When someone applies to enter
religious life you undergo a battery of psychological tests. They want to know if you are crazy before
they accept you. And so a long time ago
when I applied to the Paulists I had to do all these psychological tests.
Probably owing
to the fact that this field of psychological testing was still kind of new 40
years ago - and so not very accurate - I came out mostly as normal. There were only two scores that were
anomalous. One was a proportional score
of how you relate to people as basically good as opposed to basically
evil. The average male candidate at that
time scored in the 90’s. I scored a 07. I remember the psychiatrist commenting on
this result, “This is very Lutheran.” Whatever.
The other anomalous score was for physical
courage. Again I tested way low. Rather than lacking courage, I preferred to
think of it as having a highly developed sense of self-preservation.
Now I bring up
this odd personal fact because of our second reading today. I was struck, even startled, by St. Paul’s
assertion that “We are always courageous,…”. And just a few lines later he reiterates
this: “Yet we are courageous,
and we would rather leave the body and go home to the Lord.”
These
statements struck me because, well, courage is not my thing.
So who are the
“we” in these statements? Does St Paul
mean all Christians? Undoubtedly some of
you are courageous, and even a few of you are anxious to quit this veil of
tears, and this physical body with all its ailments and limitations, and truly “would rather leave the body and go home to
the Lord” right this very instant.
But I suspect that I am not the only one who is in no great hurry to
leave. At least not quite yet.
Or is St. Paul
speaking in an imperial way, with a kind of royal “we”, meaning primarily
himself? Certainly St. Paul was an
exceptionally brave and courageous man, sometimes to the point of almost being
foolhardy. In the 19th
Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read about an incident that occurred in
Ephesus. Paul’s preaching there was
successful, so much so that it was cutting into the business of the silver smiths
who made images of the pagan goddess Artemis, whose shrine was in Ephesus. One of the silver smiths, named Demetrius,
got all the other silver smiths, and then the general populace of the town,
riled up and angry over this threat to their liviehoods and the insult to their
goddess.
A mob gathered
in the theater in Ephesus, shouting “Great is Artemis!” and started to beat up
on two of Paul’s companions. Paul, who
was a short distance away, immediately wanted to rush there to address the
crowd, thinking he could change the mind of this mob. But the other disciples, more prudent in
their approach, sat on Paul and would not let him go to the theater. They very probably saved his life.
So was Paul
speaking about himself? Well, St Paul
was not used to saying “we” when he meant “I”.
That was not his style. And Paul
was not idly bragging when he said “We
are always courageous.” So what does
he mean?
I did some
research. In the New Revised Standard
Version translation of this passage, as well as the Greek Orthodox Bible, the
Jerusalem Bible, and even the pre-1986 “unrevised” New American Bible, this word
is translated not as “courageous”
but as “confident”. “We are
always confident…”
Confidence –
at least to me – speaks more about FAITH than does courage. Of course, it does take courage to live out
faith, and given that the Greek word St. Paul uses in this passage can also be
translated as “confident”, I think this is the kind of courage St. Paul is
referring to. Not physical prowess or
machismo, but rather the confidence to put our faith into action. More the courage of a Mother Teresa than the
courage of a mountain climber or an extreme snow-boarder.
It takes courage to live out our
faith: the courage to not participate in
office gossip and petty politics. The
courage to see all people as brothers and sisters, and not value them according
to how much they make or what they own, or what they can do for me. The courage to resist the allure and
blandishments of consumerism, to think that things can make me happy, or even
worse, to value myself according to what I wear, or drive, or what kind of
electronic gadget I have in my purse or pocket.
The courage to tell the hard truth, to reach out to help the unpleasant
person, to do what is right when everybody else is taking the easy way. The courage to resist a culture of death that
says sex is just for entertainment and that unborn persons can be disposed of.
It takes
courage based on confident faith to live this way. So, where do we get that confident faith that
makes us “always courageous”?
It is a gift
that God gives us. It is not a big,
spectacular, shiny, powerful, impressive gift, especially at first. In fact, the gift is tiny, rather ordinary,
kind of unimpressive, like a mustard seed.
(Penelope Cecile)
God plants
that very small, seemingly insignificant gift in our hearts. But once planted it can grow. If we give that tiny seed of faith the sunshine
of worship and good living, and water it with the tears of repentance for our
sins, and fertilize it with the sacrifices of letting go evil and of doing what
is right, that seed, according to Jesus, “springs
up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the
birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.”
The Kingdom of God grows in our hearts through faith.
Then truly we
will be always confident, always courageous.
As St. Paul says, “We are always
courageous”.
AMEN.
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