Proper 19, Year B: Sunday, September 16, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Proper 19-  Sunday, September 16, 2018

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Br. Robert James Magliula

The Gospel offers the startling and inexplicable claim that Jesus of Nazareth is both human being and God incarnate. This “scandal of particularity”, as it’s called, is the claim we encounter in today’s passage from Mark. The one who came as the great liberator, the Messiah, must suffer rejection, humiliation, torture, and death at the hands of the religious and civil authorities. Jesus insists that “he must undergo great suffering”. For Jesus to bring full humanity into communion with God, he must bear the fullness of the human experience, including suffering and death.



The shadow of war between the Jews and Rome loomed over Mark’s community. When Mark wrote his Gospel, Jesus had clearly not freed them from Roman oppression and domination. Mark sets this story in Caesarea Philippi, a center of Roman colonial presence on the northern fringes of Galilee. The scene takes place sometime after Jesus had taken up with his disciples. Jesus asks the disciples what they have heard people say about who he is. Then he moves to the critical question: “Who do you say that I am?” When Peter calls Jesus the Messiah, he may have right title but the wrong understanding of what that title means for Jesus.

 We bring our humanity to our relationship with Jesus. We humans think as humans. We see him as one who will support and sustain our wants and desires and enable us to become what we want to become. If we’re honest with ourselves, we prefer Peter’s interpretation of Messiah, and we make the same protest. We want a God who will spare us from suffering and death, who will spare us the painful fullness of the human experience. But Jesus’ word to Peter and to us is that we must expand our perspective. The final scandal of this passage is Jesus’ call for his disciples to follow him on this path.

The domestication of Jesus as the Christ makes it hard to be shocked by Peter’s declaration and Jesus’ teaching about the nature of the messiah and the meaning of discipleship. Only when we’ve grasped the true meaning are we in a place to hear his call to follow. Mark, in the course of his Gospel, had Jesus clarify this to the disciples three times, and they still resisted it.  The call to discipleship is more than a lack of concern for earthly matters or a call to radical social reform. It is participation in the pattern of the suffering Messiah. Mark intended this text to move his hearers beyond information and explanation to commitment.

Our human freedom depends on knowing ourselves----which includes recognizing our limitations and what is incomplete in us. Our knowledge of our poverty can become an experience of God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love. Knowing ourselves without knowing God leads to desperation and knowing God without knowing ourselves produces arrogance.

In our first lesson from Proverbs, Wisdom issues a similar warning to that of Wisdom Incarnate in the Gospel. Wisdom’s language is a strong rebuke of our cultural reflex to cast any suffering as victimhood that deserves sympathy. Persistent scoffing and hatred for knowledge exhausted her patience. Fools do not become wise through persuasion, let alone sympathy. Wisdom raises her voice: “I have called and you refused, have stretched out my hand and no one heeded” (Prov. 1:24). In our narcissistic society wealth occupies a higher place than wisdom, notoriety is more admired than dignity, success is more important than self-respect.  Our culture attempts to repress everything that reminds it of its limits and in particular the event of death, which has the power to annihilate every human delusion of omnipotence. This deprives us of the reality, that more than any other, helps us to understand ourselves, because it places life’s big questions in front of us, and brings us out of the mediocrity in which we often enclose ourselves.

Wisdom shows up in the complicated places where we live our lives. Often, she shows up in a moment of need, or crisis, or fear. When we forget about the ways of God and become mired down only in our own human ways, we often get ourselves into terrible predicaments. When we think we are beyond the basic lessons of loving justice, doing kindness, and walking humbly with God, we often end up doing and saying things we regret. When loving God and loving neighbor as ourselves are mere platitudes for us, it seems that disaster often finds us. It will always be true that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. It will always be true that we have some responsibility for what happens in our lives.

Becoming wise means learning to think carefully and act virtuously in complex situations where one is tempted to think simplistically and act recklessly. One becomes wise by learning to integrate one’s thoughts, will, and actions in faithful ways. This wisdom has very little to do with knowledge in service of power, and more to do with insight that is in service of God and neighbor.

James’ warnings about language in our Epistle are all the more pressing in our time. Error, deception, miscommunication, and disinformation have become commonplace. Defending our own viewpoints, we cease to listen to others. When we take time to listen to those we disagree with, we find ways to move beyond conflict that consumes and destroys. The fear of the Lord, which is a form of humility and reverence, is the beginning of wisdom. It is the experience of contact with a power greater than our own, before whom we give up control. 

When we find ways to honor God, we find that life can have a rhythm that feels right. When we recognize our need to forgive and be forgiven, we find a peace that is good for body, mind, and spirit. The quality of our relationships depends on the quality of our communications on a personal, interpersonal, social, and political level. Christians find the model of their communication in God’s communication to us in the Christ.

All the Gospels present Jesus as a person who, in all he says, does, and is, continues to point to the One who sent him. This gives meaning to his living and dying, making his death on the cross an act of freedom, not a destiny passively endured. Our fear of death can enslave us and prevent us from embracing the cross to follow him. The way we experience death is connected to our experience of the death of the people we love. With their death, something in us dies. But when Christians place their faith not in immortality but in resurrection from the dead, they know that their faith does not sidestep the grief of separation and death but passes through it. In Jesus, God has taken upon Godself the dramatic separation of death, making that death, not only an end but also a fulfillment. The God who calls us to life, in the same way, calls us back through death. It is not death that has the last word, as we so often fear, but God and love.  +Amen.