Proper 5 - Genesis 3: 8-15; Psalm 138; II
Corinthians 4: 13–5: 1; Mark
3: 20-35
A
homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given
at St. John’s Church, Huntingdon,
Pennsylvania on Sunday, June 7, 2015.
“THE
END OF TRIBALISM”
(Homily text:
Mark 3: 20 - 35)
It is Sunday morning, and the
faithful are gathering for worship. A
man comes up and says to the priest, “I don’t have anything to eat. Can you give me some food?” Service time is about five minutes away. The procession has already formed and the
priest is fully vested and ready for service.
He looks back at the man who’s asked for help, and realizes that he is
different from the members of the congregation in just about every way
possible: He is different racially,
different in his economic status, different in his dress (he is wearing a very
dirty tee shirt and an equally dirty pair of athletic shorts). The priest wonders what the parishioners will
think, seeing the man at the front door.
Setting those concerns aside, the priest says to the man, “Service is
about to start, and I don’t have time to go get you something to eat. But if you’ll stay for the service, we will
see to it that you get some food after it is done. If you want to sit next to my wife, she will
guide you through the service.” The man
agrees to stay, and service proceeds.
Not a single worshipper that day ever says to the priest, “Why did you
let that man in here?” On the contrary,
at coffee hour following the service, many parishioners speak with the
individual, and following that, the man is taken to the grocery store so that
his needs can be met.
The Lord asks, in today’s gospel
reading, “Who are my brothers and
sisters?” Looking around at those who
were sitting around Him, He then answers His own question, saying, “Here are my
mother and brothers! Whoever does the
will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
It is not hard to imagine that, in
the first century world of the Roman Empire, such a scene as we began this
homily with played itself out many times. Scruffy-looking persons, whose social
standing, manner of dress and appearance proved that they were among the
down-and-out of those days probably presented themselves to the Church, looking
not only for their needs to be met, but also so that they could be accepted for
themselves, accepted by Christians out of the love that these Christians,
themselves, had come to experience as a result of having come to know Christ.
So just who are the Lord’s brothers,
sisters and mothers? The short answer is
that everyone who does the will of God is the Lord’s brothers, sisters and
mothers.
Doing the will of God unifies. Doing the will of God erases all distinctions
of race, class, and social standing.
Let’s unpack this just a bit.
In the first century world of the
Greco-Roman world, and also in the world of the Jews, a person’s origins,
identity, ethnicity, racial and social status were important markers of who a
person was. Even though the Roman Empire
covered the Mediterranean basin with a patina of unity, yet within the empire,
local identities remained important.
Consider, for example, the identities of those Jews who had come to
Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost (this is a text we heard two weeks ago,
from the first part of the second chapter of the Book of Acts)….St. Luke (the
writer of Acts) tells us that people were identified as being Cappadocians, as
Medes, as Elamites, or as residents of Phrygia or Pamphylia (to cite just a few
of the origins of those pilgrims who were present for the festival).
The Jews themselves parceled out the
world according to who was a Jew and who was not. (Although it must be said that the Jews
welcomed Gentiles who had come to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
even though they had not formally converted to Judaism….such people were known
as “God-fearers”[1].)
Beyond the distinctions, in the
ancient world, of race, ethnicity and religious belief, there was the
distinction of social and economic status.
The Roman Empire was a deeply stratified place. One’s place in society was fixed and was
unchangeable, for the most part.[2] There was a small noble class, a small middle
class, and a large underclass of slaves and the poor.
Jesus breaks down all these
barriers.
During His earthly ministry, He
hangs around with the outcasts of Jewish culture, the prostitutes, tax
collectors and sinners. He breaks down
the barriers of Jewish conviction that separated the world into those who were
“clean” and those who were “unclean.” By
so doing, He opens the way to these “unclean” persons – persons who were
regarded by the likes of the Pharisees as being permanently unclean and
therefore, beyond redemption - the way of restoration of a relationship with
God and with others.
Likewise, the Lord breaks down the
barriers of race and ethnicity, willingly choosing to associate with the
Samaritans, a group that was passionately hated by the Jews. He mingles with non-Jews and shows Himself
willing to heal their sick.
Once the Good News of Jesus Christ
becomes known, there are, no longer, any permanently unclean and unacceptable
persons. Everyone can become a new
creation in Christ, everyone!
In time, the Holy Spirit descends
with power on the Apostles and on the Lord’s disciples. They are charged with going out into the
world to be the Lord’s witnesses to “Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to
the ends of the earth.”[3]
Implicit in the Lord’s charge that
the Good News will be preached to the ends of the earth is the realization that
this Good News will reach the ears of non-Jews.
It took the Church awhile to realize that that was God’s intent, that everyone
everywhere would be invited to come into relationship with the Father through
the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Once SS. Paul and Barnabas turned to the Gentiles, to tell them the Good
News of God in Christ, the Church was faced with a crisis: Should the Gentiles who had come to faith in
Christ be required to become fully observant Jews, as well? St. Luke records the debate that took place
at the Council of Jerusalem (held in the year 49 AD) concerning this question.[4] The council’s decision is that, no, Gentiles
do not need to fully follow the requirements of the Law of Moses.
As the Apostles fan out throughout
the known world, the Christian Church becomes a place where noble men and women
and slaves sit next to one another in worship, each calling the other “brother”
and “sister”. This was an affront to the
Roman view of social relationships.
Distinctions of class and economic status disappear, for all are called
to be one in Christ.
Much the same thing can be said of
the distinctions of race, ethnicity and geographical origin. These distinctions, too, disappear.
If we reflect on the world in which
we live today, we can see that much of its nature is quite similar to the
Greco-Roman world of the first century.
For example, the social makeup of
society today resembles that of the ancient world in that there are large
numbers of the poor, whose lives are marked with much the same sort of
hardships and lack of hope that the poor of those earlier days
experienced. To them the Church,
proclaiming the Good News, offered hope to people who had no hope. The Church told them that their lives
mattered to God and to those early Christians.
Many of the poor in those ancient
days were separated from the places they had grown up in by virtue of economic
necessity, or by having been sold into slavery.
The Church became a new family for such persons. The call to the Church today is to offer that
same opportunity to the disadvantaged and the hopeless of our contemporary
culture.
In Christ, all things became
new. Persons who had experienced the new
birth of Baptism also found that whatever identities they formerly claimed as
being foremost in their identification of themselves were now replaced by a new
and primary identity: They had become a
child of God in Christ.
May we, in our day, time and place,
offer the same sort of a new beginning in Christ to those who look without hope
toward the future. To them, and to all
persons, we proclaim the Good News that God so loved each one that He gave His
only-begotten Son, so that each one might have a new life, and have that new
life in abundance (I am paraphrasing John 3: 16).
AMEN.
