O Admirabile Commercium

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Imagine if you would, if you could, trade places right now with anyone that you knew or wanted to be; who would you choose.   Would it be a movie star? Would it be someone with power, maybe a president or some ruler? What person would you want to trade places with if you had the chance? In 2012, on a promotional visit to Australia, popular television reality show socialite, Kim Kardashian, who is remembered more for her racy dressing and photoshoots rather than for her faith, gave this answer, when asked the same question by a journalist. “Jesus,” Kardashian answered. “Because I think it would be pretty fascinating to see the power that he had.”  Imagine  that, Jesus looking like Kim Kardashian and vice versa.

In an antiphon of the vespers of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the Church brings the Octave of Christmas to a close with her praising, “O admirabile commercium: O marvelous exchange! Man’s Creator has become man, born of a virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” One may find it ironic that the Christmas liturgy speaks of the greatest and most wondrous commerce. It is certainly not referring to the massive discounts, bargains, and offers at commercial outlets as people go about their frenzied Christmas shopping. Rather, it speaks of the divine exchange that takes place on Christmas day – the Incarnation – The Eternal Logos, the Divine Word, the Second Person of the Trinity, took our humanity in exchange for the gift of divinity. St Augustine would also give this “great exchange” a remunerative tone. In Mary’s womb, the Son of God enacts the “divine business deal (diuina commercia), the transaction effected in this world by the heavenly dealer…. Without him, we are nothing, but in him we too are Christ.”

Certainly an unfair exchange, divinity traded for humanity. Thus the reason why we speak of its wondrous nature. In exchange for the gift of eternal life, all that we need to offer the Lord, which the Blessed Virgin Mary did at the Annunciation, was our weak and suffering prone human flesh and frail and fragile mortal lives. This is what we witness in today’s gospel story. The leper, an outcast, having to stay in isolated places, came into the city, met Jesus. Jesus in the city because of the leper ended up in isolated places. Jesus trades places with a leper.

Leprosy in Jesus’ time was not just a despicable virulent disease but also carried along with it the worst of religious and social stigmas. The disease was horrendous, no denying that. But it is compounded by the fact that you have no ability to interact with anybody but the people who also have the disease. Misery seeks company. Lepers were treated as if they were living dead men, corpses. In Israel they were barred from all walled cities. And if they did enter any other place, they had to keep their distances. If a leper came near a synagogue, he would be rejected and sent to a small holding room until they could deal with him later. Rabbis used to pride themselves in avoiding lepers and that too would be seen as a virtue.

But this leper came to Jesus, through the crowd. He violated all necessary standards of exclusion in his desperation. He came to Jesus beseeching Him, begging Him with strong pleas, showing his desperation. His attitude was humble, respectful. He literally flattened himself in humble adoration before the One, who though He was divine, humbled Himself to assume our humanity. Unlike so many who possess a delusional sense of entitlement, this man understood he could make no just claim on God or His Christ. He understood that God owed Him nothing. Rather than make demands of Jesus, the man offers a humble request, “If you want to.” The man's plight triggered Jesus' compassion. Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him and then said to him, “Of course I want to! Be cured!” Now in Leviticus 5:3 there's a law forbidding anyone to touch a leper. But Jesus couldn't be defiled by anyone. His touch was a touch of compassion. His touch was a touch of connexion. It is Jesus linking Himself directly to the healing. Instantaneously and completely the leprosy left him and he was cleansed.

After healing the man, our Lord gives him some specific instruction. He sternly warned him, (it was not a suggestion) that he should not speak of this to anyone, except to go to show himself to the priest as prescribed by the Law. But the Lord was not just concerned about fulfilling the prescriptions of the law. This would be a form of a testimony to the priest. He wants the priests to witness His authority and power, the very priests who felt threatened by His authority and had rejected it. This testimony was meant to indict the priests.

But the cured leper disobeyed these commands and instead went around to spread the news. His disobedience eliminated the opportunity for the needed testimony to the priests which is what the Lord wanted him to do. Secondly, the man's disobedience in spreading this everywhere had a negative effect on even what Jesus was able to do. It says at the end of today’s passage, “Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived. Even so, people from all around would come to him.” In an ironical twist to the story, Jesus trades places with the leper. The social outcast is reconciled with the community and the very hero feted by the community, now becomes an outcast of His choosing.

Jesus did not only trade places with us at the Incarnation, He did it too on the cross. As St John Paul II once taught, “The cross of Christ on Calvary stands beside the path of that admirable commercium, of that wonderful self-communication of God to man, which also includes the call to man to share in the divine life by giving himself, and with himself the whole visible world, to God, and like an adopted son to become a sharer in the truth and love which is in God and proceeds from God.”

The story of the leper is our story. We are the spiritual lepers who lived in alienation and isolation from God. Leprosy is a picture of sin. Is there any better physical picture of sin, which destroys the whole person, alienates, isolates, cuts people off from God and the community? But something happens when we encounter the Lord. In meeting Him, we are reconciled with God and brought into His presence. We who are aliens are made citizens of the Kingdom. But the only way we could ever be taken from our isolation and brought into the presence of God is if He left the presence of God and went Himself into isolation. Our Lord exchanged places with us, He traded places with us, He took our sin and our punishment, He became an outcast, He was forsaken for our sake in order that we might be received, accepted, cured and made into sons and daughters of the Almighty God. And that's what He did at the Incarnation and what He did on the cross.

Though we may wish to trade places with some celebrity or rich person, no one would suspect that God through our Lord Jesus Christ wants to trade places with us. He wants to exchange His fellowship with our alienation, His riches with our rags, His Truth with our confusion, His strength for our weakness. And at the moment of our deaths, Jesus will take upon Himself the penalty of human suffering and death to set us free to life in God.  This is the joy of the Gospel, that God so loved the world, and each of us, that God gave His only begotten Son that we might have life. Let us never cease to be grateful for this great gift, this great exchange, knowing that we are always undeserving of it. O admirabile commercium: O marvellous exchange!

Monkey See Monkey Don't

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

People are often surprised when I tell them that we priests go through eight years of seminary studies (some of us even longer). The initial impression is that we are walking encyclopedias who have an answer to every question and that we “know it all.”  But the myth is soon exploded when they begin to discover how little we actually do know. There are so many things they don’t teach you in the seminary, ranging from organisational skills, and human resource management to how to celebrate the mass. Now, most people would think that we should all be experts in this last area. But here’s the problem, a great number of things are learnt just through observation and imitation, ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ The problem is that when it comes to finding a model, which monkey should we follow?

During the years of my priestly formation, both in the seminary and in my early years as a priest, I received valuable advice from more seasoned priests. These values continue to be guiding beacons in my own pastoral ministry. However, I’ve also received other forms of advice, which seemed reasonable at the material time, but now after deeper reflexion, I have discovered the somewhat fallacious character of some of these advices.

One such piece of advice is that we can dispense with the rigours of the law on the grounds of ‘pastoral reasons.’  No one, however, actually explained what it meant to be ‘pastoral.’ It obviously implied that we had the people’s best interest and welfare in mind. Now, there is nothing wrong with acting pastorally. That’s simply part of our ministry as priests. We are ‘pastors’ or ‘shepherds’ of souls. Therefore it would be incumbent on us to act pastorally with deep concern for the welfare of our flock.

However, over the years I have gradually discovered that the so called ‘pastoral approach’ has less to do with the pastoral needs of the people and more to do with my own self preservation. ‘Pastoral reasons’ became the catch-all principle that absolved me from all responsibility and culpability when it came to bending or even breaking the rules. Eating meat on Friday because we were presented with a more delicious meat selection on the menu became permissible on the grounds of pastoral reasons. Cutting down the rigours of liturgical rubrics in terms of gestures, use of shorter Eucharistic text on Sundays, introducing innovations that fit in with personal preferences became justifiable on the grounds of pastoral reasons. Deception and disobedience were legitimised by pastoral reasons. As to what were these ‘pastoral reasons’ about, there was often little depth in identifying the real grounds. At the end of the day, the pastoral fallacy had finally become my excuse for justifying laziness, sloppiness and personal convenience. Ultimately, the argument in favour of the people’s need is just a thin veil for protecting one’s own need – a need to be popular, a need for a comfortable life, a need to be recognised for one’s own individuality.

Our Lord resisted and exposed the pastoral fallacy in today’s gospel. Many people sought Him out because He was healing the sick and delivering many from the power of the devil. Our Lord was doing wonderful work and helping so many people. He would have certainly been tempted to continue doing this good work with the excuse that he was doing it out of compassion for these people. But was this the will of God? Was this his mission? We often think that temptation comes in the form of being attracted to do something which is bad. This is not always the case. According to St Ignatius of Loyola, the devil tempts bad people with bad things but he also tempts good people with good things. Jesus could have been tempted to continue his works of healing and attending to the needs of the crowd, but this would only be an excuse to meet his own need for recognition and love. But he understood that his mission lay elsewhere, even though this may proof to be unpopular. Today, the readings provide us with three important criteria for making a decision.

The first criterion is that the will of God must always be our point of reference. It is not enough to do what is good, even if it is for the good of the other. The starting point cannot just be the needs of the other; it cannot just be our assessment of what is convenient or expedient; it cannot just be based on the opinions of the masses, even if it may be that of the majority. Ultimately, we must always choose to do what God wants of us. Sometimes, doing what God wants of us can be unpopular and may even go against our personal preferences. 

The second criterion is that of prayer. Note that Jesus went off into the hills to pray early in the morning. How can we possibly know the will of God unless we are also persons rooted in prayer? Prayer is the life-giving connexion between God and his people. Prayer provides us with a moral compass and direction for life. Prayer ensures that we are not lost in the mess of activism nor allow ourselves to be distracted and tempted by the competing voices of the world and self. Prayer helps us to purify our motives and intentions so that we may not deceive ourselves into believing that we are acting in the interests of others, whereas it is our own interests which are being advanced.

The last criterion is the salvation of souls. Today, very little is often said about salvation, what more salvation of souls. Too often, the Christian message has been reduced to some ‘feel good’ gospel which provides a mixture of pop psychology and spirituality for our earthly lives. Heaven seems to be a foregone conclusion whereas hell has been relegated to a myth. But, if one were to recall the answer to the second question contained in the old Penny Catechism, one will be reminded that salvation is man’s ultimate purpose – we are created by God “to know Him, love Him and serve Him and be with Him in Paradise forever.”

The last canon of the Code of Canon Law, canon 1752 has often been cited as the ‘pastoral canon’ which allows dispensing any of the requirements, rules, restrictions, prohibitions and responsibilities laid out in the Code. Any simple reading of canon 1752 will tell you that it is not so. If fact, the word ‘pastoral’ or ‘pastoral reasons’ does not appear at all. But the canon does say this: that “the salvation of souls, which must always be the supreme law in the Church, is to be kept before one’s eyes.” It is not enough to choose to help people who are in need. We may just be providing a temporary solution. It is not enough that we are able to provide some solution to poverty, because we will always have the poor when society remains unconverted. Ultimately, salvation must be the ultimate criteria for us offering to help those in need, the sick, the poor, the despondent and the lost. No form of human altruism can be an adequate substitute for salvation.

Very often we are tempted to forget this important mission of ours – to preach the gospel of salvation and give glory to God in all matters. We are more concerned with what others think of us as we seek their approval. We are more concerned with our own personal convenience and what makes us happy and we think we can find it in riches, popularity and power. If our life’s purpose is based on these factors rather than the will of God, we will soon find ourselves disillusioned and tired. We are certainly more than simians not just because we have far greater intelligence. We are created with purpose for a purpose – to do the will of God, to discover him in prayer and work for our salvation and the salvation of others. That’s certainly more than ‘monkey see, monkey do.’