Faith & Mission
A Reflection
This year, our Sunday mass readings come largely from the Gospel of Mark.
This is the shortest gospel. Straight to the point stuff. Action! No frills.
When our students come to prepare gospel readings for our College liturgies, the Gospel of Mark is rarely chosen. Readings to support the themes that are of importance to our students, Love, Justice, Togetherness etc, are more readily found in the Gospels of Luke or Matthew.
To me, this says something about why we should avoid literal or fundamentalist interpretations of Gospel passages. The message of the Gospels should be understood from a consideration of all four.
It is misleading, and often harmful, to take a literal interpretation of a gospel passage and demand that it be applied directly to human life. St Augustine taught that no interpretation of a scripture passage could be true if it did not promote the love of God or the love of people.
The Gospel from last week challenges the reader to make sense of a very confronting and impractical instruction from Jesus.
Sending out the ‘Twelve’, Jesus instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick—no food, no sack, no money in their belts. At different times throughout the history of religion, people have sought to practice this instruction in its literal sense. The difficulty for ordinary Christians is that this is not a practical way to raise a family, to care for elderly parents, to support a parish community etc. And it is certainly not a practical way to maintain our physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing.
An interpretation of this passage that promotes God’s love and love of neighbour and self is to see that Jesus is setting the priorities that are to provide the foundations upon which Gospel values are to be proclaimed and lived.
I think that the example of my wife and I becoming parents for the first time gives some insight into this instruction of Jesus. No-one actually told us that we should ‘take nothing with us on the journey through parenthood,’ but within days of bringing our beautiful baby daughter home, it was as if the world we had known was gone!
That baby girl now has three children, and as I watch her and her husband build their family, I am struck by how hard parenting is.
Yet, despite the difficulties and the challenges, the journey of fatherhood and grandparenting continues to give me the greatest joy in my life.
Parenthood is only one of many such examples. This instruction of Jesus challenges us to look to those moments in life where we have to cast off the unnecessary or even the crippling baggage of pursuits, cravings or ideas that diminish our humanity. For so many people, success through personal fulfilment has been achieved through reaching a point of awareness that they should ‘taking nothing with them’.
Pope Francis’ condemnation of clericalism could similarly be seen as a response to this instruction of Jesus. “Clericalism is a thorn. It is a scourge. It is a form of worldliness that defiles and damages the face of the Lord’s bride. It enslaves the holy, faithful people of God.”
Through the four gospels, the Good News of Jesus is that he proclaims a kingdom of love, peace and justice. To build such a kingdom, Jesus instructs us to go out and trust in the goodness of all we meet and encounter. That is certainly a challenge. What is the baggage that we would have to leave behind to start out on such a journey?
Mr Mark Hyland
Director of Faith and Mission