Mark 9:38-50, from Proper 21 (26)

This week’s Gospel passage reads like a game of theological Whac-A-Mole. Continue reading “Theological Whac-A-Mole” →

Mark 9:30-37, from Proper 20 (25)

I doubt any aspect of my life would escape disruption if I were to take Mark 9:30-37 seriously. Continue reading “Striving for last place” →

Mark 8:27-38, from Proper 19 (24)

Always a paradox, Peter got things dead, solid perfect, but only about half the time.

In this weeks’ passage, for example, we see him nailing the question about Jesus’ true identity. “You are the Messiah!” Peter declares, and we learn from the context available in Matthew that Jesus responds by designating Peter as the foundation of the Church and the keeper of the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Not a bad score for a Galilean fisherman, eh?

But just one verse after the exchange ends, we see Peter trying to talk Jesus out of Jesus’ plan to bring salvation to not only Peter but the entire rest of the world, including you and me. Peter meant well, to be sure. He probably didn’t understand the big picture and took Jesus’ talk about being killed by enemies and raised to life three days later as nothing more than evidence that the desert heat was messing with Jesus’ head.

But Jesus is thinking all too clearly, and he gut punches Peter with the famous rebuke in verse 33: “Get behind me, Satan! You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

From rock of the Church to embodiment of Satan in right around 100 words? That must be some kind of record, even for Peter.

It’s reasonable to wonder why Jesus didn’t just bench Peter and put one of the other disciples in the starting lineup. Take John, for instance. John never screws up, at least not in any of the spectacular ways Peter did. John seems utterly devoted to Jesus, and at the foot of the cross, with Judas dead, Peter grieving his three denials of Jesus, and every other disciple off hiding in fear somewhere, there’s John, close enough to hear Jesus ask him to take care of Jesus’ mother, Mary. You half expect Jesus to add, “And you’re the new rock of the Church, John. Go get the Kingdom keys from Peter, and tell him he’s fired.”

I’m glad Jesus picked Peter, though. It means there’s hope for me. It’s not that Peter’s flaws give me permission to throw my hands in the air every time I mess up and say, “Well, there I go, just being Peter again!” If I think the scale of grace Jesus showed to Peter merely gives me a pass to do whatever I want to do, then I’ve missed the point entirely. That grace is a measure of his love’s depths, not of its limits. To make the point another way: Perhaps even Peter’s batting average looks unattainable to you. If you’re looking for tips on how to improve your stats, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t think God keeps stats, so I don’t see the point of keeping mine, and I think you should give up keeping yours. The only logbook that matters is the Book of Life, and my name is written in it solely because I believe. If you’ve believed, your name is there, too, written no bigger or smaller, fancier or plainer than mine. Or than Peter’s.

Next week: Proper 20 (25)

Mark 7:24-30, from Proper 18 (23).

If you want your Jesus scrubbed clean of his humanity, if you prefer him not only sinless but sin-proof, if you think the line in Hebrews about his having been tempted in every way we are couldn’t possibly mean he ever felt like asserting his rights, going his own way or at least telling God, for pity’s sake, to just hold on a minute, then don’t read Mark 7:24-30.

You won’t like it.

There are ways to explain away the harshness with which Jesus responds to the Greek woman from Syrian Phonecia who falls crying at his feet and begs him to drive the demon out of her young daughter. When Jesus tells the woman his mission doesn’t include ministering to “dogs” like her, maybe he is just trying to shock the racism and nationalism out of his disciples, who are watching. Or maybe he’s testing the woman to see whether her pride will get in the way of her concern for her daughter.

But the likeliest explanation, to me, is the one Mark seems to be waving in front if our faces in verse 24. Jesus went – “withdrew,” in Matthew’s version – to Tyre, a gentile area north of Galilee, on the shore of the Mediterranean. There, he “entered a house, and did not want anyone to know it.” If Jesus was, as we read in Matthew’s account, “sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” why is he hiding out in a house in gentile territory, with nary another Jew in sight?

If you’ve ever spent any time in ministry, I’ll bet you know exactly why.

Jesus is exhausted. In this and the previous chapter alone, he has been rejected by the people he grew up with in Nazareth (and nearly thrown off a cliff by them); has lost his cousin, John the Baptist, to King Herod’s executioner; has miraculously fed a crowd of more than 5,000 people, only to end up arguing with them; and has made enemies out of Israel’s religious elites. And he has done all of it while healing an endless stream of people suffering from a staggering array of maladies, sometimes by his own choice and other times by getting more or less mugged of his divine power. He is done. He wants a break. He wants his life back. So he has run away to hide, if only for a few, precious hours, so he can get a square meal, a hot bath, a full night’s sleep and maybe even a lazy morning with a real breakfast, a cup of coffee and the paper.

And the plan is working just fine until this gentile woman shows up with – what else? – a hard luck story and an urgent problem only he can fix. Worse, he knows exactly what will happen if he helps her. Instead of getting chased around the country by one horde, he’ll soon be getting chased around the country by two hordes, and he’ll have no place to get away from either of them.

You’ve been there, haven’t you? Say one, little “yes” to God, and before you know it, you’re in for way more than what you bargained for. It’s like taking a kid to a toy store and handing him your credit card. In no time, you’re getting gleefully and obliviously dragged up and down the aisles, the cart is overflowing, and your bank account is way past empty. God takes and takes and takes. And when you’ve got nothing left, he asks for even more. And you know the asking is a sham, because he has your card. In fact, he has all the cards, as both he and you know. Somewhere in the rush, your willingness to go along with all of it buckles, survival mode kicks in, and the “you” in you finally decides to stand up for itself and tell God that you’ve had it, that enough is enough.

That’s the point Jesus almost gets to, here. Almost. He just wants this woman to go away. First, he tries ignoring her. Then, he tries insulting her. But she doesn’t budge, and the divinity in him finally makes him realize why: She has nowhere to budge to. She is bereft of any option besides lying in a sobbing heap on the floor in front of him and pleading for her hopeless daughter’s healing. It breaks his heart, his defiance evaporates, and he says “yes,” not only to her, but to vastly expanding a mission he thought had already gotten unbearably vast.

You or I wouldn’t have done it. You or I would have picked her up, tossed her outside, slammed the door and bolted it. I think Jesus wanted to, because I think that’s what being tempted in every way we are means. Perhaps you love him less for that. I love him more for that. It means he understands how hard it is to say “yes” when you know you should but have no idea how you’ll ever cover the cost. I’ve chosen to do it as a stranger, a friend, a colleague, a son, a husband, a father, and a Christian. But much more often, I’ve chosen not to. Jesus chose to say “yes” every single time, including the time, still to come, when he would say “yes” to being stretched out on a cross and surrendering the last of what little he had left by then.

Ultimately, I think that is the reason Mark chose to tell us this unsettling story. As much as we’d like to cast ourselves as Jesus, stoically rallying to obey God over the objections of our flesh, that’s not the role for us in this drama. We’re the woman, of course. When Jesus says “yes” to her, he says “yes” to all the rest of us gentile mutts who come to him with nothing and ask him for everything. You’d think he’d get tired of it. Maybe, sometimes, he still does. But his answer never changes.

Next week: Proper 19 (24)

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, from Proper 17 (22).

I refer to myself as a “recovering Pharisee” on the About me page. This might be a good week to explain why.

Mark 7 opens with a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. Such conflicts appear often in the Gospels. One might have expected Jesus to go around yelling at sinners, especially considering that there were so very many of them on hand in the mash-up of Jewish, Greek and Roman culture that pervaded Galilee during the time of Jesus. There were pagan temples and idols and spas everywhere. The Galilean capital, Tiberias, managed to be unclean in its entirety, having been built atop an old graveyard. But Jesus embraced the region and its many Jewish sell-outs, most notably the tax collector Matthew. What seems to have made Jesus angriest, Frederick Buechner notes, “was hypocrisy and irrelevance, and thus it is the Pharisees who come in for his strongest attacks, the good people who should have known better. ‘You brood of vipers,’ he called them. ‘How can you speak good when you are evil?'”

On this particular occasion, the Pharisees had noticed that some of Jesus’ disciples were eating with unwashed hands, a violation of Jewish law. Mark – who, tradition holds, wrote his Gospel mainly to Christians in Rome who were unfamiliar with Jewish ways – pauses to explain that, “The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.”

Whether Mark intended them to or not, I can’t say, but his words invite us to sneer at the Pharisees’ feverish devotion to such customs. For for the sake of your digestive tract, I do hope you wash your hands before meals and eat off of clean plates. But the Pharisees, Mark’s text implies, thought doing so made them better than everyone else, and they had no reservations about saying so.

I resemble the Pharisees a lot more than I like to admit, though. You might, too. They were, after all, the fine religious people of their time. They went to worship services every week. Every line of scripture was at least familiar to them. Surrounded by a corrupt and violent society, they saw devotion to their beliefs and traditions as vital to preserving faith in, and fidelity to, the one, true God. Many Christians in many churches would assert the same about themselves today.

So what was Jesus’ problem with them? If they were, as Buechner says, “good people who should have known better,” what, exactly, should they have known better than than they did?

Pharisees like me tend to see rightness with God as a condition we have to maintain. We love verses like John 3:16 and hymns like “Amazing Grace,” but it never really sinks into our heads that God simply made us right with him through a maneuver that had everything to do with Jesus and nothing to do with our behavior. As St. Paul wrote, in words that moved Martin Luther and touched off the Protestant Reformation:

“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

We Pharisees don’t get that. Instead, we keep working and working and working to keep God pleased with us. And since we’re so afraid of his displeasure, we figure you ought to be afraid of it, too, and we have not reservations about telling you so. If you refuse to be as afraid as we are, well, we consider you part of the problem, and we’ll treat you as such. In doing that, we’ll forget all about treating you like the brother or sister you are. Perhaps most closely to the point Jesus makes in this painfully pointy passage, we consider ourselves bastions of righteousness under siege by a corrupt world, and we’re not about to take in the likes of you and all the sinfulness we think you would bring with you.

Jesus bluntly tells us Pharisees in this passage that we can stop worrying about letting defilement in, because it got in a long time ago and has been spewing out of us ever since, adding to our guilt each time. Meanwhile, what should be coming out of us isn’t. Jesus doesn’t get into that aspect of the problem here, but he does elsewhere. “A new command I give you: Love one another,” Jesus tells his disciples in John 13:34-35, only hours before his arrest. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” And in Matt. 25: 31-46, the sheep on Jesus’ right had showed love and compassion, while the goats on his left had withheld both, and neither group seems to have been all that aware of what it was doing.

So, what comes out of us – or doesn’t – reveals what’s going on inside of us, and before we yuck it up over the stupid rituals of these wicked Pharisees, perhaps we should consider whether we’re truly any different from them.

While jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, in April of 1963 for leading a march without a permit, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. penned a response to a statement eight moderate white clergy had published in The Birmingham News criticizing the march and other demonstrations. If his words to Birmingham’s white religious leaders – good people who should have known better – don’t sting at least a little, we would be wise to wonder why. A sampling:

“I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

“I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.’ In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’ And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

“I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?'”

I am a recovering Pharisee because I grew up as a good kid. I memorized my Bible verses and listened quietly to the lesson instead of fidgeting or talking and gave the right answers when asked. You would have loved having me in your class, and you would have urged all the other kids to be more like me. But somewhere along the way, I started to get the idea that I really was better than the others, and I began to protect the goodness I thought I had in me by shutting out, and even attacking, those whom I judged less committed to right living than I was. My church offered everything I needed to live apart from the messiness of the world. Sinners were welcome to come to us and become like us, but we weren’t about to go to them. We put up barriers, like a dress code that forbade long hair on males, pants on females and blue jeans on anyone, that were ostensibly about protecting decency but were at least as much about discouraging the poor and otherwise different from joining us. Minorities were few, and there were subtle, unchallenged rules about mixing with them.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ time would have welcomed me, and I, them.

It’s none of your business exactly how God finally managed to confront me with my moral inadequacy. What matters is that he did, and I finally saw that my only hope lay in the the type of righteousness St. Paul described, a righteousness apart from the law, a righteousness through faith, and faith alone. But I doubt I’ll ever get fully rid of that old Pharisee on this side of heaven. I still default to judgment and self-righteousness, to fear of God’s wrath instead of faith in God’s love. Recovery is an ongoing thing, and thank God for grace.

Next week: Proper 18 (23)