Teachability and teachables

We have been thinking about the theme of teachability in the last few weeks - docibilitas - and reflecting on what is means to say 'yes' and 'thank you' to God every moment of our lives.  If, however, we need to be teachable, what is it God intends to teach us? If, moreover, we need to say 'yes' to God, what is it we are saying 'yes' about? 

The gospel of today and indeed of yesterday shed further light on these questions. What is the mistake of the Sadducees in today's gospel? It is not so different from the mistake of the Pharisees in yesterday's gospel: it is the error of judging eternal things by temporal things. It is the mistake of evaluating heavenly things by earthly things. 

In today's gospel, the Sadducees try to reduce to absurdity the argument in favour of a resurrection. If a woman married seven brothers one after the other, they argued, whose wife would she be at the resurrection of the dead? But the problem here is not in the question: it is in the assumptions of the question, and mainly in the assumption that marriage is an institution that applies to our life in eternity. In other words, the Sadducees assume that the necessities of this life overhang those of the next. At least it is a very human error. It is as human as the populist versions of heaven with their cotton-candy clouds. 

But it is also a failure of imagination, not to say faith. It is a failure to imagine that the realities of God might far outstrip our limited realities. The same could be said of the Pharisees in yesterday's gospel who laughed at Jesus' scorn of money. Their assumption was not so much that the realities of this life overhang those of the next but that human mastery of the realities of this life - ni this case money - is a foregone conclusion. Are we in control of our possessions or are our possessions subtly in control of us?

It has rightly been said that money is a good servant but a wicked master. Our problem today is that not only are we mistaken about ability to be in control of our money, we make the same error with regards to all our sources of power: technology, politics, sex. All those things by which we aspire to dominate the world or craft our own destiny bite us back badly. So much for the laughing Pharisees. 

These two lessons, therefore, marks the gospel today and yesterday. The lessons are simple but easy to forget. The first is: do not judge the next life by the standards of this life; judge this life by the standards of the next. See this life in the light of eternity. Likewise, the second lesson is: do not think we are captains of our fate, at least not like the Pharisees did. We make our world but our world makes us too, and tries to refashion us in its own image.

Thus, finally, we come back to the importance of docibilitas: if we are to avoid these errors of Sadducee and Pharisee alike, we must be teachable with respect to God and not with respect to the standards of the world. We must try to see things as God sees them, and not as the world sees them. 

It is to God that we must say 'yes', not the world. Of course, in our concrete lives, the dividing lines are so often unclear. We need not only docibilitas, therefore, but also discernment. 

But that is for another blog...