During Jesus’ time, family meant tribal safety in a threatening world. When Jesus draws people away from family, as he does in this Sunday’s Gospel, he is replacing tribalism with community and safety with risk. He tells potential followers about the risk, “take up your cross and follow after me.” The risk happens because tribal types will harm followers as they receive and help people beyond the borders of their tribe, people who are different from them or in need. But taking such risk can be offered as humanity’s shift from being barbaric to being civilized. Taking such risk is the birth of civilization, the creation of a new human family; “Whoever receives a person… whoever gives a cup of water to a little one… Amen I say to you.”
Risk is a current concern amidst the coronavirus pandemic. Administration officials are willing to risk, more accurately, take a chance that people will be hurt during the pandemic. They are not willing to chance the stock market being hurt. Concerned only about personal money making, officials thus prove themselves worse than tribal. They prove themselves barbaric, meaning cruel and inhuman. They will take a chance on other people being hurt to keep safe their own wants. It is because they are barbaric that officials are intentionally and competently preventing risks to their own health care, their own payroll, their own employment. It is because they are barbaric that they are just as intentionally and just as competently promoting risk to other people’s health care, other people’s payroll protection, other people’s employment. So it is that officials and their minions can be found without masks on in public or clogging traffic near hospitals in protest. These same people likely cannot be found with masks on in those hospitals nursing sick people back to health. The world during the coronavirus is plagued by barbaric people risking the death of a civilized world. They will not even take inconveniences let alone take risks to help people, certainly not people who are different from them or in need. The world during the coronavirus is also blessed by health care workers who are giving birth to a civilized world. One group of healers nurturing civilization is Doctors Without Borders. Begun in 1971 in France, healing members of Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), have as their mission “to provide lifesaving medical care to those most in need. All MSF members agree to… provide assistance to populations in distress, to victims of natural or man-made disasters, and to victims of armed conflicts.” In March of this year, for the first time, healers from MSF set up practice in the U.S. due to the barbaric responses from the Trump administration to the coronavirus. All told, members of MSF have served as healers of barbarity in over 70 countries. In these many countries they have risked and they have suffered – from injury, abduction, and death – death specifically due to giving health care within hospitals bombed out by barbaric soldiers from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Within the risk they are creating a new human family, a community of people healing the barbarity chancing the lives of people across the world.
The story is told of anthropologist Margaret Mead being asked what she thought was the beginning of civilization. She said it was a healed femur bone; the bone connecting the hip and the knee. She explained that in ancient days breaking that bone meant death. Being crippled in that way meant you couldn’t obtain your own needs such as food or water. You certainly couldn’t hunt, nor could you escape, on your own, when attacked. You were entirely dependent, vulnerable; a survival risk to others. A healed femur bone meant someone risked themselves for you. Another human being cared for you, fed you, and nursed you back to health for the many weeks it took for that bone to heal. “Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.” (Dr. Margaret Mead)
Prayer: Spirit, we pray peace and health upon all those who risk themselves to heal others.
Question: How am I a civilizing agent, stepping out beyond borders to take risks for those in need?
June 28, 2020 Gospel Matthew 10:37-42 Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time