Fifteen minutes of fame
Ordinary Sunday 30, 28 October, 2001
Fr Neville Connell
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Dental surgeries and doctors' waiting-rooms are not exciting places, though
sometimes one's fellow patients are more than interesting.
But at least they do give the priest, who may not be as in touch with the
'real' world as he might be (or as he is told he might be), the chance to
catch up. I mean that he can while away the waiting time by reading WHO
Weekly, the New Idea, car magazines, home beautiful journals, or if one
wants something highbrow, Womens' Weekly.
I wonder, does the variety of the waiting-room reading matter tell us
something about the particular dentist, doctor or the staff? But I digress.
These magazines, and all others like them, rely on change, on human frailty
and fickleness. Andy Warhol so rightly observed, in a sort of post-modern
creed,"everyone should be famous for fifteen minutes". Have you been famous
yet? The magazines create and destroy people; they turn otherwise but perhaps
talented people into 'celebs', who have their fifteen minutes, but at a cost. How many gifted young people have been destroyed by fame?
Once a man or a woman is a 'celeb', one is newsworthy, one's antics become
interesting, but only until one is superseded, elbowed aside by a newer,
younger, more curvaceous, hunky, outrageous, etc, 'celeb'.
I have gone on a bit, but this world of media-domination, and the
extraordinary effect it has on so many people whose lives seem so dull by
comparison, is the world in which we are called to follow Jesus Christ.
The tension is between self and Jesus.
Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other
a tax collector. The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself,
'I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest
of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax-collector here. I
fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.' The tax-collector stood some distance away not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his
breast and said, 'God be merciful to me, a sinner.'
(Luke 18:9-14).
The one is interested really only in himself, his righteousness and his
religious achievement. The other, the tax-collector, has his mind not on
himself, but on God, and so knows himself to be a sinner. He faced the
truth about himself, and cast himself on God's compassion.
Why is there such emphasis on celebrity and fleeting fame today? It can't
just be because of the instant, worldwide nature of the media today. Is it
because of a great spiritual emptiness and hunger in our people? So that
having turned our backs on God, as so many have done, we can only focus
on ourselves and our achievements, or lack of them?
And when we lack achievements, fill our lives with the apparent achievements
of others; or we fill the emptiness with drugs of one kind or another.
There is very little, if any, room for humility in such a world – for
humble tax-collectors, for instance. Yet Jesus was born in the lowest place,
in anonymity, lived in an obscure middle-eastern village, in a small but
strategically important (to this day) country. A member of a minority
religion in the Roman Empire, that was tolerated by the Romans, and no more.
His preaching, teaching and healing brought him into conflict with his
own religious leaders, which led to a show-trial, physical torture, and his
death as a criminal, between two other criminals. Jesus went meekly to the
Cross. In a way, Jesus was famous, perhaps infamous, notorious even, for more
than fifteen minutes, but seen as a threat to public order, political and
religious power; and for his disciples, at that stage, a puzzle or a
contradiction. Yet, as those disciples reflected on Jesus' life and death,
and the astonishing wonder of his rising from death to a new life with them, they discovered in this extraordinary life and death the seeds of a new way
to live – a way which was present in outline in their own scriptures,
the Old Testament as we know it.
So we read in our First Reading, "The Lord is a judge who is no respecter
of personages. He shows no respect of personages to the detriment of a poor
man, he listens to the plea of the injured party. He does not ignore the orphan's supplication, nor the widow's as she pours out her story."
(Ecclus 35:12-14).
This new way to live captured St Paul, a rising young rabbi, a 'celeb' of
his day, and turned him inside out, so that he gave himself totally to Jesus,
and proclaimed this new way of life on earth, and its goal, Heaven.
A way of life which gave him courage to face the truth about himself because
he knew he was loved – Jesus has died for him as an act of love. A way
which gave him courage to let the things of self-centredness, pride, and
so-called achievement die in order that he might find true wholeness
in Jesus.
Which gave us these wonderful words at the end of his life, from our
second reading, "My life is already being poured away as a libation, and
the time has come for me to be gone. I have fought the good fight to the
end; I have run the race to the finish; I have kept the faith; all there
is to come now is the crown of righteousness reserved for me, which the
Lord, the righteous judge will give to me on that Day; and not only to me
but to all those who have longed for his Appearing."
St Paul was so human as his letters make so clear; he comes across as a
rather prickly man at times. But he knew himself, and he suffered for it
as part of his suffering for others with Jesus, filling up the sufferings
of Christ.
We Christians today, as we have been many times before, not least in
the first centuries of the Church, are the counter-culture. We are not
called to be 'celebs'. And as St Paul prayed for those who did not come
to his defence, so must we pray for those are made into 'celebs' or want
to be 'celebs'. They need Jesus, as do we.
We will, with St Paul, share the Cross of Jesus simply by saying that
there is another way, and living it. The way of compassionate self –
acceptance and service, all in the name of the power of Jesus' rising
to new life.
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