Each Went to His Own
House
Piety
Nicodemus, one of
their members who had come to him earlier, said to them, “Does our law condemn
a man before it first hears him and finds out what he is doing?” They answered
and said to him, “You are not from Galilee also, are you? Look and see that no
prophet arises from Galilee.” Then each went to his own house. John 7:50-52
Study
Reading today’s Gospel,
I was struck by the thought that “social distancing” is not a new phenomenon. Nicodemus was the first Pharisee willing and
able (even though under cover of darkness) to venture into a direct encounter
and dialogue with Jesus. He did not keep
his six-foot (four cubits) distance. Today,
this pharisee appears for the second time in John’s Gospel as an unlikely
defender of Jesus. In reaction to his
attitude of openness, he faces the accusation that he is a stranger among his
supposed peers. The Pharisees in the Jerusalem
temple accuse Nicodemus of being from Galilee.
Nicodemus attempts to
reconcile (“converge”) his spirituality with that of the itinerant preacher-carpenter
from Nazareth. That effort does not (yet)
succeed today. He and the Samaritan woman at the well might be the first “Cursillistas”
in the New Testament as they attempt to bring their friends to Jesus. The
Pharisees reject Nicodemus and his openness to Jesus. They want to remain in the comfort and isolation
of their separate world. Perhaps
tellingly, the last line of today’s Good News reveals all in its literalism and
symbolism: “Then each went to his own house.” Although one person senses
that the world is changing, the rest refuse to give in to the winds of change. They
want to stay the course.
Nicodemus reminds me of
the kind of somewhat sympathetic character who might appear at home in a Flannery
O’Connor short story. In “Everything Rises that Must Converge,” death and
destruction accompany the moment of “epiphany” for the main character Julian
Chestny. That will come to John’s
narrative, just not today.
“Everything Rises”[i] takes
its title from the works of Rev. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ. Teilhard attempted to integrate religion and
science. He speculated that the evolutionary process was producing a higher and
higher level of consciousness and that ultimately that consciousness, now
become spiritual, would be complete when it merged with the Divine
Consciousness at the Omega point. At that time, God would become “all in all.”
In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard argues that our goal is not to be
found in individuality but in the surrender of our ego to the Divine: “The true
ego grows in inverse proportion to ‘egotism.’” We can, he argues, “only find
our person by uniting together.” After all, as St. Paul puts it, we all have “the
same Master in heaven, who treats everyone alike.”
In “Everything Rises,” O’Connor
depicts Mrs. Chestny, the mother of the protagonist, as one who “finds her
person by uniting together” despite her racially prejudiced attitudes ingrained
from her childhood. She was a widow, but
“struggled fiercely” to put her protagonist-son Julian through school. At the time of the story, she is still
supporting him a year after graduation while he is a typewriter salesman, not a
writer. “Her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straightened,” and
she even offers to take off her hat when she thinks that it might be
the cause of his irritated, “grief-stricken” face. She attempts to converse (unite)
with the woman and the boy on the bus while Julian retreats behind a used
newspaper.
Conversely, Julian sees
everything in terms of his own “individuality.” He comments on society from behind the mask of
his “liberal” education and place in the community. Despite his “holier-than-thou” attitude
toward his mother, he takes what Teilhard describes as “the dangerous course of
seeking fulfillment in isolation.” The
omniscient narrator tells us Julian likes to spend most of his time by
withdrawing into a kind of mental bubble, especially when things around him are
a bother. In that bubble, “he was safe from any kind of penetration from
without.” Within that bubble, he creates an image of himself and the world
around him. These are images, however, which have no validity with his
misplaced enlightenment while he looks down on his mother.
Julian is like those
Pharisees retreating to their private domains and attempting to wall off the
forces of change about to descend upon Jerusalem. The arrest, trial, and capital punishment of
the carpenter’s God-son are imminent. Spoiler alert: Julian is “rewarded” in the end with the life
of isolation that he wants.
Action
In our locked-down,
shelter-in-place time, it is very easy to see how we might become isolated “Pharisites.” We must resist those temptations by not
forgetting to stay in daily touch with our piety-study-action tripod. Let's remember that someday, we will emerge from this time of confinement and we have to keep up with the practices that define us.
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