22nd Sunday, 1997

Things Which Constitute Me

The readings today present a problem for the homilist which is the exact opposite of the usual problem. The usual problem, I think, is to try to ferret out some sort of significance from texts that often enough are obscure, or seem to be oblique. Today, as I said, it is the opposite because the texts are so evident, the meaning so seemingly clear - - self-evident - - that anything that you say about them would seem superfluous. I mean this thing from James: widows and orphans in those days, even more so than in ours were the absolutely last people in the world as far as status was concerned - - absolutely. If a woman did not have a man, was not part of a man’s family, she was finished. If an orphan was not part of a family, they were nobody, literally non-persons. And so, to care for them would seem to be of the essence of religion, and all this business in the famous passage from Mark about what really makes people good, or what really makes people bad, seems so obvious. And it is, in the abstract. But we do not live in the abstract. We live, bound as it were, by our own heritages, by our own histories, by our own pasts, which are solidified in our present status. For example, I am a Roman clergy person. I am a University faculty member. I live at this address. I have these possessions. And all of those things which constitute me clearly act to determine what I see, how I see, what even emerges into consciousness for me.

I do not live in the abstract. I live absolutely concretely. So, it is only on that basis that we can begin to appreciate the genius of this man Jesus, who was a Jew, who had his heritage, and yet who is stunning, and must have been, - as well as scandalous - in his own time, for the clarity of his vision. It is as simple as that. The clarity of his vision. In other words, he seemed capable of transcending everything in the Jewish tradition of ritual purification, to understand what is really at stake in human life. It is that simple clarity, of course, which made him so notable and of course which ultimately got him into trouble. Because that clarity was so odd and so discomfiting, so socially dangerous and disorientating for everybody else, that it radically upset life as usual, and that got him into trouble.

Widows and orphans were real for him, certainly in a way they were not real for anybody else and not real for us. Even at the best moments of our tradition we have indications of this clarity. For instance, that great fairytale about the emperor’s new clothes. Who was it that detects what is actually going on? Presumably a kid who was not so encumbered and could simply see what is going on. The genius of Jesus was that he was also unencumbered. But he was an old man in his time. Most people his age, around thirty-five, were dead. And here is this man who lived all these years in that cultural situation and still had that freshness of vision, that clarity of insight.

To take another example, a very timely one: somebody called me before nine o’clock this morning to inform me that the Princess of Wales had died in this car accident, and they said, " CNN is filled with this stuff". O.K., I do not rejoice in the death of the Princess of Wales. But was CNN filled with the death of the three or four-hundred women and babies whose throats were slit, and who were decapitated outside the city of Algiers three days ago?

So who contributes to the human scene? What do we understand of the contribution to humanity? These little babies whose heads were laid on their own doorsteps, and their mother's. Or this lady who seems, with her oversized clothes budget to claim our attention, so unduly, it seems to me? Now I do not, to be sure, rejoice in the death of this woman. But I do lament my incapacity and the incapacity of my society to make these distinctions. As we will see, as we go through the letter of James, in the next few weeks; to see peoples’ bankrolls, or peoples’ wardrobes, or peoples’ jewelry (James gets very practical) obscuring everything so that we cannot see people. We see all this peripheral stuff. So, this is why Jesus is so terrific. This is why Jesus is a primal disturbance figure who has to be taken seriously, because he sets in question my normal canons of who is real and who is important. Is the world made better by the presence of this person or this person, and better in what way? Those are crucial questions I put to you. And I am afraid, as I pray for Diana, the Princess of Wales, that there is something strange in the fact that, as somebody else told me, she was killed trying to escape people who were trying to take pictures of her. My God, this is grotesque folks! We live in cloud cuckoo-land and take it for granted that that is the way things are. And here is this man that said, "No. There is nothing outside of a person that can defile them; it is from within the human heart that evil intentions come". Unfortunately, however self-evident this seems to be in the abstract, in the concrete situations of my life, and I assume yours, I desperately need to be reminded of this over, and over, and over again.

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RT 13/10/97