Contending With the Beast

In today’s Gospel, Jesus addresses the formative (and formidable) assembly of His little hometown of Nazareth.  Teaching in the synagogue in which He grew in His human nature to full stature, Christ essentially speaks the difficult truth to them that His ministry of furthering the Kingdom does not exist for the indulgence of their expectations.  The Lord’s miracles are to be distributed more widely and for greater purposes than the self-aggrandizement of one’s own.

The reaction to this news was collective and hostile.  Those who once listened to Jesus---perhaps for years---with pleasure “were all filled with fury” and together “rose up, drove Him out of the town, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl Him down headlong.”  The visceral and vicious rejection by Nazareth's "body politic" of one of its own demonstrates a corporate untrustworthiness---at least for a time---with the mystery of the Gospel.

During the period in which I was contending with the very painful unknowns of my jaw’s deterioration, I came upon the following poem by Joe Wenderoth entitled, “My Life.”  Published in Poetry 180:  A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003), it reads:

Somehow it got into my room.

I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.

It was nothing more than a frightened animal.

Since then I raised it up.

I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,

Kept it for its own good.

I named the animal, My Life.

I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.

I let it into my bed, and let it breathe in my sleep.

And the animal, in my love, in my constant care,

Grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.

One day, quite recently,

I was running my hand over the animal’s side

And I came to understand

That it could very easily kill me.

I realized, further, that it would kill me.

This is why it exists, why I raised it.

Since then I have not known what to do.

I stopped feeding it,

Only to find that its growth

Has nothing to do with food.

I stopped cleaning it

And found that it cleans itself.

I stopped singing it to sleep

And found that it falls asleep faster without my song.

I don’t know what to do.

I no longer make My Life do tricks.

I leave the animal alone

And, for now, it leaves me alone, too.

I have nothing to say, nothing to do.

Between My Life and me,

A silence is coming.

Together, we will not get through this.

Rather than parse and reduce (and ultimately violate) Wenderoth’s work with my exegesis, suffice it to say that I found in his words a very penetrating description of what I felt---through my chronic TMJ problem---to be my body’s inner rebellion.  Not only could my body not repair itself; in its desperately angry pain, it was turning against me.  It took a doctor’s professional examination, anesthesia, surgery, and on-going splint therapy to resolve this contention.  And even with this happy outcome, one’s animality is what it is; one’s mortality (and accompanying anguish, in its various rational and unrational forms) also is what it is.

But the hope and glory of these Forty Days of contending in the wilderness---surrounded by beasts and angels---is that Jesus Christ is Who He is.  Indeed, He is “I AM Who I AM.”  He is Emmanuel---God with us.  Thus the Lord experiences the reaction of Nazareth as the fevered rebellion of His own Body; yet as God He passes peacefully and sovereignly (yet literally and ultimately redemptively) through this pain.  The Good News is that in moving beyond self-indulgence, Christ is restoring and extending His Mystical Body, the Church, in all of its members.  The plentiful gifts of divine healing do in fact come in the bigger picture and over the greater span of time leading beyond time to the fullness of time.  But the required operation of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Savior remains what it is:  The deeper necessity of conversion to the Gospel imposes its own timetable on “My Life.”  The sooner we stop fighting with our Head, the sooner we actually will get through this together, fully alive, finally immortal, and happy in the End.