Jesus, the Word Doctor
Introduction
Bottom-lines
Elie Weisel, the most famous Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, winner of the Nobel Prize
for Literature, has written over thirty books, but has only one bottom line:
"I write of only one thing," he says, "the dangers of
indifference.” His bottom line sprung out of the indifference he experienced to
the rising anti-semitism in Nazi
Germany. That indifference eventually burst into the conflagration of the
Holocaust. His bottom line (the dangers of indifferentism ) came full blown in
his nightmare experience in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and
Buchenwald.
We all have a bottom-line sprung out of some
experience or experiences. It’s a strange line. We don’t choose it; it chooses
us. I have often wondered what my bottom
line is. I can easily enough find out.
My writings are in the computer. So I
go to TS (i.e. "Text Search") and type in the word which
I think I use the most frequently. I believe that that will indicate to
me, what is my bottom-line. Now I
suspect that my bottom-line has something to do with words. So I go to
TS and type in the word “word.”
At the end of the search the tally reads: “You have used “word” 1,452 times in 250 files.
Yes, I think my bottom-line has something to do
with words. You see, I am a
word-processor; I spend a lot of time at words. But I notice this about myself: I'm not only for words,
I'm also against them. I often find myself doing battle against them. I
enlist the power of words to expose the impotence of words. I find myself
frequently calling upon words to un-define things and set things free from
prisons of definition. I admit I even
like to take up words as fine-edged
swords to cut down those who put too
much faith in words, who live and die by words, and by them also make other
people die.
….born from my
experiences.
As with Elie Weisel so with me, my bottom-line about words comes from many unpleasant experiences down
through the fifty years of being a priest. For example, some lady approaches me
after mass. It's a very hot summer day and the church has no air-conditioning.
And I have just had compassion on the crowds. She's angry, and she wants to
know why I did not read the words of the gospel in their entirety (very long that
day). She's angry too because I omitted
the creed that very hot day summer. She protests she comes to Mass of a Sunday
morning because she wishes to make verbal (word) profession of her faith. My bottom line about words flares up.
Or again, the pastor of the place where I had just celebrated mass the Sunday before calls me. His organist “is madder than hell.” She's angry because I do not say "the words of consecration" exactly as they are to be found in the missal. If I do not cease and desist, she’s quitting. “She is an excellent musician,” he tells me, “and I can’t afford to lose her. Let’s keep her happy,” he says to me. “When you come next Sunday, say the words as they are found in the big book.” My bottom-line about words flares up again.
Words, of course, are a problem in every facet of human life but especially in religion. We come to mass every Sunday and listen to the words of scripture, the words of the homily, the words of the liturgy itself. And all three are generously peppered with two words especially: the word “God” and the word “sin.” Four times in the Responsorial we just prayed, ” Oh God, heal my soul for I have sinned against you” (4 times). Those two words (God and sin ) are used over and over again in our total religious lives. How often they will be repeated today in the rest of this liturgy. But if all of us have very conflicting and sometimes even downright wrong meanings especially for those two very important words (God and sin), how in the world can we be called God’s one people united in spirit and in truth, sitting in one and the same church, and hearing basically one and the same message?
All the great religions of the world (Islamic,
Jewish, Christian) tell their stories
in the form of a salvation myth. Our
Christian religion tells its story in the Adam and Eve Myth. It can be told well. But it can also be told
very poorly. Like this: "In the beginning there were three: God,
Adam and Eve. And God drew a line in the sands of the Garden
of Eden, and dared Adam and Eve to step across it. They did. They disobeyed.
The sinned. And their sin was
a slap at the very face of God, an
affront to the divine majesty. Angered by their sin, God punished the original
pair, banished them from Paradise, slammed shut the gates behind them, and condemned them to eat their bread by the
sweat of their brow until at last they returned to dust. God’s anger over their
sin was indeed so fierce, it could be appeased only at the price of blood. In order to pry open the heavenly gates
slammed shut, Jesus came in the fullness of time to appease the anger of
God by the shedding of his blood.”
//When our Christian myth is poorly told like that, the important words of religion (especially God and sin) become downright erroneous or at least terribly sick. God then is no better than those revengeful and pouting gods of pagan mythology (all curled up in their divine majesty and in terrible need of being bought off and appeased). //Poorly told like that, sin is crossing over some arbitrary line drawn outside ourselves and it slaps the face of God (who has no face to slap in the first place). //When we tell our myth poorly like that, then religion becomes the business dedicated to appeasing the divine anger in order to pry open the heavenly gates slammed shut by human sin. <<Fr. Burtchael, Notre Dame theologian, rejects such a myth poorly told when he writes, “If heaven has a fence around it, with its gates slammed shut, whoever lives there, it certainly is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. “>>
<<In the sixties and the seventies of the
past twentieth century, there briefly appeared a group called the “Death-of-God
Theologians.” They maintained that God,
for one or the other reason, is dead. Some said the terrible inhumanity of
human beings towards each other, epitomized in the Holocaust, has killed God.
We recall the words of Elie Weisel. In
his book Night, he writes, “That first night in the concentration
camp of Dachau murdered my God.” But other Death-of-God theologians said that
God is dead because our words
about God and our words about sin are dead; they don’t carry any meaning for us anymore. Or they are downright
erroneous and unacceptable. And God, they claimed, will come alive again for us only when our words about God and sin come alive
again.>>
Our faith proclaims Jesus as Savior. But what is it
that he comes to save us from? Voltaire
once said: "In the beginning God created man according to God’s
own image and likeness. Ever since
then, we humans have been getting even!" We’ve been creating God according to our own image and
likeness! And Christ has come to save us from all those gods of ours: ugly gods
with ugly faces: //Angry gods who punish sinful human beings with HIV and AIDS.
//Squeaky-clean gods who favor people
who are rich and people who take showers everyday. //High-fluting gods who need crystal palaces in which to be
worshipped. // Fussy gods who favor this over that; who favor the Council of
Trent with its Latin Mass over the Second Vatican Council with its vulgar vernacular, or who favors
Vatican II over Trent. //Chauvinist
gods who don't like females, especially around their altars. //Prurient and puritan gods all obsessed
with sexual morality as we ourselves are.
//Even Mars-like gods who are up front leading the way in their “holy”
wars against this or that. //-- Jesus comes to save us from all our
false faces of God.
Positively stated, Jesus comes to reveal to us the true face of God. He says of
himself: "Who sees me, sees the one who sent me” (Jn 12:45). And the one
who sent him is father: "Who sees me, sees the father" (Jn 4
:9). According to the revelation of Jesus, //the true living God isn’t a
raging-mad parent whose majesty has been offended by naughty kids, but is rather a prodigal father or mother who showers prodigal love upon
wayward sons and daughters (Lk 15).
//The true living God isn’t a pouting immature adult but rather a magnanimous father or mother who
"makes the sun to shine upon all the children, the good and bad ones
alike" (Mt 5:45). // The true living God isn’t some monster who
concocts and inflicts the horror
of HIV and AIDS upon so-called immoral
sinners; a God whom no one in their
right mind could possibly love. No. According to the revelation of Jesus, God
is absolutely loveable with our whole
heart, whole soul, and whole mind.
-- So much for the word “God.”
Now how about the word “sin?”
The Scribes and the Pharisees, those great
religious leaders, were always on
everyone’s backs (including Jesus’ back), either for this or for that. “Shame on you, Jesus, for not washing your
hands when you came in from the market place” (Mt 15:2). “Shame on you, Jesus, for eating with sinners”(Lk
5:30). “Shame on you, Jesus, for curing
the crippled man on the Sabbath” (Lk 6:7).
“Shame on you, Jesus, for
allowing your disciple, on the Sabbath, to walk through the fields and pluck food to eat”
(Lk 6:2).
Jesus comes to save us from all our shabby and phony sins, especially the ones
created by religion. Positively
stated, he comes to reveal what true
sin, what honest-to-God sin, what the real stuff really looks like. When some zealous men catch a woman in
adultery and drag her before Jesus, hoping he will stone her to death, do you
know what he says to them? This: “Boys, do you know what is ten times worse
than her sin of passion? Let me tell you: your hypocrisy” (Jn 8:1-11). And then he took all their stones away from
them.
Again, he says to them, “Boys, do you know what
is ten times worse than her sin of
passion? Let me tell you. Once upon a
time there was a rich man, whose name was Dives. He dressed in magnificent purple and he ate splendidly every day.
While outside by the gate lay poor starving Lazarus, whose sores the dogs were licking. Now that’s real
sin for you. And it sends Dives into
Hades while Lazarus is buried in the Bosom of Abraham (Lk 16:19-31)
Again, he says to them, “Boys, do you know what
is ten times worse than her sin of
passion? Let me tell you. Once upon a
time
a man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he
fell in with robbers who waylaid him, robbed him of everything, and left him
there half-dead. Along came a Jewish priest who saw the man, crossed over to
the other side and pass him by. Along came
a Jewish levite who also saw the
man but passed him by. Boys, how much
more immoral than that can you
get? Then along came a Samaritan, who
stopped and poured the oil of compassion to into the poor man’s wounds, hoisted
him on his beast of burden, and hurried him off to the nearest inn. There he dug deeply into his pockets and
drew up a good sun of money which
he gave to the inn-keeper,
saying, ‘If you need more, I on my way
back will repay you.’ Boys, how much more moral than that can you be?’” (Lk
10:25-37).
(the
word doctor)
Our savior is a word-doctor. He comes to cure
especially the word “God” and the word “sin.”
Take now those two words cured
for you by Jesus, and carry them with you into
the new week ahead. The new word
“God” will calm your fears of God,
and will give you a Lord whom you will be able to love with your
whole heart and soul. And the new word
“sin” will give you a new moral sense that will turn you into a good Samaritan
on the road to Jericho.