Reflection for Friday, December 14, 2018

Memorial of Saint John of the Cross, Priest and Doctor of the Church

IS 48:17-19
PS 1:1-2, 3, 4 AND 6
MT 11:16-19

The readings for the day are challenging ones that demand a little context to make sense of them. The first reading has a lot of big, even violent imagery of God reshaping the earth to provide for the needy and to reshape the desert into a habitable place. The picture on the left is a threshing sledge; made of a couple of boards studded with sharp rocks, it was dragged across harvested grain like wheat or barley to separate the grain from the inedible chaff and to cut the stalks so they could be given to animals to eat. The image of God doing that to the mountains is a pretty ferocious one - imagine God promising to bulldoze or steamroll the Rocky Mountains!

I remember driving through southern Arizona and California a few years back and seeing big water barrels set along the highway at regular intervals - they were there for people to keep their cars from overheating in the desert, because if your car died out there, you very well might die too. Imagine that, but minus the car. For people leaving exile in Babylon imagining the arduous journey of crossing the desert to go to Israel, a land most of them had never seen (the exile lasted 50-something years), smoothing out mountains into flat land and setting up water stations along the way in the desert must have sounded like a pretty great idea.

The reference to John the Baptist as Elijah is strange to us - do they think John was a reincarnation of Elijah or something like that? Well, sort of. The final book of the Bible, the book of the prophet Malachi, ends with this line:

"Now I am sending to you
Elijah the prophet,
Before the day of the LORD comes,
the great and terrible day." (Mal 3:23)

To reference Elijah when speaking about John is to say that the day of the Lord is coming - a day of judgment and setting right the accounts with all God's friends and enemies. A violent image in most accounts - punishing the bad guys and rewarding the good guys. This brings us to this strange and highly disputed verse at MT 11:12 - "From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force."

What does that even mean? An incredible amount of ink has been spilled trying to explain it into something that makes some sense - "Be forceful in opposing the devil!" "Strip yourself of anything that keeps you from doing right!" "Violent outside forces like the Pharisees and the Sadducees are coming to get us!" "Sinners and tax collectors are taking possession of the kingdom of heaven from under the Pharisees' noses!"

Up until now, including with John the Baptist, the coming of the day of the Lord has been a violent image - killing the bad guys - as has been the image of Messiah. Jesus occasionally uses judgment imagery (like in MT 25), but in plenty of other places he seems to dismantle the ongoing power games of the strong overpowering the weak - a game which is simply continued by making God into the strongest of the strong, imposing the divine will on others in the same way that the powerful on earth do over the weak. But while John preaches impending doom - the axe is at the root of the tree - clearly Jesus is not planning to kill a bunch of Romans. As much as Jesus imagines an end to the current state of affairs in his time, he also presents a version of Messiah which is not simply the biggest, baddest guy in the room. He is, in fact, one who transforms not through doing violence but through receiving, absorbing, and transforming it. Not only does the cross undo all those power fantasies, but so does the manger - the coming of the kingdom of heaven is not in bravado and majesty but in simplicity and poverty.