Today’s Gospel is difficult. So let’s try and get to grips with it.
On the side, let me say that, if we do try and take a Gospel on board, it can carry us for a whole week – at least.
The context is that Christ is heading for Jerusalem. He is still in Capernaum on the north of the Lake of Galilee, but the direction is set. He is with his disciples. They are together – in their clapped-out camper van, as it were – heading for the Holy City and all that awaits them there.
Everything Jesus has, he has to give away, to share: his sonship, his body, his blood, his death, his resurrection. And this journey too. It becomes ours. It’s his life and it gives us the meaning and direction of ours. Life is for following him. Life with a small ‘l’ is for entering into Life, with a large one. Life is a journey, through many deaths and resurrections to the Kingdom of God. And so in today’s Gospel he is teaching his disciples then and us now what following him means.
We might pick out two things.
The first is generosity of mind. Usually, it’s Peter who takes the prize for misunderstanding; this time it’s John, one of the “sons of thunder” with James his brother, a hot-headed, fiery type. We saw a man casting out demons in your name, we tried to stop him, he wasn’t, in a fatal phrase, “one of us”. He’s turning the disciples, the embryo-Church, into a club, a clique, a tribe, a gang you might say, a sect. The Lord says simply, don’t stop him. “He who is not against us is for us.” The Church is greater than the Church, so to speak. And if a non-believer gives you a cup of cold water from some small sense of Christ, he will be rewarded. We can jump two thousand years to the Second Vatican Council. It taught that, yes, the Church of Christ lives on in the Catholic Church – this is the bus which takes us to eternal life, we needn’t, we shouldn’t jump off it and board another – but at the same time the Council recognised all the elements of holiness and truth in other Christian communities. Catholic means ‘universal’. Being Catholic means generosity of spirit. We are not a sect. It means recognising God’s sowing everywhere it sprouts in good things: in other Christian individuals and communities, in the seeds of the Word in other religions, wherever real human qualities like decency, honesty, justice, compassion and care shine out, in ordinary people who may not have come to faith, even in a glass of cold water. Yes, there is evil and error; there is darnel in the wheat (in the Church too); the devil also sows, we can see it writ large at the moment. But wherever there is goodness, truth and beauty, the Catholic mind will hail it. Christ died with outstretched hands to gather the scattered children of God. And risen from the dead, he once told St Paul in Corinth of all places, “There are many on my side in this city.”
So, generosity of spirit on our Christian journey. Then come the terrible warning on abuse of the little ones who believe in Christ, the summons to a mysterious amputation, the threat of Gehenna. What’s this about? Along with generosity of spirit, the Christian is called to intentionality. Following Christ is not for dilettantes; it’s not a hobby. It’s serious lifelong commitment. It’s warfare. Sin really is to be avoided. “How do you become a saint?” someone asked St Ignatius Loyola. “Determination”, he replied. And what about the terrible mutilation? What is the Lord saying through these images? Hands, feet, eyes. We have two of each. We might be required, Christ’s imagery says, to forgo one of those if they take us to sin. That’s not self-destruction; it’s a self-diminishment at one level for the sake of a fulness at a higher level. It’s about losing something at the level of life with a small ‘l’ to enter into Life with a large one. It’s about being less in the kingdom of man to be greater in the kingdom of God. How many martyrs have exemplified this! Or think of the consecrated life where the good of intimate relationship and family life is left behind for another intimacy and another fertility. Or think of how so many refuse promotions or positions or pleasures or higher salaries, or whatever, because they involve moral compromises to faith or morals. This is the great crowd of the one-handed, one-footed, one-eyed who follow the Crucified to the fulness of risen life, where all incompleteness is made whole. The Lord doesn’t offer us more of the same if we follow him – the Gospel of prosperity. He offers the better, the other. According to the Greek, he offers the good, the beautiful, the kalon. It is beautiful to enter Life lame, he says. And the kalon kalei the ancients used to say – the beautiful calls. It speaks to what we’re really meant to be. Ask a young caterpillar its dream; it’s to be a bigger, bulkier, bossier caterpillar. It can’t imagine the butterfly beauty it’s called to, the joy it’s to bring.
Generosity of spirit, intentionality of heart.
What a vision of his people, his holy Church, the Lord offers us here, the pilgrim people of God heading for Life! A shuffling crowd of thirsty cripples, fringed by unauthorised healers and generous pagans offering cold water; a great throng of the little ones who believe in me – companions of the Crucified and heirs of the Resurrection.
King’s College Chapel, 29 September 2024
