I'm going to add to yesterday's quote. Remember - today is Election Day - vote! The antidote to the rivalistic desire present among the disciples in their desire for greatness is the learning to recast desire in terms of seeking out and receiving the unimportant, like children (Mark 9:36-37). It is the unimportant ones who must not be scandalized (9:42), for it is they, marginal and peripheral to the complex world of adult desires bound up in scandal, who are able to receive the gratuity of God (10:14-15). Rich people are particularly constituted in Scandal. For the rich young man, his riches are a stumbling block to entry into the kingdom which it is impossible for human beings to overcome (10:24-27). This is to say that such people are so locked into the scandal-based order of the world that they have no access to the reformation of desire based on gratuity which constitutes entry into the kingdom of God. The same ideas are present here as in the Matthean Last Judgment scene: entry into the kingdom is the same as the recasting of desire from a scandalous involvement in the order of the world toward a reaching out to the victims of that order. I find this to be a painful reminder of how we become so locked into the one way of existing. We stumble into the wide path - the way folks tend to go to stay on top or to simply stay within the 'appropriate' flow of things. But to be there and to stay there is to buy into the whole system of desire that become the ruin of us all And yet, it is comfortable to be there - it is comfortable to be a part of the race in which we can see movement and see that we are advancing and we can see that we are better or more secure or more 'whatever' than the next guy. Connection: I'm not sure any of us can be unwrapped from the fiscal reality around us. We tend to be people who have. People who have want to keep what we have and we tend to want to have more - or have the latest - or have what is at least better. That is a game that bring about the stumbling and fall of us all. The only way out is to stop playing the game. But to stop - is to change everything. O God of life, when we are shaking at the mere thought of change and becoming something new, hold us - hold us - hold us. Amen. |
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