During
the Korean war the Catholic parish church in a little village there
came under heavy artillery fire. Outside the Church there was a life-sized
statue of Christ mounted on a pedestal. When the smoke of battle cleared
the statue was in fragments on the ground. Sometime later a group
of American soldiers helped the priest pick up the pieces of the statue
and put it together again. They found all of the pieces except for
the hands. They offered to have the statue flown to America to have
new hands made for it. But the priest said, "I have a better
idea. Let us leave it as it is without hands. We will put it back
on it's pedestal as it is and call it THE CHRIST
WITHOUT HANDS. In this way people will see that Christ has
no hands but ours with which to help the needy and uplift the fallen."
I
think this story can be applied in two ways to our Gospel today. Firstly,
we see Jesus involving the apostles in his ministry. In fact, the
greater part of the last year of his life was given to training the
apostles. We often find him taking the disciples aside after a cure
or an encounter with the people, for a little seminar on their own.
He was concerned about the fact that his physical presence would no
longer be with the people and that others would have to be his hands
to continue his work.
The
second way in which the story applies is that, even if we, his followers,
are out there doing his work, it is the hands - the power - of Jesus
that works through us. Jesus instructed the disciples, "take
nothing for the journey except a staff - no bread, no haversack, no
coins for your purses." I think he was saying that they would
need to recognize the ultimate fruit of their efforts would not be
from their wisdom or technique or abilities but that it would be a
gift that was His doing.
It
is the perennial problem of human beings that they want to downgrade
God's power. In the ingenious myth story of the garden of Eden the
devil tells our first parents that if they eat the fruit of the tree
they will "become like God." If they become like God they
can renounce their dependent status as creatures and determine their
own destinies.
In
today's world many people believe that science has supplanted God.
Science can now explain many things that were given a religious interpretation
before. Science can tell us why the rain comes and why it does not
come. But yet there are many mysteries to life - life and it's termination
and what happens after death, for instance - that science cannot ultimately
explain.
Our
selfish selves, our egos, are ever trying to Edge-God-Out (EGO). If
we have any success we tend to glory in it and forget that it is a
gift from our creator. Our egos tend to take the credit for the work
of God's hands. We need to constantly remind ourselves that while
it is very good to use the scientific method to delve deeper into
truth, and while it is very good to have the relevant technology and
training in our ministry, the result is ultimately a gift from God's
hands. From this point of view when it comes to His work we do not
have hands. It is paradoxical that from another point of view when
it comes to his work He does not have hands. He is the Christ without
hands.
For
me, meditation is a way of prayer that brings us to accept the paradox
of our power and our powerlessness; of our being the hands of Christ
and of our having no hands but his. When we start to meditate we want
to be good meditators. We judge our goodness by our freedom from distraction.
We think that we will be good at it in a few weeks. After a few years
we realize that we are as distracted as ever. If we have been given
the gift of humility we may realize that what God is asking of us
is not success - in which our egos would glory - but faithfulness
when we feel ashamed of our poor performance. As we persevere in our
meditation we begin to notice when we are distracted and come back
faithfully to our prayer word. When we continue to do this in prayer
we will begin to notice in life when our egos are getting notions
about themselves and taking glory in being the hands of God and we
will gently but firmly reject the usurpation.
