Jesus said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave. Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” So they went off and preached repentance. The Twelve drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. (Mark 6.11-3)
In 1987, twenty-two-year-old Charlie Sheen starred in the Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street, in which he played an up-and-coming stockbroker who wants to work for a wealthy and unscrupulous corporate raider, a role played by Michael Douglas. In the movie, Douglas speaks to a group of investors, offering his credo in these words, “The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
For the greater part of the movie, Sheen believes those words, going to work for the corporate raider, almost losing his soul in the process. Only at the end does Sheen realize that greed is not good, turning on his mentor and recording an exchange that incriminates Douglas. The movie ends with Sheen in the car with his parents as they take him to the New York City Courthouse to pay for his crimes, his parents telling him that he has redeemed himself by correcting his course.
At the heart of the movie is the question, “How do you measure success?” For a while, Sheen thinks success means having an American Express card, a penthouse on Manhattan’s East Side, and an office with a view. Measuring success in this way, he is willing to cut corners and to make compromises, crossing the line until his conscience resurfaces.
Some years ago, the composer and musician Peter Buffett, who also happens to be the son of billionaire Warren Buffett, urged college grads to recalibrate their understanding of success, pointing out that success based on money and career advancement can be a dangerous trap. “Those things can be taken away by circumstance. Markets can crater; companies can fold; careers can stall or vanish altogether. And if that happens,” he asked, “what becomes of self-esteem and peace of mind?”
In the end, Buffett said, we need to think more about what we accomplish in the world than about how the world does or does not reward us. “Sure, money is nice; a hot career feels good,” he wrote. “But we don’t really own those things; we rent them, and they can always be withdrawn. What do we own?” he asked. “Our talents, our discipline, our determination to make a difference . . . our hearts and minds.”
It is a good insight, one that comes to many people many years down the road, after they have tried the Wall Street version of success, only to find disappointment and dissatisfaction, realizing late in the game that they have spent their lives running after fool’s gold. Hence, Buffett’s call to recalibrate, meaning to get back on course after having gone the wrong way. It is what the Scriptures call conversion.
Today, those scriptures offer us an important message, as they always do, as Rabbi Jesus sends his twelve followers into the neighboring communities of Galilee, asking them to do as he has done, healing the sick and removing unclean spirits from people possessed with these inner maladies. Before they leave, he gives them guidelines, instructing them to take little for the journey, only the tunic on their back and the sandals on their feet. They also may have a walking stick to support them when the road has been long. Otherwise, they are to depend on the goodwill of those whom they meet, their food and lodging given to them by hospitable people.
Rabbi Jesus is clear. His followers are not to take any food, no luggage, and no money, only faith in God to provide for their needs. In a word, they are to travel light, bringing with them the good news of a God who loves and cherishes his children, wanting their burdens lessened and their suffering mitigated. That is their purpose and their objective.
It is interesting, as well, to see that Rabbi Jesus offers a different perspective on success. “Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet,” he says, telling them to move on to others who hopefully will be more responsive to the message.
Unlike other people in the world, the Rabbi does not equate success with numbers, not the number of those who listen, not the number of those healed, not the number of those who are freed from demonic forces. Simply stated, with Rabbi Jesus, there is no spread sheet.
Admittedly, this is a very difficult concept for many of us, consumed and obsessed as we are with our spreadsheets, equating our success with numbers, whether it is in a paycheck, in the contacts on our phone, or in our credit rating. We live by the numbers, allowing them to measure for us the rate of our success.
As we might expect, Mother Teresa did not worship the golden calf of numbers. Choosing to imitate the Galilean Rabbi, she never became enraptured by numbers, not the number of people she fed, not the number of dying she helped, not the number of nuns who entered her convent. Once asked the question, “How do you measure the success of your work?” Mother Teresa thought for a moment, a puzzled look on her face, and she replied in this way, “I don’t remember that the Lord ever spoke of success. He spoke only of faithfulness in love. This is the only success that really counts.”
Doubtless her questioner was baffled by her answer, incomprehensible to him that someone such as Mother Teresa was not concerned about numbers. Yet, she was simply doing as Rabbi Jesus instructed his apostles, measuring success by the standard of love, a gold standard far different from our gold standard, where everything and everybody are reduced to numbers. Crowd size. Check amount. Facebook friends.
Occasionally, a person here and there breaks away from the pack, deciding to recalibrate, redirecting their life in a way that is more in accord with the message of Rabbi Jesus. The actor Ralph Fiennes was once asked if his success isolated him from what he was before and from those he loved. With a withering look at the reporter, Fiennes answered, “Success. Well, I don’t know quite what you mean by success.”
He went on, “Material success? Worldly success? Personal, emotional success? The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.”
He added, “I call people ‘successful’ not because they have money or their business is doing well but because, as human beings, they have a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifetime task of collaboration with other human beings–their mothers and fathers, their family, their friends, their loved ones, the friends who are dying, the friends who are being born.”
Ending with a question, he asked, “Success? Don’t you know it is all about being able to extend love to people? Really. Not in a big, capital-letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.” Knowingly or unknowingly, with those words, Fiennes encapsulated the essence of the message of the Galilean Rabbi, who was never bothered by the size of the crowd and never kept a list of all the people he had healed.
Truth be told, when the end came for him, his life looked anything but successful, at least if measured in the way that we define success. He died with nothing to his name but the shirt on his back, crucified with two criminals, roundly mocked as he struggled to breathe, no one taking his side as his wounds bled onto the ground. This did not look like a success story by an stretch of the imagination.
And yet, as time would prove, his life was successful far beyond anyone’s imagining, his message repeated two thousand years later, his name revered across the globe, and his way of life replicated as near as possible by people in every age who espouse a far different understanding of success than the world’s definition of success. When love is the measure of the success of a person’s life, the Galilean’s success was off the charts.
For us who would follow in his footsteps, the measure of our success will not be determined by the typical numbers we hear hyped all around us, but only by our capacity to love others, especially the impoverished, the imperfect, and the invisible. When our aim is to love as Rabbi Jesus loved, then success is defined, not by the size of our bank accounts, but by the size of our hearts.
Today, the scriptures remind us that as the Rabbi sent out his followers to nearby places, he did not put quotas before them or monetary returns. Instead, he shifted their focus from numbing numbers to immeasurable love, instructing them to cure the sick and to drive out demons. Everything else would take care of itself, or, better said, everything else would be taken care of by his Heavenly Father.
In a world geared towards a zero sum game, where there are only winners if there are losers, the Rabbi puts before us another way, a radical recalibration that, if followed, results in everyone winning.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 