Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter
Some years ago, I had a discussion with a young man who was looking into the possibility of a Benedictine vocation. He had one lingering reservation, though. As he put it, “If the Benedictines go insane, who will stop them?” I was surprised, though encouraged by this question, as he obviously did not think we had yet attained insanity, though why corporate insanity in a religious order shouldn’t affect the superior is not clear to me.
He asked this because Benedictines are technically not an order. Each house has considerable autonomy, and the highest ranking abbot of the Benedictines, the Abbot Primate, has absolutely no canonical authority over any monks whatsoever. I head Abbot Primate Notker Wolf speak last week, and his testimony to this was quite moving. “Being powerless,” he said, and I paraphrase from memory, “is a blessing. People are not afraid to talk to me. I can look at people face-to-face as a brother and equal and not look down at them as an authority.”
Of course, while on one hand we love a man such as Abbot Notker who proclaims his powerlessness, on the other, we grow impatient when the Benedictines go test the limits of sanity while he merely plays his flute.
More frustrating is when we ask God to do something about our distress and He seems not to. St. Paul asks this thorn in his flesh to be removed, and three times is denied. More distressing yet is the picture in today’s gospel, where Jesus Himself is literally powerless, ‘unable’ to do anything powerful. This points to a surprising fact about the human person. Jesus has shown absolute mastery over the demons thus far in Mark’s gospel. Jesus controls the sea, heals sickness and even has mastery over death, as we saw last Sunday. When it comes to having mastery over the human race, however, we see God’s limitations, as it were.
Can it be that we human beings, created in God’s image, are really more powerful in some way than the demons, who seem unable to resist God’s authority? Certainly as creators and artisans, the human race has shown itself to be quite masterful toward nature in recent centuries, and that mastery continues to increase at a frightening pace. As space shuttles explore far away regions, new advancements in biology make it possible to engineer human and animal life, almost to build new human beings out of the dust, the otherwise inert material of genetic molecules. We shape not only the bodies of human beings, but by the rapid flow of information, we can shape minds and hearts as well. We human beings are powerful indeed.
Yet for all our power, misery remains. Faced with the outrages of great masses of humanity starving, killing and maiming each other in wars, dying of preventable disease, or young people even in our own affluent society killing or injuring themselves in large numbers, we are right to feel a certain indignation with the promises of the powerful of the world. In fact, it is not uncommon for many in recent centuries to go right to the top. If there is a God, why can’t He fix these problems? Or if He can, why does He not? If He does not, perhaps He is not such a good God. Today’s gospel offers us a way of answering these puzzles.
We are not the first to ask these questions. Israel was a people formed by an astounding and unprecedented rescue by God of a small band of descendents of Abraham at the Red Sea. God routed the most powerful human force of the time, the army and chariots of Pharaoh in Egypt and utterly destroyed them. Despite this, within a few days, the people were complaining in the desert. Some gratitude! When new dangers would arise, coming first from the Philistines, then Assyria and Babylon, the people would cry out to God: give new signs and work new wonders! Show forth the strength of your right hand and arm! After some time, these appeals apparently stopped working. Last week, Jesus raised the dead. This week: ho-hum, here’s the carpenter: what have you done for us lately? Jesus is hardly able to work even simple cures. Such is the power of doubt, ridicule, thinking that we know all there is to know about someone already.
And herein lies our challenge. How often do we locate the agency of our sufferings in someone other person? “If only he or she would change (or better, if only God would do something about him or her), my life would be easier.” This line of thought blissfully obscures the fact that we think we know the solution. And by the power of our pre-emptive summary of the situation, we foreclose the possibility of change, healing and reconciliation. We foreclose on these possibilities because we are acting powerfully, as if defining the situation once and for all based on our own inclinations.
If we are able to grasp, at least intellectually, the necessity of loving and forgiving others, we might advance to a different but no less troubling conclusion: that no matter how hard we try, we cannot forgive, cannot bring ourselves to love. In such a case, we might lose hope. But what we are in effect saying is, “I am powerless to change myself, and what’s more, I do not really want to change because that would mean that I was wrong all along, nor do I think that God can change me.” In other words, we are unhappy about being powerless because it wounds our pride.
Why not accept powerlessness as a gift, as St. Paul and Abbot Notker suggest to us? Jesus was not able to work cures in His home town, but He retained the power to do something greater: to forgive sins and change lives. But He exercised this power by consenting to the cross, to powerlessness. And this He did not do grumbling about the state of affairs in the fallen world, angry that it had to happen to Him, but, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, heedless of its shame.” Do we take enough time to reflect on the joy that God sets before us?
Human beings are powerful enough to resist God: what will happen when we relent and trust God? If our exercising of power by rejecting Christ has been turned by the cross into our salvation, what will our embracing of powerlessness be but eternal blessedness? All praise to Jesus Christ, seated at the right of the throne of God forever and ever. Amen.
He asked this because Benedictines are technically not an order. Each house has considerable autonomy, and the highest ranking abbot of the Benedictines, the Abbot Primate, has absolutely no canonical authority over any monks whatsoever. I head Abbot Primate Notker Wolf speak last week, and his testimony to this was quite moving. “Being powerless,” he said, and I paraphrase from memory, “is a blessing. People are not afraid to talk to me. I can look at people face-to-face as a brother and equal and not look down at them as an authority.”
Of course, while on one hand we love a man such as Abbot Notker who proclaims his powerlessness, on the other, we grow impatient when the Benedictines go test the limits of sanity while he merely plays his flute.
More frustrating is when we ask God to do something about our distress and He seems not to. St. Paul asks this thorn in his flesh to be removed, and three times is denied. More distressing yet is the picture in today’s gospel, where Jesus Himself is literally powerless, ‘unable’ to do anything powerful. This points to a surprising fact about the human person. Jesus has shown absolute mastery over the demons thus far in Mark’s gospel. Jesus controls the sea, heals sickness and even has mastery over death, as we saw last Sunday. When it comes to having mastery over the human race, however, we see God’s limitations, as it were.
Can it be that we human beings, created in God’s image, are really more powerful in some way than the demons, who seem unable to resist God’s authority? Certainly as creators and artisans, the human race has shown itself to be quite masterful toward nature in recent centuries, and that mastery continues to increase at a frightening pace. As space shuttles explore far away regions, new advancements in biology make it possible to engineer human and animal life, almost to build new human beings out of the dust, the otherwise inert material of genetic molecules. We shape not only the bodies of human beings, but by the rapid flow of information, we can shape minds and hearts as well. We human beings are powerful indeed.
Yet for all our power, misery remains. Faced with the outrages of great masses of humanity starving, killing and maiming each other in wars, dying of preventable disease, or young people even in our own affluent society killing or injuring themselves in large numbers, we are right to feel a certain indignation with the promises of the powerful of the world. In fact, it is not uncommon for many in recent centuries to go right to the top. If there is a God, why can’t He fix these problems? Or if He can, why does He not? If He does not, perhaps He is not such a good God. Today’s gospel offers us a way of answering these puzzles.
We are not the first to ask these questions. Israel was a people formed by an astounding and unprecedented rescue by God of a small band of descendents of Abraham at the Red Sea. God routed the most powerful human force of the time, the army and chariots of Pharaoh in Egypt and utterly destroyed them. Despite this, within a few days, the people were complaining in the desert. Some gratitude! When new dangers would arise, coming first from the Philistines, then Assyria and Babylon, the people would cry out to God: give new signs and work new wonders! Show forth the strength of your right hand and arm! After some time, these appeals apparently stopped working. Last week, Jesus raised the dead. This week: ho-hum, here’s the carpenter: what have you done for us lately? Jesus is hardly able to work even simple cures. Such is the power of doubt, ridicule, thinking that we know all there is to know about someone already.
And herein lies our challenge. How often do we locate the agency of our sufferings in someone other person? “If only he or she would change (or better, if only God would do something about him or her), my life would be easier.” This line of thought blissfully obscures the fact that we think we know the solution. And by the power of our pre-emptive summary of the situation, we foreclose the possibility of change, healing and reconciliation. We foreclose on these possibilities because we are acting powerfully, as if defining the situation once and for all based on our own inclinations.
If we are able to grasp, at least intellectually, the necessity of loving and forgiving others, we might advance to a different but no less troubling conclusion: that no matter how hard we try, we cannot forgive, cannot bring ourselves to love. In such a case, we might lose hope. But what we are in effect saying is, “I am powerless to change myself, and what’s more, I do not really want to change because that would mean that I was wrong all along, nor do I think that God can change me.” In other words, we are unhappy about being powerless because it wounds our pride.
Why not accept powerlessness as a gift, as St. Paul and Abbot Notker suggest to us? Jesus was not able to work cures in His home town, but He retained the power to do something greater: to forgive sins and change lives. But He exercised this power by consenting to the cross, to powerlessness. And this He did not do grumbling about the state of affairs in the fallen world, angry that it had to happen to Him, but, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, heedless of its shame.” Do we take enough time to reflect on the joy that God sets before us?
Human beings are powerful enough to resist God: what will happen when we relent and trust God? If our exercising of power by rejecting Christ has been turned by the cross into our salvation, what will our embracing of powerlessness be but eternal blessedness? All praise to Jesus Christ, seated at the right of the throne of God forever and ever. Amen.
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 8:10 PM
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