Memorial of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop & Doctor of the Church
Scripture Readings
The Gospel text from Mark today is really short—uncharacteristically so for the Catholic Liturgy. And it makes just three simple claims.
Here are the three claims:
- Jesus’s ministry was enjoying great, even shockingly great, success. The crowds were so big that they could hardly figure out a way to eat.
- People from Jesus’s home town (family and friends) were present and witnessing Jesus’s preaching and the crowd’s enthusiastic response.
- And their response to Jesus: “He’s out of his mind.”
A short passage from the Book of Mark, to be sure, but there’s a way in which it captures well the reception of Christianity not only in Jesus’s time but in ours as well. The story goes something like this.
People hear the Good News of the Gospel, and they can’t believe it. Here we have a man who is said to be a king—the king—and yet he doesn’t act anything like a king. He doesn’t steal from his subjects to line his own pockets. He doesn’t wage wars to enhance his regional influence and stuff his coffers. In fact, he doesn’t do violence at all. And he doesn’t seem to be a fan of wealth. Unlike most kings, he doesn’t even keep a list of his enemies who he plans to punish for their disloyalty to him. Instead, he forgives them. In short, Jesus is not kingly in the ways people expect.
Rather than use his position as king to enhance his personal wealth and status, Jesus heals the sick, brings sight to the blind, feeds the hungry, dines with sinners, and pleads on behalf of orphans and widows. Oh, and he calls on his followers to turn the other cheek. Violence is simply not his way.
But even as a lot of folks are super enthused about this new kind of king, there are many (more?) others who, like his family and hometown friends, think it’s all nuts. He’s nuts. What he is preaching is nuts.
What this short passage leaves out of the story, but we know well to supply it, is the crucifixion. The folks who found Jesus’s kind of kingship nuts (even to the point of being nonsensical) did understand the sort of threat it posed to traditional ways of doing kingship, and to kings themselves, who had no interest in caring for lepers. And so, Jesus (and his ideas) had to be made to go away.
I’d like to imagine that the human family is much closer today to living the Kingdom of God than it was in Jesus’s day. Wouldn’t it be nice if Jesus were smiling at us from the right hand of the Father and giving us a thumbs up?
No can do. Unfortunately, Jesus’s kind of kingship (one in which the leader actually cares deeply for his/her subjects/citizens) is a great rarity in our world today. So, we have to ask ourselves: Is that because Jesus’s kind of kingship is, in fact, nuts? Or is it because we have been told over and over and have come to believe that the kind of kingship that Jesus modeled is impossible?
It’s all too easy, in my opinion, to say that the Kingdom of God is not realistic or silly or merely the product of wishful thinking.
But, while saying the Kingdom of God is impossible (nuts even) certainly sounds smart (most will knowingly nod in agreement), it also does a remarkably good job of getting us all of the hook, doesn’t it?
What if we stayed on the hook and pledged solidarity with Jesus to nurture, raise up, become, and demand the kind of leader that he was? It’s a long shot but maybe, just maybe . . .
—Susan Trollinger