Optional Memorial of Saint Callistus I, pope and martyr

St Callistus, patron saint of
Catholic cemeteries

 Lectionary: 471

So many people were crowding together 
that they were trampling one another underfoot.
Jesus began to speak, first to his disciples,
“Beware of the leaven–that is, the hypocrisy–of the Pharisees.

Trained as I was in the early 1970's to pay attention to context, I have to notice the first words of today's gospel. Saint Luke says people were "crowding together" and "trampling one another underfoot." This sounds like catastrophic success. Recently an extremely popular entertainer condoned the excesses of an excited crowd; and ten people died of "compression asphyxiation" when a hysterical mob rushed the stage.  

We can hope Luke was using hyperbole, and Jesus's followers were not that excited. But we should notice the Lord is not carried away by his apparent success, or by the crowd's enthusiasm. Rather, he chooses that moment to warn his disciples about hypocrisy. 

Success is a great invitation to hypocrisy. It often induces a godlike feeling of achievement, accomplishment, and power. One's efforts and personhood seem validated. "I am someone!" they might declare to any bystander, whether their achievement be the defeat of an enemy or a nothing-but-net basketball goal. Some will crow about winning the lottery when they did virtually nothing but buy a ticket. Hypocrites can use even a loss to make something of nothing, and campaign for public office on their lack of achievement. 

And, on this feast of the patron saint of Catholic cemeteries, it is that nothing we're concerned about; the nothingness of having been, until quite recently, no one. For my being is entirely contingent. I came about through the encounter of a man and woman who had little idea of what, or who, I might be. I was never necessary. 

Vladimir Nabokov began his autobiography, Speak, Memory with 

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light, between two eternities of darkness. 

Tristram Shandy, in Lawrence Stern's novel, comically complained about that moment when his distracted mother-to-be asked his laboring father if he had remembered to wind up the clock: 

"I wish either my father or my mother or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me..." 

That dreadful nothingness, wearing the mask of Death, will return when I take my last breath. In the face of it and with defiance both exaggerated and hopeless, do I dare to celebrate my feeble success?

"Beware of the leaven–that is, the hypocrisy–of the Pharisees. There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the darkness will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed on the housetops.

Success is more often the result of circumstances and dumb luck. For everyone who hits the jackpot there are millions who failed because they would not quit after succeeding. They heard the promise of a false god, "Trust the Force, Luke." Hypocrites and successful persons fear the revelations that prove they are no better than anyone else. 

James Finley, in his book Merton's Palace of Nowhere, (which I recommend to everyone) cites the Trappist Monk,

A few years ago, a man who was compiling a book on success wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it happened that I had once written a bestseller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same thing again. 

If I had a message to my contemporaries," I said, "It was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. I heard no more from him and I am not aware that my reply was published with the other testimonials.