Are you jealous for my sake?

15 October 2000 17:16

Thanks to John McInnes who has forwarded the following article. It is the text of a homily given by Fr Jack Mahoney SJ in St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh on October 1st, 2000.

Prophecy and discernment are discussed within an overall theme of attitudes to power.

The three readings which we have just been listening to cover several very different topics, and also illustrate how difficult it can be for us today, thousands of years later, to understand their content and contexts, their cultures and underlying presuppositions. Yet, at the heart of this morning’s very disparate readings, I want to suggest, there is one fundamental theme being explored, which is topical in every age, and in none more than ours today, and that is the theme of power and what use we make of it. In other words, each reading this morning throws light on how we responsibly exercise the gifts which God offers each one of us to use for the purpose of spreading his kingdom of justice, love and peace.

In the first reading, from the Book of Numbers (11:25-29), we are in the world of the ancient people of Israel in the desert of Sinai over a thousand years before the time of Jesus. They are on their way from bondage in Egypt to freedom and national sovereignty in the land which God was promising to give them. Moses, their leader, was finding governing such a rabble an impossible task, so God had Moses gather seventy elders to assist him and to receive a share of his spirit. However, two of the men chosen weren’t there when the spirit of Moses was officially shared out, and yet they began to prophesy, that is, to exercise divine power just like those who had been officially authorised. This was too much for Moses’ assistant, Joshua, who indignantly called on Moses to forbid them. Moses’ answer, however, has long been regarded in Christian tradition as prophetic and as providing an inkling of the God-given power which was later to be committed to all baptised Christians: ‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!’

This Old Testament story is echoed in the Gospel passage we have just heard (Mk 9:38-48). One of Jesus’ inner circle reported proudly to him that they had come across someone who was actually casting out devils in the name of Jesus, that is, invoking the power of Jesus, even though he was not ‘one of us’; so they had quickly put a stop to that. Again, however, the response of Jesus was a positive and hospitable one. As he replied, anyone doing good in his name, or invoking his power, was not to be stopped. For one thing, they were unlikely to be opposed to Jesus if they were invoking his power; and in fact by their actions they were showing that they were fundamentally in harmony with Jesus’ own God-given mission to bring healing and salvation to the whole world.

What we have in both of these readings is on the one hand a sort of proprietorial attitude towards the gift of God’s power, an attempt to control who is to receive such power and to exercise it; and on the other hand, a much more hospitable recognition of God’s liberality in dispensing his gifts and graces. I have a fantasy about the early Christian community, when after Our Lord’s Ascension and Pentecost the Christians in Jerusalem were busy getting the early Church organised around the Apostles with Peter at their head, and when they began to get news about the notorious persecutor, Saul, and how he had had a vision of the risen Christ and was now going around preaching the Gospel all over the place. My fantasy is of Peter being puzzled and a bit put out at this development, and saying ‘I thought I was in charge around here. The Lord founded his church on me, didn’t he? So what’s going on?’

What was going on in the calling of Paul, as in the prophesying by the two men in Moses’ retinue, as well as in the evangelising by the man outside the inner circle of the apostles, is that God is not governed by structures or limited in his prodigal gifts of grace to all. One of the great theologians of this past century, Karl Rahner, wrote once that just because God gives his grace freely we are somehow inclined to think that he gives it

grudgingly. That, in fact, would be a rather mean, even a Scottish,
approach to God’s gifts! Or like approaching God’s graces as an economist,
seeing them as scarce resources to be carefully husbanded and controlled and
allocated. But God is not like that. He is the prodigal father, who is
extravagant in dispensing his gifts of forgiveness and understanding; he is

the liberal sower who scatters the seed of his word and his love indiscriminately all over the earth.

And if God is not grudging in dispensing his gifts, then neither should we be in recognising them in others. After all, we don’t own God or his powers. God is not ours; as Calvin insisted so eloquently, we are God’s. We are at most the stewards of his gifts, and yet we are continually in danger of imitating those workers in the vineyard who grumbled at the master’s generosity to the latecomers who joined the workforce only at the eleventh hour, and who earned his rebuke, ‘is your eye evil because I am good?’ We do not own the Spirit of God, and we cannot control his gifts. This was the basis of the Old Testament commandment against taking the name of the Lord in vain. Its purpose was not to stop bad language or forbid swearing; what it forbade was trying to manipulate God by using his name, and therefore his power, in magic rituals or in other ways of trying to appropriate and harness God to do our earthly and selfish bidding.

So an important lesson from today’s readings is that we should be hospitable in recognising the presence and power of God in other people, even perhaps the most unlikely people. We should be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect in not discriminating between the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, but in loving and respecting every one of his creatures in equal generous measure (Mt 5:45-48). That should be our predominant disposition, if we are to accept the message of both the Old Testament and the Gospel readings this morning.

But, of course, we must also recognise that there may be limits to generously presuming the presence and the power of God in others. Both the Old Testament and the history of the Christian Church show without doubt the possibility of false prophets and the need to be able to identify them and to take steps accordingly. There must be some criteria to recognise the genuine presence and power of God, to be able to judge that the finger of God is here. Jesus himself accepts the need for this when he observes that the man casting out devils was doing so in the name of Jesus, and not by some other claimed power. And Church history from the time of Paul in Corinth shows that one of the greatest difficulties facing the Christian community has always been that of discerning between true and false prophets, between those who proceed according to the heart and the mind of Christ and those who do not, even those who in all good faith are capable of being honestly mistaken in their beliefs and behaviour.

To this all-important question of how to identify and validate genuine Christian belief and behaviour today’s second reading (Jas 5:1-6) gives part of an answer, though by no means the whole, when it offers one criterion of genuine religion and Christianity which has gained increasingly in significance and urgency today. How does this behaviour affect God’s poor? The Book of Proverbs sums it up for us: ‘He who oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is kind to the needy honours him’ (Pray 14:31).

The diatribe of St James against those who abuse wealth and riches, and in the process exploit and oppress others, is one of the most trenchant criticisms in the entire Bible. It portrays vividly the spiritual decadence and rottenness which can result from the untrammelled abuse of the power which wealth and riches and position bring; and it graphically illustrates the dishonour, degradation and victimisation which are the melancholy lot of the poor and powerless in any society.

Of course, the Bible is not opposed to wealth and riches and power as such, and is well aware of the constructive and creative purposes to which they can be directed, including for the sake of the Gospel. Yet it almost seems as if, to the writers of both Old and New Testaments, the possession of wealth, and the power it brings, should carry a spiritual health warning. And it seems that an indispensable criterion of the proper use of God’s gifts of possessions, of office, of any power over others, is how the poor are affected by the behaviour of their more affluent fellows, whether these be individuals or agents of society, or, more potently today, governments or international groupings involved in the complex but urgent problems of reducing international debt.

What all three of today’s readings basically come down to, then, is our attitude towards power. The only power which any of us has is the power which comes to us from God’s gifts, whether these gifts be spiritual or material, individual or collective, personal or shared or social. For, as James writes at the start of his letter, every good endowment and every perfect gift comes from above (Jas 1:17); and it does so with a purpose, to be used responsibly in God’s creative service and according to his will.

How we are to use those powers with which we are invested, either directly from God or indirectly through others or society, and how we are to regard them in others, is matter for continual concern requiring various tests and criteria. And one of the most telling is how we treat the needy and disenfranchised in our midst, who if God does have any favourites calling for special concern certainly fall under that privileged heading and merit our indispensable care. For these are the ‘little ones’ to whom Jesus is referring in today’s Gospel as calling inexorably on our respect, and whom we lead into despair or sin at our eternal peril. Not children, but these little ones who have faith, the poor of Yahweh. Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.

Fr Jack Mahoney SJ

Sermon for the ‘Red Mass’ in St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, 1 October 2000 (The ‘Red Mass’ is the name given to the Mass offered at the beginning of a new term of Court hearings)