Sermon preached at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in Eugene, Oregon, 30 and 31 January 2016. By Loren Crow.
Scripture Readings: Jer 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; 1 Cor 13:1-13; and Luke 4:21-30
O LORD, open thou my lips and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise. In the name of God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — Amen.
You might think you know someone, but you don’t. No matter who you are, and no matter who she is, you perceive at best only a dim reflection her. Love her anyway. But be ready for her to surprise you, and to disappoint you, and to challenge your assumptions about who she is. She is herself, and who she really is, is a mystery to everyone but God. Just love her.
We’ve just heard two stories, one about Jesus and one about the prophet Jeremiah. And we’ve heard a very famous passage from St. Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth (I don’t care whether you call it First Corinthians or One Corinthians, as long as you read it!), the so-called “love chapter.”
Our gospel reading begins with Jesus telling a group of people that a piece of Scripture has been fulfilled. The back story is that Jesus has been preaching and doing miracles in the Galilee region of northern Israel and is becoming famous. He returns to his home town of Nazareth, goes to synagogue (“as was his custom”) and reads the passage “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor….” Today, he says that Scripture has been fulfilled.
We’re told that everyone was impressed with his eloquence, and doubly so because they recognized him as a local boy, the son of Joseph whom they knew. But for no apparent reason Jesus launches immediately into a pronouncement of judgment on the town, telling them that prophets are never accepted in their own homeland, and citing two examples from sacred Scripture of prophets —Elijah and Elisha — who saved foreigners rather than Israelites. Jesus had to realize that telling these two stories to his parents’ friends, who after all were just trying to be supportive of this local boy who spoke so well, would be sure to rattle some cages. It does even more than that! They mob him and are going to throw him off a cliff. But Luke concludes the story, abruptly, with “But passing through the midst of them he went away.”
These people had a script in their heads for who Jesus was supposed to be. They recognized Jesus, Joseph’s son, and they were willing to be supportive as long as he continued in the role they had in their mind for him. But He refused to play along. In the end, their inability to recognize the real Jesus, as opposed to the Jesus of their mental image, allows him to walk right through the middle of the crowd with no one the wiser. They were open to the Jesus they thought they knew, but could not accept the Jesus who actually was, and so they missed out on his miraculous presence.
No matter who you are, I’m willing to bet there’s someone in your life who doesn’t quite fit into the role you envision for him. Learn from the people of Nazareth: when the person you think you know turns out to be different from what you expect, who doesn’t fit into the script you’ve got running in your head about him, don’t throw him off a cliff. Just love him.
Now, on to Jeremiah. We’re not told when in Jeremiah’s life this event occurs, but it’s at the beginning of his book so most of us presume that it’s at the beginning of his ministry. It tells the story of Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet. Since before his birth, says God, he has been known by God, sanctified by God, and appointed by God as a prophet — and particularly as a prophet to the “nations” or “gentiles,” which is to say, to people other than Israel. Naturally enough, Jeremiah objects: “Ah, Lord GOD, I wish I could — honestly I do — but really, I’m not a very good speaker and I’m way too young!” (In my head, he sounds a lot like Woodie Allen.) What I notice here is that Jeremiah’s self-image is different from God’s image of him, and we have to assume that God’s assessment is the correct one. As it turns out, reading the rest of the book, we find Jeremiah to be an eloquent poet and an influential commentator on the politics of his day. How often, I wonder, do we have a self-interpretation that threatens to inhibit us from doing what God wants us to do? How often do we hate ourselves because the selves we are, are at variance with the selves we envision? I don’t know if you feel this way or not, but I’m largely a mystery to myself on so many levels. If you sometimes don’t meet your own expectations, or if like Jeremiah you suffer from a tendency to under-rate your abilities, relax. Love yourself anyway.
That’s what First Corinthians chapter 13 is about. The whole letter addresses a church that was filled with power struggles and sinful people, with charismatic tongues-speakers and prophets, with rich merchants and poor beggars. Corinth was a very cosmopolitan and commercial city, lying on the isthmus between the Greek mainland and the Peloponnesian Peninsula, midway between Athens and Sparta. It lay on a major shipping crossroads between Italy and the East. The Church in Corinth was about as diverse as you could imagine.
That diversity was tearing the Church apart; Paul argued, conversely, that its diversity was its great strength. Their view of themselves was that of a church divided, but that view was misleading. It was like viewing oneself in a mirror, dimly. But in this letter Paul begins to formulate his metaphor of the Church as the “Body of Christ” where all the body parts need one another, and need one another precisely because of their differentness. What good would a hand be if it were shaped like an eyeball? A head without feet wouldn’t be able to accomplish much. The body isn’t a body unless it’s composed of parts that are different from one another and equally necessary.
The problem is that it can be terribly difficult to see that unity, maybe even impossible. We have these scripts running in our minds about the importance of this or that ministry, and it’s not that we’re wrong, but we are short-sighted. We see only part of the picture. God has given us in our diversity to one another, so we have to assume that the diversity is a good. This is something we should constantly bear in mind as we struggle to make sense, for example, of the struggles within the Anglican Communion: We NEED them and they NEED us. Our vision is limited, and none of us is the head of this body (the head is Christ, and He’s the one who understands the whole).
We have to honor our limited vision because it’s what we have and the understanding we have is a precious gift from God, but we also have to realize that we see in a mirror dimly. Others won’t fit into our notions of what they should be. We’re commanded to love them anyway. We may be less important, or more important, than we understand. We have to love ourselves anyway. This isn’t just one of those “Oh wouldn’t it be nice” sorts of things; unless we’re willing to love people despite tensions and failures and differentness we’ll find pretty fast that we can’t live with, well, pretty much anyone except ourselves. And then we’ll find that we can’t live with ourselves either.
But there is a better way, “a more excellent way.” We have to have faith that what we see is false, incomplete, finite, and that God really does see and hold the truth. We have to have hope that the truth is better than we can imagine. And in light of that faith and hope, as we wait for the coming of God’s Kingdom, we have to love. Love, despite the fact that we don’t understand. Love, even when we think we’re right and are disappointed with others. Love may not make the world make sense, it may not solve all our problems, it may not even make you happier. Love anyway.
Amen.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Seen and Unseen
Note: If you know the writings of C. S. Lewis, you will undoubtedly recognize my debt to his magnificent sermon "The Weight of Glory," preached on this same Sunday in 1941 and using the same lectionary texts.
Sermon preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 7 June 2015
By Loren Crow
Scripture Readings:
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
In the Nicene Creed that we’ll recite in a few minutes, we’ll affirm together our trust in the God who is the maker of “all things visible and invisible.” I’ve often wondered what, specifically, was meant by that expression. Is it that God is the creator of both the physical world and the spiritual world? If so, I can agree with that, although I’m not sure why it should be important to me. Is it simply a way of saying that God created both the things we know about and millions of things about which we have no knowledge? That’s undoubtedly true, and it’s important for us to admit that our knowledge of God’s universe is not in any way comprehensive.
But I suspect that we’re not mainly making statements either about the nature of the universe or about our knowledge of it. The Greek word that we translate “we believe” — πιστεύομεν — has more to do with trusting than with cognizing. When we say the Creed together, we’re not just making a claim about scientific or historical truth, we’re formally declaring our allegiance to the God whose character is stated in the Creed — a God revealed in the whole story of God’s people and especially in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That is the God we trust, the One who is the maker of all things, both what is seen and what is unseen.
Our epistle reading this morning makes me think of “seen and unseen” in a third way, a way more in line with saying πιστέυομεν in the sense of declaring our trust in the God whose character is thus. In Paul’s thought, we have two natures: an “outer person” who is “wasting away” and an “inner person” who is being renewed day by day (2 Cor 4:16). The “outer person” is the one we see, but the glorious “inner person” is being persistently built by God inside us, even though we hardly ever do more than catch glimpses of it. The same God who made the one is the God who is now making the other. To say “I believe in” the God who made all things is to be thankful for what is now, while also being hopeful for what shall be. God’s world is good, as are we God’s human creatures, but the goodness of both derives mainly from the shining creatures into which God is making us. Not everything is in fact good right now, of course, but trusting God means trusting God to make us good.
Now if I stopped right there, I think that might be enough. But the gospel reading and the Old Testament reading present a contrasting point that brings this idea into focus. The contrast is this: sometimes our minds get muddled by what we see. We forget that what we see is not the goal; it’s a waypoint along the path to the unseen future that God is making and that only God knows.
In the Old Testament story, we hear about the people of Israel deciding that they need a king. The reason they give is that the sons of Samuel were corrupt and failing to bring about justice, which we know to be true from earlier in the story. That’s actually the problem in a nutshell, right there. Even God’s holy prophet cannot foresee and prevent the corruption of his own line. What’s good in one generation isn’t necessarily what’s needed in the next. So the people appoint king Saul, with God’s blessing, despite knowing and accepting the drawbacks inherent in kingship. But of course that’s also doomed not to last. Saul famously also fails, so that God chooses David. But David and his line also fall short of the mark. The entire story of Israel is just this: God keeps choosing and calling human beings to be their best selves, and they consistently fail to achieve it. We have only to consider the history of Christianity, or our own lives, to realize that what’s true of Israel is also true of us. We think we understand so much, but later years always seem to reveal how little we actually perceive.
But there is God, at work behind the scenes, building in secret, preparing His next move, so that those human failures are transformed and redeemed. The half-hearted, rickety structures that we build become the very scaffolding under which God’s shining temple emerges, built not with human hands but a temple made by God. God is making us into creatures of such splendor as we could hardly dare to imagine now.
On the other hand, the gospel reading is a stern warning, a warning that just as we must not underestimate what God is doing in us, so also we must not underestimate what God is doing in our neighbors, especially if we don’t see any evidence of that work. When I was a child, I was obsessively afraid of what we heard today about “the unforgivable sin,” namely “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” What if I’ve already committed that sin, I asked myself hundreds of times. And how could the God who forgave other sins not forgive that one?
One of the first things you encounter when you begin to listen to the gospels, especially Mark, is the fact that Jesus, to say the least, “marches to the beat of a different drummer.” Here is a man whom everyone, even his own family, regards as probably a lunatic. The reason is obvious: Jesus operates according to a completely different set of values than the ones accepted by everyone else. To illustrate this, here are a few things he does in the previous chapter in Mark. In the story about the healing of the paralytic, he wantonly forgives the man’s sins without requiring any kind of restitution or even repentance (2:5). He’s got a ready-made audience of scholars and professional people who are happy to engage him in lively and learned debate about important theological issues (2:6-13), but rather than doing that he walks around teaching the unwashed masses and associating with Roman collaborators (2:15-17). When everybody else is worshiping solemnly, he and his group are noisily living it up (2:18). He’s an unmarried itinerant preacher calls Himself “the Bridegroom” (2:19).
Now when you ask yourself, What’s so bad about those things? The answer is, Nothing. Yet how tempting it is to have the same reaction as the people of Jesus’ time who say His power is demonic. How tempting to see as “insane” someone like that who differs radically from us. We declare them insane, and then we don’t have to be confronted with the claim that our way of seeing is deeply untrue. The danger of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” is the danger of misidentifying God’s excellent work and writing it off, simply because it’s different from what we expect. We see a thousand terrors in the world all around us and forget that God is in the middle of it, turning even our worst blunders into blessings. We see all the things that we think are wrong with ourselves and our neighbors, and we forget to trust the God who makes both the visible and the invisible. Who knows whether the very thing we despise now might be the means by which God is doing something marvelous. Who knows whether what now seems ugly might turn out to be the most beautiful thing of all. Who knows whether something as horrible as a cross might be the gateway to resurrection.
Sermon preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 7 June 2015
By Loren Crow
Scripture Readings:
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
In the Nicene Creed that we’ll recite in a few minutes, we’ll affirm together our trust in the God who is the maker of “all things visible and invisible.” I’ve often wondered what, specifically, was meant by that expression. Is it that God is the creator of both the physical world and the spiritual world? If so, I can agree with that, although I’m not sure why it should be important to me. Is it simply a way of saying that God created both the things we know about and millions of things about which we have no knowledge? That’s undoubtedly true, and it’s important for us to admit that our knowledge of God’s universe is not in any way comprehensive.
But I suspect that we’re not mainly making statements either about the nature of the universe or about our knowledge of it. The Greek word that we translate “we believe” — πιστεύομεν — has more to do with trusting than with cognizing. When we say the Creed together, we’re not just making a claim about scientific or historical truth, we’re formally declaring our allegiance to the God whose character is stated in the Creed — a God revealed in the whole story of God’s people and especially in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That is the God we trust, the One who is the maker of all things, both what is seen and what is unseen.
Our epistle reading this morning makes me think of “seen and unseen” in a third way, a way more in line with saying πιστέυομεν in the sense of declaring our trust in the God whose character is thus. In Paul’s thought, we have two natures: an “outer person” who is “wasting away” and an “inner person” who is being renewed day by day (2 Cor 4:16). The “outer person” is the one we see, but the glorious “inner person” is being persistently built by God inside us, even though we hardly ever do more than catch glimpses of it. The same God who made the one is the God who is now making the other. To say “I believe in” the God who made all things is to be thankful for what is now, while also being hopeful for what shall be. God’s world is good, as are we God’s human creatures, but the goodness of both derives mainly from the shining creatures into which God is making us. Not everything is in fact good right now, of course, but trusting God means trusting God to make us good.
Now if I stopped right there, I think that might be enough. But the gospel reading and the Old Testament reading present a contrasting point that brings this idea into focus. The contrast is this: sometimes our minds get muddled by what we see. We forget that what we see is not the goal; it’s a waypoint along the path to the unseen future that God is making and that only God knows.
In the Old Testament story, we hear about the people of Israel deciding that they need a king. The reason they give is that the sons of Samuel were corrupt and failing to bring about justice, which we know to be true from earlier in the story. That’s actually the problem in a nutshell, right there. Even God’s holy prophet cannot foresee and prevent the corruption of his own line. What’s good in one generation isn’t necessarily what’s needed in the next. So the people appoint king Saul, with God’s blessing, despite knowing and accepting the drawbacks inherent in kingship. But of course that’s also doomed not to last. Saul famously also fails, so that God chooses David. But David and his line also fall short of the mark. The entire story of Israel is just this: God keeps choosing and calling human beings to be their best selves, and they consistently fail to achieve it. We have only to consider the history of Christianity, or our own lives, to realize that what’s true of Israel is also true of us. We think we understand so much, but later years always seem to reveal how little we actually perceive.
But there is God, at work behind the scenes, building in secret, preparing His next move, so that those human failures are transformed and redeemed. The half-hearted, rickety structures that we build become the very scaffolding under which God’s shining temple emerges, built not with human hands but a temple made by God. God is making us into creatures of such splendor as we could hardly dare to imagine now.
On the other hand, the gospel reading is a stern warning, a warning that just as we must not underestimate what God is doing in us, so also we must not underestimate what God is doing in our neighbors, especially if we don’t see any evidence of that work. When I was a child, I was obsessively afraid of what we heard today about “the unforgivable sin,” namely “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” What if I’ve already committed that sin, I asked myself hundreds of times. And how could the God who forgave other sins not forgive that one?
One of the first things you encounter when you begin to listen to the gospels, especially Mark, is the fact that Jesus, to say the least, “marches to the beat of a different drummer.” Here is a man whom everyone, even his own family, regards as probably a lunatic. The reason is obvious: Jesus operates according to a completely different set of values than the ones accepted by everyone else. To illustrate this, here are a few things he does in the previous chapter in Mark. In the story about the healing of the paralytic, he wantonly forgives the man’s sins without requiring any kind of restitution or even repentance (2:5). He’s got a ready-made audience of scholars and professional people who are happy to engage him in lively and learned debate about important theological issues (2:6-13), but rather than doing that he walks around teaching the unwashed masses and associating with Roman collaborators (2:15-17). When everybody else is worshiping solemnly, he and his group are noisily living it up (2:18). He’s an unmarried itinerant preacher calls Himself “the Bridegroom” (2:19).
Now when you ask yourself, What’s so bad about those things? The answer is, Nothing. Yet how tempting it is to have the same reaction as the people of Jesus’ time who say His power is demonic. How tempting to see as “insane” someone like that who differs radically from us. We declare them insane, and then we don’t have to be confronted with the claim that our way of seeing is deeply untrue. The danger of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” is the danger of misidentifying God’s excellent work and writing it off, simply because it’s different from what we expect. We see a thousand terrors in the world all around us and forget that God is in the middle of it, turning even our worst blunders into blessings. We see all the things that we think are wrong with ourselves and our neighbors, and we forget to trust the God who makes both the visible and the invisible. Who knows whether the very thing we despise now might be the means by which God is doing something marvelous. Who knows whether what now seems ugly might turn out to be the most beautiful thing of all. Who knows whether something as horrible as a cross might be the gateway to resurrection.
Sell all you have and give to the poor?
Sermon preached at St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 14 October 2012
By Loren Crow
Scripture readings:
Amos 5:6-7; 10-15
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
At some churches, when they talk about money (and they will talk about money), they’ll tell you that God wants you to be rich, that wealth is reward from God for good behavior. They won’t usually come right out and say it, but they really do believe the flip-side of that as well, that poverty is a punishment from God showing divine disfavor. If you’re in financial straits, the way to solve it is to give money to the church. Usually they’ll quote from Malachi or Joel something to the effect that material prosperity results automatically from supporting their church.
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, where you will hear them talk about the love of money being the root of all evil and therefore that having material wealth is a sign of wickedness. To some people’s way of thinking, it’s hardly possible even to be a Christian without forsaking money altogether. The only truly Christian life is a monastic life, a life that deliberately chooses poverty and spiritual discipline over wealth. Now I don’t want to demean this position: choosing poverty and devoting your life to God and service of others is a high, noble calling, and people who live this way are rightly admired by the rest of us. But, in my opinion, to say that this is the only way to be truly Christian, the only way to follow Jesus, isn’t right. We are more than simply economic creatures. We are not simply “consumers.” As important as money is, it is not, in and of itself, sufficiently important either to save us or to damn us.
The problem is that each of these extremes is supported by some parts of the Bible. If we’re seriously trying to live a Christian life we sometimes fixate on the parts that resonate with us and ignore the parts that don’t. Today’s gospel reading is one of those that tends to get latched onto, because there it seems like we have a clear teaching from Jesus that the only way to be his follower is to give up all our possessions, that the only way to enter the Kingdom of God is to become poor. But I think this gospel story invites us to consider more broadly the question of what money means and what God expects us to do with it.
First to the Gospel reading. I don’t know if you noticed this when the Gospel was read, but there’s something very peculiar about this text. Actually, there are quite a few peculiar things about it, but let me draw your attention to one thing. The man asks Jesus what he must do to “inherit eternal life.” Jesus responds by naming six commandments, five of which are from The Ten Commandments. But Jesus doesn’t quote all ten, and he adds one. I think it’s worth paying attention to what he adds and to what he leaves out. Here’s the list as Jesus states it:
So what does Jesus add? The second-to-last statement, “Do not defraud.” And what does Jesus leave out? He leaves out the first four commandments, and the last commandment. Let’s see if we can remember them:
I think, myself, that the things Jesus leaves unstated would have resonated all the more strongly in the minds of early Christian readers because they were left unsaid, kind of like what would happen in your mind if I were to say, “All things come of thee, O Lord.” If you’re familiar with that phrase, then the phrase “And of thine own have we given thee” is already adding a certain tint to what you hear afterwards.
There’s another reason to think this is what Jesus is talking about. Because this is exactly what he addresses next. The man — maybe he’s feeling pretty good at this point — says, “I’ve done these things since I was a kid.” In other words, he’s okay on the five things Jesus listed. Jesus, for his part, is impressed: this isn’t a bad guy. He’s just missing one little piece of the puzzle, and Jesus tells them what it is. Aye, and there’s the rub: “Go, sell your stuff and give to the poor.”
Now I know what you’re thinking: Jesus doesn’t actually mean that, or he only means it for this particular guy. The problem is that he then goes on and makes a universal application: it’s not just that it’s sad that this particular fellow didn’t want to follow Jesus more than he wanted his money, it’s practically impossible for any rich person to enter the Kingdom.
Mark’s original audience knew the Old Testament better than most of us do. When they heard Jesus’ response, they couldn’t have resisted also remembering the rest of the Ten Commandments: the requirement to worship God alone, the prohibition on idolatry, the prohibition of coveting your neighbor’s property, and the commandment to observe the Sabbath. I think the idea is that the man who came to Jesus only claims to have kept the commandments Jesus actually names. Talking about what he lacks, in other words, seems to me to be a way of referring to other four commandments that were left unsaid.
How is selling everything and giving to the poor related to those commandments? The best answer, I think, is the Old Testament idea of Sabbath, which is the last of the commandments Jesus doesn’t name. In ancient Israel, everyone understood that the world was created by God and that it was good. From that it made sense that material prosperity was something to be relished, not something to be ashamed of. In some biblical texts, like the book of Proverbs, it is assumed that if you are rich it’s because you are pleasing to God. How different is that from our Gospel text! The idea of Sabbath acknowledges both sides of the spectrum: God blesses people with time (which is another way of saying money; time, after all, is money), but also teaches that the use of this time is not simply a matter of personal gain.
Most of us are familiar with the idea that the Israelites were required to rest on the seventh day, the sabbath. Since God rested on the seventh day of creation, Israel was supposed to imitate God by working for six days and then resting on the seventh. But the Sabbath idea goes well beyond that. Not only are Israelites not allowed to work on the seventh day, but they aren’t allowed to make anyone else work either, including their slaves. Israelites could “own” slaves (which is another important topic that we can address some other time), but owning them did not mean they could treat them as mere objects. Even though Israelites could “own” slaves, it was really God who owned them; human ownership of God’s human beings was a second-order ownership, and to make that fact clear God placed limitations on what Israelites could do with them. The same was true for animals, which had to be given a sabbath rest just as human beings did. Well, you might say, so God cares about people and animals, that seems right. But wait, there’s more. It wasn’t just humans and animals. Also your field and your vineyard had to be given a Sabbath: one year in seven they were to be left fallow and unharvested. The idea isn’t crop rotation so much as it is Sabbath: it is God’s world, not ours, and God has built into the world a cycle of work and rest that we have to honor. That’s what the commandment says, Honor the Sabbath.
So the Old Testament idea of Sabbath asserts that God owns the whole world, and that any claims of ownership we might make are at most strongly limited. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in particular, go on to articulate another extension of the Sabbath idea. It’s not only about human and animal work, it’s also about economics. God is the creator and owner of everything, and more particularly God is the owner of all the land. When Israel first crossed over the Jordan to possess the land, the land was divided by lot -- essentially a kind of lottery for the fair distribution of the land. The whole land was given to the whole people of Israel, but as a practical matter some individual families had to be entrusted with particular plots. This wasn't because God liked those families better (which is the point of having the decision made by lottery) or because they deserved it. It was simply a matter of logistics.
The land God gave to the Israelite families was to belong to those families forever. It could be bought and sold, but after 49 years (a sabbath of sabbaths) it reverted to the families to whom God gave it. That fiftieth year was called the Year of Jubilee. Why? Because humans were not the ultimate owners of the land; God was. And consequently, the “owners” of the land could not do with it as they pleased, but only what God allowed.
Now some families got beautiful, fertile pieces of land filled with vineyards and olive orchards and fig trees and lots of water. Other families got barren desert. In between the two, most Israelites had plots of land that would produce bountiful crops about one year in three. You can imagine that sometimes they had to borrow money to be able to plant the next year’s crops. Now suppose old Menahem, whose fields always seem to do well, has a neighbor who lacks adequate water and comes to him for a loan after a particularly bad year. The Sabbath idea tells Menahem that God is the true owner of the land and that therefore his neighbor is entitled to a loan. But Menahem thinks to himself, “He might not be able to pay it back before the Jubilee year!” What do you think? Should he make the loan? Here’s what the book of Deuteronomy says on the subject:
The Gospel story shows us a crucial aspect of what it means to follow Jesus. Following Jesus cannot be just a matter of going to church or reading the Bible or believing Christian doctrine. It includes our attitudes toward one another as well. If we really believe, as we say we do, that God Almighty is the Creator of heaven and earth, if we really believe God created everyone, and if we really believe that every good thing comes from God, then it follows that the good things we possess, our time and our treasure, must be shared freely and without reservation with our neighbors. We must relinquish our claim to everything we think we own and open our hand to others. In doing so we’re imitating the God whose extravagance gives us everything we have. That is what is means to follow Jesus, to imitate him and thus to imitate the God who sent him. Our lives are a gift from God, our wealth is a gift from God, our world is a gift from God. And gifts are for sharing.
By Loren Crow
Scripture readings:
Amos 5:6-7; 10-15
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
Then there’s the other end of the spectrum, where you will hear them talk about the love of money being the root of all evil and therefore that having material wealth is a sign of wickedness. To some people’s way of thinking, it’s hardly possible even to be a Christian without forsaking money altogether. The only truly Christian life is a monastic life, a life that deliberately chooses poverty and spiritual discipline over wealth. Now I don’t want to demean this position: choosing poverty and devoting your life to God and service of others is a high, noble calling, and people who live this way are rightly admired by the rest of us. But, in my opinion, to say that this is the only way to be truly Christian, the only way to follow Jesus, isn’t right. We are more than simply economic creatures. We are not simply “consumers.” As important as money is, it is not, in and of itself, sufficiently important either to save us or to damn us.
The problem is that each of these extremes is supported by some parts of the Bible. If we’re seriously trying to live a Christian life we sometimes fixate on the parts that resonate with us and ignore the parts that don’t. Today’s gospel reading is one of those that tends to get latched onto, because there it seems like we have a clear teaching from Jesus that the only way to be his follower is to give up all our possessions, that the only way to enter the Kingdom of God is to become poor. But I think this gospel story invites us to consider more broadly the question of what money means and what God expects us to do with it.
First to the Gospel reading. I don’t know if you noticed this when the Gospel was read, but there’s something very peculiar about this text. Actually, there are quite a few peculiar things about it, but let me draw your attention to one thing. The man asks Jesus what he must do to “inherit eternal life.” Jesus responds by naming six commandments, five of which are from The Ten Commandments. But Jesus doesn’t quote all ten, and he adds one. I think it’s worth paying attention to what he adds and to what he leaves out. Here’s the list as Jesus states it:
- Do not kill
- Do not commit adultery
- Do not steal
- Do not bear false witness
- Do not defraud
- Honor your father and mother
So what does Jesus add? The second-to-last statement, “Do not defraud.” And what does Jesus leave out? He leaves out the first four commandments, and the last commandment. Let’s see if we can remember them:
- You shall have no other gods before me
- You shall not make graven images
- You shall not abuse the name of the LORD your God
- Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy
- You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor
I think, myself, that the things Jesus leaves unstated would have resonated all the more strongly in the minds of early Christian readers because they were left unsaid, kind of like what would happen in your mind if I were to say, “All things come of thee, O Lord.” If you’re familiar with that phrase, then the phrase “And of thine own have we given thee” is already adding a certain tint to what you hear afterwards.
There’s another reason to think this is what Jesus is talking about. Because this is exactly what he addresses next. The man — maybe he’s feeling pretty good at this point — says, “I’ve done these things since I was a kid.” In other words, he’s okay on the five things Jesus listed. Jesus, for his part, is impressed: this isn’t a bad guy. He’s just missing one little piece of the puzzle, and Jesus tells them what it is. Aye, and there’s the rub: “Go, sell your stuff and give to the poor.”
Now I know what you’re thinking: Jesus doesn’t actually mean that, or he only means it for this particular guy. The problem is that he then goes on and makes a universal application: it’s not just that it’s sad that this particular fellow didn’t want to follow Jesus more than he wanted his money, it’s practically impossible for any rich person to enter the Kingdom.
Mark’s original audience knew the Old Testament better than most of us do. When they heard Jesus’ response, they couldn’t have resisted also remembering the rest of the Ten Commandments: the requirement to worship God alone, the prohibition on idolatry, the prohibition of coveting your neighbor’s property, and the commandment to observe the Sabbath. I think the idea is that the man who came to Jesus only claims to have kept the commandments Jesus actually names. Talking about what he lacks, in other words, seems to me to be a way of referring to other four commandments that were left unsaid.
How is selling everything and giving to the poor related to those commandments? The best answer, I think, is the Old Testament idea of Sabbath, which is the last of the commandments Jesus doesn’t name. In ancient Israel, everyone understood that the world was created by God and that it was good. From that it made sense that material prosperity was something to be relished, not something to be ashamed of. In some biblical texts, like the book of Proverbs, it is assumed that if you are rich it’s because you are pleasing to God. How different is that from our Gospel text! The idea of Sabbath acknowledges both sides of the spectrum: God blesses people with time (which is another way of saying money; time, after all, is money), but also teaches that the use of this time is not simply a matter of personal gain.
Most of us are familiar with the idea that the Israelites were required to rest on the seventh day, the sabbath. Since God rested on the seventh day of creation, Israel was supposed to imitate God by working for six days and then resting on the seventh. But the Sabbath idea goes well beyond that. Not only are Israelites not allowed to work on the seventh day, but they aren’t allowed to make anyone else work either, including their slaves. Israelites could “own” slaves (which is another important topic that we can address some other time), but owning them did not mean they could treat them as mere objects. Even though Israelites could “own” slaves, it was really God who owned them; human ownership of God’s human beings was a second-order ownership, and to make that fact clear God placed limitations on what Israelites could do with them. The same was true for animals, which had to be given a sabbath rest just as human beings did. Well, you might say, so God cares about people and animals, that seems right. But wait, there’s more. It wasn’t just humans and animals. Also your field and your vineyard had to be given a Sabbath: one year in seven they were to be left fallow and unharvested. The idea isn’t crop rotation so much as it is Sabbath: it is God’s world, not ours, and God has built into the world a cycle of work and rest that we have to honor. That’s what the commandment says, Honor the Sabbath.
So the Old Testament idea of Sabbath asserts that God owns the whole world, and that any claims of ownership we might make are at most strongly limited. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, in particular, go on to articulate another extension of the Sabbath idea. It’s not only about human and animal work, it’s also about economics. God is the creator and owner of everything, and more particularly God is the owner of all the land. When Israel first crossed over the Jordan to possess the land, the land was divided by lot -- essentially a kind of lottery for the fair distribution of the land. The whole land was given to the whole people of Israel, but as a practical matter some individual families had to be entrusted with particular plots. This wasn't because God liked those families better (which is the point of having the decision made by lottery) or because they deserved it. It was simply a matter of logistics.
The land God gave to the Israelite families was to belong to those families forever. It could be bought and sold, but after 49 years (a sabbath of sabbaths) it reverted to the families to whom God gave it. That fiftieth year was called the Year of Jubilee. Why? Because humans were not the ultimate owners of the land; God was. And consequently, the “owners” of the land could not do with it as they pleased, but only what God allowed.
Now some families got beautiful, fertile pieces of land filled with vineyards and olive orchards and fig trees and lots of water. Other families got barren desert. In between the two, most Israelites had plots of land that would produce bountiful crops about one year in three. You can imagine that sometimes they had to borrow money to be able to plant the next year’s crops. Now suppose old Menahem, whose fields always seem to do well, has a neighbor who lacks adequate water and comes to him for a loan after a particularly bad year. The Sabbath idea tells Menahem that God is the true owner of the land and that therefore his neighbor is entitled to a loan. But Menahem thinks to himself, “He might not be able to pay it back before the Jubilee year!” What do you think? Should he make the loan? Here’s what the book of Deuteronomy says on the subject:
If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, in any of your towns within your land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. Take heed lest there be a base thought in your heart, and you say, ‘The seventh year, the year of release is near,’ and your eye be hostile to your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the LORD against you, and it be sin in you. You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him; because for this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. For the poor will never cease out of the land; therefore I command you, You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land. (Deut 15:7-12)The point being made, in Deuteronomy and so many other places in the Bible, is this: God gives the gift of the land to all of Israel. Likewise, God gives the gift of money to us, not for our personal benefit only, but for the good of our neighbors as well. This isn’t a political point. I don’t think it matters much to God whether we take care of our neighbors by means of private donations or by means of governmental programs. What God cares about is the people themselves: are they well? Do they flourish? Our attitude must be one that imitates God’s attitude: we must share the bounty God has given us, because that’s the whole purpose of our being given bounty in the first place.
The Gospel story shows us a crucial aspect of what it means to follow Jesus. Following Jesus cannot be just a matter of going to church or reading the Bible or believing Christian doctrine. It includes our attitudes toward one another as well. If we really believe, as we say we do, that God Almighty is the Creator of heaven and earth, if we really believe God created everyone, and if we really believe that every good thing comes from God, then it follows that the good things we possess, our time and our treasure, must be shared freely and without reservation with our neighbors. We must relinquish our claim to everything we think we own and open our hand to others. In doing so we’re imitating the God whose extravagance gives us everything we have. That is what is means to follow Jesus, to imitate him and thus to imitate the God who sent him. Our lives are a gift from God, our wealth is a gift from God, our world is a gift from God. And gifts are for sharing.
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