Wisdom 7:7-11
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-13
Mark 10:17-30

"Open and Laid Bare"

The history of knowledge is a fascinating thing. The great language theorist Stanley Fish might have called it a "self-consuming artifact." For it is the history of a thing that continually preys on itself, casts itself out, builds up its own substance and worth in order to tear it down.

The naive view of science is that it "evolves." But that is not so. In fact, the history of the sciences is more like a chronicle of shipwrecks with few being salvageable for parts. Advancement in the sciences usually comes about when we realize that we had been looking at things the wrong way. You see, this is not a gentle revising or polishing of details but a realization that the whole conception is wrong. In one of the landmark books of the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn called these models paradigms. And when the great "paradigm shift" comes, to borrow the phrase he coined in that book, we realize that we had been entirely lost, way off in the woods, in no way on track.

Consider the case of Ptolemy. He had proposed a universe that stood up for nearly one-and-half-millennia. In it he conceived a paradigm of crystalline balls, one inside another. Upon each ball was a flat land mass, which we now call a planet. As these balls turned, the planets moved in orbit around the earth, which was at the center of the universe. Now, the computations derived from this model enabled men to circumnavigate the globe, to make fairly accurate maps, and to calculate seasons and tides .... though not exactly. Nonetheless, there was so much corroborating evidence that men were absolutely certain from the time of Aristotle that this model was generally accurate and true. Yet, it was wrong. Entirely wrong. And nothing could be salvaged when this colossal Titanic went down in icy waters.

A special cable to the New York Times October 29, 1930 reported a speech by George Bernard Shaw introducing Albert Einstein at the Savoy Hotel in London. In it he described figures like Napoleon who created empires. "But there is an order of men," he said, "who get beyond that. They are not makers of empire, but they are makers of universe... Ptolemy made a universe, which lasted 1,400 years. Newton also made a universe, which has lasted 300 years. Einstein has a made a universe, .... and I can't tell you how long that will last" (Princeton Archives).

"How long that will last" are the most important words given in that speech. He went on to recount the seven men who could claim to be "a destroyer of the old absolutism and builder of the new world." Seven different men who claimed to have built new worlds. Today, we are apt to fix our minds on the phrase "new world." On the surface this would appear to be "positive" thing to do. But doesn't the main point lead us to the opposite conclusion? ... that every time we believe we have an "absolutism" — a verity, an enduring truth, a rock-solid reality — that we are wrong? That the whole world is wrong. Every mature scientist understands something that the man or woman in the street does not: that everything we believe to be true about the material world is provisional, brief, and ultimately in error, that it will be proved to have been in error by a later generation. In this sense, the world at any time lives in a vast delusion. Concerning the material world, we all are always wrong, and we are never right. Indeed, the juggernaut of our scientific-technical knowledges and powers has led us to catastrophe of our oceans becoming fouled, our sun becoming toxic, and our planet reaching the brink of cataclysm.

Nonetheless, each generation believes that it is right. Each believes that that they stand on the highest summit looking back in condescension upon all preceding errors (and the little men who made them). Yet, in every case, these "highest" summits were later shown to be molehills, or even holes in the ground, and we see that in in every moment in history, the world is full-to-overbrimming with proud men who point in triumph at the new world they have built.

But this is not so remarkable, for all that is required for mass delusion is that the great mass of people agree with each other (and, we might say, the mass media confirming their errors). The subject matter is not important; what is important is their willingness to agree.

Think of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor's New Clothes. The Emperor, you see, is surrounded by learned counselors and self-promoting flatterers as he stands before a mirror surveying his fine new clothes .... which, in fact, is no more than his nakedness. For thin tissues of nothing and a fabric of illusion can quickly become substantial when everyone agrees about how fine it is! How fine is the false-made-true! The emperor sees folds of satin and layer upon layer of the finest cloth, woven by angels, as it were. Yet, he is laid bare before the eyes of men and God. And we recall Pope St. John Paul II's admonition, "Truth is not subject to a vote."

During my hospital chaplaincy training, I was tutored by a wise religious sister at a Roman Catholic medical center outside of Boston. She realized that the chaplain's greatest stumbling block was himself, that in order to "hold what each patient had for the chaplain to hold" in solemn confidence, in trust, that he must first "clear himself." For there is a patient lying before him, and there will be much to "hold" and often that is all that will be required: to hold, to reverence, to be truly present, to be emptied. Remarkably, silence might be all that is said as one set of eyes gazes into another set of eyes, and truth is shared.

But blocking the path of this holy sharing is the person (we might say, "personality") of the chaplain himself. He is in his own way. He needs a quiet spirit and a listening heart, not a head full of noise and personal agendas, which he neither sees nor hears. Sr. Claudia proposed the Johari Window, which has four panes:

• The lower left is our public pane: this is our image of ourselves, which other people see, too.
• The lower right is our secret pane, the things we know about ourselves, which other people do not know.
• The upper left is our blind spot, what others know about us, but which we cannot see however obvious it may be.
• The last pane, the upper right, is our mystery pane, what God sees when He looks upon us, for God is the only One Who can see the whole truth.

If the point of our inner lives is to see ourselves as God see us, then contemplation of the Johari Window is invaluable as we come to integrity with respect to our secret life, to come to know and accept our blind spots, and to enter the all-important mystery of seeing ourselves as God sees us.

After all, the Last Judgment is about .... everything — about all our life and about all our future life. In the Lord's face we shall see the unvarnished truth about ourselves, perfect justice, and we shall also see the greatest compassion we shall ever know, perfect mercy. One does not replace or supplant the other; they are both present.

We must get our bearings long before this moment. Would you sit for your medical boards or your bar exam or your nursing exam without cracking a book? Certainly, I have known students who have prayed that God would "preserve" them in the final exam, but it turns out, the outcome of the exam depends upon themselves, not God. God's mercy acts within our strivings, not instead of them. Yes, we will be loved, but that perfect love finds its perfection in fairness and justice.

Some Christians believe that the mere act of believing in God, believing that Jesus is Lord, will save them. But the Scriptures teach us that the demons believe .... and tremble (James 2:19). Will they also be saved because they know God to be God? Belief marks the beginning of a journey, not the destination. As Sr. Claudia would say, the journey is to clear ourselves, that we might permit God to dwell within us. But God will only dwell in a well-kept home, one that is good and right.

How can we know what good is then? Fortunately, God's mind and ways are not a complete mystery. In His great love, He has condescended to reveal Himself to us. And He has done this with his living Word, both the Scriptures and His Son.

In our Epistle lesson this morning, we learn that "the Word of God is living and active," not mere words in an old book. On the contrary, the Scriptures speak into our lives with power, rousing our souls from torpor and acting within us like

Who has not experienced the Scriptures speaking into their lives? How often has the master subject of a moment been underlined or ratified by the lectionary reading for that day. I have been embarrassed and mortified sitting alone in a back pew as the lections and the homilist (whom I had never met) seemed to be revealing my deepest secrets and faults! I wondered if everyone else in the Church could realize it. How could they not?! The truth of it was so precise and overwhelming! Years ago, I was the assistant priest at a parish that imploded. The rector announced without notice that he was getting on a plane tomorrow. But this shock was nothing compared to the stream of women who then came forward accusing him of sexual misconduct. The morning I was forced to announce his removal from ministry to his own congregation, our Lectionary Epistle for the day was Ephesians 5:3: "But fornication ... let it not be once named among you,..." After Mass a lay leader whispered in my ear, "Father, Judgment is falling!" Who could dispute him?

Yes, the Scriptures function as oracles, as St. Paul affirms in Romans 3:2, but they are also a discipline that lays us open, dissects us, and then puts us back together again rightly. In our Gospel lesson this morning, a young man poses the master question: "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus replies by naming each commandment, not just referring to them, but reciting them one-by-one.

During seminary I asked my Old Testament professor, "What is the difference between 'a righteous life' and 'a just life'?" People use the terms interchangeably. As he was (and continues to be) the chief consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for the Old Testament, I listened closely. I wanted to know the Roman Catholic Church's position on the Hebrew Scriptures, and their role in our lives. He told me that to be righteous is to be found "not guilty" before the Law. To be just, however, is a very different thing. It is more active, more dynamic. Think of the trued wheel of a bicycle or of the perfectly tuned harp whose strings hold the frame in perfect "justness." If we submit our lives to God's Law, the Law will even us, level us, and square us up. This is what is really meant by the term justified. Our use of the world justification, which has come to mean "to make excuses," is the opposite. To be justified is for our life in perfect tune, or as in the wheel, to be perfectly true, each spoke in perfect, even tension. And I pictured a trued bicycle wheel, exact and precise, nearly taking flight, for it had come to the point of almost no resistance. Yes, it was rolling through the world, but more in the sense that angels pass through the world.

In terms of our Gospel lesson, Jesus tells the young man that in order to inherit life, which is perfect harmony with God, that he must be trued by the commandments. The Law will right him, will justify him, will tune his life to the tones of Heaven.

But then Jesus turns to the difficult subject of worldly wealth. How do riches relate to being righteous or just? This riddle begins to open for us as we reflect on the closing line from our Epistle lesson:

In our world, the least wealthy must constantly give an account of his every minute and hour. while men of greatest wealth make their own rules and govern themselves. They are best positioned to wave off every claim brought before them saying, "This has nothing to do with me." And the rich who hear the living word of God? Jesus teaches that they "are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection" (Luke 8:14). In the emperor we find the convergence of greatest wealth and greatest power. This is no king. He is an emperor. Who dares to correct him? By virtue of this fact, the emperor is in greatest danger, Jesus would point out (saying in compassion, "How hard it will be for the rich" (Mark 10:23). His wealth and his power, which make so many things possible for him, prevent him from breaking through to reality. He is hemmed in on every side by self-serving counselors and nervous flatterers. He is utterly lost in the wood of error. Discovering the true state of his soul is impossible. Do you know the Italian proverb, "Your enemy does not tell you when you have dirt on your face"? And your enemy is anyone who cares only for his self-interest. You know, fanning out around an emperor are only people who have self-interest. The emperor is apt to walk through his own capital city in grand procession standing utterly naked in his foolishness before all and he cannot see it. His blind spot is opened for all to see. His secret life is no longer a secret. He has become a grotesque before all eyes.

And in this perhaps we have taken a step closer to understanding the sentence from Micah:

We must be stretched over the frame of God's law to be righted and trued. Our every string, like a harp, must be tuned to perfect pitch. And in this sweet pitch, we love kindness, for the Law enjoins us to care for widows and orphans and to remember the poor, the stranger, and the outcast. Everyone of us must be stretched over this frame, from every social class. It simply happens that poverty brings us to the place where we have need of each other while the rich man possesses the earthly powers to ignore the rest ... but only for a time. For God's living Word continually probes us and opens us until we are laid bare, all of us.

Our Gospel lesson this morning awakens us from a shallow conception that God's Law is a set of rules that may or may not apply to us. We are roused from a shallow classism and antipathy toward the rich, for this Gospel is about the state of the human heart — that it be healthy and tender and attuned to God's own. It is not an easy thing to be stripped bare or stretched on a frame, but neither is life-saving surgery. We recall our Psalm reading today that we are glad for the days when He afflicted us. We are glad for them. May we be humbled before God's living Word, His two-edged sword, His holy scalpel. As we read in our Old Testament lesson this morning from, the Book of Wisdom,