­For the past Sundays Jesus has been shocking the disciples by showing himself as the “The Just One,” as in today’s First Reading:

He is telling them and us the most intimate fact of his life.

First, the setup. People known as “the wicked” practiced what we could call a version of childish self-interest. They say the equivalent of the following:

Look at this “righteous one.” He thinks he is so wonderful. Let’s use his high opinion of himself and “test it.” Let us see how revilement and torture will affect him. Let us see what a slow death will do to someone supposedly so patient and gentle.

The First Reading quotes these “evil ones” as saying, sarcastically, doesn’t this Just One claim that “God will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes”? We’ll see.

So, they practice mockery and cruelty, all based on self-deception.

Mockery: “If he says he is so wonderful, if he has God on his side, surely he will pass our little test. We are just conducting an ‘interesting experiment’.”

Translation: he’s on the wrong side, kill him.

Cruelty: “He thinks he is so holy. We will give him torture, revilement, and a shameful death. This is just reasonable research, to see how he will react.”

Translation: holiness is all a sham, a way for people to get what they want. Well, we want him dead.

Self-deception: we do not need this God stuff. We base our lives in what is real.

Translation: we are more important than God and this Jesus H. Christ. Self-interest will always win.

All these are seductively false. No human being can become truly and freely human unless he or she puts God in first place, valuing everything else in relation to God’s love—even power, even wealth, and especially pride.

The disciples, out of confusion, engage in a long argument about which of them is the greatest! It is as if they are children fighting for the best toys.

Instead of this, Jesus says in the Gospel that, in fact, the Son of God was going to be condemned to this shaming torture, the one that the wicked had planned, and would be killed. It would look exactly as if God did not care.

  “This is what I am going to do,” he says. I will be saying “I love you,” to my Father. But I will do it by not resisting insults and humiliating death, because I love God above these things. And I love the world, and everything in it.

And I love you, with the fullness and warmth and generosity of God’s everlasting love.

Even if it is hard for us to believe, God’s promise is that good can emerge out of suffering and death. Ultimately it seems that good can come only from these.

So, in the end, shocking or not, God does defend us and deliver us from the hand of our foes!