Sts. Joseph & Paul Catholic Church

I would like to begin by asking how many have seen the movie Jesus of Nazareth? Many of us have probably watched it during Lent or Holy Week. I find Hollywood's portrayal of Jesus as a soft-spoken and peaceful leader interesting. Consider how you might hear Jesus deliver his lines in some of the scenes in his life. Jesus calmly says to his mother, “Woman, what do you want me to do about it?” when the hosts run out of wine a the Wedding Feast at Cana. Or how Jesus responds to the elders when they have caught a woman in the sin of adultery, as he very calmly continues to draw in the sand, “Let those among you without sin be the first to cast the stone at her.” Even the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, before he is crucified, he calmly says to the disciples, “Could you not stay awake and pray with me even for an hour?”  In these scenes, he does not seem to get upset but calmly deals with the situation.

            We may be most comfortable in seeing the Hollywood view of Jesus. We shy away from the controversy of faith and stay in a comfortable place with him. As my pastor Fr. Hite, used to say to me, “We don’t want to rock the boat. It could make people uncomfortable.”

            Then we hear Luke’s Gospel, in which the words of Jesus are not soft- spoken or even peaceful. He seems to rock the boat. His words are strong and cutting as he says, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and oh how I wish it were already blazing.”  “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.”

Jesus may be comfortable speaking out like this, but, for the most part, I’m not. I hear what happened to Jeremiah in the first reading. He got dropped into the mud of the cistern and silenced for speaking out against the wrongs that he saw happening among the Israelites. No one wants to experience that. We don’t want to be called a stick in the mud for speaking out against the wrongs of our day and time. So, we keep our mouths closed, and we say nothing about we see and hear.

            Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just go through life and see it through rose-colored glasses? The world is a peaceful and serene place, families are at peace, enemies have become friends, everyone is treated equally, and all sickness and disease have been healed. But we know this is not true. We know the anguish that we feel because of the great problems that exist in our world.

            Perhaps we don’t have the venue to stand up and speak out as Jesus did. Maybe we fear being silenced or called a stick in the mud for what we might say. Whatever the case may be, as Christians we are called to be faithful to our baptism and to the discipleship that we share in Jesus -- faithful in the simple moments of our lives and in the big moments. In our faithfulness, we will find God.

To return to where I began, Hollywood’s goal is to inspire people to watch a movie, and Jesus’ goal is to inspire people to live their lives in love for others.
 

sdrose@bellsouth.net
9-13-2007

S