We understand these beautiful words from St. Paul addressing the people of Thessalonica! We, too, give thanks to God unceasingly because someone, somewhere, sometime, received our message; it took root and is flourishing. It is at work. People have been transformed by our sharing the Word - the Christ - with them. I am confident that each person here has had this experience and can tell stories of our lives as Christians, as the people of God, where God alive in us reached out and was received, accepted by another, transforming us both in the process. And that is something for which we are profoundly grateful. It is what we pray for in the Liturgy of the Hours when we say, “Bless the work of our hands, Bless the work of our hands”. And Paul instructs us in how to respond when our work is blessed, when our work bears fruit – to give thanks unceasingly. Or maybe we do not actually need to be instructed in that response – rather it is the response that occurs, that leaps up in a lover of God when another receives, accepts the Word from us and it begins to flourish in them – we spontaneously give thanks; our souls magnify the Lord. And we each know that feeling well whether or not it is what we are feeling, at this very moment.
Maybe you are also feeling gratitude like St Paul or maybe you are feeling concern and anger like Jesus. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is not at this moment giving thanks unceasingly; he is irate as he picks up the cry of the prophet Malachi. He is expressing anger, warning his disciples and the crowd. Jesus has been angry for weeks now in our Sunday gospels. Sister Suzanne noted this a month ago; he had been angry for a while then, he is angry in this gospel and this is just the warm up for the long harsh series of “Woe betide yous” that he has lined up for the scribes and Pharisees. But in the world of the gospel, it hasn’t been weeks or months; it has been just a few days of intensity. Back in the mid-September gospels, Jesus would have entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey, to waving branches and bright Hosannas but in the Lectionary, we skipped over that episode, we save it for Palm Sunday. However, that is where we are in the gospel. Jesus has been in Jerusalem just a couple of days, challenging and being challenged by day, going to rest at Bethany at night. In a few more days, he will be killed. That is where we are in the story.
So what does he challenge us to? Who are we in the gospel? Are we feeling like Jesus, like a scribe, like a Pharisee, like a disciple, like someone in the crowd? I’m like Jesus in today’s gospel…. I’m like one of the disciples in the crowd… No, you’re not! The commentators I read as I was preparing these reflections say this is a gospel where you pretty much don’t want to let yourself off the hook. As responsible baptized adults, as ordained people, as Benedictine Sisters, as Benedictine Oblates, this is a day to stand in with the scribes and Pharisees and accept Jesus’ critique, just take it, take it in and let the Word actually work on our hearts. In the Collegeville Bible Commentary, Daniel Harrington, S. J. explains that the scribes were religious intellectuals skilled at Biblical interpretation and applying it to everyday life. The Pharisees were a religious fraternity who expressed fellowship in communal meals and prided themselves on exact adherence to the law. In other words, writes Daniel Harrington, today, we can think of the scribes and Pharisees as theologians and Jesuits. Or, I would add, theologians and Benedictines. So we need to listen to Jesus.
When I was volunteering at the prison, I sometimes served as interpreter for the Drama Workshops. I remember one woman participant, a tall, grand woman from West Africa who had written a poem that made it into the production. Her poem started out, “Angry, angry, angry I am!” In the years since, I have remembered her on many occasions. Her anger seemed very pure to me, coming from a righteous place within her. It was an anger that called for change, for transformation of individual hearts, yes, but also an end to systems of oppression that have been laid one over another for centuries. “Angry, angry, angry I am!” That is how I hear Jesus’ anger in this gospel. It is not an anger that cries out to be soothed, or to run from in fear, but that calls for an intentional response - that calls us to change our ways. Jesus says - We’ve got the teaching right - but we are called to look at how we are putting it into practice in the world. Some commentators of this gospel point out that Jesus is calling us to repent, to change not our beliefs but our practice. To remember that it requires authentic humility to undertake an endeavor as exalted as the one we heard last week: “to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. To love our neighbors as ourselves.” As John Shea writes in The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Teachers and Preachers, “When you preach an egalitarian community of love under one God and one Master, keep the sackcloth and ashes handy.” He points out that, “if the message is worth preaching, no one can practice everything they preach”. When we fail, we can chose to give up or we can “get back to the drawing board” and that this is not a disgrace. John Shea says, “It comes with the territory of following something large enough for you to betray”. It is not Lent but we are on the road towards Christ the King, the end of the liturgical year and looking into the deep blue season of Advent. It’s not a bad time to take stock of where we are each at individually and as community in the project that Jesus has laid out for us. I say Jesus, and the prophets before him, and the prophets who have come after him who remind us, to keep the Word alive and at work in our hearts – we each could name many such prophetic people.
Some good news is that there is help at hand in this autumnal project. One such prophet, one such saint, is Benedict of Norcia who gave us our Rule. Like Jesus, Benedict was a man, who while not afraid of expressing or receiving righteous anger, was also a man of peace, a man of nonviolence. Hopefully, (without sounding too Pharisaical) the Rule of Benedict is a place we can turn to as we turn away for a while from the banquets, even from the liturgy, and from the marketplace to check out our behavior, our practice, checking in with ourselves – for example - Are my practices in keeping with those laid out by Benedict in The Tools for Good Works or the Chapter 7 on Humility? Or why, at evening prayer, do I sometimes feel irritated listening to the commentary on the Rule? Maybe it’s me, maybe I should respond to exactly those sections! As we know, the Rule is a long-standing guide to living in the egalitarian community of love to which Christ calls us. For right now, consider that there is probably nothing wrong with your heart; I doubt there is a single heart of stone in the house today. Your heart is a fleshy heart steeped in the Word by minutes, hours, days, years of reading Scripture and practicing lectio divinia and family or communal living. It is a heart not really mystified when Jesus teaches “Whoever exalts themselves will be humbled; but whoever humbles themselves will be exalted.” You get it. So let us be grateful that we are answering God’s call to the Christian way or the Benedictine way or whatever way you are following and at the same time to take a giant step back to observe ourselves in action. As the Navajo people would ask, Am I walking in Beauty?; as a Christian would ask, Do I look and sound like I am on the Way? And when the answer isn’t so good, to be willing, that is the humility – the humility comes in the willingness - to “get back to the drawing board” each day and bring the Word to life - because we believe.
