DO NOT JUDGE…

Homily for 4 September 2020, Friday of the 22nd Week in OT, Luke 5:33-39

In our first reading, St. Paul reminds the Corinthians not to pass judgment on anyone, and to allow only God to be the Judge. He says, God alone “will bring to light what is hidden in the darkness and will disclose the secret intentions of the heart.” In short, we have no right to judge because there is so much we do not know. We often do not fully know where people are coming from, or why they do what they do.

The great Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan puts JUDGING only as a third step in the dynamics of knowing. KNOWING, he says, presupposes a lot of EXPERIENCING, UNDERSTANDING, JUDGING AND DECISION-MAKING. When the EXPERIENCING and the UNDERSTANDING are inadequate, there is no way you can trust people’s JUDGMENT. ”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is being judged on the basis of his apparent differences with John the Baptist and the Pharisees. “How come the disciples of John the Baptist and those of the Pharisees do a lot of fasting and say a lot of long prayers while your disciples do not?” It’s a question that presupposes that John the Baptist and the Pharisees are the criteria for holiness and, comparatively speaking, Jesus does not meet up to their standards. And so his holiness is being questioned.

In my book Yeshua, Son of Man, I attempted to describe the tension that I could read between the lines with regard to the dynamics within the group of John the Baptist. John seemed to me to have signified full confidence in Jesus as his potential successor in case he got into trouble with the authorities and his community became “headless” (pun intended). Unfortunately, as evidenced by today’s reading, he may have had other members who were not only uneasy about Jesus personality, but in fact questioned his ways. Like, for instance, they made an issue about Jesus’ seeming lack of asceticism, which was supposedly the distinguishing mark of John’s spirituality. Remember his description in the Gospels as an eccentric desert hermit who dressed in camel hair and a leather belt, and who ate only locust and wild honey?

Jesus, on the other hand, was not only seen in parties and banquets, he even shared table with tax-collectors like Zaccheus and Matthew, and one time even allowed himself to be “anointed”, meaning, massaged publicly by a woman identified in chapter 7 of Luke as a prostitute. He did not seem to be very choosy with his companions. He even had uneducated fishermen and former rebels in his company.

It seems that the intrigues about Jesus even reached John the Baptist in prison. On the basis of the question sent to Jesus through the messengers that had supposedly been sent by John from prison, you could sense that there was some tension going on. You could feel that John was having second thoughts about Jesus’ leadership after receiving bad reports about Jesus from his other disciples. John supposedly asked, “Are you really the one we’ve been waiting for, or shall we look for another?” (Luke 7:20) Meaning, did I make a mistake in putting my trust in you and endorsing you as successor to my leadership?

Actually part of me is suspecting that John did not really ask the question that way. I have a feeling that these unnamed “disciples” of John were trying to create a conflict between John and Jesus. And so when Jesus said in reply, “Go, tell John the Baptist WHAT YOU HEAR AND WHAT YOU SEE…” I think Jesus was really addressing his reply, not to John, but to the messengers themselves. John could not possibly have known what was happening outside of his prison cell if nobody had reported it to him in a manner that deliberately misrepresented Jesus.

The ones whom Jesus was really challenging were those self-appointed messengers who relied on fake news, on hearsays, and not on facts, those who misrepresented him and spread malicious lies against him. He said, “Tell John what’s really happening: the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised to life, and the poor have the good news preached to them.” Meaning, It was not true that he had lost his morals because he was associating with tax-collectors and sinners. The evidence was they were being converted. And so he said, “Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.”

And now they are questioning him also about fasting and making long prayers as these were the automatic signs of holiness. No, Jesus explains that you don’t do fasting for its own sake. There is also a sick kind of asceticism, one that promotes a joyless kind of faith, one that you might call masochistic or even sadistic, as if suffering, by itself, should be glorified. Jesus is against the protrayal of God as a KILLJOY God, or a God who does not want people to enjoy life or one who makes people feel guilty about being happy, as if God created us to be miserable. Have they forgotten that kingdom of God is often portrayed in the Wisdom literature as an invitation to a rich banquet?

Feasting and fasting are related to each other. There is a proper time and a reason for either one. And you do fasting precisely so that you can do meaningful feasting. Remove fasting from the context of COMMITTED and UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, it will make no sense, it becomes meaningless.