Readings (Year B):
Isaiah 35:4 – 7a
Psalms 146:6 – 7, 8 – 9, 9 – 10
James 2:1 – 5
Mark 7:31 – 37
Reflection: Encounter the image of God
A faith community awaits the arrival of a famous wise man whom they had invited to speak with them. A knock comes at the door. They open the door only to find a poorly dressed man. Eagerly awaiting their invited guest, they shoo away this beggar. Again, he knocks. Again, they shoo him away. A third knock and finally they see their eagerly awaited guest, the wise man dressed in his finery. Welcomed in with great fanfare, the guest takes off his fine cloak and sets it in the middle of the room revealing that he was the one they had dismissed. The wise man walks back to the door and simply says, “I assume it is my cloak you invited to dinner, since when I arrived without it, you did not invite me in.”
This wisdom story echoes todays reading from James, who warns us not to make distinctions among ourselves and thus judge one another. It is the next line, though, that catches in my spirit. Because in the next breath James writes: “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.” We can learn a lot from James, who speaks challenging truths, and who in the process does not himself end up judging. No, James speaks with tenderness, as one whose identity is rooted in Jesus the Christ, whose own ministry is one of deep encounter.
Pope Francis reminds us, “faith is an encounter with Jesus, and we must do what Jesus does: encounter others . . . we must create a ‘culture of encounter’…a culture in which we find brothers and sisters, in which we can also speak with those who think differently, as well as those who hold other beliefs…They all have something in common with us: they are images of God, they are children of God.”
In the gospel today, the crowd presses in. If you close your eyes, you can feel the crowd jostling, bodies colliding. You can hear lips murmuring. You can see the anticipation in people’s eyes, the arms leading the way to weave through the crowd. Yes, the crowd is pressing in and the man who is deaf finally nears Christ. Now, Christ could have healed the physical body without a word and let him melt back into the crowd. But Jesus the Christ sees the person, the whole person. Jesus the Christ sees more than the deaf, the blind, the rich, the poor. Christ sees more than the Republican, the Democrat. Christ encounters whole persons—body and soul, in all their complexity; persons who are more than one aspect of their lives. This is the wisdom embodied and alive in Christ.
This is the wisdom we are invited to embody too! We are invited to welcome the whole of people’s identities, to open our hearts and encounter the whole of their lives and identities. Today, we are invited to encounter the image of God alive in one another.
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