04/30/2022
Evening meditation: If you're walking with the excluded, you're probably not walking with the included.
Today's Gospel (Mt. 10: 34 - 11:1)
A few years ago when I was writing something on the parables, I asked John Donahue, SJ, the New Testament scholar, about something that had always confused me.
It was Jesus's answer to the disciples, who asked him, rather bluntly, “Why do you speak in parables?” His answer: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”
I asked John Donahue about this, and he talked about what he called the “inside-outside” quality of some of the Gospel narratives. There is an “inside” group that gets things, and an “outside” group that doesn’t. You see this especially in terms of groups like the Pharisees, but often even with the disciples.
John also pointed out that the question about the parables comes in Mark’s Gospel right after Jesus’s family has come to Capernaum to “restrain” him (3:21). They don’t "get" him either, and remember he asks aloud, “Who are my mothers and brothers and sisters?” while he is inside his house, and they are outside.
But I still didn’t quite get it, and I said to John, “Did Jesus not want people to understand him?” And he gave a great response. “Most likely," he said "Jesus did not *expect* people to understand his teachings.”
The same phenomenon may be in play in today’s Gospel, in which Jesus says that he has come to set family member against family member. Jesus's words can be a shock to people who hear him elsewhere pray “that all may be one” and offer extended metaphors on how we all are invited to be part of the same vine. And imagine what these words do to people praying for Christian unity!
But Jesus recognized that making a choice for him would bring opposition. He expected this, as John Donahue said. And not just from the “outside,” but from the “inside” as well.
In his own life, Jesus saw himsel