Today's readings: Wisdom 2, 12.17-20; James 3,16 - 4,3; Mark 9, 30-37.
Life is becoming so complex that we are constantly failing to understand even the simplest things and rules of good living. The more burdened the heart, the harder life becomes and the more opaque the world around us.
In this sense, God's Word educates the heart mainly by dispelling the mist of confusion as to what really determines our behaviour.
When we read today the letter of James and the Gospel of Mark, what is immediately striking is the in-depth knowledge about how the Word of God affects the dynamics inside us.
Sigmund Freud was a scientist and, in some ways, a great one. No psychologist escapes his influence. He wanted to turn psychology into a science and reduce the complex to the controllable. He revolu-tionised the traditional way of getting to know our inner self by discovering the regions of the unconscious.
But man cannot be reduced to his body. What is the difference or the connection between the wisdom in today's readings that literally diagnoses the meanders of our human nature, and the knowledge man has gradually acquired about himself?
As Parker Palmer writes in his book Let Your Life Speak: "There is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-serving fictions, and my true self."
In Mark today we read: "But they did not understand what he said and were afraid to ask him." In some sense there is the entire history of Christianity in these words. Scholar and activist Ched Myers, commenting on these words, writes: "In Mark's story the cross is neither a heroic nor a tragic moment. It is an apocalyptic one, the epiphany of a new power that shakes the powers in the heavens."
'Apocalyptic' in the Scriptures means 'revealing'. We need to analyse in depth what the three readings today reveal about ourselves beyond what has been affirmed on the level of culture.
After 20 centuries proclaming Jesus crucified, we still do not grasp what it is all about. It has become one layer of culture that needs to be questioned seriously if we want to grasp what God is revealing.
The cross was at times hailed as a sign of victory, and served to mould a triumphant brand of Church and Chrisianity. At other times, we reach out to the cross in our helplessness, to understand and make sense of life.
For centuries we've put the cross on hilltops, in classes and in halls as part of our culture. We continue to feel at ease teaching religion classes and dishing out religious instruction. And we quickly blame relativism and the lack of values for the disharmony we experience in our families and societies.
But the readings today point to a deeper level of disharmony. In the words of James, we are all "prepared to kill". Jealousy, ambition, com-petitiveness - these make us wage wars and battles between ourselves. As the Book of Wisdom says, we find it so easy to join the chorus and ridicule the virtuous man who seems to be the exception to the rule.
While we preach and celebrate, much of the surrounding world waits "to see if what we say is true". How can we be credible in what we say and do? There was a time when the source of the Church's credibility was the authority it received from the Lord Jesus. But that is no longer the case.
What counts is not the authority that gives the licence to preach and teach, but the authority of wisdom and witness that depends on our inner landscape, that gives true knowledge of our own selves, and that makes credible all we believe, say and do.