A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at St. Thomas, Salem on Saturday, August 31st, and at St. John's, Centralia and Trinity, Mt. Vernon on Sunday, September 1, 2013.
“SHAMELESS
SELF-PROMOTION”
The college football season is upon
us. Soon, the regular season games will
begin.
Already, preseason polls have been
prepared and sent out to the media to report on the top-ranked teams. And, as the season rolls along, it’s
interesting to see how the top-ranked teams change places as they win-loss
records accrues.
As a native of Nebraska, I will
admit to you that – even though I haven’t lived in the state in quite a few
years – I still follow Nebraska football.
It is a rare year, indeed, when the Cornhuskers aren’t ranked in the top
25 teams, nationwide. Though Nebraska is
a fairly small state, compared to some others, its university has devoted a
large amount of resources and hard work to ensure that its team is among the
top-ranked teams in the country, year after year.
To get to the top of the rankings,
or to be included in the top 25, involves a lot of self-promotion and hard work. (Freedom from injuries that could sideline
the most crucial players also helps.)
In short, getting to the top, and
keeping company with those other really good teams, doesn’t happen by itself.
Perhaps the Pharisees and the
lawyers who had gathered for the banquet to which Jesus had been invited
thought of themselves that way, as well….perhaps their line of thinking went
something like this: “I am who I am and
where I am in my station in life because I’ve worked hard to get here….I keep
the Law of Moses faithfully, seeking to apply its commands to every part of my
daily life, in small matters and in great ones.
So the company I keep is proof of God’s favor towards me, his faithful
servant.”
I will admit I’m probably putting
words in the mouths of these Pharisees and lawyers, but I suspect that the
characterization I’ve made of them is pretty consistent with the picture we
have in the gospels of these self-righteous ones, who were often Jesus’ most
persistent opponents.
Of the Pharisees, Jesus says (in
Luke 11:42-43), “But woe to you Pharisees!
For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the
love of God. These you ought to have
done, without neglecting the others. Woe
to you Pharisees! For you love the best
seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces.”
In Jesus’ second condemnation, cited
above, we see the same behavior that the Lord observed at the banquet He
attended: These Pharisees and their
lawyer friends jockeyed for position, to be sure they sat near to the host, so
that their own estimation of their proper position would be recognized by all.
This sort of behavior is a little
like looking at the weekly poll numbers of the rankings of the football
teams……The teams themselves want to know who’s been recognized as being the
best, the next best, and so forth. And,
these teams also want everyone else to know just how good they are, and just
how high in the polls they have placed.
So, too, with the Pharisees….they
wanted everyone to know where they ranked in the pecking order of the banquet,
for at these feasts, nothing was left to chance: Every little detail was planned out carefully
in advance. This jockeying for position
wasn’t some random, on-the-spot, behavior….it, too, was carefully worked out.
Jesus turns the tables on these
proud Pharisees….In football terminology, He says that it isn’t the highest
ranked, most recognized teams, the ones with a 12 – 0 record, who deserve all
the attention. No, instead He suggests
that it will be the human beings that the Pharisees most likely regarded as
having a life record of 0 – 12 who deserve our attention….these are the ones
who are unclean, who are poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind, the ones
who could not come into the temple’s holy precincts in those days. These are the true outsiders, the
untouchables of that ancient time. It is
those who must be invited, Jesus says.
The Pharisees who were invited to
that banquet so many years ago wound up having a bad night….for just before
Jesus exposed their blatant self-promotion, their pride and their puffed-up
estimation of themselves, He had healed a man who was afflicted with dropsy
(the modern term for this condition is edema, a condition in which fluids build
up in the body). No doubt these
Pharisees and their lawyer friends regarded the man as a sinner, for his
physical affliction – in their eyes anyway – amounted to proof of his sinful
condition. So the “sinner” is healed on
the Sabbath day in front of their very eyes.
In one simple gesture, all their preconceived notions of who was holy, who
was righteous, and who was not, were overturned by the Lord’s care and love for
this man.
Overturned as well were their own
estimations of their rightful place in God’s scheme of things. Jesus tells them all that those who don’t
seem to count for much in the eyes of the world are the very ones that God
prizes the most. Pass the Excedrin!
St. Luke loves to convey to us
accounts of Jesus’ teaching, healing and work that turn the world upside
down…..The Lord’s destruction of the Pharisees’ views of the world and those
who live in it follows a pattern of turnovers which determine the ultimate
outcome of God’s game plan, a plan to include and honor those whom the world
thinks of as “losers”.
For so once were each one of
us: Losers. People with an 0 – 12 record, people whom
God, in His inestimable love, chose to invite us to the playing field of life,
so that we might become winners in His eyes.
Thanks be to God!
