2 Lent B February 25, 2024
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25 Mark 8:31-38
It is easy to confess universalism but quite difficult to practice such within our specific circumstances. The famous cartoon quote of Charlie Brown is insightful about the great tension between good theory and experimental practice of that theory. Charlie Brown said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."
Great love is inclusive, but our narrow-minded affinities are often very exclusive and limited. We know that God is love, and God calls us to love all but does that include the people who are thorns in my side? Does it include our enemies?
One of the goals of St. Paul was to write the Gentiles into salvation history in continuity with the salvation history as found in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures highlight the tension between the universal nature of God and God's availability to everyone and the conflict of the people of Israel with all of Israel's neighbors, including those who had been pushed from land so that Israel could claim it as their Promised Land.
How can Abraham be the ancestor of a multitude of nations, while the love of God was to be only for God's favorite Israel? How could the Psalmist implore for all the nations to praise God without specifically inviting them to do so? How could the Temple be a house of prayer for all people, and yet entrance there not be allowed to all?
The history of salvation is the history of people who believe themselves to be favored by God, not being able to grant that favor with the true largesse of the loving heart of God.
Indeed no group of people has the same largesse of heart of God; and we have to be humble at accepting our limitation and our limited ministry to the people in our lives.
However, the universality of God always invites us to the continual expansion of learning to be more universal and inclusive of more people, even people who are outside our familiar comfort zones.
The writings of St. Paul and the Gospels are about bringing the message of God's love to more people than those who had been adherent Jews of the Temple and synagogue. The movement of presenting God as being accessible to people who were more than adherent Jews of the synagogue and Temple was controversial.
St. Paul saw the Hebrew Scriptures as a witness to the universality of God for everyone, and for him, it meant that he understood the Gentiles as being pre-figured in the story of Abraham and in the universality of God written about in various parts of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Although the Gospels were written as though they are in the time of Jesus, they really are written from the perspective of people who knew the experience of the Risen Christ 25 to 55 years after Jesus had left the earth. This is clearly in the Gentile age of the Jesus Movement.
What made the Jesus Movement more universal than the synagogue experience, was the mysticism of the early Jesus Movement. This movement was based upon the experience of the Risen Christ being a spiritual experience of many people. The teachings of Paul and the Gospels included a spiritual methodology for taking on an identity with Christ through a visualization of events in the life of Jesus. One could be "crucified and raised" with Christ as an interior power of identification in the overall program of education, called repentance, meaning literally continual renewal of the mind.
One of the catch phrases of the early Jesus Movement was to take up one's cross and follow Jesus, a dying to one's soul life of former mind to receive a renewed mind, an after mind. Repentance or metanoia literally means "after mind." Instead of being a David-like external military messiah, Jesus, as Risen Christ, was an interior power for the transformation of lives one at a time in the secret place of people's soul.
Taking up the cross of Christ was like the phrase of identity in Pauline spirituality, "I have been crucified with Christ." St. Paul and the Gospel writers believed in the universal accessibility of knowing identity with the Risen Christ who was the sublime presence of a person knowing oneself as a child of God.
Let us today, as we are shackled with the limitations of our life experiences and fearful unwillingness to recognize God's relevance to everyone, let us acknowledge that the sublime experience of God can come to all and let us acknowledge such God-dignity upon the lives of all today. Amen.
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