25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Year B
September 23, 2012
Reading 1: Wis 2:12, 17-20
Responsorial Psalm: 54:3-4, 5, 6 And 8
Reading 2: Jas 3:16-4:3
Gospel: Mark 9:30-37
Jesus and his disciples left from there and began a journey through Galilee,
but he did not wish anyone to know about it.
He was teaching his disciples and telling them,
"The Son of Man is to be handed over to men
and they will kill him,
and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise."
But they did not understand the saying,
and they were afraid to question him.
They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house,
he began to ask them,
"What were you arguing about on the way?"
But they remained silent.
They had been discussing among themselves on the way
who was the greatest.
Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them,
"If anyone wishes to be first,
he shall be the last of all and the servant of all."
Taking a child, he placed it in the their midst,
and putting his arms around it, he said to them,
"Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me;
and whoever receives me,
receives not me but the One who sent me."
So among us there is no place for degrees of greatness culminating in one who is greatest. It is very sad to realise that the church hierarchy (the word means sacred order) is totally constructed on degrees of greatness, on degrees of power over others. The saddest thing is that those who fill those structured layers of church order would want in their hearts to be only servants, and would think of themselves as the least of all. But such wishful thinking is empty and vain as long as they present themselves as of superior dignity, and exercise their power as of divine right in such a way that they are beyond the scrutiny of their flock.
I am led to see Jesus on trial before the High Priest and the Sanhedrin, and then Pilate. He gave no quarter to their pretensions of greatness. In demanding evidence to support their charges he demanded respect for his basic dignity as a human being. In that simple stand on the truth he showed the hollowness of their claim to authority. To Pilate he said that authority comes from above, not from the power that a bully might have at his disposal.
So the greatest obstacle to receiving the Christ and the One who sent him is our pretensions of grandeur, our domination of others. And yet that is the way it works in our world. 'Not so among you,' Jesus said. There is a corollary, I think, to this image of child model: Many in this place reject the childishness that characterises much of religious devotion, and rightly so. We are called to leave behind our childhood thinking and be fully grown up. What then is it about the child that we should model? Is it that peculiar absolute dependence in which the child's basic inclination is to say Yes, even as it grows towards a level of independence in which it will not have to submit willy-nilly. We grow to a mature response, yet always keeping the willingness of the loving devoted child.
I wonder is there more?