Faith

Hate, in a Holy Week- Friday, 3rd Week of Lent – Mark 12: 28- 34

The text of today corresponds to the Tuesday of the Holy Week. Jesus in Mark Chapter 11 entered Jerusalem on a donkey in triumph. He spends the evening of Palm Sunday at Bethany and returns to the temple on Monday morning, driving away the money changers. The next day was testing and trying Tuesday. All through chapter 11 and 12 the Pharisees, Sadducees and their common enemy the Herodians, now ‘bosom buddies’ in their anti-Jesus cause, are out to trap the Lord.

They are relentless. “What is your authority?” they ask and so he tells them the parable of the wicked tenants. Too late do they realise that He has turned the tables against them (12:12). So they send the Pharisees and the Herodians, hated enemies, now friends in an evil cause, to trap Him. This time the issue is about paying taxes. When they fail again they send in the big guns, the Sadducees, the interpreters of the law, with the question on resurrection.

In all this insanity of hate, a scribe of seemingly good disposition, “seeing that He (Jesus) had answered well, asks him a question that was once asked to the great Jewish rabbi, Hillel; ‘Which is the greatest commandment?’ Hillel’s answer was, “What you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbour.” So was Jesus’ answer very different from the Rabbis? Jesus’ answer is a combination of orthodoxy and his fondness for going to the root of things.’ (JBC)

In answering the question, Jesus combined two Old Testament instructions.  He put the traditional Shemma (Hebrew: hear), found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, words that are still recited twice daily by persons of the Jewish faith and   the law of Leviticus 19:8, together.  Jesus brought together the balance or the vertical and horizontal dimension, which our lives must have.

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Faith

But I only stole a pencil! Thursday,3rd Week of Lent  – Luke 11: 14-23

Hate is a very, very dangerous and extreme emotion. It is accompanied by a feeling of anger and hostility. One can quell anger, but quelling hate can be like scaling Mount Everest.  Allowed to breed, hate grows rapidly, spreading its cancerous cells, infecting the mind and ravaging the body with evil. It finally infects the brain to even believe that God is the devil! That’s what the Jews called Jesus.

The Jews found the oldest trick in the book to attack Jesus. When you can’t attack a man on facts, simply get ‘ad hominem’ (Latin for, ‘to the man’ or personal attack).  ‘So because the Jews could not attack the FACT of the exorcism, they attacked the SOURCE of Jesus’ power and also those who followed His way (JBC).’ For them, the source of His power was Beelzebul.

So who is this ‘prince of devils’ that is allegedly, for the Jews, the source of Jesus’ power? Beelzebul simply means ‘Lord of Heaven’ and was the Canaanite god of the Philistine city of Ekron.  We find mention of his name in 2 Kings 1:2, when the king of Israel was injured and wanted to inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, whether he would recover.

Jesus answers the Jews with simple common sense. If He, Jesus, has His power from satan, then why would satan want to heal someone? Why would he want to do good when that’s not his nature? It would be a divided house. So just to prove a point, He confronts His detractors with a simple argument. Assuming the Jewish exorcists were successful  in  their exorcism, then did they also get their power from Beelzebul and if so, why did the Jews not protest as much as they seem to be doing now?

Their hypocrisy being exposed and inconsistencies being laid bare, Jesus asserts that God is behind the exorcism. Then as if to leave them red faced He uses a very familiar phrase ‘the finger of God’. The grey cells would have kicked in, for the term ‘finger of God’, goes back to Exodus 8:19, where the Egyptian magicians recognized God’s power through Moses. If a foreign magician could recognize God’s power, what was really wrong with these Jews? That recollection itself, would have sent them scurrying to their Pharisaic holes.

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Faith

Lent: A time for rearranging my spiritual furniture?  Wednesday, 3rd Week of Lent- Matthew 5: 17- 19

In the 400 years of the absence of prophets in Israel, the Scribes and Pharisees became the interpreters of the law. All Jews were subject to the first five books of the Bible which was commonly called the Torah and also to the Mishna which was a commentary on the Torah and also to the Talmud which was commentary on the Mishna. That’s a lot of interpretation; twisting people in a thousand knots of ‘you can’t do’s.’

Jesus clearly wants us to get back to the truth of God’s law and that’s why through the rest of chapter five he will say six times “you have heard it say…but I say to you.”  He is not only going to expose the selective misinterpretation of the law by the Pharisees but he will challenge his disciples to go beyond it in the way they live it. That’s what it was for Jesus; not something written on stone but a living law.

In contrast, Jesus words were plain and uncomplicated. His actions were liberating and perhaps this got the Pharisees really uptight. And so the whisper campaign began; ‘this man is here to ‘tear apart’ the law and the traditions.’ Jesus, in answering them, clearly states he is not here to abolish or kataluo (tear apart) the law and by assumption, nor is he here to oikodomeo or build any more. He uses the word pleroo, which means to fulfil, as in ‘to complete’

So what does all this mean? Jewish law had three aspects; the Judicial aspect, which comprised of rules and regulations, the moral aspect, which told you how to conduct yourself and finally the sacrificial aspect which governed the worship of God.

So let’s have a look as to how Jesus plans to ‘fulfill the law’. In the ceremonial aspect of the law, the atoning act for sin to be forgiven was the sacrifice of a lamb. This ‘atoning act’ of spilling blood was a way of indicating the seriousness of sin. Sin was considered to be a serious business; serious enough that blood had to be spilt and a life had to be exchanged.  When Jesus says that he has come to complete the law, to fulfill it, he does it by becoming the very sacrifice required for sin to be atoned. 

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Art/ Heritage

PICTURING THE PASSION: ‘The Disembowelment of Judas’ by Giacom/ Giovanni Canavesio (1491)

The Archdiocesan Heritage Museum, Mumbai brings to you the fifth article in the series titled ‘Picturing the Passion’

Judas Iscariot! It is the most hated name in history that instinctively recalls curse, criticism and condemnation.  People fear of being designated ‘a Judas’, the most heinous of all traitors. Dante, in his celebrated Divine Comedy, considers him the worst sinner and places him in the center of hell, in the mouth of Lucifer himself. An accursed villain in the Passion of Christ, Judas is regarded synonymous to the devil and to evil. Thanks to his well played antihero role, he is also one of the most recalled apostles, damned for his betrayal.

He betrayed Christ at two specific moments: the first was while devising the plan with the Pharisees over the agreement of the 30 pieces of silver and the second was during the execution of the said plan in the Garden of Gethsemane. As he hands his Master over to the murders, he steps closer to his own death, a self-murder.

The versions to this narrative are varied. While the Gospel of Matthew states, ‘When Judas, the traitor, realised that Jesus had been condemned, he was filled with remorse and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priest and the elders, saying ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood’ They answered, ‘What does it matter to us? That is your concern.’ So throwing the money into the Temple, he went away and hanged himself.’

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Faith

Seven or seventy seven?  Is there a magical number?-Tuesday,3rd Week of Lent – Matthew 18: 21-35

 Poor impetuous Peter, he did it again! It’s almost like he must say something at every occasion. But then again it sounds like a lot of people we know.  It would be hard to doubt the intentions of this good man who often shot his mouth. On this occasion, he sought to push himself to a new limit of giving, perhaps in the hope of winning the Lords approval. It bombed again.

Rabbinical Judaism recommended that forgiveness be offered just thrice.  Peter, who by now is quite accustomed to the Lord’s call to love more and give more, now more than doubles the Rabbis recommendations to forgive. Peter offers a perfect number, one more than the recommended double. Besides seven was a perfect number for the Jews. Seven sounded like heaven; So how could the Lord not appreciate this magnanimous figure that outdid the Rabbis in the forgiveness of one’s brother?  He surely had this one right? errrrr….wrong again

Jesus outdoes ‘Petrine generosity’, hitting it out of the stadium to seventy seven times. This sounds very nice as a thought but practically the thought of keeping such a count of forgiveness would be tedious, to say the least. So why does Jesus set this rather insane figure? Is there some magic in the number seventy times seven?

Jesus parables and teachings are filled with ‘extremes’. He is always asking the disciple for more. That is the heart of Christian discipleship; the teaching that St Ignatius held close to him, ‘let’s give the Lord more (Magis in Latin). So the call of Jesus to his disciples is to love more, give more and forgive more.  This is encapsulated in the parable that Jesus proceeds to tell to make clear his point; a parable of ‘exaggerated’ forgiveness.

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