November 4, 2012
Deuteronomy 6: 2-6 + Psalm 18 + Hebrews 7: 23-28 + Mark 12: 28-34
There is a deep and offensive wound that infects our faith and our lives in this age of the world. It is a split between the faith that many Catholics profess and their daily lives. This deserves to be counted among the most serious troubles of our age, and at the heart of this incident in Mark’s Gospel this trouble is being addressed by Jesus. Perhaps it is the frantic pace of life today in our culture that allows us to deny or avoid healing this wound and acknowledging what it is doing to us, but for this moment we sit with this Gospel, it will be undeniable.
Many think that religion consists in acts of worship alone, and they plunge themselves into earthly affairs in such a way as to imply that these are altogether divorced from religious life. I am quoting here the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The document is almost fifty years old, and it is as though it were written last week. You would have thought in 1965 that the Council would have named Communism, materialism, individualism or a host of other ideologies as candidates for the most serious error, but it does not. Instead, it names the divide that we maintain between the faith we profess and our daily lives in this world: between what we do here for an hour each week and what we do the rest of the time.
A compartmentalized lifestyle is one of the first and clearest symptoms of narcissism, and you do not have to be around long in this life to recognize that we are living in an age of narcissism. It is an un-integrated life-style that puts events and issues into separate little categories that often separates people into little groups in order to keep them apart, manage, or control their interaction so that the fragile “self” can be protected, admired, and be content. This is a self-justifying kind of life free of challenge free of change, proteted from critique, and ultimately very lonely. It is not a life-style compatible with Jesus Christ proclaimed in this Gospel.
The excuse that keeping things separate, dealing with them one at a time, and never mixing religion and life or bringing our faith to bear on our lives between Sundays is lame and useless. It is not acceptable, and it will not reconcile with what is happening in these verses of Mark’s Gospel. Failing to address poverty and the violence it breeds from frustrated unemployed young people who see great wealth in the rest of the world while concentrating on the horrible violence of abortion is a compartmentalized life. These issues cannot be separated. Not connecting the moral issue of capital punishment or war and abortion to a disregard for human life so obvious among us reveals the split that has wounded us; While leaders tempt us to argue about which issues is more important, nothing gets done. The argument itself continues to divide us, and of course, divide and conquer has long been a tool of those in power to secure their ideology. We will make no progress as long as we compartmentalize these issues and fail to see that they connect and then recognize how the immoral gap between poverty and wealth breeds violence, hatred, and war. We will make no progress toward peace as long as we do nothing about respecting all human life We have no persuasive voice as long as we choose who lives and who dies or tolerate “Collateral damage” which really means dead women and children. We will have no credible voice as long as we have money for weapons and nothing for the poor. When Jesus and this scribe talk about being close to the Kingdom of God and the commandments that once kept will seure our place in the Kingdom, they are talking about an integrated whole life free of compartments and healed of that split that has infected us and this whole world.
The body and the soul are together, and the health of one depends on the health of the other. Sickness of soul inevitably infects the well-being of the body. Body, Mind, Soul, and Heart are interdependent. We are a whole being in this life, and effective are for one part of this body demands effective care for the other. In the same way, love of God demands love of neighbor – if they are not together, the love of God is nothing more than a charade; an effort to look good in the eyes of others while remaining empty and broken, disconnected, and separated from our neighbor In the reverse, even those who do not know and may not confess Jesus Christ as their savior and close to God when they love and care for their neighbor
These Gospel verses speak to the demand for an integrated life, for a life that brings faith to hear on everything happens and every decision and every judgment. The very Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Son of God taking on human flesh puts an end once and for ever to a separation between heaven and earth and breaks up the categories that might allow us to live a secular life distinct from a spiritual life Consequently, we cannot look at violence and war and not cry out that this is wrong. We cannot look at poverty and push it aside as if it were someone else’ problem or something we might eventually get around to thinking about. Our faith will not allow us to prioritize the evils of our age and shove them into categories to be sort3d our when we have the money or the time. We will never have either asl long as we keep them apart and argue among ourselves about which one is most important. This translation of these verses uses the world “all” where other translations prefer “whole” I prefer the world “whole”. In either case, the word is repeated seven times in seven verses. If nothing else clicks, the repetition ought to say something. Wholeness is the issue, an integration of faith and life, of God and neighbor, of body, mind, and soul is what it will take to get close to the Kingdom of God. Many in this church spend more hours in the gym than in the church, more time at physical exercise than at spiritual exercise, more time at play than at prayer with such an un-integrated lifestyle, it is no wonder that the human community is so divided when we live lake that from the inside.