More Good News from Mark

In the proceeding passage (Mark 7.1-23) Jesus “declared all foods clean” (7.19).  In these two stories he declares all persons clean.  The stories advance Jesus’ repudiation of traditional codes and their taboos and advance the building of an inclusive community of faith.

The first story (7.24-30) is set in Tyre, a large Phoenician port city of Syria.  The focus of the story is not simply on the healing, but on the Gentile question:  Does God’s care and healing mission extend to all people?  Everyone?  In a world of tribal, nationalistic, culture-bound gods, this is a crucial, even an arresting and radical question.  Jesus’ rebuff of this woman seems to make use of an aphorism.  Inside of Judaism, Gentiles were labeled “dogs.”  Dogs were not cute, they were not pets, they were not domesticated, they were not fed.  They were dismissed, disgusting scavengers.  This is obviously a racist insult, a slur.  The point in this passage is clear: “Jews first.”  Historically, God’s incursion into human history did work through the Jews first.  Cf. Paul’s explication of this in Romans.  

This is one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus.  So sharp and troublesome that is nearly impossible to imagine a largely Gentile church wound invent it.  A question is obvious:  Was Jesus engaged in racism and bigotry in his use of this insult, or does he use it for ironic purposes?  Scholars are divided on this question.  The majority, it seems (and most are Christians, after all) seem to think that given all of Jesus’ sayings and all of his ministry, and his inclusion of Gentiles in God’s care and work and community—make the idea of a racist, bigoted Jesus completely incongruous with everything we know about him on the whole.  Many scholars think this is an example of “peirastic irony” (from peiradzein—“to put to the test”).  Along these lines, since Jesus is here demonstrating his commitment to Gentiles, Mark would have left out this insult altogether if he thought the irony would have been missed.  A second reason to see this as an ironical statement meant to provoke a reaction is the wit evident in the construction of the episode itself.  In this exchange, the woman gets the better of Jesus.  So, did Jesus fall into this short end of the dialogue because he’s stupid or morally obtuse or spiritually stunted?  Or did Jesus set it up this way?  One view is that Jesus “was caught with his compassion down” (Sharon Ringe, “A Gentile Woman’s Story,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, Letty Russell, ed. (1984), 69.  The other view, is that Jesus set it up, he knew what he was doing.       

In this story Jesus is crossing a variety of boundaries—geographical, ethnic, gender, theological, and cultural.  This is the only passage I Mark where the healed person is definitely a Gentile (pagan).  Matthew calls this woman a Canaanite, which seems to be a focus on her religious affiliation (Mt. 15.21-28).  Mark’s emphasis seems to be that she is not a Jew and is someone situated on the western edge of the Roman empire.  This woman addresses Jesus as “Lord”—

the first and only person to address Jesus with this word.    

This unit (7.31-37) is the last of a sequence of miracle stories concerned with the question of Jesus’ identity.  It leads up to the christological affirmation of Peter in 8.29.  The man has a speech impediment, he’s not entirely mute (mogilalon, .32).   In order to get to this location—“the region of the Decapolis”—Jesus took a very indirect route (.31)!  Jesus returns to his home province by such an extensive detour that the only objective can be deeper penetration into Gentile territory.  “Jews first”—but not at the expense or negligence of the Gentiles.    

Spit was thought in both the Jewish and Greco-Roman world to have healing properties.  And when Jesus applies saliva to the tongue and puts his fingers in the ears of this man, he may have been acting like a physician utilizing the technique of healing that was common at the time among the “lower classes.”  He sighs or groans (the Greek can mean either) as he “looks up to heaven” and proclaims, “Be opened!” and this can be a signification of anguish or concentration or passion of a positive kind—or some mix of all these emotions.  We see here a Jesus who is deeply, totally engaged in the act of healing.    

After the healing the narrator employs an adverb of a superlative degree, “He has done all things well… .”  The word, hyperperissos, means “beyond all measure” or “superabundantly.”  This is the Gentile response to Jesus’ work: “they were astounded beyond measure” (.37).  His healing work among the Gentiles is a reminder and extension of the work of Elijah and Elisha who extended the benefits of salvation, liberation, of God’s healing love— to outsiders.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.       

(Isaiah 35.5-6)  

The clean/unclean theme begun earlier, is continued in this passage.  It is hard to overstate how important this conception and question is.  Think of connotations (worthy/unworthy, set apart/not set apart, ordained/subordinate, etc.) very much at work in Israel, Gaza and West Bank, in the US, and elsewhere at this very moment.  

Mark wants to insist on two things:  Jesus does not want to be known in respect to his true identity until and unless it is clear that suffering rather than sheer power lies at the core of that identity.  Yet, Jesus’ charismatic accomplishments are so great that they cannot be hidden.  There is an inevitable tension between these.  Mark is not unaware of the tension, rather he lays it out and thinks that there is something valuable in it (rather than trying to hide or resolve it).  This tension is good spirituality as well.  As we think of the “clean”/”unclean” distinction—in all its connotations—and all the ways it lies hidden (when not explicit) in our narratives, identities, politics, and religions—let us keep the value of the tension found in Jesus close to our hearts.  How can I be a vessel of God’s accomplishments?  For what am I willing to suffer?

These questions are not unrelated.

Thanks for reading,

Michael    

Mark 7, Part #1

Good News from Mark

Mark 7.1-23 engages us in a consideration of contending holiness movements.  The text is about tradition, defilement, and holiness/wholeness.   One tradition, that of the Pharisees and the scribes, is filled with purity codes, regulations guiding use of food, and other quantitative measurements, restrictions, and permissions.  Mark has already presented Jesus as rejecting traditional purity codes/laws, but until now, however, he has not moved from particular actions to a general principle or truth.  In this episode he reformulates the very idea of holiness, defilement, and purity.  The conversation begins with what might be seen as a trivial point—the washing of one’s hands.  But hand washing and dietary laws are about more than they seem.  They are about the maintenance of strict boundaries between people.  The Pharisees defended their purity codes as fundamental to ethnic and national identity.  Jesus, on the other hand, repudiates these exclusivist definitions by attacking their ideological foundations.

This passage is about Jesus’ final encounter with his Jewish adversaries in Galilee.  A “fact-finding commission” seems to have been sent from Jerusalem to observe and report on Jesus and his movement.  What does defilement and purity mean?  What is the place and value of tradition?  These questions are at the heart of the inquiry.  To take the law (Torah) seriously, a faith community will build a system (or at least a structure) of regulations to guide members of the community.  In Judaism, this “fence around the law” was Halakah—a body of case law built to allow the Torah to be protected and put into practice.  But from Jesus’ standpoint, Halakah had become a burden and a problem.  Jesus clearly and sharply opposes this “tradition of the elders.”

Yet, on the other hand, Jesus makes positive use of the terms “commandment of God” and “word of God,” referring to law (Torah) in the Hebrew Bible.  Rather than attacking the Torah, he affirms it.  Jesus does not abolish the concept of defilement or purity, the clean/unclean distinction.  Rather, he interprets it differently than do the authorities from Jerusalem and their local representatives.  Jesus sweeps away dietary laws and affirms ethical values (.21-22).  Jesus levels two charges against his opponents.  One, that they major in the minors (.6-8); and two, that their use of tradition masks their avoidance of the actual word of God (.9-13).  He uses Isaiah 29.13 to argue that the word of God specifically repudiates “human precepts” and he uses the practice of korban (“dedicated”/“dedication”) to illustrate his point.

Korban named the practice Jews could use to give their wealth to the Jerusalem Temple and to Jewish authorities in general.  We are familiar with this device insofar as we often pledge our wealth to an organization, specifying the ends of our lives as the point of this wealth transfer.  Jesus noted that some used korban as a way of not taking care of their elderly parents.  Korban was used to fund religious Judaism.  In Jesus’ confrontation of the Temple treasury operation in 12.37-44, he accuses the scribal class of hiding economic exploitation behind public piety—again with the elderly as victims.  For Jesus, Judaism had become built upon a political economy of exploitation and oppression of the poor.  By conflating issues of table fellowship with the political economy of the Temple, Mark demonstrates his consciousness of the central

underpinning of oppression in the symbolic system of legalistic religion.  This story, then, not only serves to legitimize Jesus’ community practice of integration with Gentiles, it also serves to persuade poorer Jews that the system that purports to protect their ethnic and national identity exploits them.  Against the dominant group boundaries, Jesus offers a vision and a horizon of a new, radical, inclusive, morally powerful community and politics—one that upholds the radical moral demands of the scriptural tradition.

Jesus is laying out his contrast with those who give lip service to God and faithfulness, but whose hearts are, in fact, far removed from God.  The tradition he rejects is one in which rituals and external observances have replaced true love for God registered in one’s “heart.”  Thus, Jesus accuses the Pharisee leadership of “annulling” the commandments of God.  Religion and religiousness have become an obstacle to God.  The Levitical law code is now deprived of its authority because only that which “comes from the heart” can truly defile.  (So Mark inserts the editorial comment, “thus, he [Jesus] declared all foods clean.”)  

The legalism attacked by Jesus was not unique to Judaism, to be sure.  Legalism has been part of the Christian story from the very beginning (note, for example, Paul’s anger with the Galatians for this very thing).  I can count dozens if not hundreds of battles with legalism I have experienced in my own Christian journey (and I bet you can too).  The issues under interrogation in this passage remain alive and vexing for us.  Is everything about tradition “bad”?  Of course not.  Are all forms of innovation and newness “good”?  Of course not.  One way of putting the challenge is that when tradition is alienated or separated from the word of God— there’s the problem.  But, of course, we argue about when this is and is not the case.  One might say that traditions should have a secondary, ancillary, and buttressing relationship to the word of God—but again, this doesn’t make the matter simple.  We might also say that whereas religion changes people “from the outside,” God changes people “from the inside.”  But then, this does not simplify the matter either.  We certainly need to humbly remember that “Jerusalem” tendencies lurk within each of us.

In verse 9, Jesus says, “You have a fine (kalos) way of setting aside the commandments of God in order to observe your own traditions.”  Given the meaning of this Greek word, kalos, we might interpret this sentence:  “How beautifully you do an ugly thing!”  Religion and religiousness can be beautiful and ugly at the same time.  The New Testament does not call us to be merely religious, and God did not enter human history in Jesus to bring us a new religion.  Bonhoeffer wrote about “religionless Christianity” and he had it right (as does Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Fleming Rutledge, and others).  God forbid we would be reduced to religion!  May this Advent and Christmas be for us, a liberation from religion as a concomitant embrace of God’s “tearing open the heavens and coming down” to us (Isaiah 64.1).

Thank you for reading,

Michael   

Wrestling & Grace

Wrestling and Grace

Genesis 32.22-32; Romans 8.35-39

12 November 2023 - Bloomfield Home Gathering

It is fall, so leaves and plants are dying, turning brown, the green of life draining from them. The days are shorter and colder, more darkness and less light. Some animals are going into hibernation. Some birds are flying south. It is not surprising the fall brings melancholy and some degree of depression for many. And this fall, we enter a deathly stalemate of war in Ukraine, a horrendous war in Israel and the Occupied Territories, especially Gaza, and continued war in other locations, e.g., Ethiopia, Syria, and Sudan, to name a few. This fall we realize we are one year away from another national election, and that polling just revealed that Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in a number of critically important states. We wonder how such a horrific monster of a human being could actually be desired as president over the comparatively intelligent and decent person who is now president. We wonder how a political party that actively works to destroy democracy and produce authoritarianism can gain votes and elected offices over a party whose members, whatever their various faults may be, actually want democracy, human rights, and freedom for all. The eclipse and demise of the warmth and brightness of summer is more than mirrored by the eclipse and decline of so much decency and basic morality. We live in a society and a world that seems to be spinning off its axis as millions of people embrace hatred, bigotry, fear, greed, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and other systemic and structural sins. Not that things were entirely wonderful before, but now? O my God! Lord, have mercy.

We come together week after week, sit together, speak together, feel the closeness of one another, look into each other’s eyes, and feel the hearts and spirits of one another because we know that in order to remain sane, to find any healing, we must belong to a community of hope. We know that we will only find hope through love. And we believe that it is Love itself, the infinite Love we call “God” who breathes love and hope into our lives. God is its source and its sustenance. And so we come, week by week, to see in each other and hear from one another, about this healing, hope-giving, graceful, healing, loving, God. We come not only to see and hear about this Love and Hope, but to encounter it, to be in relationship with it, to have God take us by the hand and heart, to hold us and heal us, to feel the care and courage, the loveliness and love, the goodness and grace, of God.

This story of Jacob at the Jabbok River is powerful for its central message. It is something we sometimes seem to know, but often forget. Something about which we need to be reminded again and again. A truth easy to embrace in theory, but one we reject in the truth of our actual lives over and over. Our blessings and our wounds come to us bound together. Grace and pain come intertwined. It is good to have children sitting with us this morning, hearing this message, as it is one that is hard to learn and one that we are best off if we begin to grasp it early in life.

We pick up the story at a river toward the end of the day, as Jacob and his family are traveling. There is no need for our purposes to discuss the purpose of the travel. He sends his family ahead, across the stream, so that he is alone. The name of the stream, or river, “Jabbok,” seems to be a play on “Jacob.” It is an eastern tributary of the of the Jordan that originated near present-day Amman, Jordan. We get a picture of Jacob preparing to sleep alone on one side of the river, with his family and resources on the other side. The crux of the story is that Jacob is encountered by a “man” who wrestles with him for quite a while— until daybreak. Jacob is wounded, his hip is hit or stretched quite hard, and it causes him pain and gives him a limp.

This is the story where Jacob becomes Israel. “Israel”—his new name—means “the one who strives with God” or “God strives.” We can see how these meanings can bleed into each other. God is a God who will wrestle with us, who will strive with us, who will contend with us—and we certainly know that we humans are apt to wrestle with, and contend with, God. It is important that Jacob demands to be blessed. If God is going to wrestle with Jacob through the medium or messenger of someone who seems like a man, Jacob figures he should get some kind of blessing out of the encounter. The Hebrew does not call this figure “God” directly, but when Jacob receives the blessing, he responds by naming the place where this happened, “Peniel” which means “the face of God” and he declares “I have seen the face of God.” It’s clear that Jacob has wrestled with God, that he has asked for a blessing, that God gives him a blessing and a name to match the moment. We are not told what the blessing is. It would be to miss the story’s point to focus on the blessing itself. The point is that God’s blessing comes to Jacob, turned into Israel, through a painful and difficult encounter that leaves this new man wounded, and pained. Physically, he has been diminished. But he has not been diminished so much as he had been empowered. He is not less, he is more. But pain is involved.

Everything that God has in store for Israel, the covenant, the grace, the judgment, the heartbreak, and promise-keeping—everything comes from a loving God whose blessings are bound to woundedness, suffering, and pain. This pattern is seen in its fullness in the Anointed One, the Messiah (“Christ”) who comes to us as God and suffers even to the point of death on a cross, as the means of giving us the greatest blessing possible—our liberation, our salvation, our healing, our union with God in Christ. This cruciform truth that appears early in the story of Jacob-turned-Israel, reaches its paradigmatic climax in Jesus’ death and resurrection. But this cross-shaped reality in life is not exhausted in Christ—as Philippians 2 makes clear. It is a reality that remains true for us also.

When we are young, we can scarcely understand why things cannot always go smoothly for us. And when things do not go smoothly, we see it as an affront, as an interruption of a pattern of what should be uninterrupted goodness defining our reality. “Why is this happening to me?!” is a question that erupts from our hearts, and sometimes our mouths, often. As we get older and mature, we gain the skills to take things in stride. Well, not entirely, of course. We still struggle with many of the events in life that give us pain, that wound us. We can all quickly recollect a large number of events and facts wherein we’ve been wounded deeply, but if we live in Christ, if we’re being transformed into Christ-like disciples who live in the grace and love of God, experiencing courage and hope—we can see in many of those events, the presence and power of blessing as well.

But why am I sharing this message? If this is an obvious, nonoptional aspect of life, why bother to mention it?

It seems to me that some religious people pray for God to take hardship away from them, and while many of us do this from time to time, some religious people make such petition a defining element of their faith. Their faith is overwhelmingly, if not entirely, palliative. They want God to relieve them from pain and suffering, and often even from inconvenience. If God is not a God who delivers for us in this way, why bother to believe? That’s how many religious people are religious. But this view bears no relationship to the God we meet in scripture or in real, honest life, and I do not think those who are sitting here this morning harbor such innocent, childish, and self-centered “theology.”

We are living in a particularly challenging moment, as my opening remarks indicated. But this does not mean that God is absent or completely powerless. God still delivers blessings, grace, love, courage, hope, and change—bound to suffering and pain. This is to say something surprising and counterintuitive, if we look at it a certain way. When we see or experience suffering and pain, can we not also look for the how it might be a vehicle for blessing, a means for grace, an opportunity for love and transformation? Not because we’re optimists! We’re not optimists! We’re disciples. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Of course, we often do not know what God is doing in the world, and often it seems like God is doing very little indeed. But we know better. We know that God brings strength out of weakness. God brings life out of death. God brings joy out of sorrow. God brings freedom out of slavery. God brings light out of darkness. God brings hope out of hopelessness, pessimism, and cynicism. God brings love out of fear. As Romans 8.35-39 declares so eloquently—what can separate us from the love of God? Nothing! As we wrestle with God, let us take our wounds and limp forward— blessed, graced, loved and empowered for the journey.

Amen!