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Perquisites
from God
By
Father Timothy P. Schehr
Twenty-sixth
Sunday in Ordinary Time, Numbers 11:25-29; James 5:1-6; Mark 9:38-48
Belonging
to the group has its privileges. People use this promise, or others like
it, to get us interested in joining up. We like to feel special.
Jesus
wants us to feel special, too. But he puts an altogether different spin on
things. When Jesus talks about privileges, he is looking way beyond any
perks the world could offer us. In fact, the sort of privileges Jesus
talks about cannot be measured by ordinary means. They come from God. And
they come from service to God.
The
apostles seem to have been very preoccupied with privilege. Just a few
verses before this Sunday's text, Jesus corrected them for measuring
greatness in earthly terms only. If you want to be great in the eyes of
God, He tells them, you must put everyone else first.
Maybe
this stopped them from arguing among themselves. But, then they take
offense at people outside their circle who do good works in the name of
Jesus. They tell Jesus about it, maybe thinking that He will certainly
agree with them. But, they could not have been more wrong.
There
is a heavenly reward even for those who do little more than offer a cup of
water to people to belong to Christ. What matters is that they believe in
Jesus and the message He preaches.
So
what about the circle of our Lord's closest followers? He warns them
against becoming obstacles to the faith journey of someone else. Better to
be thrown into the sea with so heavy a stone attached that you are sure to
sink to the bottom and be removed from sight. And, if an eye, hand or foot
contributes to sin, better to remove it than risk drifting away from God
because of it.
Some
copyists, in their enthusiasm against scandal, got carried away with the
final line about the undying worm and the unquenchable fire. They repeated
it after each example. Current Bibles omit these intrusive lines, skipping
from 43 to 45 and from 45 to 47. In their zeal over the threatened
punishment, these zealous copyists obscured our Lord's main message:
concentrate on entering the kingdom of God!
The
first reading is a fitting companion piece to this Sunday's Gospel. The
youthful Joshua seems more interested in protecting the authority of Moses
than in promoting the word of God. But, Moses has the right balance on
things. He wishes every single Israelite were equipped to speak the word
of God. After all, the word of God is what they need to get to the
Promised Land. Eldad and Medad — who could forget those names! — never
make another appearance in the Bible. But, that does not take away from
their claim to fame because they preached the word of God where it was
needed most that day — in the camp of the Israelites who were losing
focus on God.
In
the second reading, St. James warns the people of his day against getting
caught up in earthly matters instead of spiritual ones. The things of this
world are subject to time. Better to concentrate on gaining eternal life.
(Father
Schehr is a member of the faculty at the Athenaeum of Ohio in Cincinnati.)
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