Elijah and the Ba'als

Oh, the joys of today's first reading!

Elijah puts the prophets of the Ba'als (read: pagan gods) to shame as he proves that their idols are insignificant figments of folklore and imagination.

After much self-mortification, dancing, and begging, their sacrifice remains a chunk of meat upon unlit timbers.  Elijah taunts them:

"Call louder, for he is a god and may be meditating,
or may have retired, or may be on a journey.
Perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."

Then the narrator lays the smack down:

But there was not a sound;
no one answered, and no one was listening.

BOOM!  That just happened.  No one answered because no one was listening.

Elijah, full of confidence, has the pagans douse his sacrifice in water...not once, not twice, but thrice, as if to say, "Even despite your best efforts to prevent my God from showing up, he's gonna show up, in a big way."

Fire comes down upon the dripping wet sacrifice and consumes the whole thing, even lapping up the extra water that spilled over the sides.

God Almighty, Elohim, Adonai, YHWH, answered.  He answered in a big way.  He was in fact listening.  He always does.

And, as this awesome video reflection from the USCCB points out, perhaps the greatest theme from this reading is that relativism is not OK.  There is a God, and he is the only God.  Inclusivity is not the greatest of all virtues...a critical distinction must always be made between respect for diversity and syncretism.  They are not the same thing, and one is detrimental to the life of the soul.

Diversity is a properly Catholic theme ("Catholic," after all, literally means "universal").  "We, though many, are one body in Christ," St. Paul asserts in Romans 12:5.  The Church, with its one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one mission, is a body that includes peoples from every corner of the earth.  Peoples are different.  Cultures are different, but our faith unites us.  Diversity in this regard builds up and enriches each community.

Syncretism, on the other hand, is the dangerous idea that everyone's ideas are equally valid, so we can simply mash all world religions together and say "we're all serving the same God".  Not true.  While each religion is a particular culture's expression of their search for truth and meaning (and therefore should be respected for what it is), it cannot be held that each is equally as valid as another.

This was not my idea.  This was not the concoction of a whole bunch of Medieval theologians locked up in ivory towers.  This is a philosophical axiom, a first, indisputable principle--the principle of non-contradiction--which, in its simplest form would state: a thing cannot simultaneously be both right and wrong.

So when Jesus says "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6), we have to take him at his word.  He cannot be both lying and telling the truth at the same time.

C.S. Lewis classically summed up this conundrum in his book Mere Christianity:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God" (Lewis, Mere Christianity, London: Collins, 1952, p54f).

Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.  Get to know him.  Make your choice.  Will you follow the bouncing Ba'als, the empty idols this world sets forth as the supreme values, or will you surrender to the God who listens, who cares, who sees your sacrifice and will light you on fire with the power of true love?

Your choice.