Insights and Challenges

309th Edition – April 2025
Mark 9:37-40: Insights and Challenges

Like many of you, I have my “go-to” books for prayer. Later in the day, I read and study the daily readings using the Jerusalem and the New American translations of the Bible. But in the early morning I use a small book that arrives each month with the daily readings: Give Us This Day (1). Before the daily scripture readings, the book includes a brief story of the “Blessed Among Us.” Some of these “Blesseds” are well-known. Others I have never met. But all of their lives offer us insights and challenges.

This month, April, is no exception. We hear of Blessed Giuseppe Girotti (1905-1945), a Dominican priest born in northern Italy who offered safe shelter, transport, and false baptismal certificates to Jews who were fleeing Nazi persecution. Mother Lurana White (1870-1935), an Episcopal sister who worked with Fr. Paul Watson, an Episcopal priest, successfully petitioned the Vatican to accept their community into the Catholic Church. We know their community as the Graymoor Community in New York. It has been designated as a pilgrimage site for the Jubilee Year of Hope. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a Lutheran theologian who joined a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. Along with his companions, he was imprisoned and hanged. Honora “Nana” Nagle (1718-1784) born in a small town in County Cork founded the Presentation Sisters. Her passion for education and compassion led her to establish schools for the poor even though they were legally banned. She risked imprisonment and death and was publicly maligned by the bishop.

To be a person of faith calls for great courage, integrity, and prayer. We don’t have to be a well-known saint or a person in leadership. Each of us is required and empowered by our baptism to respond lovingly and justly to the needs of others. Sometimes we will be required to break a law to live by God’s Law. We heard about this challenge in the lives of Girotti, Bonhoeffer, and Nagle. Sometimes the Spirit inspires us to open the boundaries that divide us as did the Graymoor Community as they continue to work for the union of Christian churches. Each year in January there is a Week of Prayer for Christian Unity that is celebrated by many Christian denominations. Each of us in prayer and silence is guided by the Spirit and called to be a prophet: one who speaks and acts on God’s behalf.

The word prophet means the mouthpiece of God. It is a call and a gift that is not limited to a few people. The gift and responsibility of discipleship and truth-telling are offered to all who draw their strength and wisdom from God. God calls each of us to be the “Blessed Among Us.” Limiting God’s gift to a few select people was not in Jesus’ plan. We hear Jesus rebuking his disciples in Mark’s Gospel when John complains that someone who is not one of the twelve is curing people in Jesus’ name. “Master, we saw a man who is not one of us casting out demons in your name and because he was not one of us, we tried to stop him” (Mk 9:38). What a curious reaction on the part of the disciples. Don’t you wonder what was behind the disciples’ reasoning? Jesus’ response is “Anyone who is not against us is for us” (Mk 9:40).

In the Book of Numbers in the First Testament, we hear a similar complaint from Moses’ community (Nb. 11:27-30). The Spirit of God had come upon seventy elders who were gathered in the Tent of Meeting. Thus, they were recognized as leaders appointed by God. Later, the Spirit of God came upon two men who “had stayed in the camp;” one called Eldad and the other Medad. They too were prophesying. An official leader complained and asked Moses to stop them from prophesying. Moses responded to the official leader, “Are you jealous? If only the whole people of God were prophets” (Nb 11:30). At that point God’s Spirit came upon all of them.

Prophetic truth-telling is dangerous, then and now. Thus, it is not a surprise that our faith begins in community with baptism and is sustained in community by the celebration of the Eucharist. Prophets are birthed within the faith community. They are nurtured, supported, guided, and inspired by their community of faith. We do not all have the same gifts, but by generously sharing our gifts we become a well-knitted community of faith that can speak the truth and act on behalf of justice even in the face of opposition.

There are many issues of justice in our society that need to be addressed. What is the truth I need to speak at this time of my life? What injustices do we, as a community, need to address? Before the passage of Mark 9:38, Jesus puts his arms around a little child and says,

Anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my
name, welcomes me; and anyone who welcomes me, welcomes
the one who sent me.

We are still in Lent, but my Easter prayer for all of us is boldly and lovingly offered in the poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest. Hopkins dedicates the poem to the “happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns.” These sisters were exiled because of the Falk Laws. The Falk Laws were an expression of the struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government over the control of education and ecclesiastical appointments in Germany. The sisters drowned between midnight and the morning of Dec. 7, 1875. In this poem, “Easter” is used appropriately as a verb, an action word. Hopkins prays, “Let Him Easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-crested east.” What would it look like to be “Eastered in Christ?”

Footnotes
1. Give Us This Day, Liturgical Press, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, MN 56321-7500. Customer Service 888-259-8470.