Luke 1:39-55, from the Fourth Sunday of Advent.

Mary has picked up many titles down through the centuries.

“Holy Mother of God” is among the oldest, appearing in the 1558 Litany of Loreto, along with “Mother of the Church,” “Virgin Most Renowned,” “Queen of Angels,” and many more.

In this week’s passage, though, she comes off more like “Mary the Malcontent.” We don’t typically think of her as a rebel, and the song attributed to her in Luke 1:46-55 doesn’t start out like a rebel’s anthem:

“My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant,” she sings.

“From now on all nations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me – holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm.”

This is the Mary we know, the one who smiles gently down at baby Jesus in every manger scene.

But read on, because there is more than a baby in Mary’s belly. There is fire.

“He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts,” she sings, her voice perhaps sharpening and growing louder. “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.”

For all we know, the next line might even have come out more like an angry hiss than a song: “He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.”

Whoa, there, Mary! I’m sensing a lot of hostility, here. It sounds like you don’t like the status quo, and it sounds like you’re expecting this baby of yours to shake it up. In fact, you sound a lot like Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, in I Samuel 2:1-10. Some highlights:

“My mouth boasts over my enemies, for I delight in your deliverance” (v. 2:1).

“The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength” (v. 2:4).

“Those who were full hire themselves out for food, but those who were hungry are hungry no more” (v.2:5).

Wait — isn’t Christmas about peace on Earth and good will toward men? Why all this violence-and-vengeance-tinged talk about whacking an out-of-whack world back into whack?

If you’ve been paying attention through these four Sundays of Advent, you know exactly why. Despite the centuries we’ve spent trying to sentimentalize it and, more recently, commercialize it, Christmas commemorates the night God waded ashore in the world and launched an invasion aimed at toppling every kingdom and replacing it with his own.

Every kingdom, yours included, I’m afraid. Mine, too.

But lift up your head, for your salvation is drawing near. Prepare the way of the Lord. He has judged the world, and you along with it, and his judgment is that much in the world needs destroying.

But not you. Your kingdom, yes. But not you. His judgment is that you, beloved of God, need rescuing. And that is why he has come.

Merry Christmas.

Next week: First Sunday after Christmas Day

Luke 3:7-18, from Third Sunday of Advent.

John the Baptist’s message doesn’t sound much like the good news Luke says it is.

Right off the bat, John calls the crowds coming to hear him preach – and, by extension, us – a “brood of vipers” (3:7). In case you’re not up to speed on ancient Middle Eastern salutations, that’s not exactly a friendly one.

The apocalyptic scree continues. Who warned you, John taunts, to run from the destruction that is coming? And don’t think for a minute that your lofty, leafy family tree will keep you safe. It had better start sprouting some penitential fruit right away. The ax is out, sharp and ready, and the fire awaits every unproductive trunk, branch and stick.

And if you think I’m being tough on you, John says toward the end of the passage, just wait until the Messiah shows up. I’m dunking you in water. He will dunk you in Spirit and fire. He will sift you like freshly harvested grain, keeping the kernels and burning the chaff.

Yikes! Are there bells yet? Let’s have some jingly, happy bells. And pitch-perfect angels and gentle shepherds with their even gentler lambs and Mary and Joseph and that cute, chubby baby cooing in the manger. This John guy downright unnerving.

John’s audience apparently finds him unnerving, too. “What, then, should we do?” they wail, bracing, no doubt, for the superhuman acts of repentance they expect John to prescribe. Maybe they’ll have to give up everything, come live with him in the desert and spend the rest of their days wearing camel skin and eating bugs, like he does. Maybe it’s too late even for that.

But the repentance John demands is astonishingly low-bar. Got two coats? Share the one you don’t need with someone who is cold, John says. Got extra food? Give the surplus to someone who is hungry. Are you a tax collector? Start collecting fairly instead of ripping people off. Are you a soldier? Start using your power justly instead of bullying everybody all the time.

If such basic ethics weren’t already common practice among the people who flocked to the desert to hear John, it’s perhaps easy to see why he called them vipers. But I’ll bet that wasn’t the case. I’ll bet most of them were generous and fair and honest at least some of the time, pretty much the way you and I and most of the people around us are generous and fair and honest at least some of the time. John seems to be calling us not so much to do good but to get serious about doing good, to notice the times we don’t do good as much as we notice the times we do, and to get more consistent.

What’s perhaps even more startling is how pervasive John wants this renewed focus on right behavior to be. Tax collecting and soldiering weren’t considered noble vocations in John’s time. You would expect a goody-goody like John to demand that people abandon such jobs and find more wholesome ways to make a living. But John doesn’t seem to be calling for a world without tax collectors and soldiers. He seems to be calling for a world with ethical ones, a world in which God’s righteousness shines everywhere, even into the little corners darkened by deprivation and conflict.

And maybe that’s the good news, here. Maybe the good news is that the Messiah and his terrible winnowing fork aren’t coming after us as much as after the darkness that has enveloped and trapped us. We are vipers, yes. But he is coming to burn away our “viperness” and winnow out the goodness in us that it has corrupted.

Doesn’t that awaken at least a little hope in your heart, at least a tiny bit of longing for what could be once this Messiah finally shows up? Maybe you’ve suspected for some time that he and the transformation and renewal he offers are somewhere “out there,” somewhere holy and wonderful but far too far from the unholiness and mundaneness of your everyday life, somewhere so far away that it might as well not exist at all, considering your meager chances of ever getting there.

The good news of Christmas is that you don’t have to get there. If the Messiah is coming to soldiers and tax collectors in the desert, to shepherds in a darkened field, to a teenage girl’s womb and to a manger in Bethlehem, he is surely coming to you, too.

That’s bad news for your vipery nature. But it’s good news for you.

Next week: Fourth Sunday of Advent

Luke 3:1-6, from Second Sunday of Advent.

They were seven men powerful enough to define their places and their time: Annas and Caiaphas, high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem; Pilate, Herod, Philip and Traconitis, regional governors; and Tiberius Caesar, emperor over them all.

And yet the word of God came to John, a nobody living literally nowhere, a strange wild man of the desert who ate bugs and honey and wore not only the skin of a camel but probably also the look and smell of one.

We should not assume that the word of God did not come as well to the seven superstars whose names open the chapter. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it had many times prior. But we can safely assume that if it did, or if it had, none of them had heeded it. Perhaps they hadn’t even heard it. Power, or rather the illusion of power, has a way of deafening its holders to the word of God.  The word that came to John was a call to confess sin and repent of it. Changing course is typically the last thing powerful people want to do.

And so the word of God came to John and not, or at least not effectively, to anyone who counted for anything by the usual standards of who counts and who doesn’t. And the word that came to John told him – and compelled him to tell everyone else – that the usual standards of who counts and who doesn’t are out of whack and about to be dismantled.

The Lord is coming, John proclaims. The real one, not these pretend ones in their opulent palace halls and temple chambers. In an empire that demanded absolute loyalty to an emperor regarded as a god, there was no way to hear such a proclamation as anything but treasonous, as a call to open rebellion. Prepare, John says. Make this true Lord’s paths straight. And it’s unclear whether these are paths leading from him to us or from us to him. Maybe they are both. But they are paths for invasion, regardless of which way they run.

“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God,” John says.

What a threat that must have sounded like to those who relied on fertile valleys for sustenance and on rugged mountains and hills for defense and on crooked ways for profit. And what sense did saving all flesh make when the whole empire operated on the assumption that some flesh mattered more than other flesh, that there were rulers and merchants and workers and slaves, and that they mattered in precisely that order.

In short, just who did this invading Lord think he was?

Having read the end of the story, we know that the powers of John’s time didn’t go down without a fight. They lopped off John’s head and nailed his Lord to a cross. They killed the Lord’s followers and outlawed the Lord’s words. But today they are dust and their kingdoms are rubble, replaced by new rulers and new kingdoms that will also one day become dust and rubble.

But John’s Lord lives. The true Lord. Our Lord. And if we are to live at all past the dust and rubble of our mortal lives, we must live in him.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.

Next week: Third Sunday of Advent

Luke 21:25-36, from First Sunday of Advent.

What a jarring way to kick off the Christmas season, eh?

Here we are all primed for stars and angels and shepherds and wise men and Mary and Joseph and “the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.” And yet the story starts this Sunday with that babe, all grown up, sitting on a hill mere hours before his execution and describing the end of the world in violence, cataclysm and panic.

We wish you an apocalyptic Christmas.

Don’t worry. All the merry, cozy, twinkly stuff is still coming. Truth is, we’ve been awash in it since before Thanksgiving, haven’t we? This week’s readings aren’t about depriving you of all that. Nor are they about shaming you for enjoying it. They are about reminding you why it matters so much.

Christmas is holy time and sacred space. And well it should be. But one of the things I love most about Christianity is its utter lack of fussiness about admission to such times and spaces. Yes, plenty of churches will expect you to dress up on the outside and at least pretend to clean up on the inside before arriving at one of their Christmas services. But Christianity itself has no such expectations.

Quite the opposite, Christianity urges you to come as you are, with your dirty, rumpled clothes and equally dirty, rumpled life, be you a tax collector like Matthew, an ignorant fisherman like Peter, a doubter like Thomas, or even a traitor like Judas. Come as you are, Christianity says, and bring your violent, panicked, falling-apart-at-the-seams world with you, because Christmas isn’t nearly as much about your coming to God as it is about God’s coming to you, and coming to you not in spite of your mess but because of it.

It’s easy to get the idea that there’s no place for you by the manger until you can make yourself as happy and peaceful as the shepherds, the wise men, Mary and Joseph all seem to be. Make no mistake, though. The manger lies in the world Jesus described that evening on the Mount of Olives. He knew all about that world before he came. Knew all about you, too. And yet he came anyway, came and laid down his life both for it and for you. The adorers around the manger aren’t smiling in bliss. They’re smiling because their redemption is drawing near. So lift up your head. Yours is drawing near, too.

Next week: Second Sunday of Advent

Mark 13:1-8, from Proper 28(33).

Scaring people can be a pretty effective means of getting them to do what you want them to do. Want them to elect you? Vilify your opponent as a threat to safety and prosperity. Want them to despise a certain group of people? Cast the group as murderers, or job stealers, or bearers of disease, or spreaders of sedition or heresy. Want them to go to war for you? Tell them they are under attack, even if they aren’t.

This week’s passage gets used to scare people pretty often. Convert, the usual sermon goes, or toe the line, unless you want to risk enduring all this bad stuff Jesus is describing here.

But Jesus doesn’t come off in the Gospels as a guy who relied much on scare tactics. He could have, to be sure. Calling down a bolt of lightning to toast a Pharisee probably would have brouht a quick end to their sniping at him. But the closest he got to anything like that was probably his cursing of the fig tree.

So what do you figure was the purpose of all the scary end-of-times talk in this week’s passage?

Maybe Jesus was genuinely trying to answer his anxious disciples’ questions. He had said the temple would be destroyed. They wanted to know when, and how they could tell it was about to happen. He did his best to tell them, although he ended up leaving the “when” question unanswered. Nobody but the Father knows, he said.

Maybe Mark’s readers, for whom the temple’s destruction was recent history rather than distant prophecy, needed to hear that as chaotic as things seemed, it was part of the plan, and God was still in control.

Maybe we’re listening to the very human response of a man looking, in his divinity, at the whole arc of history, the cruelty inflicted by people on people throughout the two millennia between his time and ours, and beyond. Imagine seeing it all, there on the Mount of Olives: swords and arrows evolving into crossbows, then muskets and cannon, Minie balls and Gatling guns, trenches, mustard gas, armored tanks, concentration camps, firebombing, amphibious assaults, mushroom clouds, world war, cold war, race war, guerilla war, civil war, religious war – all of it, all in one, terrifying, appalling vision.

Maybe whether it’s one of these things or all three, the thing to listen for is verse 31: “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” I think hat’s what Jesus most wanted to convey. It can get bad, but stay faithful, watchful and hopeful, because God is on his way.

Next week: Proper 29(34)

Mark 12:38-44, from Proper 27(32).

Remember how Jesus commanded his disciples to emulate the poor widow whose contribution of two small copper coins – “mites,” in the King James Version – exceeded the handfuls of money thrown into the temple treasury by wealthier donors because, unlike them, she had given all she had?

Of course you do. Except you don’t. Because Jesus never said that, and I sincerely doubt he even meant that.

You’re welcome to disagree, of course. But be careful what you wish for. Jesus tells his disciples that the widow has put in “everything – all she has to live on.” In Greek, the word is bios meaning “life.” The widow has given her life, in its entirety. Jesus, who said this knowing he had come to Jerusalem to give his bios, his entire life, probably wasn’t exaggerating. To put it plainly, there’s a good chance that by the time Jesus was dead, so was the widow – starved and forgotten in some side street or hovel.

You might reasonably argue that, in a theological sense, Christianity requires no less of us. It requires us to die to ourselves so that Jesus can raise us to new life in him. But does Christianity also require us to surrender so much that it truly, literally kills us? Sometimes, yes, but it’s not a general directive. If it were, the faith either would have died out a long time ago or would be professed by millions and millions of hypocrites and slackers. If that’s what the faith involves, even the apostles lived much to long to be considered saints.

So what was running through Jesus’ head, then, as he watched the widow throw her life into the temple treasury and head off to die? The verses before and after perhaps offer a clue. In 38-40, he is denouncing the scribes, who, in addition to making a show of their status and piety, “devour widows’ houses” in their greed. And immediately after, in Mark 13:1-2, Jesus walks out of the temple and, when one of his disciples expresses awe at the building’s structure, snaps, “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus sounds a little angry. And maybe what he’s angry about is a temple full of people so self absorbed and self righteous that they would fail not only to help but even to notice a poor widow quietly dying before their eyes, a woman earnestly but pathetically wasting the meager last two mites of her life on propping up a system that exploited her in order to benefit them. If God is, as the Psalmist sang, “the father or orphans and protector of widows,” shouldn’t his temple be their refuge instead of their trap, and his people their rescuers instead of their robbers? Maybe he felt no stone deserved to be left upon another.

Thus the poor widow turns out to be a simultaneously mighty one, a powerful indictment of the indifference God’s people – his people then, but also his people now, including you and me – show toward the poor, the ragged, the sick, the alone, the forgotten. And while caring for them doesn’t have to kill us, just about all of us could stand to become at least a bit less comfortable in order to help them.

“But she, out of her poverty, has put in everything – all she had to live on,” Jesus said. I think the unasked question is, “And why did you let her?”

Next week: Proper 28(33)

 

Mark 12:28-34, from Proper 26(31). Also: John 11:32-44, from the All Saints Day readings

Christians have two Gospel readings this week, one about love-infused life, and a second about life-infused death.

Together, they illustrate how the Gospel challenges – and, more than challenges, refutes – the way we all-too-easily slip into thinking about both life and death.

A lot of fast-forwarding has happened between the last Gospel reading and Mark 12:28. Having healed blind Bartimaeus outside Jericho, Jesus has ridden triumphantly into Jerusalem, tossed the money-changers out of the temple, and has argued with, and made enemies of, just about every upstanding member of Jerusalem’s religious elite: the chief priests, the teachers of the law, the elders, the Pharisees, the Herodians, and the Sadducees. Mark 12:28-34 signals the end of this phase of the story. A teacher of the law who is impressed with Jesus (in Matthew’s version, the teacher seems to have darker motivations) asks Jesus which commandment is the greatest one. Jesus responds by picking the top two. First, he quotes from the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength (Deut. 6:4-5).” Then he quotes from Lev. 19:18: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These two, Jesus says, are equally important and at the top of the list.

In John 11:32-44, meanwhile, Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead, not so much as a favor to Lazarus (“You, my friend, get to die twice. You’re welcome!”) than as a declaration that he is the resurrection and the life. Not will be the resurrection and the life at some future point in time, as Martha makes him out to be, but is the resurrection and the life, here and now, which is about the only conclusion one can reach while watching him summon, right out of a tomb, a man who has been stone-cold dead for three days.

These two stories are simply impossible to square with life and death as we typically understand both. The perspective that drives our day-to-day choices 99 percent of the time – mine, at least, because perhaps a saint like you runs on a different mindset – holds that everyone dies eventually, some sooner than others, so the smart money is on grabbing as much life as one can, and for as long as one can, perhaps even if others come up short as a result. We say we are Christians, but we work, vote, deal with others, speak and act like people who think loving one’s neighbor is oneself is stupidly impractical compared to hoarding, and death is the dreaded, tragic end of everything.

But the Gospel declares both of these assertions wrong. We Christians should have no dread of death, because we should be dead already. We should be dead to ourselves, but raised by him to walk in true life – life that loves others with the abandon that comes only from having infinitely more life than one could possibly spend on oneself.

Next week: Proper 27(32)

 

Mark 10:46-52, from Proper 24(29)

Stories about blindness in the Gospels typically have as much to do with insight as with sight.

This principle is perhaps nowhere more evident than in John’s story about how Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth. The Pharisees, who can see the miracle’s results but can’t see how it could have been divine in origin, argue with the man and then throw him out of the temple. Later, Jesus finds the man and introduces himself, saying, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

The sight-vs-insight theme is woven just as tightly, if more subtly, into this week’s reading about blind Bartimaeus.

As the story opens, Bartimaeus is begging, as usual, along the roadside when Jesus, the disciples and a large crowd go walking past on their way from Jericho to Jerusalem. Recognizing a chance at healing, Bartimaeus begins to bellow, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The crowd’s attempts to shush him only make Bartimaeus cry louder. Hearing him at last, Jesus stops in his tracks and summons Bartimaeus to him. The crowd, reversing course, begins cheering Bartimaeus on. “Take heart! Get up! He is calling you!” Bartimaeus abandons his beggar’s cloak, springs to his feet and makes his way to Jesus. When he arrives, Jesus asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus replies, “My Teacher, let me see again.” Jesus tells him, “Go; your faith has made you well,” and Bartimaeus immediately regains his sight. Then he promptly disobeys Jesus. Instead of going, he follows – that is, follows Jesus to Jerusalem, the place Jesus is knowingly heading to suffer and die.

Sorting out who is blind and who can see in this story depends entirely on what you mean by blindness and sight. The crowd can see both Bartimaeus and Jesus, but it can’t see who either man truly is. To the crowd, Bartimaeus is a blind man. Given the crowd’s callous response to his pleas for healing, all the emphasis appears to be on “blind,” and none of seems to be on “man.” Meanwhile, it’s hard to say who Jesus is in the eyes of the crowd. Most likely, they saw him as many things – rabbi, healer, rebel leader, and more. But only Bartimaeus seems to see who Jesus truly is: the “Son of David,” a title reserved for the Messiah promised to King David by God through the prophet Nathan in II Samuel 7. Perhaps it is hearing this insight, shouted so clearly and unexpectedly over the din of the crowd’s many misperceptions, that brings Jesus to a halt and prompts him to summon Bartimaeus.

And in that moment before Jesus heals Bartimaeus’ physical blindness, perhaps, as Debie Thomas’ essay suggests, Jesus heals the crowd’s spiritual blindness toward Bartimaeus. Suddenly, the crowd sees Bartimaeus as a man, not just as his blindness, and they begin encouraging him to pursue the healing they had been trying to deny him only moments ago. As Thomas writes:

“Once the crowd sees Bartimaeus, they can’t unsee him. Once Jesus opens their eyes to his full humanity, they must respond with compassion: ‘Take heart; get up; he is calling you.’ I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that Jesus heals the crowd first so that they can, in turn, participate in Bartimaeus’s healing. What the blind man needs is not physical sight alone; he also needs visibility and validation within his community. In this double miracle story, Jesus grants him both.”

These layers of meaning about sight and insight should prompt us to mull what we ourselves see, don’t see, and think we see. In my other life as a media communication scholar, I both research and teach about how media and other social, cultural and psychological factors combine to influence our perceptions of others, of what things are like, and of how things work. As I write this, thousands of people from Central and South America are making their way toward the U.S. border with Mexico. Border guards and soldiers from the U.S. are preparing to confront them. What will happen when the two groups meet remains uncertain.

But the motivations you ascribe to the groups involved, the predictions you make about what will happen next and then after that, and how you should respond, and your assessment of whether the story is vitally important, not important at all, or somewhere in between depend greatly on your news consumption habits, your political orientation and world view, and – for Christians – you thoughts, or lack of thought, about your faith’s relevance to what is happening. The struggle in times like these – and in all times, really, because in important ways, these times aren’t all that different from those times or any other times – the struggle is to see as Jesus would have us see, whether we are looking at him, at others, or at ourselves.

The good news is that Jesus sees clearly and clearly sees each of us. And more likely in spite of what he sees than because of it, he has invited each of us to come and be healed.

So take heart. Get up. He is calling you.

Next week: Proper 26(31)

Mark 10:35-45, from Proper 24(29)

This week’s reading brought to mind a quote from my pastor’s latest sermon.

“You are worse than you thought,” the Rev. Brady Cooper said in a sermon about the story in Acts of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. “And God’s grace is greater than you ever imagined.”

After everything Jesus has said and done to hammer home his point that the Kingdom of God belongs to the last, least, littlest and lost, brothers James and John pull him aside, out of the other disciples’ earshot, and try to wheedle him into appointing the two of them as his seconds-in-command during the coming glory.

As David Lose points out in his excellent commentary this week, all sorts of painful irony ensues. Jesus tells the pair they have no idea what they’re asking for, but they’ll get more than they want of it before long. One wonders whether they still coveted the spots at Jesus’ right and left as he hung gloriously dying in bloody shreds on the cross between two also-crucified thieves. And don’t miss Sarah Hinlicky Wison’s wickedly funny commentary on the brothers’ confident assertion that they’re ready, willing and able to drink from Jesus’ cup and endure his baptism, in which she coins the pricelessly churchy word, “pyropneumatoheterobaptism.”

But all this ribbing we’re giving James and John about their presumption and naivete amuses us only because we know we’re no better. We all tell ourselves, on some level and at least at some times, that God treasures us more than anyone else, and we recoil from the paradox that, in his kingdom, nobody is special – precisely because everybody is special. The heart-breaker for me in this story is that Jesus knows this – knows it about James, about John, about the other disciples who get wind of what’s happening and respond with indignation, and about us, all these years later. And yet he went to the cross anyway. As Lose puts it:

“Three times Jesus tells the disciples what will happen in Jerusalem. Three times they misunderstand. And he goes there anyway. He keeps marching, keeps healing, keeps loving, keeps serving, keeps giving himself as a ransom to save us from ourselves. And he will continue to do just that. Until all of us are saved, overwhelmed, drowned, crucified, and raised again by God’s unending, all-encompassing love. Thanks be to God!”

That’s grace greater than I ever imagined.

Next week: Proper 25(30)

Mark 10:17-31, from Proper 23(28)

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson says that all we can do with a passage like this week’s is “manage it,” by which she means figure out a way to make it say something other than what it plainly says.

Jesus surly can’t have meant that we should sell everything, give the money to the poor, and follow him. I mean, where’s the sense it that? The real point of the passage must be (pick one):

• The rich, young ruler mistakenly thought he had kept the law. Jesus needed to disabuse him of that error.
• Nobody can keep the law. The story traps us into admitting as much.
• This particular rich, young ruler’s redemption involved his abandoning his wealth. Our redemption may involve something else.
• The “give up your riches” command applies only to the wealthy … wealthier than I am, that is.
• The “give up your riches” command applies to everyone, because everyone is richer than someone. But Jesus says God can handle our inability to do it. So all’s well.
• Like Peter, we have, in fact, given it all up.

But what if these are all just dodges? What if the awful, impractical truth is that Jesus really meant what he said, here – both to the rich, young ruler and to us?

Mark, of course, is no help at all. He just drops this story in our laps and moves on. As Wilson says, “Mark’s is a relentless Gospel, which seems not so much to invite to faith as to prove again and again the impossibility of faith.”

So with that happy though on the screen, what am I supposed to do with this passage? Frankly, I don’t know. And maybe I’m not supposed to know. Maybe I’m just supposed to react like the rich, young ruler did. Maybe my face is supposed to fall like his did, and maybe I am to walk sadly away without the answer I had hoped to receive. But maybe I also am supposed to notice that Jesus loved the rich, young ruler, and that he loves me, too. And maybe I’m supposed to cling to that hope in my bewilderment – and also to what the rich, young ruler didn’t hear: that, with God, all things are possible. And maybe, instead of continuing to walk away, as the rich, young ruler apparently did, I am to turn around, come back, lay this ambiguity at Jesus’ feet along with everything else I am able to lay there, and ask him to help me do all that he requires.

At least the rich, young ruler lacked only one thing. I’m afraid I lack many things. This week, at least for a while, I lacked forgiveness. Someone treated me badly, and not in a small way. I was angry, then I calmed down. Then, in a flash, I was angry again. I don’t know about you, but anger is like that for me. It comes in waves. One crashes over me. Then, in the trough after it passes, I think maybe, maybe, it’s over. Then I see another wave rising.

But in the middle of the turmoil, the person who had wronged me came around to try to patch things up. There was no apology per se. This person doesn’t do much apologizing. But the person at least confessed to having acted upon a few misperceptions. In the end, I think the person realized the harm that had been done and felt empathy and maybe remorse, if not all that much responsibility. But somehow, that half-baked outreach was enough for me. My anger vanished, as did my hunger for revenge. I didn’t trust this person before, and I think it would be unwise to begin trusting this person now. We are not, and probably never will be, friends. But at least I no longer … hate this person.

Had you told me back in one of those troughs between waves of anger that eternal life would be mine if only I would forgive this person, my face would have fallen, and I would have gone away sad, because in terms of the right to hate, I had great wealth. But Jesus saw me and loved me. And somehow, with God, all things are possible.

Next week: Proper 24(29)