Let’s Get Together
As Jesus begins His public ministry in St Matthew’s Gospel today, we hear that the word has gone out to “Galilee of the Gentiles”. St Matthew reminds us that Jewish Messiah is meant for all. Nobody has special claims on God’s Love. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, for whomever will accept Him.
Yet, the tendency to distinguish between “us” and “them” that characterizes so many human relationships still seems to typify many of us as Jesus’ followers. How frequently do we ourselves make distinctions among people? Who is Christian? Who is American? Who is more preferable?
French sociologist, Rene Girard, documented many years ago what he called the “scapegoat mechanism”. We tend to identify ourselves and our groups as the norm. We presume that whoever deviates from the norm that we establish is to blame for whatever is wrong in our world or in our own lives. In other words, we humans have succumbed to dualistic or binary thinking. Martin Buber might call it “I – it” thought. I (or we) are the not the problem. Others are the problem. IN USA history, it was (is?) the North-South, then white-black, later the West-the East, now, Western-Islamic culture. In each guess, who is right?
Several years ago, a professor reminded his students, “Beware of the ‘ism’s’”. An “ism” is an ideology by which we evaluate others in terms of a selected category. If they measure up to what we think is desirable (usually, a mirror of ourselves), then they get preferential treatment.
So, we utilize a variety of “ism’s” in our lives. When one pre-judges people by their race, then, one is guilty of racism. When one pre-judges people by their sex, then, one is guilty of sexism. When one pre-judges people by their economic class, then, one is guilty of classism. When one pre-judges people by their age, then, one is guilty of agism. The list goes on and on and speaks for itself.
Our Catholic Church is the Body of Christ in space and time. Yet, we are an incarnational church. Jesus breaks through, sometimes, in spite of us, rather than through us. We have our flaws and wrinkles. The scandal of the Incarnation is exactly that. Most say that our Church is guilty of more than a few “ism’s”. With the Help of the Gospel, let us try to address these flaws and mirror more authentically the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The sad thing is that this call to break down barriers is clearly germane to the Gospel. Somehow, however, so many of us build, rather than tear down, barriers. We don’t invite people in; frequently, we tell many that they have to take a walk.
Father Richard Rohr, a noted American Catholic theologian, has said on numerous occasions, that there are only two world organizations that reasonably have the opportunity to break down barriers among the people of the world, viz., the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church. He reminds us that “catholic” means “universal”, “according to the entire or the whole”, etymologically.
As we hear the beginnings of the public ministry in St Matthew’s Gospel at the start of Greentime (aka the New Testament), ordinal (not ordinary) time, 2011 AD, let us ask Jesus for the Help to assist Him in His plan to implement His vision (the Kingdom of the God of Life) by living daily lives which reflect the values of that Kingdom. We cannot make the world perfect, but we can, with His Help, build “better human communities”. Whatever dimensions these communities take, may they not be circumscribed and limited by the various “ism’s” to which we all can so blithely, at times, subscribe.
In the beginning of the Jesus Movement, apparently our Christian ancestors tried to implement Jesus’ table fellowship with Saturday night gathering before the celebration of the Eucharist for what we would call a potluck supper today. Still, the effects of the System back then took its toll on the nascent Jesus Movement. The creed of St Paul’s hymn, “In Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female” was lost, at least, by some of the Corinthian house churches when the rich sat with the rich, the poor with poor, friends with friends. In addition, they checked out what another brought and what they ate. As Dorothy Day so cogently put it, 1900 years later, “I urge people again not to discredit Christianity because of the faults of Christians.” According to her, “God made heaven hinge in the way we act toward God in the dis guise of commonplace, frail, ordinary humanity.”
Jesus wants us to transcend the “ism’s” in our hearts and minds, both conscious and non-conscious. Are we Catholics in name and/or in reality? 012311AD jfq
