AN ARM AND A LEG – Mark 9: 38-48

“You’d easily know Mrs. Brown was a Protestant; she has that lost look about her.” So said a neighbour to my mother one day. That lost look! I grew up with the conviction the Catholic Church was God’s one and only church on earth. The Catholic priest was like God. Men acknowledged the priest on the street by raising a hand to touch forehead or cap. One day, when I was eight or nine, I saw my uncle on the street raise his arm in salute to a grey suited Protestant minister. Later, my mother would tell me Ministers too were men of God.

A recent issue of “The Tablet” (International Catholic Weekly) had tales from two parishes. In one, the priest announced at Mass that “only Catholics in the state of grace were to receive Communion, and listed those who were to be excluded: the divorced, those living together without the benefits of the Sacrament of Matrimony, those who are gay, those not opposed to abortion, those who have not gone to Confession at least once in the past year.”

In the other, a child asked her dad to accompany her to Mass, which he did but reluctantly. At Communion, she took her father’s hand and asked him to join her; once again, he reluctantly conceded. At the altar, he whispered to the priest: “Father, I’ll be fine with whatever you decide to do, but it has been over 20 years since I have been to Mass.” The priest held up the host and placed it in the palm of the man’s hand, smiled, and said, “Welcome home.”

Could John’s complaint to Jesus about the man “who is not one of us casting out devils” have led to all-out conflict between this person’s followers and Jesus’ disciples? Was John, Jesus’ beloved disciple, ready to cast the first stone? Was he ready to do something bad – something Jesus didn’t approve of – in order to overcome something that appeared to him to be worse? Jesus stepped in and said in effect that peace between them all was the better option. ‘Peace be with you. . . . . .My Lord and my God’ – cf. John 20: 24-28.

To follow the proceedings of the UN meeting in New York this week is to wonder how far away is a ceasefire, peace and nuclear disarmament. Is the Gospel being heard by any of them? Pope Francis has spoken words of what is called the ‘prophetic denunciation’ of war – surely in imitation of Jesus’ words to John in this Sunday’s Gospel. Francis’ words were directed to the perpetrators, but were uttered in defence of weaker and poorer nations. His voice is the lone and leading voice in our Church that’s calling for an end to these violent wars murdering and violently maiming tens of thousands of children.
Fr. QQ – 26/09/2024

Faith is the readiness to change, to grow, to admit to blindness and deafness – and become one. ( Merton)