14th Sunday of the Year
The Lord warns Ezekiel from the outset that his task would be difficult indeed. He preaches to the Jews during their exile in Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar II King of Babylon had carried the Jew into exile in 586 BC. Cyrus the Great gave Jews permission to return to their homeland in 537 BC. Early in the exile, rumor has reached Babylon that Jerusalem is almost rebuilt and that the end of Israel's exile in near at hand. But Ezekiel knows differently. The exile from Jerusalem is now not only geographical. It is also spiritual, and this is a far deeper problem.
In their exile, many Jews abandoned the religion of the ancestors and followed instead the pagan gods of Babylon. This is what we would call today the 'cultural integration of the immigrant' or of the exile. The trouble was that they had abandoned their own identity and were now hardly distinguishable from the Babylonian peoples among whom they lived. The Lord tells Ezekiel that the ending of the exile will be a long-term project. It will require years and years of preparation and conversion. Understandably, this message will no be welcomed by many. "I am sending you to the rebels who have turned against me. They are defiant and obstinate." Given the unpromising context, Ezekiel will never deliver his message to a receptive audience. He'll rarely speak to anyone eager to discover and carry out God's word. His effectiveness as a prophet will be limited by the people to whom he ministers. Yet, God assures him, results are really irrelevant. It is sufficient that they should know that "a prophet has been among them." A prophet's success is never measured by the response his or her audience gives to the prophetic message. It's gauged only by whether or not the message has been given.
Like Ezekiel, Paul too struggles with opposition, both from those among whom he ministers, and from within himself. "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ." He told the Corinthians. And again, "I urge you, be imitators of me. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the word in great affliction, with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became a model for all believers in Macedonia and Achaia." (Thes. 1) Paul put himself between the believer and Christ. Paul could not simply tell the people about the Good News. In order that they would experience the Good News as genuine, Paul would have to model the Good News for them in his own person and in his own behavior. Paul had to be what he proclaimed. Bearers of the Good News who are themselves being transformed by the gospel have a persuasive force that no mere oratory can match.
But this is a dangerous game. There are two obvious dangers. First, when the preacher states, "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ." Unless his lifestyle is exemplary, his hearers are quite liable to say, "Well, you have some neck!" If the speaker is not living the message he proclaims, he will quickly be accused of hypocrisy. (Hypocrisy is the great sin of our day. "Hypocrisy is the tribute that realism pays to idealism.")
But Paul was never charged with hypocrisy. With Paul, what you saw was what you got. He had no hidden agendas. When he arrived in a town, the first thing he did was to place his cards on the table. He was here to preach a crucified Christ. If you want to engage, welcome. If not, well don't let me disturb you. But when Paul stated, "Be imitators of me as I am of Christ" he was vulnerable to charges of pride and arrogance. There was a great danger that he might be misunderstood as saying: "Look at me. I've got the whole thing figured out." This is certainly not what Paul was saying. No other writer placed struggle at the heart of the Christian project to the same extent that Paul did. Yet Paul is keenly aware that he is open to this charge of arrogance. And he addresses this danger directly in today's excerpt from his second letter to the Corinthians. "To stop me getting too proud I was given a thorn in the flesh, and angel of Satan to beat me and stop me getting too proud! About this thing I have pleaded with the Lord three times for it to leave me." Obviously this thing was interfering with his ministry. Given the geographical areas which Paul evangelized, scholars today believe that he was referring to the malaria he contracted during his many journeys. This affliction lingers for years and springs up when one least expects, its fever and chills rendering the victim helpless. It must have been torture for someone with Paul's restless, driven personality, to be demented for weeks with this horrible fever.
In prayer the Lord tells him, "my grace is sufficient for you." This means that he now has to share in the cross of Christ and so his sufferings is a making present among the people the Cross of Christ. "For it is when I am weak that I am strong." His strongest proclamation of the gospel is his own suffering.
We must hear the Gospel (Mk 6: 1-6) against this background. Accustomed to regard Jesus as the all-powerful, divine Son of God, we're taken aback when we listen carefully to what Mark actually says about His disastrous return to Nazareth.
We can handle the amazement and questions of the people, and we often quote the remark of Jesus that "a prophet is only despised in his won country."
But, we have problems with the statement, "He was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying His hands on them. He was amazed at their lack of faith." According to Mark, the ministry of Jesus, like that of Ezekiel, is limited by the faith of the people to whom He ministers.
Matthew, who had a copy of Mark lying in front of him when he wrote his Gospel, finds such restrictions on Jesus a little too embarrassing. So he changes the "not able to perform" to "did not work many mighty deeds." (He also tones down the sneers of the neighbors: "Is He not the carpenter?" to "Is He not the son of the carpenter?"
Matthew's alterations of Mark start a pattern: the tendency to downplay the historical limitations on Jesus, the weakness of Jesus in other worlds. By the time we get to John's gospel, the last gospel to be written, it's hard to find any restrictions. Yet, no matter how much later evangelists were reflecting on the unlimited power of the risen Jesus, we can't ignore the fact that the historical Jesus achieved His death and resurrection in the midst and in spite of huge restrictions.
It's something we should remember when we're tempted to give up because "it just isn't working!" We are never more powerful than when we reach our weakest level.