26th Sunday in ordinary time, Cycle B. Today’s readings: Numbers 11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9:38-43, 45, 47-48
At a time when the world seems so fragmented as though everyone were building their own petty empire, there are also noteworthy examples of people who, despite acting out of apparently different convictions, seek to share common ground.
This reflection came to me as I was reading David Attenborough’s memoirs, A Life on Our Planet, that had been recently gifted to me. The British naturalist, now almost about to celebrate his 100th birthday, and whose documentaries I followed with fascination throughout my childhood, writes about his lifelong appreciation of nature. He also expresses his disappointment at how the environment has been exploited, mistreated and abused over the past decades. In so doing we are becoming less human. Today, many people from various faith traditions share Attenborough’s concern.
In today’s gospel, the disciples express their indignance at seeing a man, who did not form part of their inner circle of the Twelve, casting out evil in Jesus’s name. How dare he? By whose authority? Jesus, however, rebukes them for prohibiting the man from doing good. He insists that those who drive out evil are not to be stopped. Such people are acting anyway in the name of God, who is Love.
The good that others do, as we’ve seen in a recent editorial, ought to be encouraged irrespective of the origin of their conviction, as long as it is motivated by a quest for the good. It seems that for the Twelve, their identity was only as deep as their forming part of an inner circle rather than their shared response to the common calling of Christ. Fragile individuals that they were, they saw the man who successfully drove off evil as a threat and a menace to their sense of identity.
In the same way that Attenborough calls for the severing of practices that destroy humanity because they exploit the environment, so through the well-known passage of the cutting off of body parts, Jesus demands that we detach ourselves from whatever makes us less human.
Jesus demands that we detach ourselves from whatever makes us less human
Farsi Uomo, by Luigi Bettazzi, the late bishop of Ivrea.This is something that struck me in Farsi Uomo, the late bishop of Ivrea Luigi Bettazzi’s book. He shares his surprise at the goodness and authenticity he saw in many people he met in the 1970s, in Turin, where he ministered as a newly ordained bishop, which then was very anti-clerical and divided over political views. In them he observed a deep sense of seeking for justice and truth which he sometimes found missing in himself and in others very close to the institutional Church.
Only last week, Drachma, a group for LGBTQI+ persons and for their parents, gathered for a thanksgiving mass, celebrated by Archbishop Charles Scicluna on the 20th anniversary of their founding. Condemning others is easy. But it takes a double dose of humility to accept that those who do not enter into my frame of reference can be seeking good as much as or perhaps more than myself.
St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, better known by her birthname, Edith Stein, in one of her writings admits how, upon entering the order of discalced Carmelites after her conversion, she was scandalised to see how the more elderly nuns in her congregation often sat and sometimes even dozed off during adoration, while she made every effort to kneel for long hours and to mortify herself to stay awake.
It took her years of spiritual maturity to admit that it was nothing but her pride that appeared under the guise of scandal. She eventually learnt how to adopt a more understanding attitude towards her more seasoned sisters. She understood that what for her appeared to be disrespect was actually the fruit of a whole life of selfless dedication to God and their child-like confidence in him.