JUly 8, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
BCP Lectionary
Isaiah 66:10-16 As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you
Psalm 66 Jubilate Deo
Galatians 6:(1-10)14-18 Bear one another's burdens/all must carry their
own loads
Luke 10:25-37 Three orders of ministry: Priests, Levites, and Samaritans
(Revised Common Lectionary: Trial Use)
2 Kings 5:1-14 A young girl, a prisoner of war, gives advice that heals a
scabrous warrior
Psalm 30 Exaltabo te, Domine
or
Isaiah 66:10-14 see above
Psalm 66:1-9 Jubilate Deo
Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16 see above
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 I watched Satan fall like lightning
In Luke's gospel, when the Seventy returned from their advance mission "on ahead of him in pairs", they returned to Jesus with joy saying, "Kyrios, in your name even the demons submit to us!" and Jesus was delighted and said, "I watched the Accuser fall from heaven like a flash of lightning." G. B. Caird, the Congregationalist scholar whom I met once at Mansfield College, Oxford, says that their success as exorcists inspired an estatic experience for Jesus, a prophetic vision in which these exorcisms are tokens of the cosmic exorcism of evil from Creation. René Girard, the French anthropologist/philosopher gave his new study of violence the title, "I see Satan Fall Like Lightning". Girard declares that "evidently he falls to earth, and he will not remain inactive." The collapse of the satanic lie about the human project is not the end of Satan, but "the end of his false transcendance" says Girard. The power of evil is disenchanted, de-mythologized, defanged, exorcised, cast out, by the eager ministry of the young people who follow Jesus in the Springtime of the Gospel. . But "Satanas", the genius of evil, is not terminated.. It no longer has a celestial status, as Satan had in the book of Job, and in the ancient edifice of human religion, a courtier in mythology whom we thought was on first-name basis with the Ineffable. Satan, always a parasite, never had an independent existence. Satan's power was a creation of human myth. Here Girard sees Jesus prophesying the prodigious success of the gospel, overthrowing the universal system of sacrificial victims, "absorbing the living force of (the) symbols and customs" of the pagan world--the religions which demand a victim, human or animal. The Accuser's role was always to demand another murder. Persons with "demons" had often been expelled, ostracized, cast out of the human community, made into victims, stoned--the fate to which the woman taken in adultery was destined, until Jesus interrupted, but which took Stephen the Protomartyr, and takes all the martyrs.. And the demand for it is contagious-- mimetic violence--the mob mentality is always satanic. The crowd always demands the deaths of the victims. The guilt or innocence of victims is always irrelevant to mobs--and it continues. God's justice never murders, but breaks out of the circle of mimetic violence. But from the time of the first mission of the Seventy, Satan's claim to be sacred, its violence and its sacrifices to be holy -- has ended. Satan is now seen as a secular, not a sacred myth. It has fallen like lightning from its place in heaven. And now, more clearly, it is human governments and the "synagogues of Satan", not the churches of the gospel, which sanction the terrestrial myth that the death of victims is the way to life for the rest of us.
.It should not surprise us that Luke's evangel, directed by its author "to the outside world", should be the one to tell us of the mission of the Seventy to the Gentiles, for he himself is the only Gentile author in the Greek Scriptures; he has a Greek name, wrote beautifully in the language, and addressed his work to "lovers of God" among the people of the ancient world who took their cultural and religious leadership from the Greeks, the people who invented and were custodians of the venerable myths. He is especially interested in what Jesus had to say and do with non-Jews, and with women, and with children, and with outcasts of all kinds. As the mission of he Twelve reached out to Israel's twelve tribes, so the ministry of these Seventy is directed to the rest of us.
The Book Genesis records that there were, all together and all counted, some seventy Gentile nations in the world, and the ancients believed that, just as they knew there were Twelve tribes in Israel, Twelve signs of the Zodiac, and one hundred fifty six kinds of fish.
Jesus had said that his own mission was only to the Jews, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But his vision expanded in his own lifetime, and in the burgeoning ministry of his own disciples, in this phalanx mission through Samaritan (i.e., "heretical") territory on their way to Jerusalem. The day would come when Paul would assess the failure of his own mission to Israel and declare, "Lo, we turn to the Gentiles, to the world outside." It was in fact 'outside' that Paul found himself after his conversion from his life as prosecuting attorney to missionary apostle. Jesus,in Luke's gospel, snatches this future into the present of his own ministry, and sends out Seventy--one for each of the Gentile nations--to preach peace, to live simply, and to exorcise and heal, in exchange for hospitality, for bed and board. "Let us work for the common good, especially for those of the faith community," Paul writes "in large letters", with his own hand.
Jesus tells the Seventy that they are to have a ministry of mutual support, two by two he sends them out, so that they begin already as cells of partnered itinerant ministry. . The gospel is to be preached as much by the way the missioners live as by the stuff they talk about. Their theology is not to be "just a matter of words," which is what secularists in our time insist is the stuff of religion. Missioners are not out for individual adventure, not competitive entrepreneurs, not even solo flight evangelists, but gospel travellers in tandem. He tells them to expect hostility: "Behold, I send you out as lambs amongst and amidst wolves." In seminary I was never told that, but to look for amicable and receptive situations on tree-shaded suburban lanes, to wear a rabat, not a slip-in fake collar, a white shirt with cuff links, to avoid hostile venues and to look for ways to cuff-link into the friendly culture of northamerican capitalism and offer the chaplaincy of the Church to the local satraps and subjects of Empire. Improve your image.
How to prepare for ministry amongst wolves? Luke uses the "wolf" in a pejorative way, to posit the enemies of the gospel as ferocious and mad-dog thirsty for blood. But Jesus here again was proleptically a Francis of Assisi, who converted the wolf of Gubbio and made him a friend of children. Jesus commission to the wolf-bait disciples is to live simply. If you don't have too much meat on your bones to attract predators, you'll be okay. But lambs walk warily in Wolf Land. I learned that on the west side of Chicago, in thirty years in a ghetto mission. The vicarage was frequently invaded by burglars who took anything that could be traded for cash in a pawn shop. They never took a single one of my several thousand books, and left my notebooks and archives untouched, the plants in the window ledges undisturbed, the art glass in the windows left to offer sunbeams to our worship. When we switched from sterling silver chalices to a glass goblet for the eucharist, we were suddenly bereft of midnight visitors to tote away the hallmarked altar ware. We had hardly been attracting attention to the gospel with our precious metals, but we were in fact owners of "attractive nuisances."
The A & P supermarket across the alley from the Chicago vicarage burnt to the ground one day in the 1980's and the entire neighborhood gathered--grownups and kids--to rifle through the ruins, gathering up canned goods and whatever could still be toted away, smoldering in their arms. The Incendio initiated a community project of the redistribution of wealth, I thought at the time. But a few years ago in Managua, while I was in the States one August for a medical visit, Casa Ave Maria burned to the ground as well. Friends pushed my Toyota from the garage to the street to keep it from exploding. The fire consumed everything I owned except the suit I wore and the clothes I had carried on the trip. Again, neighbors (I am told) swarmed over the smoking ruins and toted away whatever could be snatched from the burning. Weeks later, when I returned, a neighborhood boy brought to me some scorched photos he had found in the ashes, sad mementos of thirty joyous years. The only thing left to me in the house was my library, sodden with water from the firemen's hoses and beginning to mold. No one wanted any of the books in English. The Incendio slimmed down my mammon, quicker than a gospel admonition could do..
Jesus said, "carry no purse" because purse-snatchers can't snatch if you don't have one. "Carry no bag" to flaunt your burden of worldly goods. Some of our pilgrims, arriving here in the second poorest land in the hemisphere, are equipped with enough luggage for a Doctor Livingstone safari into the heart of darkness. Skinny neighborhood children watch in amazement as the travellers descend from microbuses like new divinities of a Cargo Cult being born. . "No sandals even," Jesus told them--an astonishing caveat. I haven't walked bare-foot since I was a kid, and find it awkward to do so now, "nor can foot feel now, being shod," wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins. Drunken derelicts who fall asleep on the sidewalks in Managua are likely to wake up and find their shoes have been slipped away, along with their consciousness. Jesus says his mission to the world outside is to be simple, efficient, and not itself an object of envy and greed because of its vehicle, its luxurious lifestyle.
Francis of Assisi was asked by the Pope why he insisted upon having no property at all ofhis own, and why he insisted that his disciples too must own nothing. Franis replied that "if we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them." Francis's whole apostolate from Jesus was in the lifestyle. G. K. Chesterton said of him that "what gave him his extraordinary personal power was this--that from Pope to beggar, from the Sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the woods, there was never a soul who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernardone was totally interested in them: in his own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that he himself was being valued and taken seriously and not merely added to the spoils of some social policy. . . he treated the whole mob of humanity as a mob of royalty. . . . It cannot be done by giving gold or even bread, for it is a proverb that any reveller may fling largesse in mere scorn."
It is this that Jesus intends for the church to do--to live simply, to preach peace, to minister healing by a sincere commitment to the stranger encountered on the way. Then, if the church is rejected, it will be rejected for its commitment, its truth-sharing, rather than for what it has hoarded against the hungry, has hidden in its treasury from the poor. The rejection is then an authentic refusal of the gospel's challenge for change.
We have about us now a world as much apart from God as the one into which Jesus sent his friends, and the apostles sent their representatives, but one in which "el Satanas" has been exorcised from celestial dignity. "I have given you authority to walk over the wicked ways of the world, but don't rejoice so much that the demons are subject to you--don't take this for a power trip, but rejoice instead that your names are written in heaven.
And in a mission to the non-Kosher community, Jesus tells his own religionists, "Eat what is set before you." Don't expect gefilte fish and blintzes in these neighborhoods. So it is a message to us in the beginning of the Twenty-First Century: Eat What Is Set Before You. That may mean what the world has left to set its table with in the coming days. God has set the world's table with abundance, but northamericans and Europeans hog most of it for ourselves. And hog is high on our menu, along with cow and every other flesh, taken by violence from the meadows and meat-factories of the earth. . Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher and bioethicist, believes that the time has come for a "sea change" in what will be set before the human community to eat, and that the violence the human commnity does to our companion mammals on the planet, to inflict pain and suffering on them, to give ourselves gustatory pleasure, is no longer ethical. Increasingly here in Managua I have northamerican guests who identify themselves as vegetarians (many think that chickens and eggs are vegetables, however), and fail to notice that most Nicaraguans live perforce on rice and beans, supplemented by very little animal protein, usually Beef Soup made with bones. For the poor of the earth, vegetarianism is not from Virtue but from Necessity. It can be safely prophesied that in a hundred years, there will be much less of Porky Pig or Bossy Cow on our buffets. We may have to turn to what the Two Thirds World is eating now and has been eating for a long time. Rice and Beans. For us, they will doubtless now be Genetically Modified. Eat what is set before you.
Paul writes to the Galatians that they have begun to forget their constitution, that the life of self-indulgence will reap corruption. No one ever got to be a saint, or even a respectable human being, by what he or she owned or acquired or wrested, filched or robbed. The honored, the saintly, the esteemed, are so amongst us in the human community because of what they gave, not because of what they got. It is not John Paul Getty or Artistotle Onassis, Armand Hammer or J. P. Morgan who are enshrined in our hearts with love and respect, marvellous though their works of acquisition and self-serving largesse may have been. Instead, we love and cherish the lives of Francis Bernardones, Albert Schweitzer, Theresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Mohandas Gandhi, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr. and their heavenfull of generous holy ones.
"Do not be fooled," says Paul, "God is not mocked. Whatever a person sows, they'll reap. Those who plant in the Spirit, who like himself "crucify" the world and themselves to it, will invariably find that they bear the "stigmata" of the Lord Jesus. The signs of the Cross in their lives. St. Francis is said to have found in his own hands and feet the very marks of Jesus' wounds, and St. Paul here is talking about the kind of brand-marks of ownership burned onto a slave's body. He says that in his body, in his life, in his spirit, are the brand-marks of Jesus, his body's "owner." After all the burglaries in the vicarage long ago, I bought a magic pencil that I could use to write in invisible ink my social security number on my TV set, my radios, stereo, camera, slide projector, and Waring blender, and all the other "impedimenta" that embellished my lifestyle, so that when they were carried away by a burglar, I could hope that the secret ID would be detected by detectives and the loot returned to me. Well they never were. The magic pencil was about as magic as my Captain Midnight secret decoder badge, got with seals from a can of Ovaltine when I was ten years old. Burglars didn't look for the invisible stigmata, and would hardly care if they found them. But the Sign that Paul talks about, impressed upon us in our Baptism and Chrismation, makes us the property of God, the women and men of God's household. The secret Sign of God's ownership is here, in our hearts and minds. . But if we are so 'owned' by things, our 'propriedad', our 'bienes', then God's ownership of us and our lives is diminished and erased. No one can buy or sell us into slavery but ourselves. But even in her slavery, the young girl captive from the land of Israel, servant in the house of the Aramite king, is free to teach us all compassion, even for her captor. To the Syrians, she comes with a gospel of deliverance for Naaman. Doubtless, she will be their "good Jew,." for her ministry of prophetic healing to this alien commander. .
[BCP gospel:]
So also the 'Good' Samaritan (read: 'the Good Heretic') --we all know one
or two--teaches us that our good things and good works should be at the
service of the victims, lavishly and generously, irrespective of our
religious loyalties, or the victim's credentials. There is no mention of
the victim's deserving, or whether he might have undisclosed assets, or
reeked of alcohol abuse from a watering hole on the way. The amiable
innkeeper's succor is purchased--fair enough, his is a commercial interest,
he operates a business--but no commerce is involved in the Good Heretic's
pity ("compassion"), womb-stirring mercy, once again). Jesus'
interlocuter, the one with theological fine points, cannot quite take the
personal identity of the Good Heretic into his head, or speak it with his
lips--such things are too far afield from Theory. Nevertheless when Jesus
asks him for the punch-line response to, "Which was neighbor?" he chokes
out, "the one who showed compassion." We have all known the ministrations
of that order of the Ministry called politely by us
"Samaritans"--compassionate people of faith and religious practice
different from our own. Theirs is a Third Order of Ministry, apart from
that of the authorized and ordained, often neglectful and fearful Priests
and Levites, servants of the Church. Frequently, we are never aware
of the mercy, skill, and generosity they show to us. The gospel bids us to
see them as its ministers sent perhaps from the Heretic God, Allah the
Compassionate and Merciful, or the agnostic's Unknown God, or from
Hail! The Jewel in the Lotus. Or from the Deus Absconditus, hidden in the
Sacred Heart of Jesus.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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