WHO SAVES US?

I’m not sure that anybody would have imagined a year ago that we would still be dealing with serious disruptions of life now due to COVID-19.  But we are.  The continued spikes in the virus, the disruption in supplies, the filling up of hospital beds, the ongoing resistance to vaccinations… it’s these phenomena are all still here. We try so hard to manipulate our own way out of all of this, only to recognize the limits of what we can control.  Our shared longing is to return to “normal,” whatever that is.  And we can’t. And that isn’t entirely bad, because that desire presumes that what was normal in the year of 2019 was entirely good.  It wasn’t.  This time of ongoing challenge is also a time for re-imagining how we ought to be together as human beings and as Christian disciples and, that’s an invitation to change and who wants to do that?  I like what I am familiar with.  I have come to terms with what I can expect, even if it’s not what I’d prefer.

But that’s not the life of a Christian—not as Jesus showed us. To follow this savior is regularly to be pushed in to something new.

Throughout his whole earthly ministry Jesus tried to convince his disciples that he was teaching and showing them a different way to be faithful to God.  The greatest are to become the least; the first are to become the last; the children are to become the teachers; the powerful are to be brought down; the rich are at the greatest risk; the sick, and suffering and grieving and poor are to be the center of the universe.

And his friends just couldn’t believe it.  Sometimes they actually challenged him about that. And sometimes we still do now.  Because it’s unfamiliar with the way things seem to work in almost every other facet of life.  The sun comes up in the morning and the moon comes out at night, both right on schedule.  We can predict those things to the very minute for years to come.

But what if we can’t?  Today’s gospel of Mark places that very troubling question right at our feet today.  Jesus tells his friends that one day, sooner or later, the sun won’t shine on the earth and the moon won’t glow and the stars will no longer be in the sky.

What?!  What sort of sun can there be that doesn’t give light to the earth?  And what moon and stars are there that can’t illuminate the darkness?  These things just are, and have ever been, and will forever be. And Jesus’ word to us is, “No they aren’t.”  Heaven and earth, he says, will pass away, together with all certainties that we imagine them to provide.

Surely he’s exaggerating, right?  It’s a figure of speech, right?  Well if it is, the gospel surely doesn’t tell us that. All that we have come to cling to as “normal” and “stable” is not going to save us in the end.  COVID19 has given us all a hard lesson in that.  The only thing that endures is God. Not politics.  Not health.  Not good fortune.  Not our merely human traditions and expectations, including those here in church.  It’s natural to want to gravitate to all those things when we feel threatened but they won’t save us.  Only God can do that.

I think of the image of the birds, from the smallest to the largest of them. The only hope they have for their young ones to survive is to kick them out of the nest, not to be alone, but to make them learn how to trust in what will keep them alive.  That’s what Jesus is doing for us in his words
today—inviting us to trust in that one dependable life source that will keep us from despair.  So COVID19 is, in its own paradoxical way, teaching us the very same thing.  Here and now.  So there is grace even amid suffering, and for this we rightly offer thanks, as we gather again around our Eucharistic table.  We may well be invited to put out faith in something – Someone – who up until now has been unfamiliar.