Third Sunday 1977

Vocation

This passage from the First Letter to the Corinthians is by all scholarly accounts truly from Paul himself, as opposed to some of other writer. That’s important because it sounds really weird, how seriously are we supposed to take this stuff: "those who have wives should behave as if they had none, those who mourn should behave as if they were not mourning?" Is this the standard injunction to the other-worldliness that many of us grew up with as the proper form of religious life? No, it’s not, as a matter of fact. The reason that Paul is talking this way is that he truly believed when he wrote this thing, probably in the late fifties or early sixties of the first century, that the end of the world was going to come, Jesus was going to come, God was going to reconcile the human race, and that would be the end of it... period. And on that basis one could say: "listen, folks, this is imminent." Until the day he died, around 64AD, Paul believed that was going to happen, and that’s what he is talking about here: we should be focused on what was very real, immediate, and imminent.

This spells itself out in a variety of ways. If you look at the Pauline communities, how were they built? They were built in a radically democratic fashion. Why? Because, if this movement was going to culminate in God’s general judgment and resurrection, then there was no need for any kind of bureaucracy: in each community there would be what is called a charismatic group of people who were to be gifted by God to do whatever the community needed to get by. Paul never talks about Bishops, or Priests, or hierarchy, or any of that other business. There is simply no need for it. This is important because the subsequent development in the Christian Movement, the Church that we know, is precisely that: this movement was in it for the long haul and had to get organized to some extent. I propose that it is out of that rubric that we get the general notion of vocation.

The readings from last week, and even this week, are about Jesus’ calling these guys. That’s vocation, vocation in terms of what I talked about last week. In the light of all that, it is pretty interesting to look at the vocation of Jonah. The Book of Jonah is of course that thing that Ira Gershwin immortalized when he wrote "It Ain’t Necessarily So." That is certainly true in terms of history, which is not necessarily so. The writers and readers of history did not see the story of Jonah as history, but rather as a kind of cautionary tale, if you will. The connection with the notion of vocation is a very interesting one because Jonah, who is supposed to be a prophet, a spokesman for God, runs away from his vocation. You don’t get that from this text but, if you read the whole book, Jonah is the guy who gets called by God and decides: "I don’t need this noise, I’m out of here." That’s how he gets swallowed by the big fish, he was escaping his vocation to God. I hope to make some sense of this in terms of where we end today with the flight from vocation.

The writer from Jonah makes this pattern over and over: Jonah is called, Jonah runs in the opposite direction; Jonah is called, Jonah runs in the opposite direction... To what was Jonah called, and why did some old Jew write this whole story anyway? Well, there are all kinds of clues. What was Nineveh? Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. What was Assyria? Assyria in the ninth century before the common era was the great dominant empire in the ancient Near East, and the Assyrians were as barbaric a group of human beings as you are likely to run across. When they conquered people they sowed salt in the fields just to make sure that the victory would be total and complete, and they executed and deported virtually everybody. That’s what happened to the northern kingdom of Israel in 727, they were conquered by the Assyrians. The point is that by the time that the Book of Jonah came to be written, Nineveh was a byword for the most awful anti-God possibilities in the world of the Jews. The reason for sending Jonah to Nineveh was precisely to make a point to the Jews about their vocation. Which was to be what? Their vocation was to be the light of revelation to all nations, even the Ninevites.

The Book of Jonah was written precisely to counteract the normal tendency of all us human beings, not just Jews of 2600 years ago, to insulate ourselves and defend ourselves against the aliens, or those we perceive to be the aliens: "God, our God, could not possibly be interested in these ruddy pagans. Our God who is compassionate to us seeks to relieve us of all the people who are oppressing us. God could not possibly be interested in those people who oppress us." So the Book of Jonah was written to counter-act that normal tendency to tribalize God, to fit God into our expectations of how God should behave, and all of those expectations are in one way or another self-serving ones. And so a Jew who would read this passage might say: "my God , what’s going on?" This very figure of Jonah would be a metaphor for the people as a whole who precisely wanted to circumscribe the mercy of God, and God’s concern, and His will to save. That’s why this Book was chosen to be included in the Canonical Writings: it didn’t have to be included. They said: "we need to keep this in mind, the constant tendency to make God of our own minds, the tendency to proportion God in terms that are manageable by our own minds and our own desires."

I think that this is extraordinarily to remember as individuals. How do we define the other? Who is the alien? Who is beyond consideration? It doesn’t stop there. Our self-consciousness, because we are members of a group, is larger than that, and here is where Paul and subsequent developments after Paul, and the notion of vocation all come together.

There is an instance that I would like to talk about for a couple of minutes. There is a seventy-two year old priest in Sri Lanka who has been officially excommunicated by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under Canon Law 1374. Tissa Balasuriya was ignored time after time because he wrote stuff that a bunch of bureaucrats did not appreciate, or did not approve of, and he spoke in a language and with figures that were not consonant with their ears and their mode of hearing. They did this without really listening to him. He was literally thrown outside the community, excommunicated. So what is our vocation as a church? I mean this is not even an alien, this is one of our own, he has been a priest for forty years. He is trying to proclaim the reality of Christ in Sri Lanka which has an eight-percent Christian population and a ninety-two-percent Buddhist population. How are you going to talk about Jesus in a situation like that, folks? My suspicion is that a German academically trained theologian who heads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is not going to have particularly sensitive ears. So all this comes down to vocation, how the Church has developed, and how we are faithful to what we’re supposed to be because we are the continuation of the Jews, we are to be the light of revelation to the nations. We are supposed to hear better and have larger hearts.

One of the great ironies in the present Church is that there is much talk about social justice in Poland, in China... , but how about in our own community? What are we to do with ourselves? This priest’s name is the latest name on a growing list of people, theologians for the most part, who have been circumscribed or silenced, until we cannot hear them: "You have nothing to say to us, in fact what you have to say is disgusting." How well do we listen? What are the borders of our community? Who are the Ninevites? Where is the Jonah of today? So, as I read the Book of Jonah and wonder about myself, and whom I exclude, and whom I consider unworthy of God’s attention, and there are a number of such ones, as a member of God’s Church, I have to sense things beyond myself. I cannot say that what’s going on is over my head because it is not--it’s not.

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