Who is the greater? - Peter Steele sj

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 9:30-37

I once went to an exhibition of kimonos worn by eighteenth-century Japanese fire-fighters. The garments were big and handsome and, up to a point, safe. The notes that went with the exhibition told you that there was great prestige attached to being a fire-fighter—that you were, in effect, a kind of civic samurai—and the costume would proclaim this to anyone who looked you over.

All this was new to me, and I was happy to applaud the daring battlers who were prepared to risk their lives for the public good. Who could begrudge them their bold costumes? And by the same token, why should I, or any of us, begrudge courageous or generous people the insignia of their activities, the medals and ribbons?

Come to that, why begrudge ingenious or industrious people their own flaunted labels—the squashed hats and gaudy gowns of those in academic processions—the splash and flash of a mayor’s chain and robes, the discreet but still highly visible buttons or brooches with which various recipients proclaim that their country thinks well of them?

Well, I don’t begrudge them, and I doubt whether our Lord did, or does. Why should I, and why should he? Applause is a good thing: the recognition of excellence is itself an excellent thing. The rub comes, though, not when others are glad to applaud us, but when we are very eager to applaud ourselves.

God applauds us, of course: the action of love whereby he keeps us in being from instant to instant is itself applause. Each of us, he says, is applaudable, is laudable. But if we really believed that, we would not anxious to milk applause from others, or to keep a drum-roll of it going for ourselves.

In the gospel passage for today, our Lord does the best he can to pluck his followers clear of the very human insecurity which drives us to make claim after claim on the endorsement of others. It’s not that he never wanted that endorsement himself: many passages in the gospels make it clear that he did. But it shouldn’t be the first word, and it can’t be the last word.

There is a very significant gesture in Mark’s story. He says, not just that Jesus put a child in front of the followers in order to teach them a lesson, but that he put his arms around the child. This stands for shelter, for endorsement, for embrace. If the child were not embraced by God our Father, the child would be—and each of us would be—a doomed waif, someone emerging from the crevasse of nothingness and destined to fall back into it.

One way or another, many forces in our culture lie to us: they tell us the lie that this is indeed the way things are. If we believe that, no wonder we will be intent on talking ourselves up, and talking others down. Desperation is not a neighbourly emotion: despair is not a generous policy.

By contrast with this, creatively good people, people who are realistically holy, are ones who accept the sheltering, endorsing, embracing arms of God, and are thus nerved to help liberate others. They know that they are like a river: anything they have is something they have received, and therefore their own style becomes, more and more, a style of giving.

The example of such people, living or dead, is useless to us unless we can sense that their story can be ours too: a saint we merely idolise is a saint we have wasted. Those of them who have gone before us did many foolish things, and all of them did sinful things, some of them vile things: and those of them who are our contemporaries are all prone to make just those same moves.

But the crucial thing is that they kept, and they keep, stumbling back to the conviction that God is not reluctant to put his arms around us, and is not sceptical about our capacity to be re-born from day to day. For us, too, that is the only thing that we have to rely on. And that is the only thing we need.