Play fair

Here is the text of the meditation I shared with those who came to pray with us today: some thoughts about the call for every disciple to be truly wise about how we use the gifts God has given us.

The wisdom of the just

I had a brief conversation this week with my almost-six-year-old niece.  She’s got almost everything ready for school, but she’s nervous:  she’s beginning Grade 1, so there is going to be homework.  In other words, things are getting serious now.  She’s already recognized the fact that she’s going to need help, so she’s asked almost everyone she can if they will be willing to help her.  Oh how I wish we could all maintain the simple approach of a child when it comes to identifying the challenges that life places before us!  If only we were wise enough to recognize that there will always be times in our lives when things will get serious, when there will be homework to be done, and when it’s okay to ask for help!

Almost-six-year-old children see life as a series of tasks to be accomplished and they’re not afraid to tackle them.  Hopefully there are teachers and role models in their lives who can show them how to size up a challenge, analyze the problems and break down the work into manageable tasks which can be attended to one by one.

These lessons apply to life in general, but they also apply to our life of faith.  The gospel passage we heard today tells us that they brought (to Jesus), a man who was deaf and who had an impediment in his speech, and begged him to lay his hand on him (Mk 7:32).  This was an act of faith on their part.  They understood all too well that any impediment was enough to condemn a man to a life of begging, but they also trusted that Jesus could help him.  Jesus sized up the challenge, understood all the problems that this man was facing and broke down the challenge into a series of tasks: first, he took him aside in private, away from the crowd, he put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue (Mk 7:33), and then Jesus looked up to heaven and said Ephphatha – be opened (Mk 7:34).  None of these tasks in and of themselves seem difficult, but when they were combined and performed as an act of faith, even miracles happened (cf Mk 7:35).

Some of those who witnessed this miracle believed that it was the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah that we heard in today’s first reading (Is 35:5), and perhaps it really was, but the story doesn’t end there, because faith makes it possible for all of us to do wonderful things for the sake of others.  If we truly believe the words that Jesus spoke, then we will strive every day to see other people – the ones who are sitting next to us right now, and the ones we will meet this coming week in the midst of our travels – as brothers and sisters, children of God just like us.

Saint James cautions us today not to perform acts of favoritism in order to gain other people’s favour.  Otherwise, we will be tempted to treat some differently from others (Jas 2:2-4), and we ourselves will become more and more mired in the traps that are set by the lure of earthly riches, and less and less able to distinguish the tasks that are truly set before us.

If instead, we focus on the fact that God has chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom (Jas 2:5), then we will indeed be well on our way to learning the lesson he wants to teach us.