HEED THE MARGINS
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
March 06, 2021
As we are gathered in prayer today, Pope Francis is spending
the weekend in Iraq. That land is the
very place where our faith was born.
In ancient times it was known as UR of the Chaldeans, and it
was the home of Abraham, our father in faith. It was from there that he set out to a new place when the voice of God
commanded him to. And much later, that
land became home to one of the most ancient Christian communities of the early
church. It’s still there –barely. What was once a large and thriving community
has been almost wiped out by centuries of political and religious warfare. Christians are fleeing for their safety
today, and sometimes for their lives.
So of all places on earth where the Pope might travel, why
there? Why now? In fact, Francis has made it a characteristic
of his years of the papacy to notice and to respond to the so-called “margins”
of the church, by his visits, by the people he appoints to high office, and by
his teaching. Why? Because these places and people are no less
fully the church than we or anyone else are. His visits are not only acts of encouragement; they are acts of
justice. Marginalized people and
communities are deserving of a voice, and too often they are not given
one. Their wisdom and their pleas are
often drowned out by other, louder voices that have access to resources and
power. And that can happen when we start
to evaluate the importance of any other group-by its size, its wealth, its
influence, its access to political favor, its popular esteem. Because of Francis’ journey this weekend, the
Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq has a voice and a public face for all the rest
of the world and church to see and hear.
I once heard a speech given by Dr. Diana Hayes, who is now
retired from her theology professorship at Georgetown University. She is an African American woman, and was
speaking to the issue of race and of women in the Catholic Church. And the great insight I took away from that
talk was her noting that the people and groups whom we think of as
“marginalized” depends entirely upon what and who we imagine to be in the
center. In other words, “marginalized”
from where? For more than 1000 years now
the imagined center of the Catholic church has been Europe, for a whole host of
political and economic reasons, even though the church didn’t start there, and
Jesus- as far as we know-was never there. More recently the United States has become part of the imagined center
because we tend to have a lot of wealth and influence around the world. Every other place on earth, then, is
relatively situated toward the “margins”. Pope Francis, as a native Latin American, understands that very well, as
well as the injustice that occurs when all those other churches have little or
no voice. So what does any of this have
to do with today’s scripture on this third Sunday of Lent? Actually quite a bit.
In today’s short second reading form St. Paul to the
Corinthians, he tells the people that the Gospel does not proclaim merely
Christ, but “Christ crucified.”
That is to say, Christ humiliated, rejected, ridiculed, and
finally executed. He was the Messiah who
went through this world as a marginalized person, at least in the eyes of the
wealthy and powerful and in the popular imagination. He identified with those people and
communities who without him would otherwise have no voice in the mainstream of
public life-both political and religious life. He gave voice to the witness of women, children, lepers, sinners, pagans,
the poor, foreigners, even the dead. He
spoke for them, by his words and deeds, and so he made the ones who thought of
themselves as the center to be confronted with the witness of the
marginalized. He confronted Kings and
Governors, high priests, and synagogue leaders…and in the Gospel today, he
confronted the wealthy merchants and the money changers. And none of those people cared to listen to
such a voice from the margins. Better
that they remained in silence. Which is,
of course, what got Jesus put to death-as he predicted at the conclusion of
today’s gospel.
And it’s what made it so difficult for so many truly to
believe that this could be God’s Messiah on earth. Paul refers to it as a “stumbling block” to
the Jews and “foolishness” to the Gentiles. A savior who comes from the margins? Surely, they thought, this can’t be true. Pope Francis right now is calling the church
back to an ancient witness-in fact to the very life of Jesus: The so-called
marginalized and weak are only so in our own imaginations. Their voices must be heard, not only in
justice to them but for the sake of our own conversion and salvation. If we are serious about finding the real God
in this holy season, let us begin to reconsider where God is most reliably to
be discovered. Let us open our eyes and
ears to the ones who are regarded as weak, and unlikely bearers of what all of
us need to hear. Let them speak.
|