31st Sunday of the Year
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,
and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Kahlil Gibran, from The Garden of the Prophet
I do not remember where I saw these lines: ‘I sought God and (him) I did not see. I sought my soul, but it eluded me. I sought my neighbour and found all three.’ These lines bring together the fundamental affirmations that love of God and neighbour are at the heart of everything. For Jesus the love of God and love of neighbour cannot be separated.
And neighbour today includes all non-human life as well. Neglect of, or indifference to, our neighbour in need is indifference to God. Whatever we do or fail to do for our neighbour, we do or fail to do to God. It must also go beyond empty words. The encounter with the scribe seems to one of the more respectful interactions Jesus had with people who may have been trying to trick him. As with so many stories in the gospels, we do not see what the endpoint is for the characters. We do not know what they do. We have no idea with this scribe, as with the young man who could not give up his possessions and follow Jesus, what the outcome is. Was a step taken toward the neighbour in love and if the neighbour included the poor, the sick and even those deemed sinners? All we know that an invitation was extended. It is up to us to complete that story. Will we take the step towards neighbour and to God?
More and more we live in a culture that prioritises selfishness, greed, individualism, greed, and security. When politicians take us to another election, we ask if we are better off than previously. Jesus would probably say that it is the wrong question. Do we ask about children as young as ten being deemed criminally responsible? Do we challenge that law and order is prioritised over welfare? Do we question why more prisons are being built and more money spend on military rather than homes, hospitals and schools? Do we ensure that the elderly are treated with respect? Do people receive a living wage for the work they do? There is an intense call in the readings to love ‘the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.’ The first word in the text from Deuteronomy is ‘Hear then, Israel,’ (‘Shema’ – ‘listen’). The double-edged gospel commandment demands a face, race, gender, name, the acknowledgment of the other as a neighbour, a sister or brother. So often we fail to give faces a name, a story, a history. It begins with listening – deep listening. It is a teaching that needs to be enshrined and enfleshed in our lives. It needs to have the flesh and blood of the everyday to touch our hearts and become action. As with Bartimaeus last week, people try to render some people invisible. Our challenge is to follow the nonviolent Jesus and oppose whatever harms people or Creation. The God of Jesus does not collaborate with the military leader, the banker or financier who is enriched at the price of other people. In fact, this God suffers with people on the underbelly of society. The call to love God and neighbour cannot be separated from loving all creation, even ‘a speck of dust’ as Pope Francis says because God is present in all.
Today’s readings place God’s law above all human legislation which needs to take a back seat to love of God and love of neighbour. Jesus’ response to the lawyer subverts any system that is prepared to sacrifice women, children, Indigenous people, our young people and the asylum seeker and migrant to national security and law and order. This God stands with the enslaved, with single mothers, with orphaned children, with people in solidarity with people at the world’s borders seeking peace. On a more global level, war, conflict and poverty result from hatred and meanness where personal or political or national agenda is put before the common good. Climate change comes from a failure to respect, love, appreciate God’s creation.
Pope Francis reminds us that our sisters and brothers have faces, stories, and histories and require love and support. ‘I was hungry and you fed me………’ When Jesus tells the lawyer that he is not far from the reign of God, he is saying that knowing the commandments is not enough. It is about seeing our lives as bound up with the other – both our sisters and brothers and God’s creation – and find our loving God at the heart of all things.
The neighbour is not just the one who has the same values that we hold, or speaks the same language as us, who dresses as we do. It can be difficult when we see Palestinian people murdered and brutalised on a daily. They are our neighbours. Can we hear their pain, trauma and painful history? Those who murder and brutalise are also our neighbours. Can we still see them as human beings? We will never meet these neighbours, but they are the trafficked person, the asylum seeker, the peoples of Pacific Island nations threatened by climate change, colonised Indigenous peoples around the world. As we grow more sensitive and attentive to the other, we discover our connectedness and our shared humanity that awaken us to the consequences of our choices and actions towards other and all creation. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes: ‘Love people even in their sin, for this is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of god’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things…. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.’
In 2021, Pope Francis, at World Meeting of Popular Movements, made some concrete calls, “In the name of God, I ask financial groups and international credit institutions to allow poor countries to assure ‘the basic needs of their people’ and to cancel those debts that so often are contracted against the interests of those same peoples. In the name of God, I ask the great extractive industries………to stop destroying forests, wetlands and mountains, to stop polluting rivers and seas, to stop poisoning food and people. In the name of God, I ask the great food corporations to stop imposing monopolistic systems of production and distribution that inflate prices and end up withholding bread from the hungry. In the name of God, I ask arms manufacturers and dealers to completely stop their activity, because it foments violence and war, it contributes to those awful geopolitical games which cost millions of lives displaced and millions dead. In the name of God, I ask the technology giants to stop exploiting human weakness, people’s vulnerability, for the sake of profits without caring about the spread of hate speech, grooming, fake news, conspiracy theories, and political manipulation. In the name of God, I ask the telecommunications giants to ease access to educational material and connectivity for teachers via the internet so that poor children can be educated even under quarantine. In the name of God, I ask the media to stop the logic of post-truth, disinformation, defamation, slander and the unhealthy attraction to dirt and scandal, and to contribute to human fraternity and empathy with those who are most deeply damaged. In the name of God, I call on powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions against any country anywhere on earth. No to neo-colonialism. Conflicts must be resolved in multilateral fora such as the United Nations. We have already seen how unilateral interventions, invasions and occupations end up; even if they are justified by noble motives and fine words.”
In Laudato Si,’ Pope Francis says every ‘little gesture of love’ becomes an antidote to acts of violence, abuse and indifference. Through such gestures the church is called to build a ‘civilisation of love’ but as Wilda C. Gafney writes in A Woman’s Lectionary for The Whole Church, ‘If our gospel proclamations are not true for the most marginalised among us—women, non-binary folk, trans folk, gender non-conforming folk, and LGBT folk—then our gospel is not true.’ We could add to this group. We are, after all, connected. We are extensions of each other. We are part of the same human family. What affects one, impacts all. We are part of each other. Together we get to determine what kind of people we will be. We do not know what the scribe chose to do after his encounter with Jesus, but what we do it critical.
Love versus Scripture. David Hayward The Naked Pastor October 25, 2018