Homily: Wednesday, 2nd Week of Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Sm 17:32-33, 37, 40-51; Ps 144; Mk 3:1-6

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Years ago, when I taught pre-Confirmation classes of ninth-graders, I learned never to be surprised by either their questions or their answers.
 

I recall once, during a discussion on the gift of faith, one young lady asked, “How come the Pharisees didn’t have faith, but the Apostles did?” It was actually a pretty good question, and so I thought it might keep the discussion going in a good direction if I let the rest of the kids in the class offer their answers.
 

But instead of just turning the question over to the class as a whole, I thought it might be best to prepare the ground a bit. So first we read today’s Gospel passage from Mark. And then I asked them if they noticed anything different about Jesus before he healed the man with the withered hand? It took few minutes before one girl said, “Jesus is angry.”
 

“That’s right,” I said. “Mark is the only Gospel writer who mentions the anger of Jesus. Oh, John tells the story of Jesus driving the buyers and sellers from the Temple, but he never explicitly says that Jesus was angry. Only Mark does that.”
 

Let’s take a moment to picture the scene as Mark describes it. Jesus had just asked the Pharisees a question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” From a commonsense point of view, it’s a pretty simple question; and from a charitable point of view as well. Only from a close-minded, self-serving, hateful point of view can one say “No” to this question.
 

And so how do the Pharisees answer it? They don’t. “But they remained silent,” Mark tells us. And it’s easy to see why. For them to answer, “Yes,” would have been a lie and would only highlight their hypocrisy. But to answer, “No,” would be a public admission of their lack of charity. They had set out to trap Jesus and, once again, he had trapped them. Usually it was their words that exposed them. This time it was their silence.

What happens next? Well, Mark tells us that Jesus looked “around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart,” and then went on to heal the man’s hand. Virtually every scene in the Gospels has at one time or another been the subject of a painting…except this scene. I know of no painting that shows Jesus looking around at the Pharisees with anger.  

I suspect such a painting wouldn’t be very popular among those who have this distorted image of a warm and fuzzy Jesus who roams through Galilee and Judea dispensing hugs.

“And so,” I asked my ninth-graders, “Why was Jesus angry?” Well, I got all kinds of answers from them, but the evolving consensus was that Jesus was angry with the Pharisees because, as one young man remarked, “They were jerks.”

Now the Gospel doesn’t use those exact words. One translation says, “Because they had closed their minds.” “Because of their hard-heartedness,” says another. Now these only seem different. The mind is open by its very nature. Notice how young children are very open-minded, always ready and able to learn. It’s only when they grow up and get stupid that they do otherwise; for it is the heart that closes the mind.

These Pharisees, these sullen, joyless and loveless people in front of him, had lost any sense of compassion for others. They had ceased being childlike. They had stopped loving. And because love couldn’t penetrate their hearts, their minds were closed as well. Hate and selfishness had so closed their minds that couldn’t even recognize the hand of God in the miracles that occurred right before their eyes. They had created an almost impenetrable barrier to the gift of faith.

The Apostles, on the other hand, were in a sense more childlike, more open to the Spirit’s urgings, more open to receiving the gift, more willing to love. You see, brothers and sisters, hatred closes and love opens. Indeed, love is itself an opening, a kind of wound. The mystic, Julian of Norwich, prayed for “the wound of true compassion.”

God grant that we may never be healed of it! And keep us from being jerks.