Reflection on the gospel for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
To be alive to God, one has to be dead to the world. This is a basic principle of the spiritual life. The more dead we are to the world, the more alive we are to God.
One of the effects of original sin is disordered passions. We have an inclination to love creation in place of the Creator. But to allow the goodness and beauty of the world to move us beyond itself, and ourselves, to the absolute goodness and beauty of God, is to die to the world. It is much like passing through the stages of life: we die to infancy as we enter childhood; as we die to childhood with its pleasures and security, we enter adolescence; we must die to adolescence with all its illusions and fantasies to become adult. Similarly, one cannot be alive to God without dying to the world.
In the gospel for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Mt 10, 35-45), James and John were not yet dead to the world. Nor, for all the time they had spent with Jesus, were they fully alive to God. They were ambitious. The apostles did not understand the mission of Christ the Messiah, which is why Jesus had to foretell his Passion three times. They were expecting a Messiah who would conquer, a warrior king like David, who would overthrow the Roman Empire and re-establish the kingdom of Israel in all its dynastic glory. And James and John wanted places of honor in that kingdom, at Jesus’ left and right hand. They were not thinking as Christ thinks, but as man thinks. We see this even in Peter, immediately after Jesus gave him the authority of the keys of the kingdom. We read:
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
The human heart seeks to preserve itself at all costs; left to itself, it loves itself above all others and wishes that others should do the same. It is inordinately ambitious; it seeks its own honor and glory, and can do so without shame, even in the presence of Christ himself. The mother of James and John was likewise seeking honor for herself through her sons, when in truth the greatest honor for them would have been the honor of Christ their king.
It is particularly interesting that when this gospel was actually written, James had already won the victory. In his martyrdom, he had already drained the cup of suffering that Jesus spoke of in this gospel. Perhaps the writer of the gospel of Mark chose to preserve the memory of this shameful event in the lives of these great apostles, to illustrate the perennial temptation to all those called to serve Christ, in particular those called to be apostles. Jesus addressed this when he criticized the scribes and Pharisees, who “love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in marketplaces, and to be addressed as ‘Teacher’” (Mt 23, 6). Jesus explicitly exhorts us to seek the lowest place (Lk 14, 10). It is not for us to raise ourselves up, nor even to elevate others; it is the Lord who raises up and casts down. I’m convinced that Karl Rahner, one of the most important theologians of the 20th century, was right when he said that the greatest glories of the Church will remain unknown until eternity. Many in our midst, who have suffered tremendous adversity and endured with great faith, are completely hidden from the world and from the eyes of the Church on Earth. Water, after all, is the most powerful force in nature, and yet always seeks the lowest place.
Nonetheless, there are still people in this world, in the Church even, who insist on vying for the highest places of honor. What they forget is that Jesus, the suffering servant of Isaiah, brought about a great reversal; the highest place is now the lowest, and the lowest place is really the highest. The cross is the throne that Jesus chose for himself, thorns his crown, and the identity he chose for himself is “Christ crucified.” Poverty, eating with tax collectors and sinners, choosing to become ritually unclean by associating with the sick and the forsaken, touching them, healing them, all of which was repugnant to the religious leaders of the time – all this is what he chose for himself. To those who have not died to the world, this is unintelligible.
And yet James, John and all the Apostles eventually came to understand. What changed them? What, but the suffering and darkness into which they were plunged at the arrest of Jesus, his trial, and his death?– all of which to their minds was proof positive that everything Jesus said and stood for was a failure. He could not have been the Messiah, the Christ, because he did not defeat the Romans; rather, the Romans defeated him, or so it seemed. That darkness and utter despair was a genuine experience of death for them.
What happened next? He rose from the dead. He appeared to them, and on Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended upon them, giving them the fullness of the divine life, completing their death to the world and bestowing on them a courage that was transformative, as we see by comparing the Gospels to the Acts of the Apostles. Unconcerned about their livelihood, unconcerned about their lives, they were ready for martyrdom; their blood, and the blood of countless other martyrs in the first three centuries after Christ, was the seed from which sprang forth the life of the Church.
Image: Adobe Stock. By Formoney.
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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