Tag Jesus

The Scandal of False Opposition

Steve Beckham 4 Comments

Mark 9:38-50

In George Eliot’s wonderful book, Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke asks a question that I keep coming back to over and over again.  “What do we live for,” she asks, “if it’s not to make life less difficult for each other?”  

That’s a powerful question, and if you take nothing else home with you today, I hope you take that.  I hope you let that question live with you.  What do we live for, if it’s not to make life less difficult for each other?

It seems like so often in life too many of us go out of our way to do just the opposite.  We make life more difficult, more challenging, more contentious, often without even intending to.  

In the ninth chapter of Mark, there’s a moment when the disciples made life more difficult for someone and they wanted Jesus to approve what they had done.  John, the disciple, came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us.”   

Think about that for a minute.  Someone was freeing people from spiritual oppression or possession—in the name of Jesus, no less—and they tried to stop him.  Because…?  Because he was not part of their group.  In the eyes of the disciples he wasn’t properly authorized to use the name of Jesus, I guess.

The way Jesus responded to this probably surprised his disciples, and  I can’t help but think he was maybe just a little bit exasperated when he told them, “Don’t stop him!  No one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.  Whoever is not against us is for us!  If someone does something as simple as giving you a cup of water in the name of Christ which you bear, they’re helping, not hurting.  Nobody loses God’s favor for helping others.”

That seems pretty clear, but Jesus has more to say.  He really wants them—and us—to be more aware of this human habit we have of creating opposition where there isn’t any, just like the disciples did when they told the non-disciple to stop casting out demons in Jesus’ name because he wasn’t a member of the Disciple Club.  

“If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,” said Jesus, “it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”  That’s how his words are translated in the Updated Edition of the NRSV and in a number of other English translations.  In some translations, he says, “If you cause one of these little ones to stumble…” which is a more accurate translation but still doesn’t really give us the whole sense of what Jesus is talking about.

The Greek word in question here is skandalise.  In its most common sense, it means to cause someone to stumble or to trip someone.  It comes from the word skandalon which gives us our English word scandal, but it’s not an exact equivalent.  A skandalon is a stumbling block or a trip wire.  It’s something that trips you up, slows you down, stops you, or springs a trap.   

The late René Girard said that in Mark’s Gospel this term is being used by Jesus in a very particular way to describe a very common dynamic in our relationships with each other.  He said that we “scandalize” each other in any number of ways by creating almost endless small rivalries which lead to blaming and scapegoating.  

I saw an short stick-figure animation the other day that was a perfect example of this.  The first character said, “Dang.  I spilled orange juice all over myself.  You never tighten the lid properly.” “Never?” said the other character.  “You’re saying I always, in every instance in my entire life, fail to screw the lid all the way down?”  “Yes.  The orange juice, the milk, the aspirin bottle… you never put the cap on right.”  “Well maybe the real problem is that you insist on shaking things without checking to make sure the cap is secure.”

Sound familiar?  They are “scandalizing” each other.

René Girard said that all these little contests of will are the “scandals” that Jesus is referring to and that we “scandalize” each other all the time in any number of ways, often without even noticing it.  These “scandals” create tension and anxiety in our relationships and they can escalate if they’re not addressed right away.  We carry that anxiety and tension out into the world with us where it joins in the great cloud of everyone else’s anxiety and tension.  

Think of road rage.  It may start with something small, one car not letting another merge into a lane, or one car cutting in front of another, but as we’ve seen far too often, with the wrong people in the wrong mood on the wrong day it can quickly escalate into something violent that puts everyone on the road at risk.

We scandalize others and are scandalized by others, colliding with each other in what Girard calls a cycle of mimetic rivalry which we keep reflecting back and forth at each other. Eventually, says Girard, our mimetic rivalry becomes contagious and our anxiety can all too easily become a kind of violent potential energy looking for a place to land, or, more specifically, a designated victim who will be the scapegoat that releases the tension.

We fall into this mimetic rivalry naturally enough, but there are forces in our world that encourage it for their own profit.  Politicians and certain news organizations, for instance, often manufacture or exaggerate a problem to serve as the target of our anxieties so they can then portray themselves as the ones who have the solutions—solutions which almost always involve scapegoating someone else.

This was the dynamic Hitler was using when he convinced the German people that the Jews were the source of their problems.  This is the dynamic some of our own politicians are using when they stir up antagonism toward immigrants, or even the other party.   

“If one of you scandalizes one of these little ones who believe in me, the ones with less power or resources or stature, it would be better for you if a great millstone—the Greek actually says the millstone of a donkey, a millstone so large you need a donkey to turn it—it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea,” said Jesus.  In other words, if you do something inadvertently or intentionally that traps someone else into a cycle of mimetic rivalry, especially if it’s someone with less social currency than you have, you’re sinking yourself and that other person into a very deep sea of trouble.

Jesus wants us to know that it starts in our bodies.  He wants us to understand that this mimetic rivalry is a very physical thing.  

“If your hand scandalizes you, cut it off.  It’s better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to Gehenna.  If your foot trips you up, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into Gehenna.  And if your eye scandalizes you, pluck it out.  It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.  I’ll say more about Gehenna in a moment.

Now let’s be clear.  Jesus is not advocating that we maim ourselves in any way.  A lot of people are really troubled by this passage, and a lot of pastors hate to preach on it.  One pastor asked his adult Sunday School class to think about which Sunday would be good for inviting their friends to church and one woman said, “Any Sunday except pluck-your-eye-out Sunday.”

She has a point.  It’s a scary text and it could put people off.  But it’s important to remember that Jesus is using hyperbole here.  He uses these very graphic images to hammer home the point.  The cycle of mimetic conflict begins in your body.  If your hand reaches for things that don’t belong to you, teach it to open up in gratitude for the things you do have.  If your hand all-too-easily balls itself into a fist, teach it to relax and reach out to others with understanding and compassion.  Metaphorically cut off that angry hand and give yourself one that’s peaceful.  If your foot keeps stepping into trouble, give yourself a foot that knows a better path.  If it keeps ending up in your mouth, well that’s a different problem, but maybe give yourself a more patient tongue.  If your eye keeps looking at others with inappropriate desire, retrain it to look on the world with genuine love and appreciation.

Mimetic rivalry and mimetic desire begin in your body.  And your body can be trained.  And healed.

Thich Nat Hanh, the great spiritual teacher once said, “My anger lives in my body but it will do no harm if I do not direct it at anyone.  When you say something really unkind, when you do something in retaliation, your anger increases.  You make the other person suffer, and he will try hard to say or to do something back to get relief from his suffering.  That is how conflict escalates.  I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight…I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.”

 If we don’t learn to stop this scandalizing that we fall into all too easily, the penalty is pretty severe.  And it’s self-inflicted.  “Better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna, where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.”

Many of our translations say “thrown into hell,” but the Greek word here is Gehenna, not Hades or Sheol, and it is a very specific place.  Gehenna was the nickname of the Valley of Hinnom, a ravine running along the south side of Jerusalem.  It was believed to be cursed because, allegedly, children had been sacrificed to the Canaanite god Moloch there in one of the darker chapters of Israel’s history.  In the time of Jesus, this ravine, Gehenna, had become the city dump.  In addition to all kinds of refuse, corpses of animals were dumped there as were the bodies of criminals and nameless beggars. 

Jesus is telling us that if we keep scandalizing each other, if we don’t teach ourselves to escape these mimetic cycles of antagonism and anxiety, we will be sending ourselves to the trash heap, and I suppose that is a kind of hell.  The mimetic repetitive cycle where we keep mirroring our anxieties off each other, this scandalizing is the worm that never dies and the fire that is never quenched.  

But there is a way out.  “Everyone will be salted with fire,” said Jesus.  “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”  Salt, in his time, was medicine.  It was the number one antibiotic.  Salt was used to treat infection.  And it burned like fire, but it worked.  Salt also transforms things.  If you put salt in your food as you’re cooking, it doesn’t just season it, it changes the chemical composition of it because salt is a mineral, not a seasoning.  It transforms the food and makes it something different.  “Have salt in yourselves,” said Jesus.  “Burn out this contagious infection of antagonism so you can be at peace with one another.  Be transformed.”

Be at peace.  Be at peace with each other and with yourself.  Do your best to lower the temperature and reduce the anxiety around you.  And the anxiety within you.  “Be kind,” said author Wendy Mass.  “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”  

Be kind.  Greet the world with an expansive and welcoming attitude—not one of exclusion or antagonism or defensiveness.  Help people whenever and however you can.  Or at the very least, don’t be a stumbling block when you see someone else helping people. 

After all, what do we live for, if it’s not to make life less difficult for each other?  Especially if we can do it in the name of Jesus.

A Different Kind of Fire

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

It has been a stressful week in Springfield, Ohio.  A middle school was closed on Friday and two elementary schools were evacuated because of bomb threats.  Yesterday, three medical facilities in Springfield were targeted with more bomb threats.  The police have beefed up their staffing because racist threats of violence against Springfield’s Haitian immigrant community have been circulating and there is concern that these threats could escalate into actual violence.[1]  

Things were already a bit uneasy in Springfield, a mostly blue-collar city of about 60,000 residents.  The city’s manufacturing economy was hit hard by the Covid shutdown and economic renewal, while steady, has been moving more slowly than they had hoped.  Over the past few years about 15,000 Haitian immigrants have been drawn to the city by new factory jobs and relatively affordable housing, but some of the longtime residents, mostly white, have been antagonistic to the newcomers, accusing them of driving up housing costs and straining city services.

All of this came to a head last week when a neo-Nazi group fabricated a story about the Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ household pets.  This racially inflammatory story moved from the social media platform Telegram to X where it was picked up by Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance who repeated it as part of a verbal jab Vice President Harris even though the story had already been debunked by the mayor of Springfield and police officials.  When former President Trump repeated the story during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, the lie about immigrants eating cats and dogs immediately became the source of countless jokes and memes, but the people of Springfield aren’t laughing, especially not the Haitian community.  Some of them are afraid to leave their homes.

“How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!  And the tongue is a fire,” we read in the chapter three of James.  “The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of life, and is itself set on fire by hell —a restless evil, full of deadly poison.  With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people, made in the likeness of God.”

Words have power.

This week we observed a horrible anniversary, the commemoration of an event that upended our world and set enormous changes in motion.  Coming, as it did, on the day after an important presidential election debate, this anniversary was overlooked by many, but in many ways the explosive shock of that day is still reverberating throughout our nation and the world.

It was twenty-three years ago, September 11, 2001, when terrorists violently assaulted our religious, social, economic, and political structures by crashing three planes into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon.  Analysts think that the fourth plane, which was heroically brought down by its passengers, was intended to crash into the US Capitol building or the White House. 

The heinous action of the terrorists was born in words. It was a statement, a word of hatred, self-righteousness, religious piety and vitriol, but its inarticulate message was incinerated in the flames and destruction of its violence.  How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire.

Words have power.

In the aftermath of that violent act, a lawyer sat down at his computer and wrote a sentence, a 60 word run-on sentence that blurred the line between war and peace, a sentence that led us into the longest war this country has ever known.  On September 18, 2001, that 60-word sentence was adopted by both houses of Congress and signed into law as the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Words have power.

In the Gospel lesson from two weeks ago, some Pharisees and scribes gave Jesus a bad time because his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating.  So Jesus said to the crowd, “Listen and understand:  it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person.  It’s what comes out of the mouth that defiles.  What comes out of the mouth gets its start in the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and racism.  That’s what pollutes.”

Words have power.

In last week’s Gospel lesson, Jesus traveled to the region of Tyre and Sidon.  The people of Israel had a low opinion of the people of Sidon and Tyre, an opinion rooted in a long history of animosity between the two regions.  When a woman from the area asked Jesus to free her daughter from a demon, Jesus insulted her.  “It’s not right to give the children’s food to the dogs,” he said.  He called her a dog.  You have to wonder why he would say such a thing.  

Did Jesus, the same Jesus who was criticized for hanging out with tax collectors and “sinners,” the same Jesus who crossed all kinds of boundaries to embrace all kinds of outcasts, the same Jesus who touched lepers! did this Jesus trek all the way to the heart of Sidon just to insult this poor woman with a racial slur?

Yes.  Yes he did. Jesus schlepped all the way to Sidon to create a teaching moment that his disciples and all his followers forever after would not forget.  Words have power.  Especially the ugly ones.

In that moment with that desperate woman, Jesus said aloud what his disciples were thinking.  He wanted them to hear the ugliness of their attitudes out loud.  He led them to the neighborhood of “those people,” the ones who they think are inferior, the ones who they think are cursed.  The ones who, in their understanding, God doesn’t much care for. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that the disciples in particular or Jews in general were xenophobic.  I’m suggesting that almost all of us are to one degree or another.   We humans have a bad tendency to “other” each other.  And we do it with our words.

Words have power.  Words have consequences.

It’s not what goes into the mouth that pollutes, it’s what comes out of the mouth.  It’s from the heart that we vomit up lies, blasphemies, bigotries, othering and racism.  That’s what pollutes us.  That’s what poisons us generation after generation.  

Our words have power.  

At the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his campaign to change the world with an announcement.  He proclaims that the Reign of God is arriving.  Everything that happens in Mark’s gospel pivots around that opening announcement:  The reign of God, the dominion of God, the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy, the kingdom of God—is arriving.  

The announcement, itself, the very language of it, has power.  Jesus doesn’t announce that the Kingdom of God has arrived, but that it is within reach.  The message is that even though Jesus, the Christ has arrived to inaugurate the reign of God, it’s not a done deal.  And maybe it never will be.  The language Jesus uses tells us that the kingdom may always be a work in progress.  

In chapter 8 of Mark, smack in the middle of the gospel, the disciples come to an inflection point, a crossroads.  Mark wants us to understand that if we follow Jesus and try to live his Way, at some point their inflection point will become our crossroads, too.  And it will all hang on a word.  Because words have power.

Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”  It’s an easy question.  What’s the buzz?  What’s the word out there in the crowd?  What do the polls say?

They told him that some people thought of him as John the Baptist.  Others thought of him as Elijah.  They all pretty much agreed that at the very least he was a prophet.  

At this point, the question Jesus is asking is theoretical.  The words are speculative.  The question and the answers are all in the realm of rumor.  It’s about what people are thinking.  It’s a head question and the answers are all nothing more than opinion.

But words have power.  When Jesus redirects the question and asks his disciples point blank, “Who do you say that I am, he puts them on the spot.  Suddenly the question becomes visceral.  And so do all possible answers.  Words have power.  And that power becomes action.

The geographic location where Jesus asks this question is speaking its own words of power.  They are in Gentile territory just outside Caesarea Phillipi, a city famous as a center of pagan worship, most notably worship of the god Pan—a very sexy and earthy deity.  They are at the edge of a city that was reconstructed by and named for the Tetrarch Phillip, the sycophant son of the ruthless Herod the Great.  In an effort to curry favor with his Roman overlords, Phillip also dedicated the city to Caesar, the Roman Emperor, a dictator who claimed to be divine.  On top of all that, Caesarea Phillipi was the place where the Roman legions took their R&R.   And when those same Roman legions marched into Palestine to put down Jewish rebellion, they launched their campaigns from Caesarea Phillipi. 

Here, in a place that confronted the disciples with pagan gods and stared them down with the brute force of its political and military might, here is where Jesus asked them—and asks us—his pointed question:  “Who do you say that I am?”  In the face of the allure of mythical nature religion and all the idols that seduce us, in the face of intimidating political power, in the face of the addictive efficiency of brute force, in the face of a world noisy with rumor and gossip and inuendo, Jesus asks “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter said, “You are the messiah.  The Christ.”  Is that your answer, too?  What does that word mean to you?  Messiah.  Christ.  What consequences come with that word, that identity?

Jesus, apparently, did not like the way Peter and the others interpreted that word.  Messiah.  He told them not to say it.  He told them not to talk about him in those terms.  He didn’t deny that he was the Messiah, but he knew that they were thinking of Messiah in terms of political power.  Coercive clout.  Military might.  Maybe he was worried that they might be thinking of doing something rash and violent—the first century equivalent of  flying planes into Rome’s symbolic towers.  

So he told them to keep quiet.  

Then he told them about the cross.  He told them that if they really were his disciples there would be a cross for them, too. 

Peter didn’t like what Jesus was saying.  Peter was thinking of Messiah as a righteous general who would lead a holy army into a holy war, but Jesus was telling him he wasn’t willing to play that role, that pitting violence against violence was not the way to bring about a world of nonviolence.  So Peter argued with Jesus right there in front of everybody.  

How often do we argue with Jesus because he won’t play the role we want him to play?  How often are we looking for a Messiah who will kick tail and take names and step in and fix everything?  That seems to be what Christian Nationalism is all about, but if Jesus wasn’t willing to do it then, why does anyone think he would be willing to do it now?

In Mark’s gospel, acknowledging Jesus as Christ, living life as a follower of Jesus, means standing in opposition to both the religious and political systems that enrich and empower some while simultaneously creating a permanent underclass of the oppressed and disadvantaged.  The first readers of Mark understood that Jesus was asking for a total commitment to his nonviolent revolution, his transformation and restructuring of the world to bring it into conformity with God’s vision.  

Jesus is still asking that of us.  But he wants us to understand that there are consequences for standing against the powers.  He also, however, wants us to understand that there are consequences for not doing it, for continuing to play along with all the forces of business as usual. 

“What good will it be if you play the game and get everything you want, the whole world even, but lose your soul?  Your very self?  What are you going to get in exchange for selling off your soul in little pieces?  What’s the going rate for that internal eternal essence that makes you uniquely and creatively you?  What’s the market price for the image of God in you? What good will it be at the end of the day if you’re surrounded by every comfort but you’ve lost everything that makes you really you, everything in you that shines with the likeness of God? 

Be careful how you answer.  Words have power.  

[1] ABC News, September 14, 2024

Body Language

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

John 6:51-58

“Very truly, I tell you,” said Jesus, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  This is such graphic language.  Well, let’s be honest.  It’s more than graphic, it’s cannibalistic.  Eat my flesh?  Drink my blood?  It’s no wonder the Ioudaioi—those Jews who were challenging Jesus at every turn—it’s no wonder they found what he was saying confusing and even repulsive.  

Just to be clear, the word translated here as “flesh,” sarx in the Greek, essentially means meat.  And blood. . . well, blood is blood is blood and it is absolutely forbidden for an observant Jew to eat or drink it, or even to eat meat with the blood still in it.  “For the life of the flesh is in the blood,” says God in Leviticus, “and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar, for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement. Therefore I have said to the Israelites, ‘No person among you shall eat blood, nor shall any alien who resides among you eat blood.”[1]  That’s the rule for the blood of sheep and goats and cattle and every other animal, so for Jesus to tell people crowding around him that they need to eat his flesh and drink his blood would be beyond shocking.

So why does Jesus use such scandalous language here in the sixth chapter of John? 

The rhetoric of cannibalism had a long tradition in the ancient world because it was particularly effective for its shock value when someone really wanted to drive home a point. In the 26th chapter of Leviticus we find a series of blessings and curses that are a sort of codicil to the covenant between God and the people of Israel.  If the people remain faithful to the covenant,  God will make the land rich, the trees will yield plentiful fruit, enemies will be routed, the rains will fall in due season, and so on.  One of my favorite things God says here is “I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhor you.”  Not exactly warm and fuzzy. 

On the flip side, the curses for breaking the covenant are pretty severe:  fields that don’t produce, famine, wild animals killing children and destroying the fields and vineyards, and finally the ultimate curse, being attacked by enemies and held under siege so that “you shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.”

Torah repeats the curse in Deuteronomy[2], and Jeremiah and Ezekiel both expand on the threat of cannibalism as a reminder to the people that being unfaithful to the covenant has penalties[3].  

The prophet Micah uses the rhetoric of cannibalism as a sharp polemic to chastise the unfaithful rulers of Judah and Israel:

Listen, you heads of Jacob

                  and rulers of the house of Israel!

         Should you not know justice?—

                  you who hate the good and love the evil,

         who tear the skin off my people

                  and the flesh off their bones,

         who eat the flesh of my people,

                  flay their skin off them,

         break their bones in pieces,

                  and chop them up like meat in a kettle,

                  like flesh in a caldron.[4]

Yikes.

The invective of cannibalism was common throughout the Greco-Roman world and was most commonly used to denounce treachery, betrayal, faithlessness, factionalism and threats to society.  Homer described the warriors arrayed against Troy as blood-thirsty predators.  Agamemnon’s vicious fighting style is compared to “wolves, who tear flesh raw” and  Achilles’ rage is so intense that he desires to cut up Hector’s flesh and eat it raw.  In a historically later example, Cicero vilified Mark Antony saying, “he gorged himself with the blood of citizens.”

The upshot of all this is that the people listening to Jesus have heard this kind of jargon before, but not the way Jesus is using it.  Jesus, here in chapter six of John, takes this all this unsavory language and subverts it—he reverses its direction.  Instead of a curse for breaking the covenant, eating his flesh and blood become the seal and sign of a new covenant with God through him.  Instead of being a threat of the worst kind of destruction, his flesh and blood bring the promise of eternal life. Instead of fearing the gruesome penalty for causing strife, divisions and factions in society, his followers will be bonded into a profound unity with him and with the Father, a unity so deep that “those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.”

When Jesus refers to himself as “the living bread that came down from heaven” then goes on to say “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world,” this is obviously sacramental language.   He is pointing to the cross, but also beyond the cross to the table of companionship and the eucharist that binds us to Christ and to each other.

When he describes himself as “the living bread come down from heaven” and asserts that he gives his flesh “for the life of the world,” he is claiming for himself the mystical descriptions of John’s prologue in the first chapter.  He is telling us that he is the Word who became flesh and lives among us.  He is telling us that he is the one in whom there is life, a life that is the light of all humanity.  He is, in short, telling us that he is the Cosmic Christ, the Word who was with God, the logos who brought all things into being.

Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg wrote, “[W]hen Jesus referred to his body and blood, he meant the bread and wine should become, in the minds and hearts of his followers, fully associated with him in the entire spectrum of his life – his person, his teachings and his works. In other words, Jesus expected to be fully understood and received through active participation by faith. By faith in Him, the believer would partake of salvation, which is found in Jesus alone and is offered freely to all. So let me summarize. Jesus’ statement about his body and blood is true and no other picture could have made it clearer. His flesh and his blood, meaning Jesus Himself – the whole Jesus – is the only thing that can sustain a human being to life everlasting.[5]”

The central theme of the Gospel of John is incarnation, a word that literally means “in the flesh.”  Christ is the intersection, the nexus between the spiritual and invisible God and the visible material creation.  Jesus, as the Christ, is God’s declaration that God is present in, with, and under all of creation.  The bread and wine of communion is our reminder that Christ is present in, with, and under the everyday things of life that sustain us, that God in Christ is sustaining us and traveling through life with us.  “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them,” said Jesus.

When we share the sacrament of the table, we are reminded that Jesus has bound us together to be the body of Christ, to carry the life that brings light to the world into the world for the life of the world.

 “Both Christ cosmically and Jesus personally make the unbelievable believable and the unthinkable desirable,” said Richard Rohr.  “Jesus Christ is a Sacrament of the Presence of God for the whole universe!”  Rohr went on to say, ““We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, ‘My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.’[6]

[1] Leviticus 17:11-12

[2] Deuteronomy 28:53ff

[3] Jeremiah 19:9; Ezekiel 5:10

[4] Micah 3:1-3

[5] Lizorkin-Eyzenberg, Eli. The Jewish Gospel of John: Discovering Jesus, King of All Israel, p. 97. Jewish Studies for Christians. Kindle Edition.

[6] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

Asking the Wrong Questions

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

John 6:24-35

When I read this morning’s gospel lesson, I was reminded of something Annie Dillard wrote in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a wonderful and thought-provoking little book, by the way, full of wisdom and pithy observations that get right to the heart of things as she thinks about life, and nature.  And God.  Anyway, here’s the part that came to mind as I read this morning’s gospel.  Annie had been listening to a mockingbird singing from her chimney, and she found herself wondering, “What is she saying in her song?”  But then she paused and thought,  “No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formula for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?”  

Why is it beautiful?  That’s a transcendent question.  That’s a question that leads us more directly into an encounter with Christ’s presence in the song the mockingbird sings.  Why is there something in me that finds that lilting melody beautiful?  Why is there something built into me that thrills to life when I encounter beauty?  Why does anything that’s truly beautiful—the song of the mockingbird, the colors of sunrise or sunset—why is it that something that’s truly beautiful creates in us a sense of longing?  

If you start to ask those kinds of questions, you are on your way to encountering the sublime presence of Christ that surrounds us all the time and everywhere.  You’re on your way to what Richard Rohr calls “falling upward” into the Ground of All Being in whom we live, and move and have our being.

You can’t find the right answers in life if you’re asking the wrong questions.  

That’s one of the things that’s happening in today’s gospel; the crowd is asking Jesus the wrong questions.  They had followed him across the lake to the outskirts of Tiberius, and when they got hungry, Jesus fed them—the whole multitude—by sharing out 5 loaves and two fish that a young boy had brought with him.  At nightfall, Jesus slipped off into the hills to be alone for a while and the disciples quietly sailed back home toward Capernaum.  

The next morning, when the crowd saw that Jesus and the disciples were gone, they headed back across the lake to Capernaum to look for Jesus.  And when they found him, the first thing they asked him was, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”

It’s the wrong question.  It doesn’t lead to anything—at least not to anything useful and not to anything Jesus is interested in discussing.  So he cuts to the chase. “I tell you the solemn truth,” he says.  “You are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs, but because you ate the loaves and had all you wanted.”  

He sees right to the heart of their motives.  Our motives.  How often do we seek out God, how often do we come to Christ saying, “Take care of my needs.  Satisfy my hunger.  Fulfill my desire.”?  We may not be saying it out loud, or we may be saying it in very prayerful language, but how often when we come to Jesus are we basically saying, “Jesus do the magic again.  Solve my problem.  Fix my situation.  Fill my hunger.”

“Do not work for the food that perishes,” says Jesus, “but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Human One will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.”  Change your focus, says Jesus.  You’re overlooking what matters.

But do they say, “Tell us more about that food that endures for eternal life.  What is that?  Who is the Human One—is that you?  What are you talking about exactly?”  No, they don’t say any of those things.  Instead, when they realize he’s not going to do the bread trick again and give them a late breakfast, they ask him, “What do we have to do to perform the works of God?” 

This is actually a good question, but they’re thinking about it the wrong way.  They seem to be looking for some secret incantation or special prayer that will enable them to do miracles.  The way they’re thinking about it, it’s a controlling question.  They want to know how they can get God to do what they want.  They want Jesus to teach them the magic trick.  It’s clear that they don’t really understand what they’re asking.  They ask how they can do the works of God, but they don’t even know what the work of God is.

So Jesus once again redirects.  “This is the work of God,” he says.  “Believe in him whom God has sent.” 

And now they’re finally starting to catch on that he’s talking about himself.  So they say to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?”  And then they go on about Moses giving their ancestors manna in the wilderness.  “Bread from heaven” they call it.   It’s more than a little ironic, really.  You want a sign?  Did you not eat your fill at yesterday’s picnic—that little miracle that started with 5 loves and 2 fish?  Have you not seen all the healings?  Once again Jesus has to redirect.

“I tell you the solemn truth,” says Jesus, “it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  

“Well then give us this bread all the time!” That’s their response.  And it sure sounds like they’re still thinking about, well, bread.  Magic bread from heaven, maybe.  But bread.  They asked for the right thing this time, but they’re still thinking of it in the wrong way.  They’re missing the point.  So Jesus spells it out for them.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; the one who comes to me will never go hungry, and the one who believes in me will never be thirsty again.”

Blaise Pascal once said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ.”  Jesus is the bread of life who fills that hunger.  Jesus is the living water who quenches that thirst.  But we won’t come to a useful understanding of what that means if we’re asking the wrong questions or getting distracted with trains of thought that don’t go anywhere.  If we’re just thinking about physical food, we’re going to completely miss the spiritual nutrition that Jesus is providing.  And the irony here is that the spiritual nutrition Jesus brings us can help to feed the physical hunger of the world if we let that spiritual nutrition teach us to imitate his actions in our everyday world.

We tend to think that to believe in Jesus means that we intellectually or emotionally accept certain things about Jesus: that he is the Son of God or God incarnate, or that his death and resurrection somehow erases all our sin.  But to believe in Jesus also means to trust him, to follow his example.

After he fed the 5000 people on the hillside near Tiberias, the crowd that followed him back to Capernaum wanted to know what they had to do to “do the works of God.”  “Well to start with,” he told them, “trust the teacher God has sent you!”  He wanted them to realize that he wasn’t hiding anything or withholding any secrets. That day on the hillside he had shown them exactly how to “do the works of God.”   He took what was available even though it looked like it couldn’t possibly be enough—five loaves and two fish contributed by a boy in the crowd—he took what was available, he gave thanks for it, and he started handing it out.  

I want to share some statistics with you from ELCA World Hunger.  Today, right this very minute, in a world that by God’s grace provides more than enough food for everyone, more than 2 billion people aren’t sure where their next meal will come from.  For as many as 838 million of them, that next meal won’t come at all.  Not today, anyway.  And maybe not tomorrow.  Or the next day.  Two million children die every year from malnutrition.  There is a huge gender imbalance among the hungry:  84.2 million more women and girls face food insecurity than men and boys.  And food insecurity is not just a third world problem.  Seventeen million households in the United States face food insecurity.  Every day.  And yet supplemental food programs are often the first thing on the chopping block when budgets get tight.  

Just this week, the City of Los Angeles decided to discontinue the Rapid Response Senior Meals Program, a program that has been a lifeline for 5800 homebound low-income seniors.  Sixty-year-old Leo Del Rosario is one of the people who counts on that daily meal.  He has not been able to work regularly since he had heart-valve surgery last year.  To cut costs, he moved out of his apartment and has been renting a bedroom in a house.  When asked what he’s going to do without the city-provided meal he said, “Not to be dramatic, but you do what you have to do, right?  There’s always peanut butter.”  He went on to say that he would call on family and friends but try not to be a burden, then he added, “I will pray God’s grace, work hard, and implore City Hall to reconsider.  How we take care of our elderly is a reflection of ourselves and our society.”

How we take care of each other is a reflection of ourselves and our society.  It is also a barometer of our faith.  “The bread of God,” said Jesus, “is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  Sometimes God uses our hands to hands to carry that life to the world. 

When Jesus says that he is the bread of life, he is telling us to swallow him whole, to take him completely into ourselves so that we can be completely complete in him and so that he can be at work in us.  That’s what the sacrament is all about.  It’s a sign—not merely a symbol, but a sign.  It points to Christ.  It tells us what to do.  Take and eat.  Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.  Share.  He wants the deepest level of intimacy possible with us.  He wants us to be completely infused with who he is and what he is about and how he lives in and loves us, and how he lives in and loves the world through us.  He wants to be part of our very cells so that wherever we go, he goes, too.

But we won’t get to that level of intimacy and understanding if we’re always asking Jesus the wrong questions or focusing on the wrong things.  Learning to ask the right questions is vitally important in your own relationship with Jesus, and it’s also hugely important in our life together as followers of Jesus.

What are some of the wrong questions we’ve been asking as a church?   I know I’ve been asking, “Lord, how can we get more people into the church?”  Maybe what I really should be asking is, “Lord, how can we bring the church to more people?” or simply “Lord, who are we missing and why?  What do they need that we can give them?”  

Or maybe we should be asking for something even more basic and broader than that.  Maybe we should be asking, “Jesus, help us to see you more clearly in, with, and under all things.  Help us to see the image and likeness of God in every face we face.  Help us to love them as deeply and completely as you love them.  Help us to fall upward into the fullness of you.  Make us carriers of your compassion.  Help us to see the beauty of your generosity in the world.

And when we hear the mockingbird sing, help us to understand why we find it so beautiful, why it touches our hearts, and what it is we’re longing for.

Silencing the Critic

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Mark 6:14-29

“Power does not corrupt,” said John Steinbeck. “Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”  That seems to be the story of Herod Antipas, at least as he is portrayed in the Gospel of Mark.  Because of his fear of losing face, Herod Antipas has gone down in history not as the king who built the beautiful city of Tiberias or who rebuilt the important trade city of Sepphoris, but as the villain who executed John the Baptist and had his head served up on a platter.  

Mark implies that it was really Herodias, Antipas’ wife, who was responsible for John’s death.  As Mark tells the story, she is the one who pressured Antipas into arresting John the Baptist in the first place, and she is clearly the one who tells her daughter, Salome, to ask for John’s head on a platter as a reward for her enticing dancing.  

John had been preaching and baptizing, calling people to a change of life, but he had also been talking about God’s judgment on the sins of the nation.  In that vein, John had been especially vocal in publicly condemning Herodias and Herod for divorcing their spouses in order to marry each other, a sin that John found particularly egregious because Herodias’s first husband was Antipas’ half-brother, Philip, the tetrarch of the large territory to the north and west of Galilee.   And because the wife Antipas was divorcing was a princess of an important kingdom to the south, this whole situation created more than a little political instability in the region.   

That political instability erupted into a nasty little border war.  In order to marry Herodias, Antipas divorced his first wife, Phasa-el, the daughter of Aretas, the king of Nabatea, which led to a bloody territorial war which proved disastrous for Antipas and his sovereignty in Galilee.  As the war began to get out of hand, the Roman Emperor Tiberius sent Roman troops marching in to reestablish the peace.

Blood had been spilled.  People had died.  Regional political balances had been upset.  

The ancient Jewish historian Josephus also records the beheading of John in his Antiquities of the Jews.  He reports the beheading in a straightforward recital of historic events.  There is no cunning wife or beguiling daughter.  In his account, the unjust arrest and beheading of John is described as a purely political expedient to silence a persistent critic.   

Some tend to read the execution of John the Baptist in Mark as a kind of morality tale, an abbreviated historical novella about a morally compromised aristocracy, one that won’t hesitate to imprison or even murder its critics.  But Mark is also telling us a cautionary political story.  We just don’t hear all the political nuances because we don’t know the history of all the people in the story, a history that would have been very familiar to Mark’s original readers.

The Jews of Palestine had no fondness or real loyalty to the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great called himself a Jewish king, but he was not really Jewish.  He was an Edomite who had begun his career as a brutal enforcer in the Hasmonean dynasty.  The Hasmoneans had defeated the Greek Seleucid colonizers in the Maccabean revolt and, as a result, were much loved.  For a while.  But they became Hellenized, adopting the ways of their former Greek overlords and more or less abandoning their Jewish ways, laws and customs.  

Herod the Great, who was pretty much the equivalent of a mafia boss, rose to power through a combination of brutal force and astute politics.  His father, Antipater the Idumean, was on good terms with Julius Caesar, and Herod, himself, cultivated a friendship with Mark Antony who convinced the Roman Senate that he would be a good choice as a client king to keep the unruly region of Judea under control.  

Herod had nine wives and at least 10 children.  In his will, he divided his kingdom into four parts and arranged for three of his sons to govern in a tetrarchy with one of the sons, Archelaus, being given a double portion.  Antipas was given control of Galilee and Perea.  

One of the ways that the Herodian dynasty preserved its power and perpetuated its authority was through intermarriage that bordered on incest, and Herodias was a perfect example of this.  

Herodias was the granddaughter of Herod the Great.  Her father was Aristobulus, Herod’s son by Mariamne I, who was the last descendant of the Hasmonean dynasty.  After executing her father, Aristobulus, Herod the Great arranged for Herodias to marry Herod II, sometimes known as Herod Philip or Philip the Tetrarch. Herodias and Philip had one child, a daughter named Salome.  The Hasmonean bloodline of Mariamne, Herodias and Salome gave a slight patina of Jewish legitimacy to the Edomite Herodians, but it really wasn’t enough to make serious Jews regard them as genuinely Jewish rulers.

Neither the Hasmonians nor the Herodians paid much attention to the Law or the established rituals of Judaism, and the marriage of Herodias and Antipas was seen by many as an affront to Jewish culture, standards and customs.

It would be easy to write off John the Baptist as a religious zealot who was opposed to divorce and remarriage, but John was more deeply concerned with the political fallout from the marriage of Antipas and Herodias.  John was also attacking the dynastic agenda that the marriage represented, and he was particularly upset with their collaboration with Rome.

John was speaking truth to power, the truth of his people and the truth of the God they served.  He was, as always, inviting even Herodias and Antipas to a change of life.  Mark tells us that Antipas, at least, was beginning to listen: “for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him.  When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him.”  

But Herodias flexed her power.  She wanted her annoying critic silenced once and for all.  And when, in an unguarded public moment Herod told Salome to ask for anything, Herodias saw her chance.  She told her daughter to ask for the head of John the Baptist.

Mark tells us that “the king was deeply grieved.”  But he was backed into a corner of his own making.

The king was deeply grieved.  John’s execution haunted him. Later, when Antipas began to hear reports about Jesus, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was John, raised from the dead.

Nobody likes to hear criticism.  Nobody likes to be told where they are failing or falling short.  Nobody likes to be told that they are on the wrong side in the everlasting struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.

But if we don’t speak up, nothing gets changed.  If we don’t speak up, bad can quickly go to worse.  

Those of us who are called to live in the Way of Jesus, who are called to invite the world to change, are also called to speak truth.  Even truth to power. Even when we know that power will try to silence us.

1 Peter 3:15 tells us, “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,  yet do it with gentleness and respect.”  Good words to remember when we stand up and invite the world to change when we tell the world what we see that needs to be changed. Good words to remember when we challenge the world to abandon self-serving lies and rationalizations so the truth can transform them.  Gentleness and respect.

“For this I was born,” said Jesus when he stood before Pilate, “and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Crossing to the Other Side

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

Mark 4:35-41

  On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

It’s been about three years now since the Covid 19 pandemic retreated enough so that we could begin to gather again in church and other public places.  We spent fifteen months secluded in our homes because a kind of life-storm rose up unexpectedly and caught us off guard and unprepared, a storm created by a virus that flew in from the other side of the world.  That storm has mostly receded now, although we are still dealing with occasional waves,  and maybe it’s just me, but even though it has been three years, it still feels like we haven’t really returned to normal, or at least what normal used to be.

In some ways that’s good.  There was a lot about our old “normal” that needed to be improved.  But in other ways, it’s not at all good.  It feels as if we are still locked into a heightened state of anxiety, and since anxiety always wants a target, we seem sometimes to be taking it out on each other, especially in our politics.

We lost a lot during the pandemic.  Social connections were lost or  strained. Some of our common understanding of how society is supposed to work was lost.  The Church, unable to gather in person in our usual places of worship, lost members in a decline that had already been underway but was exacerbated by the enforced restrictions and now shows no signs of slowing or reversing.  And, of course, millions of lives were lost throughout the world.  

Ever since Covid, we have been sailing through choppy waters toward the shore of a new and unknown reality.  It feels to me that we are somewhat like the disciples in the boat after Jesus calmed the storm.  The storm has stopped, but we are still sitting in the middle of the lake in the dark, bailing out our boat.

Today’s Gospel lesson from Mark lifts up some important things for us to think about as we sail toward a future we can’t really see.  And let’s face it, we’re not going to simply sail back into the way things used to be.  Too much was changed in those 15 months of isolation and these three years of recovery.  

In Mark’s telling of this story of the storm on the sea,  Jesus and his disciples set out in the evening, of all things, to sail across the Sea of Galilee.  A great windstorm blew up and the boat was being swamped.  We know it was a serious storm because even the fishermen who were out on this water all the time were frightened. Through all of this, Jesus was soundly asleep on a cushion in the stern of the boat.  Finally, the disciples cried out, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?!?” That’s when Jesus woke up, then got up and rebuked the storm.  The sea became dead calm, and the disciples, dumbfounded by this new dimension of his power and abilities, were left wondering just who Jesus really is.

When we read or hear these stories, these episodes from the life and ministry of Jesus, it’s natural for us to ask ourselves, “Okay, what does that mean for me or for us?”  It’s always good to try to  imagine how the original listeners heard these gospel stories if we’re able, but we also hope there’s something in the story that we can take home with us, some lesson that fits our lives right here and right now.  That’s why we do this little exercise of preaching and teaching with the gospel every week.

With this particular story, it has been far too tempting for far too long to personalize it a little too much.  And I confess I’ve been as guilty as any preacher out there in doing this.  That sermon goes something like this:  “When storms arise in your life, just remember that Jesus is in the boat with you…even if he’s taking a nap at the moment.  He has the power to quiet the storm.  Maybe he’s asking you, ‘Why are you afraid?  Where’s your faith, pal?’  Muster up some courage.  Maybe it’s your turn to stand up and tell whatever  storm is swamping your boat, ‘Peace!  Be still.’”  

I have preached that sermon.

Listen, there are probably worse ways to go with this story.  We’ve all had moments in our lives when we’ve wanted to join the disciples in yelling, “Teacher, don’t you care that we’re perishing?!?”  I know I’ve been there a few times.  But the fact is, there is something greater at stake in this story than a bromide to help us face our fears.  There is something greater at stake here not just for them in their time, but for us in our time.  But to know what that is, we have to range beyond the boundaries of these six verses.

From the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has been announcing that the kingdom of God is imminent.  Actually, imminent is not quite the right word.  The Greek word is engikken.  It’s often translated as “has come near,” but there is an even greater sense of immediacy in the word than that.  Think of it as a train coming into the station.  It’s not all the way into the station yet but the engine has already reached the edge of the platform.  That’s the sense of it.  The kingdom of God’s engine has already reached the platform of our lives.  The train is engikken.  Get ready to board.

Everything Jesus says and does in the Gospel of Mark is said and done to demonstrate the power and presence of this new reality he calls the kingdom of God or, as Diana Butler Bass calls it, the Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy.  He is not just telling people about this kingdom, he is showing them what it looks like and how it acts.  When Jesus calls the disciples, he is recruiting them to build a new community, a Beloved Community, based on the ideals and principles of “The Way,” which is another name Mark uses for the kingdom of God.  

Another thing to understand about the Gospel of Mark is that everything that happens in this Gospel is heavily weighted with myth and symbolism.  That’s not to say that the events the gospel depicts didn’t happen, but that it is important to pay attention to how Mark is describing and using these events and what kind of language he is using as he tells the story of Jesus.  

We need to ask questions.  What other scriptural connections does Mark make—or expect us to be making?  What apocalyptic expectations and understandings are at  work in the culture of Mark’s time?  What mythic stories are at work in the background as Mark tells the story of Jesus?  What cultural boundaries and expectations are being crossed?  If we don’t catch all these clues, then we might not get the point Mark is trying to make. We’ll get some other point instead.

When we see the disciples and Jesus set off from the shore in a boat in the evening, Mark wants us to be nervous.  We’re supposed to remember that in their mythic understanding the sea is the home of Chaos and Destruction.  Dread, unpredictable, cosmic forces hide in its depths and the only thing that could tame it at creation was the Spirit of God hovering over it.  That they are setting out as night falls with the intention of crossing all the way to the other side—well, if we were Mark’s first readers or listeners we would know they’re heading for trouble.

As the story unfolds, Mark assumes that somewhere in the back of our minds we are maybe remembering Psalm 107: “Some went down into the sea in boats…then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves were hushed.” (107:23,39)  When we read that Jesus was asleep on a cushion in the stern of the boat, Mark wants us to remember how Jonah slept as his boat was about to break up in a mighty tempest. (Jonah 1:4, 10).  Mark puts all these things together so that we will understand that this storm that the disciples face out there on the sea of Chaos is not just a metaphor for the troubles of life.  This is a Cosmic storm.  Their boat is being assailed by cosmic forces.  Something wants to stop them.  Some great elemental power wants very much to keep them from getting to the other side of the lake.  But what?  And why?

To understand that, it’s important to understand why Jesus wanted to cross the lake in the first place.  

The Sea of Galilee was also called Lake Gennesaret or Lake Tiberias depending on who was talking about it.  It served as a clear geographic boundary between the territories of Philip and Agrippa in the tetrarchy of Palestine when the Emperor Augustus divided up the region between the sons of Herod the Great, and it continued to serve as a clear social boundary between the Jews of Galilee on the south side and the Hellenized Jews and Gentiles of various nationalities throughout the Decapolis on the north side. 

Why did Jesus want to go to the other side of the lake?  Quite simply because that’s where the gentiles were.  

Jesus was fighting other-ism.  Racism.  He wanted his new beloved community to embrace everyone—Jew, Gentile, people of all nationalities and types, people who had differences in how they worshipped. So he took his mission of proclamation, healing, exorcism and teaching across the sea to invite those “other” people to be part of “the Way.” He also wanted to teach his disciples that in the kingdom of God there simply is no room for such nonsense as racial exclusion or historical segregation or anything like that.  In the kingdom of God no one can call anyone else unclean.  Or unwelcome.  

That storm that rose up against them is symbolic of all the storms that rise up to resist our attempts at opening our hearts and minds to reconciliation and renewal.  It was the elemental malicious something in our world and in the human heart that wants to keep us forever sorted in our caste systems and historic animosities, that force that resists healing and unifying humanity.  And I want you to notice something here:  The words that Jesus spoke to stifle that storm are the words of exorcism.  Most of our translations make those words prettier than they actually are, but they are the same words that Jesus spoke when he cast out the demon in Mark 1:25.  “Peace.  Be still.”  Okay, sure.  But that’s a very mild translation.  The full force of the words in the Greek text is more like “Silence!  Shut up!  I muzzle you!”  

Maybe  this is how we need to speak to racism.  Maybe this is how we need to speak to Jim Crow laws and race-baiting and race-driven gerrymandering.  Maybe this is how we need to speak to racial slurs and jokes and microaggressions and all the derogatory language of bigotry.

Maybe we need to speak this clearly and bluntly to the forces that try to dissuade and discourage us from reaching out to make new bonds of friendship.  Maybe this is how we need to speak to those voices who keep dragging up tradition and history as reasons to preserve symbols of hatred and monuments to violence in public displays.  Maybe this is the plain kind of speech we need to use with those who continue to pursue paths of prejudice that have done nothing but separate us and poison us against each other.  Maybe instead of trying to be reasonable and persuasive against such divisive winds it’s time to simply say, “Stop right there!  I will not listen to hate.  I will not let you keep us from getting to the other shore.  I will not let you stop us from including everyone in the Beloved Community.”

During the pandemic, we had fifteen months of enforced separation, an imposed time to sit apart and consider all the things that are dividing us.  We had fifteen months to witness as more than a million people died from a disease that could have been curtailed much more easily and much more quickly if we had been more unified.  

We had 15 months to watch as unreasonable political forces and conspiracy theory voices assaulted the foundations of our democracy and truth, itself.  We had 15 months to see racial tensions repeatedly exacerbated by hate and violence and lamentable systemic conditioning.  

We had fifteen months to sit apart in our homes and miss each other and think about what it means to be friends, to be church, to be disciples of Jesus, to be people of The Way.  

And now the doors have been open for three years.  The storm has subsided.  We’ve been back together for some time now.  We get to be “us” again.  But there are people “not like us” across the road, across town, across the lake, on the other side of the sea of chaos. And Jesus is still saying, “Let’s go across to the other side.”  

Yes, storms will almost certainly rise up.  The elemental malicious  something will try to stop us.  But Christ is in the boat with us, and Christ has given us the words to silence bigotry.

“Christ sleeps in the deepest selves of all of us,” said Frederick Buechner, “and whatever we do in whatever time we have left, wherever we go, may we in whatever way we can call on him as the fishermen did in their boat to come awake within us and to give us courage, to give us hope, to show us, each one, our way. May he be with us especially when the winds go mad and the waves run wild, as they will for all of us before we’re done, so that even in their midst we may find peace…we may find Christ.”

image © Laura James

Scattering Seeds

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Mark 4:26-34

With what can we compare the kingdom of God…  

What do you think of when you hear or read that phrase: the kingdom of God?  I think it’s hard for us to really grasp what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the kingdom of God not only because he described it in metaphors and parables, but because a kingdom, itself, is a thing entirely outside of our experience for almost all of us.

Most of us think of kingdoms in terms of either physical territory or fairy tales, but clearly Jesus is talking about something that transcends mere physical boundaries and is a lot more real than fairy tales.  A kingdom can simply be a territory ruled over by a king or queen, but it can also mean a sphere of authority or rule, and that might be closer to what Jesus is getting at:  the rule of God.  The authority of God.  But even that is something most of us can’t relate to too well because we have never lived under the authority of a monarch or a lord or a master, and those monarchies that are still active in our world are either almost entirely symbolic or wildly dysfunctional or utterly dictatorial.  And I don’t think we want to attribute any of those qualities to God.

Also, words like authority and rule can have a coercive edge to them, and the kingdom, as Jesus describes it, seems to be much more about influence, persuasion and cooperation.  It’s more organic.  It’s something that grows in us and around us and among us.  

I have often used the phrase “kin-dom of God” for that reason—to try to capture some of the cooperative, love-based nature of God’s sovereign rule as Jesus describes it in the beatitudes and parables.  Diana Butler Bass has called it the Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy, and I think that might be even more in the right direction.  Maybe.  But it’s also important to remember that the kingdom of God is not a democracy.  God is sovereign.  God’s rule is absolute.  Fortunately for us, so is God’s love, and that love is the very fabric of this thing Jesus is trying to describe as “the kingdom of God.”  The kin-dom of God.  The Commonwealth of God’s kindness.

When Jesus told these parables, and thirty-some years later when Mark wrote them down, trouble was brewing in Galilee and Judah and pretty much throughout all of Palestine.  Landowners were putting pressure on tenant farmers for rents they could barely pay.  Scribes from the temple in Jerusalem were demanding a crushing and complex levy of tithes from those same farmers.  Herod Antipas was demanding taxes from the landowners because Rome was demanding taxes from him.  Unemployment was high.  Bandits roamed the highways.  Soldiers patrolled everywhere.  Rome’s colonial government was heavy-handed and oppressive to the point of brutality.  People wanted a heavenly anointed messiah to step in and fix things before they exploded—or maybe to light the fuse and set off the explosion that everyone felt was coming. It’s no wonder that the disciples kept asking Jesus, “Is this the time when you will bring in the kingdom?”

Jesus kept trying to tell them and all the crowds following him, “No, the kingdom of God is not like that.  It’s not what you’re thinking.  It won’t do any good to simply replace one coercive external system with another one even if the ruler is God!”  

The change has to be internal.  It has to be organic.  Seeds have to be planted.  Human hearts and minds have to be changed. It’s not about imposing a new kind of law and order.  It’s about implanting a new kind of love and respect.  That’s what will fix the world.

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”

For generations we had a family farm in Kansas—my  mother’s family farm—where we grew winter wheat.  Winter wheat is planted in late September or early October, depending on the weather.  Not long after it’s planted, it starts to sprout.    Beautiful little shoots that look like blades of grass start to poke their heads up out of the soil.  And then just as they’re getting started, the cold hits them.  And it looks like it’s killed them.  They slump back down to the dirt and go dormant, and they’ll just lie there all through the winter.  The ground will freeze.  Snow will drift and blanket over them.  And there’s nothing you can do.  

All winter long you go about your business.  You sleep and rise night and day.  And then you get up one spring morning and notice that the weather is a bit warmer, and the snow is patchy or mostly gone, and you look out the window to see that you suddenly have a field full of beautiful green wheat starting to rise up out of the ground.  It’s an amazing thing to see, and if you have half a sense of wonder, you thank God for the natural everyday miracle of it and marvel at it for at least a moment before you get on with your chores.  

The kingdom of God is like that, says Jesus.  It is seeds scattered on the earth.  Seeds of ideas and vison. And sometimes it looks like they’ve died.  Or been crushed.  Or been frozen out or buried.  Or simply forgotten.  But they are still there, just waiting for their moment.  

The kingdom of God is seeds of ideas and vision and understanding.  They are ideas about fairness and justice and cooperation.  They are an understanding about fuller and more generous ways to love each other and take care of each other.  The kingdom is a resolve to make a world that is healthier for everyone.  It’s a resolution to embrace God’s vision for how the world is supposed to work—a world where everyone is housed and everyone is fed and everyone can learn and everyone is safe and everyone is free to be their true self.  The kingdom is a determination to repair the damage we’ve done and restore creation so that we and all the creatures who share this world with us can breathe clean air and have clean water.

The kingdom of God, the rule of God, the reign of God, the kin-dom of God, the Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy is a commitment to let justice roll down like water and to show each other kindness and to walk humbly with God and with each other.  It is a continual correction of our vision so we keep learning how to see the image and likeness of God in each other—in each and every face we face so that racism and classism and every other kind of ism evaporate from the earth.  It is the seed of courage taking root in our hearts and minds so that we learn not to be afraid of something or someone simply because it or they are different from us or from what we know or what we expect or what we are used to.

“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?,” said Jesus.  “It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

The mustard seed!  That tiny seed that produces the most egalitarian, most democratic of plants!  That’s what God’s kingdom is like.  It freely and bounteously shares itself and all that it has.  Given half a chance it spreads itself everywhere.  The mustard plant doesn’t care if you are rich or poor.  You don’t have to buy one.  It will come to you and give you and your family food and medicine and spices for your cuisine and healing oils for what ails you.  A most amazing, versatile and humble plant.  And it starts as just a little tiny seed.

The kingdom of God is the planting of seeds. The seeds don’t have to be eloquent preaching or brilliant explanations of theology—probably better most of the time if they’re not.  “Preach the gospel at all times,” said St. Francis. “When necessary, use words.”  At a time when the city of Assisi was a rough and dangerous place, Francis would walk through the town from the top of the hill to the bottom and say as he went, “Good morning, good people!”  When he got to the bottom of the hill he would turn to the brother who accompanied him and say, “There.  I have preached my sermon.”  What he meant was he planted a seed—he had reminded the people that the day was good and that they had it in themselves to be good people.

The seeds of the kingdom may be little acts of habit, like bowing your head for a moment to say grace before a meal in a restaurant, even if you don’t say it out loud.  That simple thing might remind those around you to pause, to be thankful, to remember all the connections that bring food to our tables, to remember the goodness of the earth and the sweat of the farmers, to remember the presence of God.

The seeds of the kingdom might be small acts of kindness.  When Oscar Wilde was being brought down to court for his trial, feeling more alone and abandoned than he had ever felt in his life, he looked up and saw an old acquaintance in the crowd.  Wilde later wrote, “He performed an action so sweet and simple that it has remained with me ever since.  He simply raised his hat to me and gave me the kindest smile that I have ever received as I passed by, handcuffed and with bowed head. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him about what he did … I store it in the treasure-house of my heart … That small bit of kindness brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world.”

The seeds of the kingdom might be a word of affirmation and encouragement when it’s needed most.  Helen Mrsola was teaching ninth graders new math years ago.  They were struggling with it.  The atmosphere in the classroom was becoming more tense and irritable every day.  So one Friday afternoon Helen decided to take a break from the lesson plan.  She told her students to write down the name of each of their classmates on a piece of paper, then to also write down something nice about that student.  She collected the papers, and over the weekend Helen compiled a list for each student of what the other students had written. On Monday, she gave each student a paper with list of what the other students liked about them.  The atmosphere in the class changed instantly; her students were smiling again. Helen overheard one student whisper, “I never knew that I meant anything to anyone!” 

Years later, a number of the students, all young adults now, found themselves together again at a school function.  One of them came up to Helen and said, “I have something to show you.”  He opened his wallet and carefully pulled out two worn pieces of notebook paper that had obviously been opened and folded and taped many times.  It was the list of things his classmates liked about him.  “I keep mine in my desk at work,” said another classmate.  Another classmate pulled hers out of her purse, saying she carried it with her everywhere she went.  Still another had placed his in his wedding album.

The kingdom of God.  The rule of God.  The reign of God.  The kin-dom of God.  The Commonwealth of God’s kindness. . . 

To what shall we compare it?

It’s like seeds scattered on the earth, says Jesus.  It’s like mustard seeds.  Seeds of righteousness.  Seeds of justice. Seeds of vision.   Seeds of help.  Seeds of hope.  Seeds of mercy.  Seeds of peace.  Seeds of affirmation.  Seeds of goodness.  Seeds of kindness.   Seeds of love.  

You don’t know how they grow.  But oh, they do grow.

On earth as in heaven.

When Mom Doesn’t Like Your Job

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Mark 3:20-35

Question:  What do Katy Perry, Kris Kristofferson, Florence Nightingale, Edouard Manet, Miles Davis, Alfred Nobel, Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Zemeckis have in common?   Answer: Their parents objected to the careers they chose.

Family can have a profound influence on the path we follow in life.  Alex Haley said that in every conceivable way, the family is a link to our past and a bridge to our future.  Your family can inspire, you, guide you, and cheer you on as you find and pursue your vocation, or they can misguide, misdirect, discourage and just plain thwart you.

I first felt called to become a pastor when I was fifteen years old.  My parents did not like the idea, and that is one of the main reasons I didn’t begin seminary until I was almost forty.  They loved me.  But they had a different future in mind for me than the future that chose me.

In today’s gospel reading from Mark we find two groups who would be happier if Jesus were to pursue a different career.  They would like nothing better than for him to stop the healings and exorcisms and the preaching and teaching and go do something more normal. Like be a carpenter, maybe.  On the face of it, these two groups wouldn’t seem to have much to do with each other, but the one big thing they have in common is that Jesus scares them.

Jesus had been busy traveling around the Galilee, announcing the arrival of the Reign of God, or, as Diana Butler Bass calls it, the Commonwealth of God’s Justice and Mercy.  In his preaching and teaching he had been describing a very different way of life that comes with God’s reign, and he had been demonstrating what this Commonwealth of Kindness looks like with healings and exorcisms and other acts that restore people to community.  In doing all this, he had also butted heads with the religious establishment because he was continuously reinterpreting Torah in ways that undermined the hierarchical authority of the scribes and the piety of the Pharisees.

Mark tells us that the crowd following him had become so large that it was almost unmanageable.  People were coming from as far away as Jerusalem, Idumea, Tyre and Sidon.  And then one day his family showed up, lingering somewhere at the edge of that great crowd that was following Jesus everywhere he went.

The NRSV translation says that his family had come to restrain him.  That’s a fair enough translation, but it doesn’t really capture the force of krateo, the Greek word that Mark uses, unless you imagine them using actual restraints.  To be clear, they had come to seize him and take him home by force if necessary because they thought he had lost his mind.

They were afraid for him.  They were afraid for him because they didn’t understand him.  They were afraid for him because it was hard for them to believe that this kid who grew up in their house had turned out to be so much more than the kid who grew up in their house.  They were probably a little bit afraid for themselves, too.  After all, having a crazy, radical preacher in the family can be hard on a family’s reputation.

But mostly they were afraid for him because they loved him.  He was family, after all.  So they worried about him, especially when they overheard this other group that wanted to rein him in.  Or worse.

Some scribes had come down from Jerusalem to see Jesus for themselves and to begin to form some kind of official opinion of him and his actions.  And their official opinion was that he made them nervous.  They wouldn’t have said it in so many words, but they were afraid him.  They were afraid because he called their privilege—their role and status and authority into question.  But mostly they were afraid of him because the crowd loved him.  And the crowd kept growing.  Big crowds would make their Roman overlords pay attention, and the things Jesus was saying, his language about “the Kingdom of God,” might sound like a call for revolution. . . which, to be fair, it was.  And is.  

“It is by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that he casts out demons,” said the scribes.  “Well how does that make any sense?” asked Jesus.  “How can Satan cast out Satan?  If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand!” He may have had his family in mind when he added, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.”

Finally, to make it crystal clear just what his mission was all about he said, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house may be plundered.”  

But Jesus wasn’t finished.  In one last note of caution for the scribes, Jesus said something that should give all of us pause, especially when we are about to speak judgmentally about people or things happening in our world that we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable.  “Truly I tell you,” he said, “people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin.”

He said this because the scribes had accused him of being possessed by Beelzebul. But Jesus, of course, was actually intimately connected with the Holy Spirit.  

I have thought of this passage often over the years when I have heard others say that something they are opposed to is evil or demonic. During the years when our denomination was debating whether it was okay or not to ordain lesbian and gay and trans people, I more than a few times heard people describe our efforts at being more inclusive as being evil when it seemed clear to me and others that it was the work of the Spirit.

How many times in history have we been trying to hold a door shut that the Holy Spirit is trying to open?  How many times in history has the Church called something demonic only to realize in retrospect that it was the work of the Spirit trying to broaden our minds and horizons?  God’s embrace is always bigger than ours and God’s vision always sees farther than ours.

God’s perspective is broader than ours.  Jesus sees things differently than we do, and sometimes that can be unsettling.  I still find the last segment of this episode with the scribes and his family disconcerting.   

Jesus’ mother, Mary, stood outside the house with his brothers and sisters, calling out to him.  The crowd that surrounded him made sure he knew they were there.  Someone spoke up and said, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.” 

The way Jesus responded can sound cold and heartless, but it’s important to remember that everything Jesus said or did in this Gospel of Mark was calculated to reveal the values and vision of the Reign of God—the Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy.  

Jesus posed a rhetorical question: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.  Then, looking at all those people who were crowded around him, he gave the Reign of God answer to that question.  “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother.”

In one sentence, Jesus undermined the coercive and restrictive potential of the biological family and at the same time expanded the definition of family.  As cold as his answer might sound to us, Jesus did not actually disown or repudiate his biological family, but he wanted to make it clear that in God’s eyes family goes far beyond being biologically related.  In the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, family is whoever does the will of God.

Sometimes the imagery in the gospels can be confusing or opaque.  More often, though, I suspect that the problem isn’t so much that the words of scripture are puzzling as that they make us uncomfortable, so we move past the troubling parts without taking time to really deal with them.  As Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”

According to Ched Myers, author of Binding the Strong Man, which has become pretty much the go-to commentary on the Gospel of Mark, this gospel was probably written somewhere in Palestine between 68 and 71 CE during the height of the Jewish revolt against the Roman occupation.  Myers tells us that this gospel, in which Jesus is gritty, uncompromising, down-to-earth, and scathingly direct—this Gospel of Mark is, in fact, a manifesto for nonviolent revolution, written to serve as an alternative path for the followers of Jesus who are being pulled into the violence of the uprising against Rome.  

In Mark, the followers of Jesus, then and now, are truly being called to subvert the dominant paradigm—to challenge and deconstruct and then reconstruct the systems by which our world operates until there truly is liberty and justice and peace and health and wholeness for all.  Anywhere there is coercion, the followers of Jesus are called to stand up to it with nonviolence.  

In other words, the gospel that Jesus proclaims, the living and uncompromising assertion of the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, is nothing short of a nonviolent revolution.

Almost every pastor I know has stories about times we have been accused of being too political.  I have had people say to me that they come to church to hear about spirituality and not politics.  I get it. We humans have this very unfortunate tendency to compartmentalize our lives.  We organize our hearts and minds in little boxes: spirituality in this box, politics in this box, everyday life in this box over here.  The problem is that that these things really are not separate.  Our politics and economics are a barometer for our spirituality.  Our everyday life and the way we conduct our business puts our real beliefs on display.  

If we are sincere about following Jesus, then we can’t avoid politics because the gospel that Jesus proclaims is a kind of revolution and revolution is political.  Jesus wasn’t crucified for being a spiritual teacher.  He was crucified at the intersection of religion and politics because he was proclaiming a revolution that seeks to transform and restructure the entire world, to unite and unify all of life, and to redefine what it means to be human.  But before you can do that, you have to undo life as it is.  You have to take apart coercive systems and deconstruct business as usual.

Jürgen Moltmann, the great German Lutheran theologian who died this past week wrote, “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”[1]  God calls us to take up the tools of Christ to bring that promised future into the unfulfilled present.  But our tools are nonviolent tools.  Following the model set by Jesus, we use logic and common sense instead of violence.  Our first tool for reshaping the world is a stubborn resistance rooted in love and compassion and kindness and truth and hope.  And our hope is rooted in a vision of a healthy world where we all live in peace and cooperation with each other and with our God-beloved, God-made planet in a harmonious and generous balance.

Jesus came to bind the strong man, to take down all the human, religious and demonic forces that bully and constrict God’s children and crush our souls. Empire.  Coercive religion. Even family when it becomes too rigid and authoritarian.  People who are deeply vested in unhealthy systems don’t like to read the gospel this way.  They prefer to keep things “spiritual” which, in the end, means that neither Jesus nor his words ever touch the ground.  Or the depths of the heart.  And they certainly don’t change the world.

Jesus came to plunder the house of the strong man, to liberate every person who will follow his Way so that together we can build the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness and make it as visible on earth as it is in heaven.  

[1] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology

Human Values vs. Legal Values

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Mark 2:23-3:6

How do you deal with people when their obsessive focus on something good leads them to use that good thing in a way that is manipulative or domineering?  How do you get through to people whose attention to the details of something good and beautiful leads them to treat people in a way that is harsh or even cruel?

There was a letter that appeared in Amy Dickinson’s advice column the other day that really brought that question home to me.  The letter writer was concerned because one particular house in their neighborhood had become an eyesore because of deferred maintenance.  

“Dear Amy,” they wrote. “I live in an affluent neighborhood of expensive although older homes. The vast majority of homes are well maintained and manicured. Many have had major remodels. 

However, there are a couple of homes that are in serious need of a facelift! One home in particular is a complete eyesore. 

Although it is worth more than a couple million dollars, the lawn is dead, paint doesn’t match and/or is faded in places, wood facia is rotting, along with other significant cosmetic problems.  There do not seem to be any code violations. I am not aware of the owners’ financial situation, but they’ve been there long enough that there should be significant equity to refinance and get money for repairs — or sell and move to a less expensive home.  Other neighbors have left notes, to no avail.  Any suggestions on how to get this family to fix up their house, or even move?”

The letter was signed, “Frustrated Neighbor,” and Amy’s response to this Frustrated Neighbor was pure gold:

“Dear Frustrated,” she wrote.  “It is so generous of you to provide such a detailed list of repairs to be made to this property! You’ve obviously inspected the house quite closely. 

“What a neighborhood! People leaving notes and developing repair punch lists and investment advice — and not one finding out who these neighbors are and asking if they need a hand. 

“I suggest you approach this by putting human values ahead of property values. Changing your orientation and approach should improve the neighborhood.”

Putting human values ahead of property values.  Or legal values.   Or economic values.  That’s exactly what Jesus was doing when he began his nonviolent campaign to confront the traditions and  institutions and the political and religious authorities and laws that were squeezing the life out of the people of Galilee.

In today’s Gospel reading from Mark, we see two episodes where Jesus is confronted by self-appointed guardians of Sabbath piety, men—and they were all men—whose  strict interpretation of Sabbath codes was impairing the quality of life for the very people whose quality of life they were supposed to be safeguarding.  Their pious concern for every jot and tittle of the very good gift of God’s law in Torah had led them to treat God’s people with harsh inflexibility.

The first confrontation comes when Jesus and his disciples “made their way” through the grain fields on the Sabbath.  As they forged a pathway through the field, the disciples were plucking and eating heads of grain.  This didn’t sit well with the Pharisees who were observing them.  “Look,” they said, “why are your disciples doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath.”  

The Law of Moses permitted poor people in Israel, or travelers, or aliens to glean enough grain for a meal from the crops in a landowner’s fields. Deuteronomy and Leviticus both make it clear that you were allowed to pluck grain by hand in a neighbor’s field or pick some grapes from your neighbor’s vines as long as you didn’t use a tool to cut the stalks or collect your gleanings in a basket.  The open question, though, was can you do this on the Sabbath?  

The Torah did not specifically say one way or the other, so the Pharisees, who were always inclined to err on the side of strictness, had concluded that, while it might be okay to do a little personal harvesting on the other six days of the week, it was definitely not okay on the Sabbath.  This, of course, could leave poor people in a real bind.  If you can’t use a basket to collect enough for tomorrow and you can’t come back to the field on the Sabbath, you’re pretty much stuck with going hungry on the day of rest.

Jesus, of course, took the opposite view.  Hunger doesn’t know or care what day it is.  Hunger doesn’t know or care about Sabbath laws.  Human values override religious legal values.

Jesus tried to get the Pharisees to discuss this issue by referring to an incident from the life of King David.[1]  “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food,” he asked them,  “how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions?”  When the Pharisees responded with stony silence he added, “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.”  The point Jesus was trying to make is that some human needs take precedence over other human needs.  The need for food takes priority over the need for rest or Sabbath observance.  

Since Mark’s account immediately moves to the next confrontation, we are left to assume that the Pharisees simply were not open to debating this issue with Jesus.

“Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand.  They were watching him to see whether he would cure him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse him.”    

The way Mark’s gospel describes it, this looks like a setup for entrapment, but Jesus sees right through the Pharisees’ scheme and decides to put them on the spot. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” he asks them.  “To save a life or to kill?”  Jesus turns the issue into a clear binary decision.  The implication in his question is that there really is no moral middle ground between compassion and legalism.  If you fail to do good when you have the chance then you are doing harm.  If you do not act to save a life in peril when you have the chance, then you are complicit in the killing.  

The Pharisees responded to Jesus once again with silence.  Jesus, we are told, “looked around at them with anger.  He was grieved at their hardness of heart.” 

With all that tension simmering in the air, Jesus healed the man’s withered hand. And the Pharisees?  “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”

The Pharisees in these incidents are like a homeowners association who are so concerned about maintaining the curb appeal of the houses in their neighborhood that they completely ignore the lives of the people who live in those houses.  When they see a house that is not in compliance with their standards, rather than seeking to understand the situation or even provide assistance, they add to the burdens and difficulties of their neighbors with their notices of noncompliance and their threats of fees and legal action.

Standards are good.  Laws are necessary.  But people are more important.

In chapter 12 of Mark’s gospel a scribe asks Jesus, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied by combining a quote from Deuteronomy with a quote from Leviticus. “The first is,” he said, “is ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

In reflecting on this Greatest Commandment, Father Richard Rohr said, “Imagine how different the world would be if we just obeyed that one commandment—to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. It would be the most mighty political, social upheaval imaginable. The world would be radically different if human beings really treated other people as they would like to be treated. We can take this as a simple rule of thumb: What would I want from that person right now? What would be helpful for me to receive? Well, there’s our commandment. There’s our obligation to do to others!  

“It’s so simple that we can see why we put all our attention on the Ten Commandments, or the hundreds of other regulations culture and religion place on us. It’s much easier to worry about things that keep us ‘pure,’ so to speak, but are of little consequence.  

“After all is said and done, it comes down to loving God and loving our neighbor—and that implies loving ourselves. If I said this without quoting Jesus, I could be accused of oversimplifying or ignoring some of the important commandments, but thank God Jesus said it first. He taught that it’s all about love, and in the end, that’s all we’re all going to be judged for. Did we love? Did we love life? Did we love ourselves? Did we love God and did we love our neighbor? Concentrating on that takes just about our whole lifetime and we won’t have much time left over to worry about what other people are doing or not doing. Our job is to love God, love ourselves, and love our neighbor.”[2]

The Pharisees love God and they love Torah, God’s law—that’s a good thing—and in their own way they love their neighbor because they believe that their neighbor will benefit if everybody rigorously obeys Torah.

Jesus loves God and also loves Torah, but Jesus interprets the law differently because he understands that, to paraphrase what he said about the Sabbath, the law was intended to serve people; people don’t exist to serve the law.

The way Jesus interprets Torah is consistent with the way the prophets understood the law.  The prophet Micah summed it up very succinctly when he wrote, “God has told you, O Mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

To love kindness.  The Hebrew word that Micah uses here is chesed.  It means kindness.  Or steadfast lovingkindness. Or, sometimes, mercy.

In rabbinic tradition, the world is said to stand on three things:  Torah, divine service, and chesed—acts of kindness.  Chesed, kindness, is considered “boundless” because a person can never do too much of it.  It is behavior that goes above and beyond the letter of the law, a one-sided giving that brings goodness to the neighbor.

Chesed, kindness, strengthens mutual relationships.  It reinforces the bonds of our implied covenant with each other, our social contract.  Chesed, kindness, is one of the attributes of God.  At the end of Psalm 23 the psalmist is speaking of God’s steadfast lovingkindness when he says “Surely goodness and chesed, kindness, will pursue me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

Kindness acknowledges that we are of the same kind.  We have the same needs.  We have the same fears.  We face the same pitfalls.  We have the same hopes.  We are of a kind.  Kindness acknowledges that what is good for you is good for me, or to put it another way, I will be kind to you and trust that you will be kind to me because we are all in this together.

What kind of world might we see if we made chesed, kindness, the central pillar our politics our economics and our laws?  That’s the question Jesus wants us to consider as he moves through our world announcing that the Kingdom of God, the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, is within reach.  It can be our reality on earth as it is in heaven.

Standards are good.  Laws are necessary.  But people are more important.  

[1] 1 Samuel 21

[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr,“613 Commandments Reduced to Two,” homily, November 3, 2012. 

The Dawn of a New Day in the Middle of the Night

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 3:1-17

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night.  Some have suggested that Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night because he didn’t want to be seen talking to Jesus.  The Gospel of John tells us that Nicodemus was a Pharisee and an archon, a leader or ruler of the people and a highly respected teacher.  He was also fairly wealthy.  He had standing in the community as a righteous man, blessed by God, so he had a reputation to protect, and he was putting all that at risk by meeting with a man who many of his fellow Pharisees regarded as a troublemaker.  

Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night because it was less risky.  Nicodemus came at night so he could avoid the crowds.   Nicodemus came at night because it would be easier to have an open and honest conversation away from the judging eyes and oppositional expectations of his fellow Pharisees.  That’s how this meeting of the minds is often framed, and, in fact, that might all be true.  But there is more going on here that we might miss if we simply accept this very practical and prosaic explanation then go charging ahead to our favorite verses later in this passage.  I’m looking at you, John 3:16.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night.  Night, nyx in the Greek, means darkness.  Nicodemus came in darkness.  Figuratively, night can be symbolic of blindness, especially spiritual blindness. Metaphorically, night can also mean a state of incomplete or defective spiritual understanding.  But night is also a time for revelations, especially in dreams.  

The dynamic tension between light and darkness is an important recurring theme in the Gospel of John.  One of the first things this gospel says about Jesus, the Logos, is, “In him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it.” (John 1:3-4)  Later, in chapter 3, we will read that light has come into the world but people loved darkness. . . “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:19-21)

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night.  He came in the darkness of an incomplete or faulty understanding of God and how God works and what God was doing in the world.  No judgment there.  If we’re honest, we’re all in the dark to one degree or another.  But he came into the light of Jesus, who could illuminate and broaden his understanding.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night… and night has yet one more meaning that might surprise us.  For the Jews, the new day begins at sunset.  That means that night is the beginning of a new day.

When Nicodemus sat down with Jesus, it was, for him, the beginning of a new day.  He was moving out of darkness and into the light.  Nicodemus reminds us that faith is a process.  He reminds us that understanding unfolds by degrees.

The first thing Nicodemus said to Jesus when they sat down to talk was, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from God.” It’s kind of sad, really, but in our time and our culture, when we see a greeting like that we think it’s just flattery, and our first impulse is to hold onto our wallets.  But Nicodemus wasn’t trying to schmooze Jesus.  He was simply stating his confusion.  It’s as if he was saying, “Look, I can see that you have a direct connection to God, but you are just so different from what we’re used to, from what we expect.”

His confusion and doubt notwithstanding, Nicodemus showed Jesus great respect. He called him rabbi and acknowledged not just the powerful things Jesus had done, but the source of his power.  Nicodemus acknowledged the relationship Jesus shared with the one he called Father, though he couldn’t possibly have understood the true nature of that relationship.

But then, who does?  Oh, we have no shortage of doctrinal formulas and illustrations now to describe that relationship—relationships, really, because the Holy Spirit is part of that eternal dance of love we call the Trinity.  But when you get right down to it, who can really understand the relationship between the Maker, the Christ and the Spirit?  Saint Augustine said that trying to understand the Trinity is like trying to pour the ocean into a seashell.  

We recite the illustrations and restate the formulas and then think that because we found some language to corral it, we understand the mystic communion of love that is God.  But our language, itself, betrays our lack of real understanding.  In naming them Father, Son, and Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer we insert a separateness between them and ascribe roles for each person which is the antithesis of their relationship, their existence, their being, their unity, where they cannot and will not be separate.    

Frederick Buechner described the Trinity as the Mystery Beyond us, the Mystery Among us, and the Mystery Within us—and it’s all one deep and eternal Mystery that gives us life, the Mystery in which we live and move and have our being.  The best we can do is enter into the Mystery and experience it—and understand that we will never completely understand.  

Right now we stand at a perilous moment in our history.  Our planet, our only home, is sick from pollution that we released into the air we breathe and the waters that sustain us.  Our economies are dominated by greed.  There are political forces at work in our country and our world that are bent on authoritarianism and oligarchy.  At the same time there are those who want to flex their moralizing muscles to invade everyone’s privacy and codify what you may or may not do with your own body, or tell you who you may or may not love, or even deciding what you may or may not be allowed to read.  Ironically, some of these power-hungry people call themselves Christian.  And let’s not forget our seemingly relentless fear of anyone who is different, a fear that endlessly reasserts itself in unreasoned hatred and violence.  And on that note, I would be remiss if I didn’t note that yesterday marked the 4th anniversary of the death of George Floyd. 

The world is a mess, and it seems sometimes that all of creation is crying out to the heavens saying, “I can’t breathe!”

Fortunately for us, God’s love and grace is patient and kind and the Holy Spirit, the Breath of Life, continues to draw us into the dance of Trinity.  The Mystery Within us leads us to the Mystery Among us who forever points us to the Mystery Beyond us.  In the light of Christ our eyes are opened to see the promise of the new day, the possibility and promise of the Reign of God—the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness—becoming a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  

When the Spirit draws us into the perichoresis, the circle dance of love that is God, it’s like being born anew, being born from above, and it can happen to us at any age.  

Love can change us.  Love can change us as individuals, it can change us as a people, it can change us as a nation, and it can change the world.

When we are captivated by God’s love for the world, for all of creation.  We see each other and the world with new eyes, we hope with a hope that is greater and deeper than our practical assessments allow, and we love with a love that’s beyond our capacity.  

This is how God has loved the cosmos—the world—all of it, everything: God gave God’s unique son so that everyone who lovingly trusts him need not be destroyed or lost in the endless waves of chaos but may instead have eternal life.  God did not send Christ into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be healed and made whole through him.  

That’s what love does.  Love heals.  Love unites.  Love makes things whole.  That’s the point.  God loves.  God loves everything God has made.  The dance of Trinity embraces all of creation and says that it is good.  

Jesus reminds us repeatedly that the Reign of God—the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness—is in reach.  It’s doable.  The Spirit, in love, is calling us to embrace God’s vision of a whole and healthy world and to join the work of making it our reality.

As the Spirit draws us to the light and love of Christ, in the middle of the night may we find the dawn of a new day.