29th Sunday
in Ordinary Time
This weekend I was out in the Putnam Valley woods with Troop Forty, taking part in the annual Michael A. Boccardi Memorial Trek-o-ree. I celebrated Mass there, and again this morning at St. Vincent's Hospital, but without a written text for either Mass. Here's an oldie, then.
Mark
10: 35-45
St. Joseph, Passaic,
N.J.
Oct.
22, 2000
“The cup that I drink, you will drink” (Mark 10:
39).
You can go into some large bookstores and find a
section of books for dummies: Windows 95 for Dummies, Macintosh for Dummies, even subjects
with nothing to do with computers, like Bicycling
for Dummies and travel guides for dummies.
At our Sunday liturgies we’ve been reading what we might call “Gospel
for Dummies.” Week after week, Jesus
explains some truth about the way to salvation, and the apostles, like dummies,
don’t get it.
Five weeks ago, Peter identified Jesus as the
Messiah. Jesus made his 1st prediction
of his coming passion, death, and resurrection.
Peter said that couldn’t happen to Jesus, and Jesus chewed him out, even
calling him “Satan.”
Four weeks ago Jesus made the 2d prediction of his
passion, death, and resurrection. The
disciples proceeded to get into an argument among themselves about who was the
greatest. Jesus had to remind them that
the greatest among them was the one who served everyone else.
Three weeks ago John was jealous of the apostles’
position as Jesus’ closest followers when he saw someone else driving out
demons in Jesus’ name, and Jesus had to admonish him.
Two weeks ago, people were bringing children to
Jesus to be blessed, and the apostles were trying to chase them away. Jesus welcomed the children, blessed them,
and reminded the Twelve that we must be like children if we want to enter the kingdom of God.
Last week, when the rich man did not accept Jesus’
invitation to become a disciple, Jesus pointed out that it was close to
impossible for people with earthly attachments to be saved; but with God all
things were possible. Peter immediately
wanted to know—at least he implied it—what was in it for them who had followed
Jesus. Jesus promises his followers a
multitude of new family, and persecution and eternal life.
Between last Sunday’s gospel and today’s we skip a
small passage in which Jesus once more predicts his coming passion, death, and
resurrection. Then we come to James and
John’s ambition: “Grant that in your
glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left” (10:37). Jesus is talking about serving others, being
like a child, suffering and death as the way to eternal life. They’re asking for power and authority. And when the other 10 apostles find out that
James and John have tried to jump ahead of them, “they became indignant at
James and John” (10:41). They just don’t
get it. So Jesus, infinitely patient
with them, as he is with us, has to explain it to them again: Gospel for dummies.
St. James the Greater, Basilica of Immaculate Conception, Washington |
Yes, James and John, like every disciple of Jesus,
must drink his cup: must undergo
self-denial, persecution, and suffering, and must finally pass thru death. Whoever wishes to be great in the Christian
community—wishes to be a great Christian—must be “the slave of all” (10:44) in
imitation of Jesus himself, who came “to serve and to give his life as a
ransom” (10:45).
Talk of suffering and death and service to others
is not exactly attractive. But Jesus has
pointed out to us that he has drunk this same cup first: “Can you drink the cup that I drink or be
baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? …The cup that I drink, you
will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be
baptized” (10:38-39). And in the other 2
readings today we heard about Christ’s suffering. 1st, the prophet Isaiah foretold that the
Lord’s Servant would suffer: “The Lord
was pleased to crush him in infirmity.
If he gives his life as an offering for sin…. through his suffering, my servant shall
justify many” (Is 53:10-11). Then, the
Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Jesus, our high priest, entered heaven to
be our intercessor only after having himself experienced our human weakness,
after having been tested in every way that we are: being tempted by sin, knowing intense
suffering, and dying a cruel and shameful death.
St. John the Apostle, Basilica of Immaculate Conception |
The Lord’s cup of suffering, our personal baptism
into his passion and death, comes to us in many ways.
You don’t like the weather. You don’t like the traffic. Your neighbors’ dog barks at 3:00 a.m., or
their teenage offspring party beyond your bedtime. We all suffer from this sort of affliction,
and for most of it there’s not much we can do about it. Except in our attitude. Without liking it, we can accept it as part
of our human condition and offer our discomfort or aggravation to the Lord, in
union with Jesus. Our cup becomes part
of his cup.
Then there’s stuff we do have control over, to some
extent. Your body hurts because of
illness, weariness, or old age. You try
to do something about it: medicine,
rest, surgery, make-up, hair dye.
OK. But sometimes what you try
takes time to kick in, or it just isn’t successful. You have a hard time getting up in the
morning. But you have to. Sometimes your job or other responsibilities
make unpleasant demands upon you. You
have a relative, a co-worker, a neighbor who just loves to bend your ear, but
you find her or him rather tiresome after a while. You try to be polite, even long-suffering,
but part of you after a while wants to say, “All right, already. Who cares about your Chihuahua’s lumbago or the 38th picture of
your grandchild?” All of these are part
of the human condition, which we can whine about, inwardly rebel against, even
get angry at God about. Or we can accept
what is our duty or what we finally can’t avoid as part of Christ’s cup of
suffering.
Then there’s serious stuff. Jesus talks about being the servant of
all. Most of us love to help other
people and find a lot of satisfaction in it, up to a point. But it doesn’t take long for raising a child
or caring for a sick relative or teaching a classroom full of energetic
youngsters to become stressful. Our
families and the parish make demands upon us that amount to serving other
people with constant generosity, and often with little recognition. We may do service in the wider community,
either thru our jobs—work that directly benefits others, like nursing,
teaching, policing, social work, government—or as volunteers in some
organization. This is important for
society. We can take that a step higher
by uniting ourselves interiorly with Jesus Christ, who came to serve and to
save us. We thus enter more deeply into
his baptism, with the hope of sharing in his resurrection. And when we do that, we’re passing beyond the
stage of “Gospel for Dummies” to “Gospel for Disciples.”
Finally, we may, like Peter and James and John and
most of the apostles, have to suffer because we are disciples of Jesus. Those of you who lived in Poland before
1989 know about that. The rest of us
have heard about the sufferings of the martyrs from the age of the apostles
right up to the present, when bishops, priests, and nuns are being put into
Chinese labor camps and Christians in the Sudan are being sold into slavery.
But we too suffer from persecution. Every other week there’s a story somewhere in
the newspaper or on TV about some form of anti-Catholicism or some put-down of
religious people in government, in schools and universities, on the editorial
pages, in our entertainment media. That
can only happen when Catholics and other religious people have convictions
about what they believe and attempt to live out their convictions, whether that
means living Sunday as a day of rest, or teaching that homosexual behavior is
sinful, or speaking up against the crime of abortion, or refusing to take
advantage of clients in business. Kids
who try to do what’s right in school—to study and not to cheat, not to use foul
language, not to smoke or drink or mess with drugs—risk being labeled
“goody-goodies” and picked on by some of their peers. It’s a kind of persecution for doing what’s
right. But when we know what’s right and
try to live by it, as disciples of our Lord Jesus, then indeed we’re in Gospel
graduate school. We’re drinking fully of
his cup, with firm hope of sharing in his heavenly glory.
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