2438AFC092024 – Greatness isn’t so great. ← 😊 PODCAST LINK
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Wisdom 2:20 – 20 Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.”
Psalms 54:6 –
6 With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to you;
I will give thanks to your name, O Lord, for it is good.
James 4:2-3 – 2 You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
Mark 9:35 – 35 He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
Aloha nui loa, ʻŌmea! Grace and Peace to each of you from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus the Christ, in the Power of the Holy Spirit. Last week was Friday the 13th, but it seems that the superstition about that day is happening four days late. Just about every tool I use for writing these posts seems to be “on the fritz.” You may not even be able to see the post online at alohafriday.org. it’s that bad since they automatically updated it without my consent. If any of you use the Bible-passage links I set for you, you may find that these are working differently from what I usually send. The Bible-Hub website returns a “Timed Out” error whenever I try to enter a passage for retrieval. Our MBN webpage fails to bring up archives from the righthand column – if I choose something like September 2015, I get a blank page with no posts showing for that month or any month. That’s kinda slowing me down. Being unable to do what I usually do isn’t so great. I don’t like it, but it hasn’t stopped me either – so, let’s get into what I can do with these Key Verses. And thanks for sticking with me thus far. That computer genius from Kukui-IT straighten it out.
This week we’re going to take them “in order” as we usually do. We start with the Book of Wisdom. If you do not have a Catholic Bible on hand, you won’t find this passage in a non-Catholic Bible. The Book of Wisdom is one of the seven books not included in a non-Catholic Bible. If the link isn’t working, you may not be able to see other translations of the passage. I chose only the last verse of what we will hear Sunday. It’s based on Wisdom 2:12-20 (←that link will work) but only a few of the verses are excerpted for the Lectionary. When we hear it, we know it is prophetically describing the arrest and Passion of Jesus. It describes an ambush for the righteous one because his righteousness is annoying. He sees the antagonists as transgressors against the law and considers them debased. He claims to have knowledge of God, a child of the Lord, someone who is different. The unrighteous will conspire against him and seek to embarrass him by submitting him to torture and shameful death. “We’ll see if God really will save him.” We know that all through Scripture, God blesses the righteous. As in Psalm 146 God protects the weak and disadvantaged, but the way of the wicked he thwarts, he brings them to ruin. In the passage from Wisdom, the Foe conspires to bring righteousness to ruin and sully the ascribed Greatness of the Righteous One. Righteousness is a nuisance for them, and in their view, there is nothing great about being a nuisance.
We’ve stated that in this passage The Righteous One described applies to Jesus. Just what does it mean to be “righteous” in the eyes of the Lord? It means we follow God, we praise him, we obey him, we trust him, we worship him, we thank him and we honor him with our gifts (all of which come from him) – we consistently choose (there’s that word again!) to do what is just and right (Lest we forget: Micah 6:8). We are reminded of Psalm 18:20 –
20 The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he recompensed me. Or Proverbs 11:18 –
18 The wicked earn no real gain,
but those who sow righteousness get a true reward.
We also have Wisdom 5:13-15 –
13 So we also, as soon as we were born, ceased to be,
and we had no sign of virtue to show,
but were consumed in our wickedness.”
14 Because the hope of the ungodly is like thistle-down carried by the wind,
and like a light frost driven away by a storm;
it is dispersed like smoke before the wind,
and it passes like the remembrance of a guest who stays but a day.
15 But the righteous live forever,
and their reward is with the Lord;
the Most High takes care of them.
We see that righteousness is always rewarded and wickedness is always chastened. And so we know that while righteousness and its rewards are Great, THE CONVERSE IS ALSO TRUE. The Lord rewards us according to our unrighteousness. This is especially true when we fail to imitate Christ. Those rewards are great, but not in any positive or desirable way. We still fall for the hype about Worldly things and trade our Heavenly Treasures for mire and brimstone (yep, I meant mire because we get mired down in our bad choices). Here’s what many of us forget all too often:
Righteousness is among the Gifts from God. Righteousness is good, (See James 1:17) and it comes from God, so if it is a Gift, we must choose to accept it, and having accepted it, we must choose to use it the way HE expects us to use it. How can righteousness be Great if it is abused? And, if we somehow manage to live righteously, that’s Great but does that make us Great? Of course not, because even the righteous among earthlings are still sinners. Only One is Righteous, so only One is Great. Only through him, and with him, and in him can we experience what it is like to know what is Great. If we understand the greatness of that Righteousness, we can choose to be thankful, to willingly lay down our lives as a “living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (See Romans 12:1).
Offering God our lives is something I strongly encourage. Everyone should be willing and able to make a Daily Offering. In the Key Verse from the Psalms today there is this statement: With a freewill offering I will sacrifice to you. A “freewill offering” is and offering that is not required by law, or as a pledge, or vow, or tithe. It is an “over-and-above” offering – more than just the bare minimum. It is an offering arising out of generosity, a gift of thanks as a return for blessings. It is the kind of Gift the righteous make often because they are Greatly Blessed and therefore Greatly thankful. It may seem silly, but it reminds me of that old adage that goes, “The harder I work, the luckier (or richer) I get.” It might come out like, “The more I thank God, the more he blesses me,” or “The more I Praise / Love / Obey / Serve / Seek God, the more he blesses me.” That sounds pretty great to me. But, it doesn’t make us great. Having all we need is often not enough because there remains whatever we want. God knows about those things, too. In my experience when we ask God for those wants, he generally has four kinds of answers: [1] Yes. [2] No. [3] Hang on, I have something better in mind. [4] Are you kidding me? But we really, really want it, so we ask. Not a Great move.
In our Key Verse from James, he tells us we ask, but we ask wrongly because we ask for what will fulfill our wants – our passions, our lusts, our pleasures, our selfishness. Selfishness is the opposite of what God wants from us. He wants selflessness. He even made a Final Offering out of his Daily Offering, and showed us how to be selfless. Now, being selfless does not mean we are nonentities, some sort of invisible drain of energy. We recently took a peek at James 2:18, 26 – 18 But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 26 For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead. Is our Daily Offering “our works?”
ʻŌmea, what if our Daily Offering included a commitment of prayer, fasting, and giving alms? What if we choose to lay down our lives – even just a teensy bit – for someone else, or for lots of someone-elses? Wouldn’t that be Great? Wouldn’t that earn us a moment of “Well done, my good and faithful servant?” Would we be good Disciples if we could choose to be like that? Zoom right over to Matthew 10:18 for the answer: 18 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. Well, Jesus is God alone, but the man asking him what he had to do to get eternal life didn’t know that. If we know that God alone is Good, then our being good isn’t Great, it’s just good, probably just barely good enough (See Luke 17:10 – 10 “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” It seems like the way God has it worked out, no matter what we do to make us stand out, it’s not Great. The Disciples were trying to figure that out while walking behind the Great Shepherd, arguing about who was the Greatest. You know how that turned out. It’s in our Key Verse from Sunday’s Gospel.
Mark 9:35 – 35 He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. This one reminds us of Matthew 20:26-28 – 26 “It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; 28 just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
We’ve used this song before, but it fits so well with this precept of servanthood. The Servant Song (↔ Music Link) gets right under the wants that separate us from God’s will and feeds the fulfilled needs God has placed into our lives. We spend so much energy teaching our children and each other the importance of greatness, the necessity to strive to be seen as above all the rest. Is this wrong? Are we not to live up to the full potential we have within us? Should we hide and not express the Great Gifts God has poured so generously into us? Yes, Belovéd, we must certainly NOT fail to make full use of God’s multitudinous Gifts. But of course you and I know that we must use them for HIS Glory, not ours. That is what Jesus, Truly Man and Truly God, expects from us. But it’s hard!
I saw this written on a sidewalk in Los Alamos, NM when I was between my sophomore and junior years. There were @more scientists per square foot than anywhere on earth, and I guess it showed up in the kids’ way of thinking. Being inferior is not great, and neither is being picked on for not being nerdy. In Los Alamos, eggheads were great and regular kids were, … well, inferior. Yet, both kinds of kids are called to Greatness.
It’s so hard to be Great, and that’s why greatness isn’t so great. Worldly greatness is a lousy substitute for being Great. I found out on the evening news Monday night that I’d missed the Emmys again – for about the 52nd time. We want that recognition in our lives so very much. When we think of that want, it is helpful to have an infrequently used memory verse in mind:
Isaiah 14:13-14 –
13 You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to heaven;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
on the heights of Zaphon;
14 I will ascend to the tops of the clouds,
I will make myself like the Most High.” Well, he kind of got greatness – the greatest failure of wants. Only God is Good. Only God is Great. Only God rewards us for the greatness of our righteousness which makes us smallest in the World. We can trick ourselves into believing that we’re really on the right road to Righteousness – until some trivial thing makes us blurt some careless remark (like politicians often do, eh?), and then we see our Road to Righteousness (↔ Music Link) has a few potholes. Here’s what Jesus has said about those off-the-cuff remarks: Matthew 12:36-37 – 36 “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; 37 for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Smarty-pants putdowns are off-limits in the Kingdom of God. that’s no way to be great there or in Los Alamos. We want to be great, but we need to be Small and servants to all. You know what comes next: It’s all in the Absolutely Perfect Plan. YOLO-F!
Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
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Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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