“Jesus said to them, ‘Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?’” -Mark 12:24
Fr. James and I have been speaking a fair bit recently about our collective grief and shame as a result of some of the sins of the Church. Yesterday, I went to visit the steps of our cathedral in Halifax where there is a makeshift memorial for the children of the residential schools. I felt compelled to go there out of a sense of grief. I know your grief because some of you have spoken to me about it.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus uses the challenge of the Sadducees to show how the intellectual pursuit, as noble as it is, if void of compassion entirely misses the point. Let me rephrase that: If the pursuit of truth is void of the truth of compassion it pursues absurdity.
Let me explain. The Sadducees were a sect that did not believe in the resurrection but did uphold their understanding of the law of Moses. One of those laws, in the context of the age, was to prevent a widow from becoming destitute. So, at some level, inside the modern challenges of a woman’s inherent agency, the Mosaic law was as act of compassion in that it provided for the material provision of a woman who would have otherwise become destitute. Again, I want to emphasize, this is use of the text in its historical context from which can tease out core themes at play in Jesus' teaching.
Interestingly, the Sadducees could have made their rhetorical point by creating a dilemma with only two brothers but they took their intellectual, rhetorical point to the absurd. They took a compassionate commandment and turned it into an absurd rhetorical trap. As such, they tried to render the concept of the resurrection as absurd.
Jesus says the reason they are wrong is because “they know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.” They have no idea what they have read because the condition for the human experience in time is based on our participation in the eternal. The resurrection is not another ‘belief box’ to tick so we adhere to a specific set of religious beliefs but the resurrection is a statement about how God relates to us in life and death. All life is in the presence of God and life doesn’t end at the death of our bodies.
The presence of God is revealed through the person of Jesus Christ who has little time for the hubris of the intellectual void of compassion.
May the truth of our own lives reveal the truth of our compassionate Lord. And may the truth of repentance renew in us the beauty of Jesus Christ who calls us to serve, not to be served.
Saint Mother Teresa spoke truth with compassion. She said, "If we have lost our peace, it's because we have forgotten that we belong to one another."
No comments:
Post a Comment