22nd Sunday of the Year
At the beginning of that excerpt from Mark's Gospel, Jesus warns his followers to beware of the Scribes and Pharisees. They had, in the view of Jesus, emptied religion of all meaning, reducing it to a mere exercise in score-keeping. On their watch, jar of meal had been emptied, jug of oil had failed. Writing of the same incident, Luke wrote: "And his teaching made a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority." He returns to his home town synagogue, and challenged his Pharisee neighbours there, Luke tells us they sprang to their feet and hustled him out of the town. He had enraged them because he suggested that God might also have the welfare of foreigners at heart. Jesus was attempting to expand the imagination and consciousness of Israel to accept foreigners as children of God too. This in a nutshell is what sparked off the clash between the Pharisees, Sadducees and himself.
Obviously, Jesus was born into a world and a religion where a crisis of authority was already a dominant experience. The Romans had lost credibility as civil rulers. The scribes and Pharisees were no longer credible witnesses to religious values. Historians refer to this period as a period of social and cultural fragmentation. Long-established social groupings were coming apart while traditional values were being discarded as obsolete. As the questioning of old certainties intensified, and as old values eroded, the Scribes and the Pharisees sought refuge in the simplistic certainties of the law. The law was the authority they relied upon. They were all of course lawmen and they had a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo.
This was where Jesus parted company with them. The law was being used to protect established interests. Genuine religious values were being damaged, not promoted, by the law. In one famous incident, Jesus accused the scribes and Pharisees of piling up burdens on peoples' backs and not raising a finger to help them. Jesus was prepared to take on the authorities of the day, to confront the vested interests. He took to advice of Jeremiah: "Do not be dismayed at their presence or in their presence." This was the new authority that the people were quick to detect and willing to emulate.
The circumstances of our own day are not at all unlike those existing at the time of Jesus. Political authority throughout Europe and indeed the United States is seriously discredited. We though that the fall of communism and the Berlin wall would solve most of the political difficulties of the Western world. In truth this development only added to our difficulties. Racism, that skeleton in Europe's cupboard, began to rattle horribly once more. Even in the Auschwitz commemorative speeches during this week, that horrible rattle was audible.
The Church too is going through the same fragmentation that the religious authorities in ancient Israel experienced. The rules and regulations that sustained believers up to very recent time are now seen and experienced by a new generation as archaic, quaint and obsolete. And, as this questioning of old certainties becomes more widespread and intense, there is a tendency on the part of some Church leaders to react as the Pharisees of old reacted: to take refuge in the certainties of the law. But in truth, this doesn't answer the questions asked; it merely allays for a time their own insecurity. There are two schools of though concerning the direction of our Church today. One will say that, in reality, each individual must now draw his own her own conclusions about life, about religion and about God. We have moved from a religion of convention to a religion of conviction. The Church must lead; but she can never again compel. The only authority she now has is the authority of her own experience and her own example. If she is not credible on that score, people will simple walk away. The other school, those whose sympathies lies with G. K. Chesterton's analysis, will take a different view. Three times in history mankind had judged that the Church had gone to the dogs; on all three occasions, it was the dog that died. In racing parlance, each of us must back the horse he judges to be most promising.