I want to call our attention to two major themes from this week’s readings. In the readings from Numbers and Mark’s Gospel, we observe a resonance between Moses’s and Jesus’s prophetic missions. Both accounts describe scenes where a religious elite is perturbed by people blessed with spiritual powers who, the elites fear, do not deserve those powers. Moses and Jesus rebuke their closest followers’ responses and warn them against the errors of jealousy and pride. These stories communicate the first theme of this Sunday’s readings: the Holy Spirit is neither a possession nor a reward; the holy cannot guard it for safekeeping or police who it visits. 

We can think about this first theme from two sides. On one hand, these stories serve as warnings against elitism, spiritual pride, and ecclesiastical dogmatism. After Jesus criticizes his disciples for trying to stop these vigilante exorcists, he issues them a series of remarkably stern warnings. It would be better for each of you to be drowned in the sea’s abyss, he tells the very people he had chosen to found the Church, than to disrupt the work of the Holy Spirit carried out by “these little ones.” It is pride to believe that one knows better than God who should be visited by the Holy Spirit. Even the holiest people, perhaps especially the holiest people, are liable to forget that the Holy Spirit works through them and in spite of their undetected “failings” and “hidden flaws” (Psalm 128). Today’s readings, then, should recall religious leaders to humility and to an openness to learn from new sources and witnesses of the Spirit’s works. 

Considered in a different light, however, these scenes of rebuke should not just warn but encourage us. The author of Numbers describes YHWH as “taking” the Spirit from Moses and redistributing it to others. Far from feeling aggrieved by loss, though, Moses expresses a wish that YHWH would take all the Spirit from him so that “YHWH would bestow the Spirit on them all!” Besides anticipating Christ’s commending of his spirit into God’s hands (Luke 23:46), Moses’ sentiment challenges us to a courageous, selfless, and communal faith: a faith not necessarily marked by an anointed feeling of God’s proximity to the self, but rather by the conviction that the Spirit must exist as the open community of all God’s people. Moses and Christ model a faith that can withstand being “forsaken” by God (Deuteronomy 3:26-3:28; Matthew 27:46) and still trust that the Spirit is working through others to create the Kingdom of God. Their examples embolden us to trust that even in those times when we cannot feel God’s presence in our own lives, the Spirit lives and creates through others. Those who proclaim the good news are also called to be witnesses to it.  

The second theme I’d like to highlight – what it means to lead a fulfilling and virtuous life – struck me primarily in James’s epistle, in Psalm 128, and in the final verses of the Gospel reading. When I first considered the relationship between these readings, I perceived a tension. Psalm 128 seems to suggest that there is no friction between adhering to God’s commandments and leading a wise, happy life – the virtuous life simply is the happy one, as Aristotle teaches (Nicomachean Ethics). Yet, in James, it is the poor and innocent who suffer, while the rich, guilty of deceiving and cheating their laborers, enjoy power and comfort. Further, in the Gospel from Mark, Jesus seems to be telling his disciples that adhering to God’s will may require them to voluntarily undergo lifelong suffering. The New Testament readings seem to throw into question the prudence – in this life, at least – of following God’s commandments. 

However, further thought has cautioned me from drawing too sharp a contrast between the Psalm and the later readings. It would be mistaken to juxtapose Psalm 128 as an ethics of the good life with an ascetic morality of the afterlife in James and Mark. After all, the suffering of the poor in James and the imaginary acts of self-mutilation in the Gospel are presented as genuine moral harms. If we return to the context of the New Testament readings, we can see that the grave sin we are being warned about is prioritizing the isolated self over the Spirit’s construction of the Kingdom of God. The rich usurp the bonds of communal reciprocity by exploiting their workers, and the Apostles are at risk of vainly attempting to monopolize and steer the works of the Spirit. In both cases, Christ and the author of James express in the strongest possible terms that well-being exists only in the communion of the Holy Spirit. We should have the achievement of this communion always as our foremost goal: this, not our individual happiness considered in isolation, is what we strive for when we genuinely strive to be virtuous.

Taking this communal perspective of virtue into account, the words of Psalm 128 take on a new shade of meaning. We don’t follow God’s commandments simply because they keep us pure and holy. An individualistic pursuit of self-purification, in fact, is a dangerous misunderstanding of what virtue is. God’s laws are God’s laws because they are the principles of a just community, and building that community just is what it means to lead a virtuous and fulfilling life. (For an important account of why virtue always has to be conceived in communal relations of giving and receiving, see Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals.) Bearing in mind that the Psalms have always been conceived as communal prayers for the rites of the faithful, we should see Psalm 128, too, as an encouragement to solidarity. What is good for all of us, the psalmist tells us, is good for each of us.

“Holy Spirit Prayer” of St. Augustine

Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit,
That my thoughts may all be holy.
Act in me, O Holy Spirit,
That my work, too, may be holy.
Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit,
That I love but what is holy.
Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit,
To defend all that is holy.
Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit,
That I always may be holy.

One of the clearest symptoms today of how our communal life is morally disturbed is the system of mass incarceration. Premised on a pathological conception of individual accountability, the carceral system and its associated structures recognize the value of community only in the most sadistic fashion: they know that individuals suffer when they are deprived of defining networks and relations. The Abolitionist Law Center is working toward dismantling mass incarceration and creating community-based transformative justice as a viable alternative to the institutions we have in place now. The ALC deserves our support, our voices, and our time!