In 2007, Sr. Louise Lears was present for the ordination of two women in St. Louis. She had been a coordinator of religious education for the arch-diocese as well as a member of the pastoral team in her parish. The archbishop of St. Louis at the time, Raymond Burke, immediately banned her from receiving the sacraments as well as from doing any form of ministry within the archdiocese unless she repented her “sin” of participating in the ordination.
On the Sunday following Burke’s disciplinary action, Sr. Louise went to Mass at her parish to be with her community. She wasn’t planning to receive communion, just needed to be with those she loved. Her sister and 85-year-old mother were with her. When it came time for communion her mother stood and told Louise to follow her. Louise didn’t question her mother, simply stood and remained at her side. When Louise’s mother received the bread she broke it, turned and gave it to her daughter.
After seeing this, Louise’s sister did the same. Many of the parishioners, once they realized what was happening, broke a piece of their bread and gave it to Louise. In the end Louise’s hands were filled with fragments of the Eucharist.
When Mass ended, and the family gathered at the back of the church, Louise’s mother said to her, “I was the first person to feed you, and I will feed you now.”
The role of a MOTHER is to feed her children, all of them. As the Body of Christ in the world the Church is called to be the hands and heart of unconditional love. It’s mission is to accompany and embrace all God’s people while serving them with kindness, understanding and compassion. It is this Divine Maternal care Jesus exhibits by reaching out to everyone, poor and rich alike, Pharisee and Samaritan, the ritually ‘clean’ and the ritually ‘unclean’ throughout his ministry. It is that tender quality of care we witness in mothers with their newborn infants that we can imagine in Jesus’ eyes as he heals, forgives, listens and comforts the outcasts and marginalized of his society.
“Are you ‘the One who is to come’ or do we look for another?” John has his disciples ask Jesus. “Go back to John” Jesus says, “and tell him the blind see, the crippled walk, the deaf hear, the lepers are cured, and the poor have the Good News preached to them.” Jesus answers John with a reference to Scriptures they all know well. He places his ministry within the context of ancient prophecies that gave hope to their ancestors in Jerusalem following the Babylonian invasion roughly six centuries before. The weak and infirm had been left to care for themselves after the strong and highly skilled had been carted off to Babylon. Isaiah urged them to have courage, telling them “Your God is coming; your God is coming to save you. The eyes of the blind will be opened. The ears of the deaf will be cleared. The lame will leap like dear and the mute will sing for joy.”
Jesus tells John’s disciples to go tell John: this is the time of God’s arrival. His job of preparing the way is done. The day our people have been waiting for has arrived. Look, see—I am here.
But there is something even deeper than fulfillment of prophecy in the words we read today, deeper than establishing Jesus’ identity as “the One who is to come.” Looking at those Jesus mentions we see groups of people ritually excluded by Jewish law from participating in community life. These are the ‘unclean,’ the ‘sinners.’ They are believed to be sinners because they are viewed as defective or deficient, rather than WHOLE and intact human beings.
Deeply imbedded in the cultural psyche, and therefore in the religious system, is the conviction that personal impairments of every kind are God’s punishment for sin. Blindness, deafness, disease, and poverty afflict the most grievous sinners exclusively. Remember Job? Cultural norms link hands with religious law to shun people with impairments and create distance between them and what is considered to be the HEALTHY population so as to prevent contamination.
Jesus comes along, and instead of excluding those on the margins from his circle of concern, he makes them the focal point of his ministry. Not only does he not ignore or condemn, he reaches out and touches them, makes himself ritually ‘unclean,’ heals them without requiring repentance, sits at their tables and eats with them. And he doesn’t worry about prescribed purification rites afterward.
All of these actions are counter-cultural. They fly in the face of cherished beliefs and practices found in the Torah and followed meticulously for centuries.
In light of all this maybe we can somewhat understand Jesus’ final words to John: “Blessed is the one who finds no stumbling block in me.” Smashing the sacred cow of rule-bound religion in order to see, hear, meet, touch, comfort and heal people broken and crushed by those rules still proves to be a stumbling block for many.
Jesus’ maternal concern for the poor, his outreach to those blinded by pain, deafened by humiliation, crippled by rejection and scourged by judgment continues to chafe against the cultural and religious norms of a society bent on condemning and excluding populations on the margins.
Sr. Louise, her mother and so many others stand on that prophetic edge where the Mother of all Creation beckons the heart of humankind to let go of old ways and laws so that vulnerability itself can find a birthing place.
As the Body of Christ we, the Church, are called to expectantly await the appearance of God in vulnerable moments and in the weakest among us. Then, when the first breath of God appears, we are called to embrace it, to feed and nurture the helpless one in our arms with the tenderness of a mother with her newborn infant.
As we include the outcast, seek to feed and nurture the excluded in violation of laws and taboos created to ignore or marginalize them, we stand with Sr. Louise and her mother, Jesus and Mary, his mother, Elizabeth and her son, John. There on that prophetic edge we “strengthen our weary hands and steady our trembling knees” taking courage from the fact that God is not only coming, God is HERE—here in our community, here in our lives, here in the compassion shining through our hearts. This is not only our calling during the seasons of Advent and Christmas, it is our pledge as Christians and our identity as Church.
Where are we, as a community, relative to that prophetic edge? How shall we—together and individually—live out our pledge as Christians to include the excluded in the year ahead?
Rev. Toni Tortorilla, Sophia Christi Catholic Community
December 14, 2013, 3rd Sunday of Advent
Leave a Reply