21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

In 2018, Pete Davis a Graduate student at Harvard Law gave the commencement address at his graduation. He spoke of an experience that will perhaps be familiar to many of us of being up late at night looking for a movie to watch on Netflix. Even after watching numerous trailers and maybe even reading several reviews, you are still stuck in infinite browsing mode, having failed to choose anything to watch. Finally after 30 minutes of failing to choose, you decide that you are now too tired to watch anything and you decide to cut your losses and go to bed. Tongue-in-cheek, he states that he has come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of our generation – keeping our options open. He likened our generation to someone who finds themselves in a long corridor filled with doors, but who ends up never opening any of those doors and going into one of the rooms because going into one room means losing the opportunity to open the other doors and see what is in the other rooms, and so we spend our lives stuck in the corridor.

In today’s gospel we hear Jesus talking about the spirit giving life and the flesh having nothing to offer. Jesus’ dismissive attitude towards the flesh might sound rather jarring to our modern ears, but we can understand them better if we consider that the Israelite people believed that the flesh was adamah, the Hebrew word for clay. Incidentally this is where the name Adam comes from, whom God fashioned out of clay. The flesh only came alive when it was animated by “ruah” – moving air – or Spirit. The Hebrew people believed that it was God who gave people life through breath, by breathing his “ruah” into them, so that they were literally “inspired.” To expire meant to have this breath taken away from you, and die. The spirit is that which animates and gives direction to our flesh – that which inspires our actions so that our experiences in the flesh are meaningful and fulfilling. Without the spirit, they are uninspired, meaningless and fleeting.

So when Jesus talks about the spirit giving life and the flesh having nothing to offer, I think that perhaps one way of understanding this is that just going through life peeking in through all the doors, but never actually committing to live in any one room will not give us the joy and fulfilment we seek. This is not an inspired way of living our lives – it is spiritless. Indeed, if we reflect honestly on the times that we have sought to simply consume as many experiences as we possibly can, throwing away the empty bottle when we have sucked all the enjoyment was can out of it, we will admit that this leaves us feeling rather tired and jaded. It is the Spirit that calls us to transcend the level of mere brutish consumption and through a series of consistent choices to give meaning to the experiences of our flesh. Soren Kiekegaard, a Swedish philosopher tells us that making good choices increases our freedom, in other words – making good commitments increases the number of doors that are available to us to open. On the other hand, not making a commitment, or making bad choices reduces the number of doors available to us. Jesus is looking for a commitment from those who have been following him, and so he ups the ante and invites them to consume his flesh, a flesh that will give life to the world. Some of his followers find this too much, it is too much of a leap of faith to commit to and they leave him.

Even when we have made a choice and committed to opening one door and living in the room behind it, we can’t seem to shake the feeling that we are missing out on what’s behind the other doors, and perhaps we are tempted to dart back out into the corridor and take a peek behind the other doors. This was the situation that the Israelites found themselves in when they got to the promised land. The episode that we hear about in today’s first reading takes place several years after the Israelites have entered the promised land. Moses died before being able to enter the promised land, and the lot of leading the chosen people into this land fell to Moses’ right-hand man, Joshua. Joshua was an immensely talented general and masterfully led the Israelite people to many victories over the inhabitants of the land of Canaan in order to carve out a portion of land that they could call their own. For the past forty years they had been a wandering nomadic people in the desert. With their arrival in the promised land, they must now completely reorient their way of living to becoming a settled people, taking up agriculture and building permanent homes.

Their fundamental experience of God up till this point had been of God as their liberator from slavery in Egypt, and as the one who provided for them in the desert during their wandering nomadic years. When they enter the land of Canaan, they find the Amorites who have their own god, Baal, who was the god of fertility. The Amorites have an elaborate set of rituals to ensure that their fields are kept fertile, that the rain comes when it is supposed to so that they will be able to live of the land. The Israelites are completely new to this agricultural way of life. There would have been a huge temptation for them to abandon the Lord and see what life was like by putting their trust in Baal. Their own God, YHWH had proved himself a powerful liberator in their experience as slaves and a miraculous provider in their wanderings as nomads – but would their God also prove as adept in fertilizing their fields and making the rain come? So they are faced with a choice as to whether to recommit to YHWH, or to throw their lot in with Baal. Joshua realizes this is the quandary that they face, and he also realizes that when people are wavering in their commitment, all they need is just a little push that comes from seeing someone else recommitting themselves and taking the leap of faith that a commitment made many years ago can still be a source of joy and fulfilment in the present. This is why Joshua makes the public display of committing himself to the Lord: “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” His gamble works and the rest of Israel follows his lead.

A fellow Jesuit once shared with me that at a time in his Jesuit life when he found himself falling in love with a particular woman, he really struggled with the serious question of whether he should leave the Society of Jesus and instead start a life with her. He told me that during this time he would tell the Lord in prayer, “Lord if you want me stay, you are going to have to call me again.” When we are struggling in our lives to be faithful to the commitments that we have made in our lives, it helps to remember that we do not have to go it alone, we can ask the Lord to call us again.

Questions for reflection:

1. Have you been inspired lately by witnessing the commitment of another person to a goal or to another person?
2. What gives you strength to go on when you are tempted to renege on your commitments?
3. Have you noticed how your commitments have actually opened more doors for you than they