30th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2018

Seven Sundays ago we had the story of Jesus healing another blind man, though surprisingly he did it in two stages – first a partial cure, then the full cure.

At a time when the Royal Commission has invited the Catholic Church to look seriously at the destructive effects of clericalism and our endemic blindness to many of its expressions, we could well go back seriously over what Mark has given us these past seven weeks.

On three different occasions Jesus has mentioned his coming passion and death, and warned the disciples that a life dedicated to preaching and living a message of unconditional love would bring its share of suffering for them, too. We had Peter, the natural leader, disapproving of Jesus talking about his coming death – only to be answered sharply by Jesus telling him, “Get behind me, Satan! because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.”

That was soon followed by the story of the exorcism of a deaf and dumb spirit from a young boy, the interesting thing there being the inability of the disciples to cast out the spirit, despite their trying, and despite their previous successes when they had been earlier sent out on mission around Galilee. When they queried Jesus afterwards about their failure, Jesus commented that this kind of demon could be driven out “only by prayer”. What did that say about the prayer-life of the disciples?

The rest of the material in between has had to do with personal interactions within the Christian community and the particular traps facing disciples as we relate to each other. We had the story about the disciples arguing among themselves as to who was the greatest. That gave Jesus the opportunity to insist that all who want to be first must make themselves last of all and servant of everyone else; and he used a little child to illustrate his point.

John then proudly related how he and others had come across someone using Jesus’ name to cast out devils and they had stopped him, since he was not one of them. Jesus proceeded to puncture their self-importance and exclusiveness by stating simply that “anyone who is not against us is for us”.

Not long afterwards, John would be at it again – he obviously was still not seeing too clearly. Along with his brother James, he asked Jesus to promise that they would be big time in the coming kingdom, sitting one at his left and one at his right. The other disciples were not much better, just slower off the mark. This led Jesus to insist for a second time, and even more clearly, that “anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant, and anyone who wants to be first among you must be slave to all.”

In between those two incidents in which the disciple John had figured, Jesus took the opportunity to speak about disciples who in the prevailing culture were regarded as having no rights and being of little consequence.

Firstly, he mentioned “the little ones who have faith”, those disciples who have got the message of humility though perhaps still tentatively. In quite strong language [cutting off your hand, tearing out your eye] he warned of the danger of “bringing down” such “little ones” – perhaps particularly by drawing them, like themselves, into the fruitless business of “who is the greatest?”.

He then warned the males of the community, in a radical challenge to the prevailing culture where women had no rights, to face up to the fact of the equal dignity of women, and have no part, for example, in the common practice whereby men could and did divorce their wives, virtually at will.

Even children, in Jesus’ mind, had a dignity that needed to be recognised and respected – and learnt from.

We could do well to make our own the heartfelt plea of today’s blind man of Jericho, “Master, let me see again!”; and resolutely “follow Jesus along the way” of enlightened discipleship.