that line of thought, it’s come to light that the algorithms are manipulated to draw us into controversy as much as possible, because the more hits the website gets, the more advertising dollars it can make. It's a difficult world that we live in, where people are encouraged to be at the height of tension.

I think today's gospel helps us to navigate through that. That's why I asked you to listen carefully to a couple of things in the story. The first thing to talk about is the strange way that the man is introduced. It said, “Bartimaeus, blind man, the son of Timaeus...” Now, most translators assume that Mark, because he wrote in Greek, was telling an audience that did not speak Hebrew that “Bartimaeus” simply meant the son of Timaeus. But, if he meant that, he would have said, “Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, that is, a blind man.” But that's not what he said.

So, Mark says that the other ten became indignant at James and John. I don’t know. Indignant is like when someone cuts in front of you in the grocery store line. So, I looked up the word in the Latin translation of the bible, and it says, “Indignus.” Some lazy translator simply translated indignus into indignant, because that’s where the word comes from. But if you examine the roots of the word, we use the word dignus in English in the Mass, just before the Holy, Holy. That dialogue, “Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God.” “It is right and just.” The Latin for that is “Dignum et iustum est.” So, if something is right, or worthy, then indignus is unworthy. What the ten felt was that they were calling James and John unworthy. They were dismissing them from their company. How come? What’s going on here?

A little background probably is in order. When Mark begins his gospel, he tells us how Jesus chose His disciples. He says, “He walked along, by the seashore, and he saw Peter and Andrew, and they were fishermen.” He said, “Come after Me and I’ll make you fishers of men.” And He walked along a little farther and saw two other fishermen, James and John, in their boat with their father, Zebedee, mending their nets. Because we think of the twelve apostles as a homogenized group, we assume that Peter and Andrew must have been friends of James and John. But not necessarily.

I asked you how old you thought the person was who came up to Jesus and asked Him that significant question. I asked you that because one of the other gospel writers, when he tells this story, changes the story, and says, “A young man came up and approached Jesus.” But Mark, the earliest gospel, doesn’t say he was a young man. In fact, if you noticed the answer the young man gave, when Jesus proposed the Ten Commandments as the way to eternal life. The man said to Jesus, “I have kept all these things from my youth.” Which suggests that, maybe, instead of being someone just starting out, he might be someone who is middle-aged, who’s reached that time in life where there have been some accomplishments, when you begin to feel satisfied with yourself. He may feel dissatisfied with where he is in life, and be wondering what else he should do. Or maybe, maybe, he’s an old person feeling the loss of things in life, and saying to himself, “Is that all there is? Is that all there is to life? What I’ve done? That’s it?” So we don’t know what the motivation was.

And did you notice that Jesus treats him harshly? He’s very polite. He came up and said, “Good teacher…” How much more polite could he have been? And Jesus throws the word ‘good’ back in his face unnecessarily, provoking him in a sense, putting him off and allowing the crowds around him to see the harsh interchange. Because sociologically, in that time, there was no middle class like we have today, who are fairly comfortable and settled in their lives. There are a few people who are very, very wealthy, like this man, and everybody else was in poverty. It’s a different kind of poverty than ours, for almost everybody had a place to live, but everybody eked out an existence with some sort of trade, or else they went begging. And so, the audience that Jesus has would be innately hostile to this man, and Jesus echoes that hostility, revealing the man’s weakness, by causing him, eventually, to turn away and not go on the journey with Jesus. What does this mean?

Jesus’ primary concern in this gospel reading was to point out an injustice being committed against women. In his religious tradition, a man could give his wife a gett, a bill of divorce, for the slightest reason, trivial reasons, really, but she could not do that to her husband. And if he did that, unless she had a son, a father, or a brother to run home to, she became a non-person in that society. And that is Jesus’ concern as he teaches this morning.

So, I asked you, when you listened to the first reading, to pick out what you thought was the most important sentence. There's only one place, in the passage that we read, where God actually speaks. He says one simple statement, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Now, when we read our scripture in English, the word man is used throughout the story. “... and so the Lord brought to the man” and “The Lord placed the man into a deep sleep” and so on and so forth. But in the original languages in which our scriptures appeared, there are two different words being used for man. All the time that the writer is talking about the man, and when God says “It is not good for the man to be alone,” the word that’s being used, in Greek, is anthrōpos, from which we get the English word anthropology, which is the study of human beings. That word means “It is not good for the human being to be alone.” But, when the man sees his image in the woman, the language changes, and instead of being called an anthrōpos, he’s called an andros, which represents the male sex, as opposed to the female sex. It’s the same thing in Hebrew. In Hebrew, the man is called ha adam - recognize in there the word Adam. Ha adam is something taken from the earth. One of our scripture scholars jokingly said that, basically, we can translate that Jewish word as “earthling.” It is not good for the earthling to be alone. But when he wakes up from his sleep and is confronted with his mirror image in the woman, the words that are used are ish for man, and isha for woman. They’re the same word - masculine ending and feminine ending - ish and isha.