Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter
At the turn of the last century a missionary society of priests and brothers, who labored on an isolated island in the south Pacific, sent their yearly report to their superiors. In part it read, “We have made some progress. Small steps really. On Fridays the cannibals only eat fishermen.”
Missionaries Paul and Barnabas, in today’s first reading, didn’t face cannibalism on their first missionary journey but rather a far more familiar soul killing enemy — flattery.
After healing a cripple, the people of Lystra confuse Paul and Barnabas with two popular Greek gods. They proclaim Barnabas as Zeus (Jupiter), patron of Lystra, because Barnabas was tall and handsome, like the head of the gods. Paul was called Hermes (Mercury), the spokesman of the gods, due to Paul’s eloquence and short stature. In those days the Greeks believed that Zeus and Hermes would sometimes visit worshipers in human form.
It is a dangerous and tempting thing to be treated like a god. Back in the ‘70s I was a seminarian in Cincinnati, studying for the bishop of Youngstown. When I’d go home on breaks I’d find that family and neighbors were suddenly deferential to me. In those days (among the Irish, anyway) having a son, brother, or nephew a priest was the greatest honor imaginable. It made me uncomfortable, not because I was above flattery, but I knew I was still me, warts and all. And the last thing I could be was a pious walking holy card. When I left 5 years later it made it doubly hard on them.
Paul and Barnabas reject self glory. They rent their garments as a sign of great indignation and they flee. They don’t run away out of cowardice but out of prudence. “Flight,” according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is “prudence in action.”
In the dark ages popes were sometimes treated like gods. Being an earthly lot, Catholics have a way to illustrate truth with sometimes over the top, even macabre imaginations. Upon the death of a pontiff, his corpse was undressed of all his papal finery and laid out stark naked on a slab for all to see.
Vanity and flattery can be traps for us as they were for the apostles. It may be good for us to comprehend the word “vanity” in its true sense — for vanity is vain. And when we are tempted by self importance and arrogance may we flee with the swiftness of Paul and Barnabas.
—Timothy J. Cronin