Week 25 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Wisdom 2.12,17-20; Psalm 53/54; James 3.16-4.3; Mark 9.30-37

There is something very real about the diagnosis of human behaviour that we find in the Letter of James. Everything originates within yourselves, he says. All conflict and fighting have their origins in your feelings of jealousy and ambition. Feelings lead to thoughts lead to actions lead to consequences in the world.

We see this also in the first reading, from the Book of Wisdom. The good person, simply by being good, provokes the envy and even hatred of others. They take his or her goodness as some kind of judgement or criticism of themselves. Even your prayers can be vitiated by your desires, James says, one of the most disturbing statements in the whole of the New Testament. We might have thought that our prayers at least could be kept untouched by our baser instincts, but James says no: we can even try to manipulate God, try to put him at the service of our jealousy and ambition.

The same problem is there in the gospel reading, so all three readings harmonise quite powerfully today. Jesus is trying to teach his disciples about the paschal mystery, his suffering, death and resurrection which are to come, and they fail to understand and are afraid to ask more about it. Instead they amuse themselves by considering which of them is the greatest. Even in the presence of Wisdom itself, human self-centredness and sad anxiety distract and distort.

How are we to fight against such distraction and distortion, against the ambition to be greater than others and the jealousy we feel where the goodness of another is taken as criticism or judgement on me?

The response is phrased in one way by James, in another way by Jesus. The antidote, says James, is the wisdom that comes down from above, because it is pure, makes for peace, is kindly and considerate, is full of compassion, and shows itself in doing good. There is no trace of partiality or hypocrisy in it. It is a portrait of the good person, echoing what we find in Wisdom 2, the beatitudes in Matthew 5, and the hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13.

It is a portrait therefore of Jesus himself. He is the Wisdom come down from above and his antidote to the distraction of the disciples in today's gospel passage is to present them with a little child. Here is the cure for your ambition and jealousy, he says: seek to be as insignificant and as powerless as the child. Seek to be the least, not the greatest, in order to be at the service of all. Purity, peace-making, kindness and consideration, compassion and doing good, justice and honesty: Wisdom 2, Matthew 5, James 3-4, 1 Corinthians 13 - it is the life of the beatitudes, the still more excellent way, the lifestyle of Jesus, his 'spirituality', life according to the Spirit.

The likelihood is, of course, that we will continue to find it difficult to understand because it is so contrary to how 'healthy, mature and successful living' are understood in the culture within which we live. In place of confidence, assertion, success and self-promotion, we are to seek simply to serve others, to be the least among them. Like the disciples we might be afraid to ask more because it will reveal not just our failure to understand but also our moral and spiritual poverty, the hold that jealousy and ambition still have over us. Can I even claim that my prayers are free of these things, that at least the desires I express in prayer are rightly ordered?

The Wisdom that comes down from above is incarnate in Jesus, is contained in his teaching, and is accessible to those who live by his Spirit. And it is found only along the way of the Cross. Only through the foolishness and weakness of that 'little way' can we come to possess true wisdom and so have our hearts set right.