I chose it to begin my homily because, as I mentioned at the beginning of Mass, today is Gaudete Sunday - the Sunday of Joy. It seems to me that if you feel like I do, you feel like joy is in pretty short supply these days. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what joy means in the sense of our scriptures and in the sense of our liturgy.
Now Saint Mark, in his gospel, begins with the story of John the Baptist. But he asks his readers to see his story, not only the story of John the Baptist, but the entire story he’s about to tell - the Good News about Jesus Christ. He wants us to see the whole thing through the lens of one particular phrase in the prophet Isaiah. And that phrase is hidden in today’s first reading. I’ll show you what I mean.
I was reminded of that because this very powerful parable that we just heard from Matthew’s gospel actually is based on the first reading, from the book of Ezekiel. And Jesus told, all together, in all the gospels, about five parables that involve shepherds in some way. All of them are rooted in the shepherd imagery from the book of Ezekiel, a little bit from the book of Isaiah, and the beautiful psalm we had as the psalm between the readings, “The Lord is My Shepherd.” The compound image has always been taken as one that is very gentle, very sweet, but the story in the first reading tells of a different tale.
And, since the story says that the master was gone for a long time, that means this money was invested in something that would yield a long term benefit, at least a CD. Nowadays, maybe one-and-a-half percent on a CD. But, in the stock market, which is ironically booming right now, that would’ve brought an enormous return on the individual investment. I mean an incredible amount of money.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.” And that’s kind of the message behind today’s gospel. That’s why I asked you to listen for its inconsistency. The motto at the end of the gospel says, “Therefore be alert,” or the translations say, “Be awake.” But it’s the wrong motto, it’s the wrong lesson for the story that Jesus just told.
Jesus tells us the story about being prepared. The virgins, some of them brought extra oil, some of them didn’t. They were unprepared. The inconsistency is that all ten virgins fell asleep. So, at the end of the story, you can’t say the motto is to be awake if all ten of them fell asleep. What happened here?
That’s because we were not aware. we were not made aware, that what we memorized was part of gospel passage. That, in fact, altogether there were nine Beatitudes, the last one aimed directly at Jesus’ audience rather than at a presumed group of people. The “this,” and the “that.” You, “you were persecuted in my name.”
In order to understand what we need to know about these Beatitudes, first of all we have to realize that when we were taught them they were treated as individual maxims, separate from one another. And that each one of them was analyzed for us as though a particular virtue, which was meaningful enough as it stood. But the way the gospels were formed tells us a very different story about the Beatitudes.
James Henry Leigh Hunt, better known to almost everybody as Leigh Hunt, was a poet, an essayist, and a playwright in the 19th century. He was in that same circle of literary figures as Shelly, Wordsworth, and all of those people we were forced to study in high school. Like most people in England in the 19th century, he was serenely confident in the superiority of all things British. The sun never set on Her Majesty’s empire. And also, like most people in Europe during the 19th century, he had a tremendous fascination with all things Egyptian, Arabian, and Middle Eastern. And because of their unspoken assumptions about the world, they never really took seriously the faith of Muslim people, whom they would have called Mohammedans back in the 19th century, but they liked to fantasize about them. Leigh Hunt was also probably an Anglican Divine, a pastor. He never got a parish of his own, and drifted away from church things, but we can be fairly certain that he had a much better knowledge of both the Old and New Testament than you and I have. That was just typical of people at that time.
And so he writes a poem based on his enchantment with things Middle Eastern, but he also based it on an assumption that’s probably correct. And that is, across the spectrum of religious faith, at least the major known faiths at that time – Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism, the Baptist churches, Judaism, and Islam, – all people reverence and hold as God’s word the two great commandments, which we just heard in today’s Gospel. So he creates a character for his poem. The character’s name is Abou Ben Adhem. Abou is what he thinks is a common Arabian name. But Ben means “son of;” then he chooses “son of” Adhem (Adam). He wants us to identify with this person as like you and me, descended from the first human being. And this is what he writes:
I recently read a novel called Damascus, about the life of St. Paul and other Christians, some of them martyrs during the 1st century. I didn’t care much for the book, by Christos Tsiolkas, but I did appreciate how he brought to life what if was like to live in the 1st century, what it was like to be a Christian back then. It was a tough slog in many ways, and the novelists graphic descriptions of the terrible conditions in which everybody, Christian and non-Christian, lived, the terrible things they endured, almost blistered my mind. I asked you to listen, during the second reading, for some of the vices, or character flaws, that St. Paul exhibits in that very brief passage.
I once had a friend who would give you the shirt off his back, almost literally. I remember one time, I needed money in a hurry. I told him my sad story. He opened his wallet and gave me a thousand dollars. Without blinking an eye, without making any arrangements to get it back. But he could not accept anything from anybody graciously. He simply did not know how to say thank you, or to show any appreciation. This is a wonderful man in many ways, but that one character flaw turned many people off from him, because they didn’t understand.
Reality TV. Reality TV is both the salvation and the destruction of the television industry. When many of us were growing up, for most of the day, all you could see on most channels was a test pattern. Then, when the kids got home from school, children’s programing began, followed by the evening news, followed by prime time scripted programs – comedies, dramas – and then the evening news, and then a sign-off, and a test pattern appeared again. But when we went to 24/7 programming, it became much more expensive to run television stations. Only the big three were really able to provide fresh programming all day and all evening long, because the cost of a scripted program was enormous – way over $1,000,000 per episode. And so, those stations needed to sell a $1,000,000 worth of advertising for each program just to break even. And the goal of the major broadcasting companies was not to just break even, they needed to make a substantial profit for their investors and for themselves. So in the early 1990’s they came up with a brilliant idea. Reality TV.
Because it only cost a fraction of what it cost to produce a scripted program. You didn’t have to pay those enormous salaries to the big-name stars, all you had to pay people on the screen was the daily minimum for someone who appeared on a talk show. Back in 1970’s, the daily minimum was about $79. So even given the cost of inflation, it didn’t cost much, say, to have a cook demonstrating how to bake something, or a carpenter, how to fix something, or some people fishing, how to find fish in deep water. So it’s simple to do. Instead of having five cameras on a set, you had one guy walking around with a camera on his shoulder.
The iconic movie, On the Waterfront, was all about corruption, especially mob-inspired correction, on the docks. It was a true story, based on the life of a Jesuit priest who worked for the betterment of the working conditions of people who worked on the docks. But we would be mistaken if we thought that today’s gospel has anything to do with social justice for workers. Why did Jesus tell this story? Why did Matthew include this story in his gospel?
It is almost the same story as a story with very different characters that we find in Luke’s gospel – the story of the Prodigal Son. In each story there is someone who obeys the rules and always does the right thing, and someone who seems to be messing up. Both of them are treated with the same kindness and generosity by the person who represents the authority figure. That’s the similarity between them, but one is found in one gospel, and one in the other.
When I was studying communications media at Loyola University in New Orleans, one of our assignments was to produce a fifteen minute movie using one of Jesus’ parables as our subject matter. We had to shoot it in Super 8. For those of you who are not of a certain age, Super 8 was home movie film that had no soundtrack. So we chose the parable that you just heard as our subject matter. And what we did was to turn it into a modern-day parable. The storyline was that the movie began with a priest being pulled over by a cop because he was speeding. And the priest begs, and wheedles and cajoles the cop into not giving him a ticket. And they ride off as best buddies. The priest arrives home at his rectory, and finds that some parishioner has had the audacity to park in the “clergy only” parking space behind the rectory. And just as he is having a fit, the offender comes out to get his car, and the priest really lands into him in a violent way. That was what you might call “Theology Lite,” but today’s story has a much more powerful punch than you might imagine.
It all goes back, the genesis of what Jesus says in the parable, goes all the way back, if you’ll pardon the pun, to the Book of Genesis. Chapter 4. All of us know the story of Cain killing Abel. We don’t pay much attention to what happens afterwards. God condemns Cain to be a wanderer across the face of the earth, and Cain says to God, “That punishment is much too harsh because I will be a victim of everyone who wants to take my life.” And God says, “Oh, no. I put my mark on you, and anyone who touches Cain will feel my wrath seven times over.” And you flash forward to Cain’s great-great-great-grandson, whose name is Lamech. Lamech calls his wives in one day and tells them, “If anyone wounds me, I will seek vengeance seventy-seven times. If even a little boy bruises me, I will seek vengeance seventy-seven times. Imagine what his wives thought about that; I’m sure they were impressed. But that’s where Jesus got the numbers in today’s story. The seven and the seventy-seven.
I tell you that because it will help us to understand today’s reading. I asked two questions before the Gospel began. The first was, was St. Peter’s comment to Jesus - “God forbid anything should ever happen to you” – was that altruistic? We have to understand what was in Peter’s mind. Unfortunately, when we read this gospel, the translators have chosen to say in the line just before it, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” as we heard last week. And using the word “Christ” now makes us think it’s part of Jesus’ proper name. The correct translation should have been, “You are the anointed one, the son of the living God,” because that’s who Jesus was to many people, the promised savior who would throw off the yoke of Rome, and rescue the people from their military might. In last week’s gospel, that’s what Peter had told Jesus He was, and Jesus called him a rock.
At one point in her life, my mom decided that she wanted to be a member of the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians. And just as they do here in this area, the place where she was living, they met in the local Catholic church. So, on the meeting night, she went early, and she found one of the applications and filled it out and put it on the table with other people’s applications. Everybody was milling around before the meeting began and two of the officers of the Ladies AOH went over to the pile and started leafing through the names. And one said to the other, rather loudly, “Who’s Madori?” I’m sure what she meant was which one of the people standing around that we don’t recognize is this woman who’s applying? What my mother heard is, “How dare somebody, whose name ends in a vowel, apply for membership in our organization?” My mother was very proud of her Irish heritage on both sides of her family. And so she immediately took umbrage that someone would say that, walked out without ever staying for the meeting, and never had any use for the Ancient Order of Hibernians for the rest of her life.
Binding and loosing is a thorny topic. What we heard this morning in the gospel, for a long, long while now has been what we call the “proof text.” During the Reformation, in the 16th century, Protestant reformers took phrases out of the scriptures to prove their points, points against Catholic doctrine. The main doctrines that they attacked were the perpetual virginity and the immaculate conception of Mary, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the apostolic succession, papal infallibility, the power of the keys, that is, the power of priests to absolve penitents in the sacrament of Penance. The last three of those all are connected with the reading we heard this morning. The apostolic succession, that is, that our church descends, in an unbroken line, from the apostles, through every generation of bishops who are ordained to take the place of the apostles. Papal infallibility, which actually wasn’t defined as a doctrine until the nineteenth century. And the sacrament of Penance.When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, there were certain neighborhoods you just didn’t go into, because there were gangs there. Not like the gangs today, that carry guns and sell drugs, they were just hormonal teenagers, spoiling for a fight. But still, it was better not to go there.
In senior year of high school, our class went on a retreat to a little Jesuit retreat house just outside of Tuxedo. And we were warned by the retreat master, if we were walking on the grounds, not to go into the woods beyond the markers of the retreat house property, because there were people in the wood who really didn’t like strangers, and didn’t have any quibble about taking a shot at them with a shotgun. Those people, I later learned, were called Jackson Whites.
Jackson Whites were an intermarriage between the original Ramapo Indians, part of the Leni Lenape Tribe, who lived in that area for centuries, and German Hessian soldiers, who had been employed by England during the Revolutionary War and deserted, and runaway slaves. I encountered the Jackson Whites a second time when I was a deacon in the parish in Suffern, NY. There was a very nice little community of middle class homes and neat streets located just between Rt. 17 and Rt. 59. You had to cross over a bridge that crossed the railroad depot, a place where there were about 13 or 14 tracks, where they parked freight trains overnight, to get to the little neighborhood. But it was well-known throughout Suffern that you were not wanted in that neighborhood. I used to shortcut my car through there because it saved over ten minutes trying to get to Rt. 17. But still, if you did, you got very pointed stares from any of the people walking on the streets. This little community, called Hillburn, which belonged, almost exclusively, to the descendants of Jackson Whites.
Some of the most loved stories of my childhood and my youth had to do with the sea – “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” “Kidnapped,” “Treasure Island,” “Moby Dick,” “The Old Man and the Sea.” Since ancient times, people have had a fascination with the sea. Our earliest recorded epics were the “Iliad,” the “Odyssey,” and the “Aeneid,” all of which have to do with long sea voyages. But the fascination with the sea is only one side of a coin. The other side is the terrible fear of the sea.
We think of our culture as a Western European rooted culture, but when we think of it that way, we tend to think of the map of Europe. The fact is that our culture has its roots not up there in Germany and France and the Netherlands, and places like that, but rather around the Mediterranean basin – Spain, Italy, Greece, that corner of the Middle East that borders on the Mediterranean, all across North Africa, beginning with Egypt – that’s where our culture began. And in that culture, the Mediterranean was the life of the people. It’s how they got their food. It’s how they conducted their commerce. It’s how they won their battles. Whoever controlled the sea, controlled everything. The Romans used to call it mare nostrum, our sea. As long as no one was to come over the mountains against them, they were dominant.
There’s an old Irish joke, and it’s based on reality, of course. In the old Irish villages it was customary for men not to go to Mass; that was something the women did. But they all went out to the church together. The men would stand across the street, leaning against the stone walls, smoking and talking, until their womenfolk came back out of church and they all went home together. Teenage boys would start to do that around the age of 10 or 11. They’d run off to Mass and then they’d come home, and their mothers would say, “Did you go to Mass?” And they’d say, “Yes.” And the mother would say, “What was the Gospel?” The traditional answer was, “The loaves and the fishes, Ma.”
And the reason why they got away with that lie all the time was because “the loaves and fishes” is one of the most common stories in our scriptures. In four Gospels, the story appears six times. And since it appears so often, you must realize that it was being used even before the scriptures were written, and all during the time they were written, being used to teach things about our faith. To put them in the context of the story. So as you move from one version to the next of the story, certain things change a little bit, and those changes tell us what that particular writer wanted his people to learn from the story. That’s why I asked you to listen carefully to a couple of things in the story.