Some days are simply not going to go as planned. Saturdays normally are the one day of the week where there is nothing on until 11 AM and I enjoy that: this morning one son was up at 5 AM because he is worried about a school competition he has to help with. So he gets breakfast before the lectionary is read.
Today’s passage reminds me of the way Christianity is not like Paganity. Half of what we do is invisible, or more than that. The Liturgies are important — but even the most High Church Anglican Priest (who takes thrice as long as the Pope to celebrate Eucharist) spends the bulk of his week doing other things.
We do not exist in meditation. We exist in the world.
30They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; 31for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” 32But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.
33Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” 34But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 35He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” 36Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, 37“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
38John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40Whoever is not against us is for us. 41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.”
Some notes.
- Christ had to use security by obscurity. If people knew he was in the region, he would have been flooded by the crowds. He needed to teach his disciples. The disciples and he needed time out. Although we must be in the world and engaged with the world, we are not of it, our allegiance is not to any state, nor to this world.
- As a speculation, this may be why we don’t need symbols. None of the Hebriac religions do: the second command is that we do not make graven images and bow down and worship them. Pagans find this crazy, and consider that without an object to worship we worship all material, all nature. To be fair, a large number of Westerners are functionally as strong a bunch of dialectical materialists as any member of the Soviet. But the beauty of this world points to God, and it is God alone to be venerated. The internal religious conflict around ikonoclasm (destroying ikons) follows directly from the command not to make ikons.
- The most important people, for Christ, are not the bishops or bloggers. They are the frail, the little, the simple and the least. We are judged, as a church and society, by how we handle them, not how we deal with abstruse theology.
Not to say that abstruse theology is something that should be done casually. Some people (I praise God regularly that I was not called to this, but instead to the doctoring of the mad) have to spend their days being careful, logical, in the defense of the faith from old heresies repackaged: but for most of us we show our salvation by the works that we do.
Hidden. Quietly. Judged not by what we feel, or how spiritual we are, but on how we treat the least.