Are You a Prophet or a Scandalizer?, 26th Sunday (B), September 30, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
September 30, 2018
Numbers 11:25-29, Ps 19, James 5:1-6, Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

We encounter in today’s Gospel a big contrast and a big surprise. The contrast is between those who are working for God and those who are not. As the Lord says, some are “for” Him; some are “against” Him. The surprise is that those who might seem to be working for the Lord in fact may not be, and those who seem not to be working for Him in fact may be. Insofar as all of us are here because we want to be working for the Lord, because we want to hear him say one day to us, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” we need to examine what the Lord Jesus says today and apply it to our own actions, to see whether we really are working for him or against him.

We start with God’s collaborators. God wants all of us on his team, working for him and his kingdom. In the first reading, Moses says, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” The Lord wants all of us to preach him, to spread his truth, to invite all others into the circle of his incredible love.  He’s said this to us in many ways. His last words before ascending to the Father were “Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News!” (Mk 16:15). He called us to be the Light of the World, reflecting the light of his truth and the warmth of his love to others (Mt 5:14). He said that those who are great in his kingdom “will keep my words and teach others to do the same” (Mt 5:19) Proclaiming this Gospel, as Jesus told us, is not just saying, “Lord, Lord,” but “doing God’s will” (Mt 7:21) and he wants to help us to seek, find, treasure and do his will to make disciples of all nations.

What we see in today’s readings is that sometimes those on the Lord’s team aren’t wearing the team uniforms and those who are often are not actually helping the team win. In the first reading today, Eldad and Medad were not among the original seventy elders chosen to prophesy in the name of the Lord to the Israelites. But the Lord filled them with his Spirit and they began to proclaim God’s word throughout the camp. The still young and immature Joshua, who would become Moses’ successor, objected, “Moses, stop them!” Imagine: Joshua wanted to have them stop preaching about the Lord! Who was working for the Lord here and who was not? Moses told Joshua there was no reason to be jealous. God wants all to be prophets, and always works outside of our cozy parameters. Even those we think are not the ones chosen by the Lord to be his ambassadors might in fact be his emissaries and coworkers.

We learn the same lesson from the Gospel. Soon after the failure of the disciples to cast out a demon from a young boy (while the Lord was being transfigured before Peter, James and John on the mountain) and the Lord had castigated their generation for its lack of faith, the disciples caught someone who wasn’t among their number casting out demons in Jesus’ name. St. John said that he and the other disciples had tried to stop him. Who was working for the Lord and who against him here? The disciples were the ones who were supposed to be the Lord’s collaborators, but like Joshua, they still hadn’t figured out God’s ways. He had come to set prisoners free, to defeat Satan once and for all, but the still-immature disciples wanted to stop someone from casting out devils, from doing the Lord’s work because, essentially, they were more concerned with what they wanted to be their exclusive prerogatives in God’s kingdom than in accomplishing his work. None of us should ever think we have a monopoly on the name, mission, message and power of Jesus.  We should never find God’s action in others a threat, but rather something to marvel at and praise him for. We should of course want to help them to come to the fullness of the truth about God revealed to us by Christ in His Church, but we should rejoice that others, at whatever stage of revelation they’ve received, would be corresponding to the gentle breeze of the Holy Spirit. We repeat with Moses, “Would that all God’s people were prophets!”

But not all God’s people are in fact prophets. Jesus says quite strongly that there are those who are “against” Him, those who not only do not work for him, but actively oppose him. We see many of these opponents in the Gospel: Satan in the desert; some of the Scribes and Pharisees during Jesus’ public ministry; Herod the Great at Jesus’ birth; Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas at Jesus’ death; even, for a very short time, St. Peter, whom Christ called Satan and told to get behind him when he rejected the possibility that the Lord would suffer.

Those, however, were not the ones Jesus specified in this episode as those who were against him. He referred, rather, to those who give scandal. Those who are against him are the false prophets, who teach others, especially the young, not about how to know, love and serve the Lord but rather how to sin.  Such is Jesus’ love for his children that he passionately warns everyone who harms little ones through scandal to know what punishment they should expect: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and thrown into the sea.” The word “scandal” in the original language of the Bible meant two things: something that causes another to fall and something that is an obstacle to someone’s doing good. Applied to the matters of faith, scandal is something that either causes another to sin against God (i.e., fall from God) or something that prevents the access of another (an obstacle) to the kingdom of God.

Many of those in the Church today, who seem to be on the Lord’s team, often turn out to be false prophets, erroneous teachers of others, rather than those who pass on to them the truth. Jesus wants us to be brutal in cutting out of our lives not only what leads us to sin but what leads others to sin. And today he wishes to give us the help and the motivation to do so. We could easily find examples of those whose deeds others astray: bishops and priests who haven’t walked the walk, as we’ve seen in the recent scandals of sexual abuse and the failure of those in positions of authority to eradicate them or to tell the truth about them; celebrities from the world of music, movies and sports whose example draws the young into drugs, into using others in relationships, into the worship of status; educators, who teach young people in public schools about premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion and other topics in ways that are totally contrary to what God wants; politicians who pretend that their duty to the Constitution trumps their duties to God. If it were possible to buy stock in a millstone business, now would be the time to buy.

But I’d like to make Jesus’ teaching much more concrete by focusing on the role of priests, religious, parents, godparents, grandparents, older siblings and friends to be true rather than false teachers, to be prophets rather than scandals. It would be easy to focus on certain actions to see whether those in these circumstances facilitate or frustrate the lessons God wants the young taught: does our example inspire or discourage young people to pray, to come to Mass, to go to confession, to learn the faith, to fight against sin, to sacrifice ourselves to care for the poor and needy, to use appropriate language, to be honest, to stay faithful to the Lord in terms of love, sex, marriage and family, to forgive and give people second chances? But I think it’s important to get beyond individual actions or habits to look at the “big picture” and whether, by the entire orientation of our life, we are motivating or dissuading the young to become true saints, to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength. The young learn from those who are older what’s really important in life and so we need to focus on what we’re teaching, not just by our words, but by our example. For those of us who are priests and religious, we could similarly ask the question: does the way we live out our vocations increase the fire in seminarians and novices, for example, or turn the flame down? Today when the Church celebrates St. Jerome, the great translator of the Bible who taught us those who are “ignorant of Scripture are ignorant of Christ,” do we inspire others to live off of every word that comes from God’s mouth — to quote today’s Psalm, to treat God’s law as perfect, trustworthy, wise, refreshing, pure, just — or to think they’re fine if they ignore it?

The best way to learn to be a true and good prophet, to be “with the Lord” rather than “against” him, is to learn from Jesus himself. At Jesus’ time there was a lot of hypocrisy. He pointed to it when he said that they should listen to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees who sit on Moses’ seat, but not follow their example, because their example was a clear violation of the words of God they spoke. Jesus, on the other hand, was full of integrity. He was someone who never merely said, “Do what I say,” but always “follow me.” And he had set his goal, his eyes, on always doing the will of the Father who sent him, of leading others on the way of sanctity, which is the way of the Cross, all the way to heaven. In order to be the type of true prophet that God wants us to be, we, too, need not merely to mouth the words of the faith, but to be able to say to the young “follow me!,” and set out not for worldly goals and ambitions but on the clear path set out by Jesus and the Church he founded. We need to toss from our lives whatever is not fitting for that journey, so that others, in following our footsteps, may come to God.

“Would that all God’s people were prophets!” Would that all people brought others to Christ by their actions! The Lord would not be calling us to be his prophets in word and deed unless he were planning to give us all the help we need to live up to that vocation. After having heard him in Sacred Scripture today, and in anticipation of receiving His body and blood inside us, let us ask him to heal our wounded eyes, or sinful hands, or scandalous feet, so that every part of us — and the lives of those whom he has entrusted to us — may be “with Him” in this life and in the next.

The readings for today’s Mass were: