Recovering our lost integrity

“What does God want?”

“He wants his creation to recover its lost integrity.”

Bishop Barron’s words from his homily for the first Sunday in September, Be Opened, explain everything. While God’s creatures search madly for answers to their despair and sense of meaninglessness, there is just one remedy. Only one method to repair the disharmony, loss of identity and divisiveness caused by our enemy.

The context for Bishop Barron’s recovering our lost integrity, is Mark’s Gospel passage that recounts Jesus’ leaving Tyre and going to the Greek city of Decapolis. The tales of Jesus’ healing miracles precede him everywhere he goes. And so the Greeks bring him a deaf man with a speech impediment and “begged him to lay a hand on him.”

He took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” —
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.

Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

Indeed, Jesus is a wonder worker

states Bishop Barron.

Why?

Why does he restore speech, hearing, raise the dead and cure lepers?

To show off?

To reveal God the Father. Over and over Jesus tells his disciples that when they listen to him, when they look at him, they hear and see God the Father. But although they were with him for three years, they were incapable of hearing–and seeing, Just like me, you and everyone on this beautiful planet, bleeding from flood, drought, bloodshed and hatred.

“Jesus,” says Bishop Barron, is the icon of the invisible God, the visible representation of the God of Israel…whatever he’s saying or doing is explaining who God is and what God is about.”

“And it’s not just an anthropological problem. No. Sin affects all of creation.”

The proponents of climate change are right, the natural world is sick, but their solutions can fix nothing. Governments and their regulations cannot heal the planet. The work of recovering our lost integrity begins with repentance: I am a sinner, and so are you, my friend.

I italicized Bishop Barron’s words, “Sin affects all of creation,” because they warrant reflection. Perhaps even reading the first three magnificent chapters of Genesis, carefully and thoughtfully. Long ago, when I’d decided to become Catholic, my now-husband John suggested I read the Bible.

I did. And was astounded by the poetic beauty, the splendor of the prose in the first three chapters. And I knew, Eden is real.

It is because I hear the echoes of Eden.

Of a place where all of creation – all of us creatures were, in a sense, one. We humans had dominion but the word does not connote perversion of power or hierarchy, rather it implies a deep reverence for all creatures, an understanding that supersedes words because perfect communication can exist only without words.

Ever Think About Eden? Whether It was a Real Place?

But we still don’t get it, do we?

Just like Joshua, we’re suspicious of modern Medab. And we, like the “Sons of Thrunder, want to rain down fire upon those who aren’t “one of us.” On his recent Asian trip, Pope Francis spoke at an interfaith meeting of Singapore young people.

“Every religion,” Pope Francis declared, “is a way to arrive at God.”

Jesuit Pope Francis is surely well-versed with another Jesuit: Karl Rahner and the brilliant, radical theology of his “anonymous Christian.” In fact, the pope frequently refers to Rahner’s criterion of “men of good will” when explaining the universality of God’s salvific plan. But instead of examining the meaning behind the Pope’s phrase, the predictablly banal outrage against Pope Francis once again exploded, not just from Catholics but from Christian groups as well.

Jesus’ reply to the James and John’s offer to rain down fire on those who rejected him and the disciples should “chill” us.

Anyone who is not against us is for us.

Numbers 11:25-29:If only the whole people of the Lord were prophets.
James 5:1-6: Your wealth is all rotting, your clothes are all eaten up by moths.
Mark 9:38-43,45,47-48: Anyone who is not against us is for us.

The stern words of today’s Gospel should send a chill down our spine. They set out what it means to be ‘for’ and ‘against’ Christ. It is clear that the Lord is not content with lip service. What he requires is an integral response that must shape our behaviour and definitively  structure our life. We are to cut ourselves off from everything and anything that incites us to evil. We are to look upon others with creative compassion, striving to anticipate and meet their needs.
Above all, we are not to come between them and the Lord, as stumbling blocks. How remarkable it is: we have the potential to reveal God to one another; and we can likewise conceal him from each other. It is a terrifying prospect: by my actions I may effectively block another from seeing God, from reaching true freedom, happiness, and beatitude.

Sunday B: Coram Fratribus