When I was growing up, I loved being with my Mamita, my mom’s mom. I remember the way she looked. She was elegant. My Mamita’s nails were always painted her trademark shade of bright red. Her makeup was impeccable, and her lipstick always matched her nails. Just over five feet tall, she wore fabulous jumpsuits and high heels wherever she went. My cousins and I would visit her in Palm Desert for weeks at a time during summer when we were growing up. Swimming in the pool those summer evenings, we knew it was time to get out when we heard the sound of her tiny kitten heels clicking against the concrete.
And my Mamita worked, from the time she was a young teenager in Bolivia until she retired in her 60s, here in the States. Most of my life, she ran a chain of flower shops in Palm Desert. During those summer visits, the temperature regularly rose above 100 degrees. I remember my cousins and me racing from our Mamita’s air-conditioned car into the shops. We sought refuge from those brief moments of desert heat in the refrigerated glass case, where the roses and flowers and baby’s breath were kept. Sliding the glass door closed, we reveled in the cool, fragrant air as long as we could, pressing our noses and cheeks against the glass, giggling together, waving at our Mamita until she called us to come out.
I loved listening to her voice. Whether she was speaking in Spanish or in English, her voice had a lilt to it, a song-like quality I’ve come to recognize as characteristic of the women in our family. My Mamita had her dichos, little sayings for which she was known among us. As we climbed into her bed those summer nights, we talked through the events of the day. We prayed together, and she asked God to bless each member of our family by name. As she closed our prayer, she often said, “Hay poder en la familia unida.” (There is power in the family that is united, the family that stays together.) Especially in times of disagreement, she was quick to remind us of this. As a teenager, I did not always welcome this reminder, to put it mildly. At the time, I worried that focusing so quickly on unity left too little room for us to be understood or to understand fully the perspective of the person with whom we were disagreeing.
I share these memories of my Mamita because she loved spending time with the Scriptures, and I wish I could ask her now what she thinks of the Jesus we meet in Mark’s Gospel today. Mark tells us that the news of Jesus’ works had begun to spread, and many had pressed in on him, asking for healing. When we meet Jesus and his disciples today, they are in the midst of a disagreement with the Pharisees and scribes. According to Mark, the Pharisees and scribes are concerned that Jesus’ disciples are eating without having washed their hands. The Pharisees and scribes have begun to engage in practices not written in their sacred texts, but these practices have become important to their community, nonetheless. They attempt to hold Jesus’ disciples accountable for choosing not to partake in this practice of hand washing. In return, the Markan Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah, who warned against those who claim to honor God but cling to their human traditions. He calls out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and scribes for failing to heed the warning of Isaiah’s text.
One of my favorite New Testament professors taught us that the glimpses we get of Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and scribes, as we do today, should not be interpreted in black and white terms. She sensitized us to the anti-Judaism to which some Christians can fall prey when we try to lift up Jesus as an exception to a Jewish community obsessed with fidelity to the letter of the law. Remembering her advice prompts me to revisit the First Reading. We meet Solomon as he celebrates what a gift it is to have a physical place where his community can come together and worship as a body. Jesus, the Pharisees, and the scribes all trace their religious lineage back to Solomon. As members of a religious minority, making their way under Roman occupation, Jesus, the Pharisees, and the scribes lived on the underside of history. All of them belonged to a religious community whose sacred places were denied them, even destroyed, by those who held political power. I wonder about the impact that living in occupied territory might have had on their psyches, on their relationships with themselves and with other members of their community, on the ways they experienced and thought about their faith.
With passages like today’s Gospel, it’s easy to malign the Pharisees and the scribes. It’s easy to collapse into the kind of either/or thinking that enables us to side with Jesus and make enemies of all who disagreed with him. One of the gifts of Ignatian spirituality is its invitation to imaginative prayer as we encounter Scripture. So let’s step back a bit from the immediacy of the conflict Jesus is experiencing with his Jewish brethren. Let’s remember what they hold in common—their deep and abiding love for their God, their commitment to live out that love in community, their passion for the perspectives they bring to the table. Taking a cue from Ignatius of Loyola, let’s be curious together about how God might see each of them. How might God see their love for the Divine? How might God see their commitment to practicing their faith? How might God see their passion for their perspectives?
None of us can know for sure how God might respond to these questions, and I don’t claim to have definitive answers.
But I do have some hunches about our God, that self-same God over whom Jesus, the Pharisees, and the scribes are disagreeing about how to honor. I have a hunch that our God is a both/and kind of deity, big enough to hold all kinds of names. I have a hunch that our God responds to all the pronouns we now ascribe to the Divine and then some. I have a hunch that our God weeps alongside us when disagreements like the one in today’s Gospel are cemented into the divisions that haunt the Holy Land just as deeply as they do the borderlands of Texas. I have a hunch that our God laments the stubbornness that can prevent us from seeing the fullness of the Divine in our siblings with whom we disagree. I have a hunch that God is calling each of us individually and all of us together to conversion—conversion from the everyday sins that allow petty disagreements to crystallize into mistrust of one another, conversion from the structures of sin that are designed to make us forget that we belong to each other, just as much as we belong to our God. I have a hunch that our God smiles on us when we refuse to forget, when we opt instead to remember that we are all integral parts of the family of God’s creation. I have a hunch that our God rejoices with us when we live into that remembering. When we repent from our complicity in those sinful structures. When we celebrate the presence of God in the family of creation. When we take some deep breaths and begin to listen to one another. When we’re able to see something akin to our own pain, our own fear, our own anger in the pain, the fear, and the anger boiling over in the words of those with whom we disagree. When those who would push others to the ground begin to recognize that doing so not only breaks the backs of the oppressed, but also prevents themselves from standing upright. Porque hay poder en la familia unida, because there is power in the family that is united, that stays together. If we’re gonna get free of what binds us, if we’re gonna work through what divides us, we’re not gonna do it alone. Today’s Gospel shares with us an invitation to recognize ourselves, as well as those with whom we disagree, as part of the family of God.
The Gospel of Mark has been called a passion narrative with a long introduction. If we sit with the long-term impact of public squabbles like these, we see how the leadership of a religious minority cooperated with those in political power to convict Jesus of crimes he didn’t commit, of blasphemy and sedition. In the face of the overt and covert violence that fueled his trial, Jesus practices nonviolent resistance. He refuses to cooperate with the powers and principalities that tempt us into believing the lie that we are not worthy of our rightful place in the family of God. What would it be like for us to join Jesus in that nonviolent resistance, to call the lie what it is, to live into the truth born of relationship with God in him? Amen.
