Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time
(A comment on this photo: This is the main entrance to the parish office of Our Lady Of The Snows in Dexter, Maine. As you can see, the parish is aptly named!)
Today’s Mass readings – the story of the Tower of Babel and Jesus’ teaching on the necessity of denying ourselves, taking up our cross each day and following him – present certain challenges to us who hear or read them today. First of all, these readings seem, at first glance, to have little to do with one another. Secondly, it is all too easy for many people to simply dismiss any readings from the early chapters of Genesis as ancient myths, impossible to square with what paleontology and archaeology teach us about the origins of humanity and civilization, and therefore irrelevant to us today. If we take a longer look, however, we may find that these two readings have a genuine connection. Moreover, stories like that of the Tower of Babel can be surprisingly relevant to our own day. Keep in mind that the book of Genesis does not intend to give us information about archaeology. It intends to diagnose what has gone wrong with humanity, and what God is doing about it.
Earlier in the book of Genesis, the focus seems to be on how sin invades the lives of individuals and families. Here, in the account of the building of the Tower of Babel, the focus shifts to what we can call social sin. We are presented with a group of people who settle in the valley of Shinar. Then, they say to one another, “Let us build a city with a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves”.
This is very reminiscent of what the serpent says to Eve in the garden a few chapters earlier: “You will be as gods, who know what is good and what is evil”. It’s the same temptation, but now on a social level. People want to make a name for themselves. They no longer trust that they are already made in God’s image and likeness. They no longer accept the name and status they already have been given. No, they must make it for themselves. They must control their own destiny. The result of this effort to be “self-made”? They become divided. After all, there are many ways to make a name for ourselves. People who do this can no longer understand one another. They lose their cohesiveness and become scattered and fragmented.
Look at our own society now. How many of us are busily making a name for ourselves? We may do this as individuals. We may also do this by identifying with a certain group or class or political party. We at times give in to the temptation to not trust or accept the status God gives us, as people made in God’s image and likeness, and as members of the Church, the Body of Christ. The result of yielding to this temptation? We no longer understand one another. We become divided, fragmented – even as Christians, even as Catholics. We no longer speak the same language. We can’t even agree on the facts of the case. We will dismiss any inconvenient truth from “the other side” as “fake news” or “alternative facts”. Only I, and my little group, are right. Or so we may believe. We do not see – we do not want to see – how this is a more subtle kind of temptation to pride. My group… my side… we know best. We are the elite. No one else knows anything. No one else has anything to teach us. Not even God. In fact, we are God – in our own little minds.
Now we are ready to see how we need the teaching and example of Jesus given in today’s Gospel reading. How are we to deny ourselves in this context? We deny the illusion that we, as individuals or as groups, know it all or are self-sufficient or self-made. We deny the ability to create ourselves. We accept, once again, that we are already created in God’s image and likeness. We accept that we need to learn from God what that means. Jesus doesn’t spare us. We must take up our cross, thus dying to society’s normal ways on interpreting life, and embracing the teaching and example of Jesus and all those who have faithfully followed him (and continue to do so). We too often want to remake ourselves – and even God – to suit us. Our truth is the other way around. It is God who remakes us, healing our wounds, forgiving our sins, and empowering us to become what we are intended to be – God’s own people, filled with God’s very life, freed from all fears, even that of death. God leads us in the way of humility and peace. However, addicted as we are to the illusion of being self-made, the way of God will be hard to follow. It involves a certain dying to this addiction so we can be open to the much greater and much more abundant life of God. That dying can feel unpleasant, disorienting. Not unlike the D.T.s But only thus can God stretch our hearts to enable us to receive his abundant gifts of love and mercy and life. May we trust God once again, and be humble enough to let God lead us and teach us, by any means that God wishes to do so. Even through someone from ‘that’ group!