Leaven and perseverance

The texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary today offer us some guidelines which we can use to assess our journey as believers. The Letter of James addresses the experience of temptation. He clearly rejects any idea that temptation comes from God and he identifies a path which we often follow when we let the allure and pleasure of the temptation confuse us into imagining outcomes of our misadventure which may be ok and acceptable. The temptation is brought to us through our own desire and like the leaven, which we will consider in the Gospel from Mark, it diffuses our living to love and serve others into including some love and service for ourselves. The possibility that temptation could actually lead to a better situation for us without actually impacting others is born in our imagination. James identifies this as the path to sin where we act to satisfy our need for power, privilege and personal gratification. Marty Kalkowski from Creighton University shares how our desire to “keep it all together” may blind us to the opportunity to see and hear Christ in the encounters with the people in our lives. The disciples in the Gospel account from Mark are questioned by Jesus about their inability to see the temptation in the leaven of the Pharisees which the dailyexegesis blog identifies as blatant legalism and hypocritical actions. Those who parse their spiritual journey into what I will do to follow the rules of God and what I am then left to do for me are stuck in the process leading to sin explained in the letter of James. The leaven of Herod which seeks a powerful leader to compel people to live a righteous life is another temptation to reduce the invitation of an intimate relationship with Jesus in communion with the whole world to an enforcement of morality. The path which Jesus invites the disciples to see and the Word he calls them to hear is in His action to bring love, mercy and compassion to all. The baskets of broken pieces were twelve for the tribes of Israel and seven, the number symbolic of completeness, for the rest of the world. Pray with the psalmist that we are restored to the journey when our feet are slipping.