I thank my father for having taught me to ask for the reason behind all things. Every night before tucking me in bed, he would tell me, "You must ask why. Remember to always ask why..."
Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education, p.10
Matt. 8:18 "When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other shore."
So, why? Why that order?Usually the dynamic between Our Lord and the crowd is very different. Even when he is tired, the sight of the crowd awakens his compassion. He sits and talks to them, preaches and teaches, reaches out and heals the sick who have been brought to him, even feeds everyone on more than one occasion. Why in this situation does the Lord who sees the crowd as his sheep, seemingly act out of character and tell his disciples to get the boat because they are going to cross over to the other shore? Why not attend to the crowd since they are curious enough or interested enough to be there? What was the disciples reaction when they heard his command? Were they too stunned to react?
The problem with asking these things is that they are "Giussani questions", i.e. questions of a special category, and not the simple, natural whys we automatically ask. We can never fully know why another person acts as he does, much less can we fully know the why of acts of the One who is An Other. To ask why of Mystery is fruitful and frustrating at the same time. The answer(s) we receive illuminate us by opening up to yet more Mysteries, and leave us in a more deeply illuminated darkness.
Since Christ is Teacher par excellence, his deeds are as instructive as his words. What is he teaching us and the crowd by withdrawing from them? Perhaps that our curiosity and or/interest are not enough. In order to follow him, one has to make the effort to get to the other shore, and our own resources are never sufficient to get us there. Only a Faith that is lived out in Love and Hope on an ever deeper level is able to reach the other side.
Verse 19: A scribe approached and said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go."
As his disciples go get a boat, two men who already consider themselves disciples speak up. The first is a scribe who boldly asserts that he will follow Christ anywhere and everywhere, no matter the difficulty. For the scribe to say such a thing presupposes a great conversion has taken place in the man. Scribes lived, ate and breathed the words of Scripture. Their very lives centered on pondering the sacred texts; studying the various interpretations offered by individual rabbis, rabbinic schools and different branches of Jewish tradition; Scribal lifetime consisted of studying, discussing and arguing about the opinions each personally favored. For a scribe to give up his professional status as an expert theologian and state publicly his willingness to become a disciple of a penniless, travelling rabbi was stunning. This scribe sees Jesus as the Living Word, as He who is the fulfillment and the surpassing of all the sacred words of which his scribal life had consisted. I wish Matthew, the Gospel writer, had noted the crowd's reaction for us, instead of leaving it to our imagination. Still, the crowd's reaction would have been nothing compared with Christ's terse response.
Verse 20: "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head."
As the Son of Man, as one of us humans, Christ doesn't even have the limited comfort and security that the animals enjoy. An incredible statement! But that's what it means to be the Word made flesh, or Son of Man. Jesus the human being , is dispossessed of everything except his relationship to the Father. True, that relationship is everything. True, all creation has been made in him and through him. True, he is Lord of everything since everything has been given him by His Father. But as one of us, he is as limited as we are: he is wayfarer, wanderer, an exile, as much as we are. Would it be fair to say "even more so" since all of the human limitations he experiences as a man, he experiences out of his divine capacity and not merely to the finite extent we do? How else could he experience the total desolation of forsakenness? As Son of God, he comes as gift to us, as the Father's love made man. As Son of Man he continues to pour himself out at every moment in everything he says and does. That is his way back to the Father, the way that takes us with him.
Does this not mean that the only way we can receive him in faith, hope and love, and truly reverence him for who he is, is by making a gift of our lives to him, thus joining him in his insecure state of homeless wayfarer? Make that state of being ours? Is that the cost of discipleship? The security of living with him is the tension and insecurity of self-surrender? This is why I love/hate Giussani questions. The answers take me beyond my comfort zone, where my desire to measure, grasp, understand, and control does not want to go.
In addressing the second man, Christ states the challenge more extremely:
Verse 21: Another of his disciples said to him, "Lord let me go first and bury my father." But Jesus answered him, "Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead."
It seems like such a cold response. So unfeeling, so lacking in compassion. Just an absolute no, without any explanation. Why? Is it because the man is already a disciple, has already said yes to a relationship that trumps all human bonds? Is the conflict the man goes through, his love for his father, his felt need to bury him, the guilt and pain he experiences in not burying him, - is all that part of following the Lord? Was it all implicit included in the first yes? It certainly seems to be.
But it seems extreme, no? Elijah let Elisha go and say his good-byes, break with his past, his family and friends, and then follow him. Why doesn't Mystery explain itself? Perhaps because we could never fully understand or completely accept the answer. That explanation seems appropriate, especially since the yes to Christ is one of Faith, Hope, and Love, which makes our yes as total as his call. Perhaps Fr. Giussani's human father was saying more than he realizes when he told his son to "ask for the reason behind all things." He didn't know he was setting his son on the way to Christ.
36. All revealed truths derive from the same divine source and are to be believed with the same faith, yet some of them are more important for giving direct expression to the heart of the Gospel. In this basic core, what shines forth is the beauty of the saving love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council explained, "in Catholic doctrine there exists an order or a 'hierarchy' of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith." This holds true as much for the dogmas of faith as for the whole corpus of the Church's teaching, including her moral teaching.
The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis, par. 36, p. 19
3. I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that this message is not meant for him, since "no one is excluded form the joy brought by the Lord." The Lord does not disappoint those who take this risk; whenever we take a step toward Jesus, we come to realize that he is already there, waiting for us with open arms.....
7. ....I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict XVI which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: "Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and decisive direction."
(So why do so many of us Christians still presume our religion is basically a matter of adhering to free-floating moral standards and doctrinal truths disconnected from the person of Christ?)
The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis, pp. 1, 4
Saint Joan
You felt so afraid,
so all alone
in the dungeon
of disbelief
mistrust,
daggers thrust
into your confidence.
Your cheek
you turned
against the splinters
of the stake
and there it stayed
and burned.
Charred body's
what was left
to tell the story of your death.
But of your life,
what could we say?
Not a fallen soldier
but a burnt and blackened bride
went to paradise
that day.
Rita A. Simmonds, Magnificat, pp.424, 425
