• Proverbs 31:10-31

The collection of teachings and aphorisms borrowed from Egyptian and other neighboring sources, included in the Hebrew canon as Proverbs now turns to a depiction of an ideal wife/mother.  She is clever, industrious, wise in the ways of the world, an entrepreneur, the primary provider for her family, has muscular arms, and has a happy disposition.  Also, “she opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hand to the needy.”  For all this, she has earned the praise of her children and husband, who “share in the fruit of her hands.”

• Psalm 1

Of the first psalm, Robert Alter writes:

“It is easy to understand why the ancient editors set this brief, eloquent psalm at the head of the collection.  In context, it is a Wisdom psalm, affirming the traditional moral calculus (to which Job will powerfully object) that it pays to be good, whereas the wicked will be paid back for their evil.” (The Book of Psalms, New York: W.W.Norton, 2007, p.3)

OR

• Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1,12-22

The question identified by Robert Alter (also see comments above) is a recurring question in the Hebrew scriptures: Does the person who seeks to do good for neighbor and love of God get a reward and others get punished, or is life indifferent and we might as well grab for ourselves what we can while we can?  This excerpt from Wisdom says the “ungodly” have decided that life is “short and sorrowful” and when you die, that’s it.  The “righteous” person is an affront to this attitude, because it is “unlike that of others, and his ways are strange.”  He claims to seek and know “God’s ways” and “boasts that God is his Father.”   But the test between these competing claims arrives when we die, “for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him and deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.”  Those who “did not know the secret purposes of God” have “made a covenant with death.”

• OR Jeremiah 11:18-20

Jeremiah had accepted the lonely role of being God’s prophet.  But after “the Lord made known” to  him that even his family were out to assassinate him, he describes himself as “like a lamb led to the slaughter.”  Still he remains committed to the Lord’s “cause.”

• Psalm 54

The psalmist reacts to an immediate crisis when personal enemies are out for revenge.  She pleads for God’s help, on which she has relied in the past.

• James 3:13-4:3,7-8a

The writer of this letter attributed to a “James” enters into the ancient debate about how one ought to live this life.  One approach he depicts as base, marked by “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” even to the point of lawlessness and murder.  The other approach assumes that there is something more to life than base instinct; it is understood as “wisdom from above.”  Following this approach has very different results, which can be described as “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.”  Decide which alternative you will bet your life on!

• Mark 9:30-37

Perhaps the followers of Jesus are still excited by the “transfiguration” of Jesus, which has just occurred, when he tells them for the second time in Mark’s chronology that “the  Son of Man” will be betrayed, killed and rise again.  But “they did not understand what he said and were afraid to ask him.”  When Jesus asks them what they have been  discussing, they are too embarrassed to tell him they had been speculating about their status as leaders in the movement growing around him.  But Jesus says anyway, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all.”  To make his point vividly and unforgettably clear, Jesus places a young child among them and says that “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” as well as “the one who sent me.”

These readings are not subtle and today’s gospel is perfectly clear.  They juxtapose two starkly competing assumptions about the best way to live this life.  One way assumes life is “short and sorrowful” and that justifies “selfish ambition.”  The alternative wants to believe there is a “wisdom from above” that instructs us to be “peaceable, gentle” and to look out for the needs and interests of others, such as the immediate needs of any child right in front of us, right now.  This attitude challenges the more calculating approach to life, (it can feel like a ‘threat’ to many).  Still, the Wisdom of Solomon asserts that those who decide that life is just dog-eat-dog and only-the-strong-survive have “made a covenant with death.”

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is generally regarded as a turning point in Western thinking in the Twentieth century, can be considered as a sustained exploration of this question: how one chooses to live the life one is given.  He begins by noting that human beings are distinct for our capacity to imagine, experiment, discover, project, remember, and make decisions about our identity, our lives.  (Therefore, human beings can have the kind of debate with themselves that preoccupies our readings and gospel this Sunday.)  In one place, Heidegger describes this human capacity thus:

“These entities in their Being comport themselves towards their Beings.  As entities with such Being, they are delivered over to their own Being.” (p.37)

In his gloss on Heidegger’s Being and Time, William Blattner summarizes:

This sense of identity underlies my awareness of my convictions, commitments, thoughts, and responsibilities.  To be a person is to project a person to be, and so our being is at issue for us.”  “To live a life is to answer the question of identity.”  (Heidegger’s Being and Time, p.37)

Heidegger continues by drawing a distinction between the level of attention one gives to this question of identity, responsibility and commitment.  We can live quite ‘successfully’ at the superficial, conventional level.  This is the comfortable world of “They,” i.e. all others who are also just going-along-to-get-along.  However, one can  also make the decision to dig deeper into life.  This decision entails the never-ending quest to know and accept one’s self and to care for others with a keener moral obligation, especially for any who are the most vulnerable, fully aware that this decision will put us at odds with conventional morality.

The universal human crisis that reveals the difference between these two distinct approaches, according to Heidegger, is the reality of death.  To live superficially, death is just a distant fact over which I have little control anyway.  The reality of death just proves that life really is just “short and sorrowful.”  Those who care to live life more deeply, however, recognize that because that time will come when we are no longer a part of other peoples’ lives and our life can no longer impact theirs, there is a sense of focused urgency about whatever time we might have.  Further, there is the recognition that one can experience a certain emotional, moral, spiritual ‘demise’ even before our bodies give out.  In Being and Time, Heidegger describes this attitude as “Being-towards-death.”  This is not a morbid nor fatalistic preoccupation, it is just the opposite– a healthy “anxiety” which can lead us to “the possibility of understanding one’s ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-Being– that is to say, the possibility of authentic existence.”  (p.307).  Heidegger continues, “When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in those [superficial] possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among factical possibilities lying ahead….” (p.308)

For the second time in Mark’s narrative, Jesus raises with his new followers the eventuality of his own death.  Their reaction is instructive and familiar– they did not understand  or at least did not want to understand and did not want to confront the reality of his death, and their own as well.  Instead, they wanted to gossip and speculate among themselves about who will have what status in this exciting, growing Jesus enterprise.

But the blunt biblical warning is that those who choose to live life “superficially” have in fact “made a covenant with death.”  Even before their bodies can be pronounced dead, they can “die” in the sense of not finding nor fulfilling their “authentic” “Potentiality-toward-Being.”  Conversely, those who have confronted both senses of dying acquire a purposeful moral urgency about life, an insistence not to live absorbed in the conventionality of the majority.

And as if to ground this discussion in immediate, concrete reality, Jesus moves a child front and center and says that anyone who is attentive to the most vulnerable, such as this child, right here, right now, welcomes me as well as “the one who sent me.”  That is just how clear the choice is.