Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for
this weekend is taken from the wonderful book
of Numbers. Now, the book of
Numbers is one of the five books of
the Pentateuch or the Torah, the most sacred part of
the Old Testament. I might urge you,
get out your Bibles and find the book
of Numbers. It's called Numbers,
by the way, because at the very beginning,
all of the tribes of Israel are kind of
lined up like an army, and they're numbered. They're kind of
organized in order. That's where the
name comes from. The book of Numbers has to do,
for the most part, with the journey of Israel
through the desert to the Promised Land. They've received the Ten Commandments
and all of that described in the book of Exodus,
and now they're making their way
to the Promised Land. That's what it's about. And as is often the case,
during their forty years of wandering in the desert, the people complain
against Moses. Listen. "If only we had more to eat!
We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for
nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks,
the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up,
and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at." That's a marvelous little thing,
isn't it? Like most of us sinners, making
our way from sin to salvation, we tend to look back
at our sinful ways and say, "Hey, wasn't it at least easier
back in those days? This journey is too hard. Oh, I long for the days of old." But I love this. "Our strength is dried up,
and there is nothing but this manna to look at." So they're being fed by God
with miraculous bread from heaven. And that's not good enough.
The manna is making them sick. It's a beautiful example
of how we sinners just don't get it. We look back to the ways of
sin. We complain against God. Anyway, that's typical of
the book of Numbers. But in the wake of this kind of
criticism, Moses says to the Lord, "I am not able to
carry this people all alone, they are too heavy
for me." So he's saying, "Look, Lord,
give me a break here. Help me
to guide this people." So God says, "Okay, I'm going
to take some of the spirit I placed on you,
and I'm going to share it with seventy elders
of the people. I want you, Moses, to choose
the candidates, and then I'm going to give them
some of your spirit to share your responsibility." So a list is drawn up, the men gather on the
appointed day, and the Lord does indeed
send his spirit. And they begin prophesying. We don't quite know
what that means; it's all through the Bible. They begin to speak
prophetic words. They begin to maybe carry on
in a kind of enthusiastic way. Maybe the sort of charismatic
movement gives some idea, but the Bible says they
begin to prophesy, which means they're now
capable of sharing in some of Moses’
leadership responsibilities. And you say,
okay. It's kind of a prototypical
ordination, if you want; people are formerly chosen,
there's some kind of ritual, they gather, and then
the Lord sends his spirit to them, and they share in the
governance of Israel. So anyone who's ever been to a
priesthood or diaconate ordination ceremony might
recognize the dynamics at play. But then there's a very
interesting little twist to the story. It has to do with two men. They're named
Eldad and Medad. They had been on the list
of the chosen, but they didn't show up
for the ceremony. They weren't there.
Nevertheless, the spirit descended on
Eldad and Medad, and they began to prophesy
like everybody else. So this caused a little ruckus. Someone brings it to the
attention of Joshua, who was Moses' chief aide, and Joshua comes to Moses,
full of righteous indignation, and says, "My lord Moses,
stop them." Look, they didn't come
to the ceremony. They weren't there at the
appointed moment. And yet they're prophesying. So this is not right. It's disrupting the order
of the community. To which Moses, exhibiting extraordinary humility
and clarity of vision, responds,
listen, "Are you jealous
for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people
were prophets, and that the Lord would put
his spirit on all of them." Marvelous. It's a marvelous
response. Joshua upset that
the religious rituals were not properly followed —God's spirits operative,
and it shouldn't be. Do something about it. And Moses is saying,
"What are you talking about? I'd like God's spirit to be
available everywhere. If God's doing this,
praise God, and let's not worry about it." Now, there are two things
I want us to see now from this kind of
peculiar little story from the book
of Numbers. The first has to do
with God's relationship to the very rituals and symbols and
sacraments that he has determined. Now, I would challenge
anybody who's read the books of Exodus or Numbers
or Leviticus or Deuteronomy to tell me
that God doesn't care about liturgy,
about ritual correctness, about sacramental realities. We get detailed,
and I mean detailed, descriptions of exactly
what God desires in his temple, what his tabernacle
ought to look like, how his priests ought
to be vested, how they should be ordained, how people should
approach the sacred space, clean and unclean animals,
clean and unclean food. I mean, the Bible is filled with
very detailed prescriptions from the Lord of how
he wants us to go about our ritual
and religious lives. God is not indifferent
to ceremony and to ritual. Don't believe people that say,
"Oh, who needs all of that? God can be worshiped out
in the woods," and, "Forget all that old
fuddy-duddy ritual from the Old Testament." No, no, no. God is
intensely interested. Here's something from
Thomas Aquinas I've always loved. Thomas asked the question,
why are the sacraments necessary? And let's broaden that.
Sacraments, liturgy, ritual, all these sort of physical
means by which we cultivate our
relationship to God. Why is all that necessary?
His pithy answer was: "because we're not angels." If we're angels,
we're pure spirits, all we need is the word, and all we need is
God's invisible grace. But I'm a spirit in this body. I'm an embodied spirit. And so, yeah,
I like words —that's why we say all
the sacraments have a form— but every sacrament also has matter. See, color and ritual and
gesture and movement and vesture and
all of that matters. Yes, indeed.
Absolutely. We're not angels. And so, as I say in our
story for today, you've got something like a
formal ordination ritual unfolding, and God wants it. God approves of it. But then remember
the twist in the story. Nevertheless, God's grace
was operative outside of this formal structure. Eldad and Medad
didn't show up. They weren't there
for the ritual. Nevertheless, they received
the gift of prophecy. And Moses says,
"Great, I'm delighted." Here's something everybody,
now, in Catholic theology. It's an old principle. If you want to find it,
you'll see it in Catechism paragraph 1257. Here's the principle. God establishes the
sacraments of his Church. Yes, indeed. He wants them.
He desires them. There are the ordinary means by
which he communicates his grace. Absolutely. But God is not constrained
by his sacraments. He's not limited
to the sacraments. God can operate outside
of the formal ritual and sacramental structure
of the Church. Why? Well, because he's God, and he's determined
these structures, but he can operate outside
of them if he so chooses. And that, I think,
is what we're dealing with in this quirky little story
of Eldad and Medad. Okay. The second issue I want
to look at, and it's related, is this issue of envy. I talked about it last week, how envy is a
capital sin. From it flows
all kinds of trouble. The Middle Ages talked about
"invidia clericalis," clerical envy, as maybe
the worst type of envy, the kind of envy that obtains
within the religious context. Do we have in Joshua's
complaint against Moses a kind of invidia clericalis? "Hey, look, we were
at the ceremony. We followed the ritual precisely. But yet those people,
they get the spirit too?" Well, yeah. Yeah. God can do
what God wants. Why, instead of
being jealous, aren't you rejoicing
as Moses does? I wish everybody
was a prophet. Well, something very similar
on display in the Gospel, which is why the Church couples the Gospel with the story
from the book of Numbers. Listen, the Apostle John
says to Jesus, "Teacher, we saw someone driving out
demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him
because he does not follow us." And Jesus replied,
"Do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a
good deed in my name who can at the same time
speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us
is for us." What's John complaining about? The same thing Joshua complained
about in the Old Testament. "Teacher, hey, there's someone
driving out demons." Well, that sounds
pretty good, doesn't it? This guy's driving out demons. That sounds like a
good thing to do. But we tried to stop him
because he's not one of us. Okay, he's not one of the
formally chosen disciples or apostles of the Lord,
true. Does Jesus want apostles?
Yes. Does he love the
apostolic succession that includes bishops up
and down the ages? Yes. He's all in favor of it. But can God operate
if he chooses to outside of those formal
structures? Yeah. Again, Jesus said, "Don't prevent him. If he's not against us,
he's for us." If demons really are being
expelled, well then, God's grace is operative. Look, what's the final point
of all of this business? I mean ritual and sacrament
and liturgy and vesture and all the formal structures
of the Church. What's the point? That God's grace might come
flooding into the world. Yes, God wants his Church to be the ordinary sacramental
vehicle of that grace. But God can do
what God wants. God can operate outside
of those structures. What comes to my mind here
is something that Cardinal George
always said. He said, "The Catholic Church
has all the gifts that Christ wants
his people to have." That's lovely.
Isn't it? The Church,
there's a fullness. We have the Word.
Yes, indeed. But we also have liturgy.
We have sacraments. We have the Mass,
we have the Eucharist. We have honoring
of the Blessed Mother, we have apostolic succession,
we have the papal authority, we have all the gifts that
Christ wants his people to have. But then Cardinal George added, that doesn't mean that
certain gifts might be better exercised
in other contexts. You know, for example, many Protestant churches,
you've got preaching that puts our preaching to shame. I've read biblical commentaries
from Protestant authors that are marvelous, that have graced me
in an extraordinary way. I've benefited. I think of
a sermon by Billy Graham that's brought me, I think,
some of the grace of God. Okay, good. Maybe some of those gifts
—the Catholic Church has the fullness of what
Christ wants his people to enjoy— but some of them might be
better exercised outside that formal context. Okay. Who am I to say no to it? Who am I to
complain about it? Why should I be
jealous about it? Rather, shouldn't I rejoice wherever the grace of God
is on display? So, remember
the story of Eldad and Medad, and let's overcome any type of
ecclesial jealousy that would put formal structures
above the grace of God. The formal structures serve the grace of God,
not the other way around. And God bless you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video,
I invite you to share it and to subscribe
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