Friday night, Jon and I were at the San Francisco Symphony for what turned out to be a particularly fine musical experience. The program could have been less than exciting: “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” Liszt’s 2nd Piano Concerto, and Holst’s “The Planets.” I like them all, but all of them get played often enough that they are in danger of being overfamiliar.
The pianist was Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom I had heard of but had not heard perform. And a young German conductor named Christian Reif replaced Charles Dutoit. Between them, everything in the program became new. The experience felt much the way Leonard Bernstein’s fabled first performance with the NY Philharmonic must have felt. I went directly from not knowing what to expect to being blown away. The San Francisco players responded magnificently and there was not a moment of perfunctory playing in the whole evening.
The opening “Rhine-Journey” offered a premonition of things to come. It was beautifully nuanced, with every detail standing out clearly. And it never lost its sense of continuity and movement.
The Liszt was amazing. Since numbers on works seldom mean much to me (and I’m not a great fan of concertos in general), I wasn’t actually too sure whether I’d heard it before. The opening bars reminded me that, whether I’d heard it live or not, I’d heard it repeatedly on broadcasts. But there was never a moment in the piece when my attention began to fade. Even the soloist’s most demanding passages were true music, never just excuses for showing off. The rapport between soloist and conductor seemed perfect. I hope to hear M. Bavouzet many times in the future.
And “The Planets”. . . . I’ve probably heard this work as many times as any big orchestral piece in the whole repertoire. When I was still a child, I found a special bond with the early twentieth-century English composers, Holst among them. And the recording by Adrian Boult was my introduction to this work. I had heard Dutoit conduct it both in recordings and, once, live. And I liked what I heard when he last conducted the San Francisco Symphony in it. His rendition had tremendous energy and drive.
Oddly enough, though, I realized that I hadn’t been looking forward to hearing him conduct it again. This happened before the questions raised recently about his character and behavior. It was a musical rather than a moral shift. What I remembered from his previous performance was, as I said, intensity and drive—at a level perhaps more suitable to Orff’s Carmina Burana, which has some wonderful music in it, but also an undercurrent of sheer brutality that I find offputting as I get older. The intensity and drive tended to flatten out or conceal the complexity and variety of the music itself.
Reif’s interpretation had as much energy and drive as Dutoit’s. “Mars” was brutal, as it should be. Given the new awareness of the experience of World War I that I have been acquiring during the centennial period, I’m amazed that the British audience manage to endure this passage in 1920—or that Holst could have written it just before the war, not yet knowing precisely what it would mean.
But, in addition to intensity and drive, Reif’s interpretation had perfect nuance. “Venus” was deeply and mysteriously attractive, not merely delicate. “Mercury” sounded like a true god for our era of digital communication, speeding along with indifference as to exactly what the message might be. (For that matter, that was pretty much the Mercury/Hermes of ancient Greece and Rome.)
“Jupiter” had posed a bit of a problem for me for many years: how to connect all that romping “jollity” with the noble hymnic passage in the middle? At some point, the thought had struck me that, well, Holst was British; the model was the festivity surrounding some great royal birthday or wedding. And, in any case, Jupiter is King of the Gods. But Reif made more of it than that. The hymn was revealed as jollity transcendent, the kind of joy that one experiences in moments of exaltation, moments of love, moments of aesthetic significance, moments of religious depth. But such moments can never continue indefinitely, and the return to more ordinary sorts of jollity reminds us that it is all on a continuum.
“Saturn” lost nothing by coming on the heels of that. For one so young, Reif seemed to grasp old age in both its limitations and its lengthened perspective, its beauty and its threats. “Uranus” bounced about like the supreme master of sleight of hand. “Neptune” was transcendent. The women’s chorus was flawless. And Reif continued “conducting” the silence just briefly after the chorus fell silent, a wonderful device for allowing the audience to “hear” the silence as part of the music.
Perhaps the thing that most seemed to characterize the whole performance was Reif’s combination of architectural mastery in each of these pieces with an unembarrassed embrace of their wide range of emotion. Emotion, not sentimentality. Emotion compromises a vast portion of our human knowledge of our world. Some strands of modern music-making seem to have wanted to erase it and replace it with something more narrowly rational or to reduce it to a narrower range, emphasizing dread, brutality, arrogance, anger and so forth. Emotion has been dismissed at times as “sentimentality.” But “sentimentality'” isn’t simply a reflection or expression of our emotional lives. It’s an exploitation of them. With Reif, we heard human emotion expressed, never exaggerated, never falsely aroused, never utilized for ulterior purposes. There was always an element of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
We’ve seen how Matthew, in chapter 8, tells stories of Jesus’ miracles in such a way as to emphasize not just how great Jesus’ power was but also the way he transgressed expectations—the expectations of religious leaders among Jesus’ own people, the expectations of Jesus’ disciples (who are left wondering just who he really is), and the expectations of the pagan folk of Gadara, who apparently felt that the cost for exorcising a couple of violent homeless men was much too high. He’s putting himself in a dangerous position, isn’t he?
It looks that way. And Matthew implies that it was an inevitable consequence of his basic message, the message embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, with its blessings on the merciful, its command to love one’s enemies, its indifference to normal human anxieties. And now chapter 9 continues this series of miracles, leading finally to a radical rupture with the established religious leadership. That little expedition to Gadara on the far shore of the Sea of Galilee was a kind of prologue to more extensive travels that will fill the middle of Matthew’s Gospel. But, for now, Jesus is back in “his own town” (9:1). You get the sense that he’s just stepped out of the boat onto the shore when he sees “some people” carrying a paralyzed man on a cot and he himself initiates the interaction that follows. And that’s not how I remember the story. I thought he was indoors in the middle of a crowd and they actually had to open a hole in the roof and let the cot down on ropes!
Yes, once again Mark tells a much livelier version of this story (2:1-12), and it’s the one that irresistibly sticks in our minds. But in Matthew’s time as much as in ours, people who retell a story typically have a purpose in mind that necessarily shapes the telling. And Matthew’s purpose, here, is to talk about tensions and conflicts as much as miraculous healings He seems to be feeding the tensions! Why does Jesus start off by forgiving the man’s sins? He doesn’t even know him. And it’s his faith but that of the people carrying him that catches Jesus’ attention. Where does this sudden focus on sin come from?
People often make an association between sin and sickness. In our time, we’re more to start with sins of diet or stress or (lack of) exercise. In other periods, any sort of sin would do. I wonder if Jesus is saying, in effect, that we always have to deal with the deeper causes as well as the symptoms. Yet, it’s interesting that forgiving the sins doesn’t, in itself, heal the paralysis. Maybe the point, then, is that people require all sorts of healing and we shouldn’t be misled into thinking that the physical healing is the only important kind. Forgiveness is as much an expression of God’s love as bodily healing.
In any case, Matthew has stripped the story down in a way that focuses it squarely on Jesus’ remission of the man’s sins and the outraged reaction of the scribes who are present. The story of the healing that follows is a miracle in its own right, but it also (and this may be even more important) makes it difficult for the authorities to criticize Jesus’ granting of forgiveness. But their reaction seems perfectly reasonable to them, since only God can truly forgive sins; there is no provision for a human being to do it. He’s violating the religion he shares with them. So how can Jesus call their reaction “evil”?
Matthew may be suggesting that their religious system is more important to them than the good done to the man by hearing a message of forgiveness. Certainly, when Jesus does go on to heal the man’s paralysis, it’s a direct challenge to them, their criticism, and, in effect, their authority. And, to make matters worse, Matthew, for once, also includes the traditional note of amazement at the end of the story—something that’s routine in Mark’s Gospel, but not in Matthew’s: “When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God who had given such authority to human beings.” The point? Jesus has public opinion on his side, which makes the scribes’ position more awkward and also raises the stakes and ultimately precipitates a public rift. I suppose that hanging out with tax collectors and sinners isn’t going to help, either.
Probably not. In chapter 8, Jesus turned down a scribe who wanted to be part of his inner circle. In this chapter, he summons one Matthew, a tax collector to join that very group. What does Matthew know of Jesus at this point? What sort of disciple would he prove to be? Why does Jesus summon him without warning? These are questions we’ll consider further when we come to the formal listing of the Twelve in chapter 10.
But we can at least say that calling Matthew immediately puts Jesus in touch with a whole group of interested hearers who might never have dared approach him on their own—the tax collectors and sinners that he has dinner with at Matthew’s house. Who were these people? “Sinners” is such a broad term that it could include almost anybody who was less than rigorous in piety. Tax collectors, for their part, were further suspect because of their work. Taxes were collected on a system that rewarded those who collected as much as possible, making them the natural enemies of everyone who had to pay the taxes. But, also, they had a practice of going into people’s houses and poking their noses and hands into all sorts of things. They could easily become unclean in the process and then carry that uncleanness into the houses of other people, such as the Pharisees, who were trying to maintain the highest standards of purity. It’s no wonder the Pharisees reproach Jesus’ disciples about it. They feel they can no longer trust his commitment to purity. So he tells them to go soak their heads! He’s not trying to avoid conflict, is he?
Not at all. But he’s not just being insulting. He’s setting forth a basic principle. The love of God brings forgiveness to sinners and healing to the sick. It may seem meaningless, then, to the righteous and healthy—or to those who conceive themselves as such. But a suggestion remains hanging in the air that the righteous might be mistaken about themselves. There is a suggestion, too, that the religious leadership has misunderstood the God on whose behalf they claim to act. If they are more concerned about sacrifice (and the purity code that governed access to it) than about mercy, they have God quite wrong. Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 to make it clear that this is no new-fangled notion of his own. What about fasting? Even the disciples of John the Baptist are upset about the lack of that among Jesus’ disciples.
Since fasting was broadly accepted as a basic expression of piety, it must have seemed bizarre that Jesus and his disciples weren’t practicing it. And Jesus has the effrontery to say that his ministry is a wedding feast, the exact opposite of fasting. His teaching won’t be conventional. It’s a proclamation of “good news,” which changes everything. How strange to read the passage about patches and wineskins here after Jesus’ assertion in the Sermon on the Mount that he wasn’t changing anything at all (5:17-20)! He is changing nothing. And he is changing everything. And neither he nor Matthew intends to give us a detailed explanation of how to work this out, though he does expect that fasting will reappear after he is taken away from his disciples.
Next up: A DECISIVE BREAK WITH THE RIGHTEOUS (13:18-38)
I see that there are more miracle stories coming up in this chapter, but the next few verses—the problem of the two wannabe disciples—feel like an interruption. Actually, one of the two is already referred to as a disciple! Why is Jesus discouraging them?
It’s not an easy passage to figure out. I notice that the passage begins (vs. 18) with Jesus wanting to escape the crowds and giving orders to cross over to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. So, these are, in effect, not general requests to become some kind of disciple, but specific requests to go with Jesus as he leaves Capernaum. In fact, as you noticed, one of them is already a disciple and can only be asking to go along on the new adventure.
Jesus is not actually rejecting these people from discipleship as such. We sometimes assume that discipleship was a single category. But Jesus clearly had disciples of more than one kind. Some were folk who continued their daily lives, but took his teaching seriously (like the crowds at the Sermon on the Mount!) and came to hear him when they could. Other disciples, like Peter and Andrew, James and John, have been spending much of their time with him in Capernaum. But it’s their own hometown, where he has been living since 4:3. They’re also part of a developing group who will soon take up a wandering lifestyle alongside Jesus. Indeed, the impending voyage across the lake is a kind of preview of that period, which will begin in earnest in chapter 10.
The scribe who wants to go with Jesus is already recognized as a religious expert, by virtue of his learning and his office, who now wants to learn Jesus’ interpretation of the religion of Israel. But can he really give up his dignity and his social importance in Capernaum to go on the road? Jesus thinks not. The other disciple here has been listening to Jesus and wants to hear more but he has family ties that he’s not prepared to break. Jesus says, “You won’t be able to join this expedition.” But aren’t they still being rejected as disciples?
I always read the passage this way in the past. But I no longer think so. Jesus is saying to these two, “No, this sacrifice is not for you.” It’s also worth noting that Matthew presents the inner group of disciples as people whom Jesus himself has picked. He initiates the relationship, not the would-be disciple. We read about the calling of the first of these folk in 4:18-22, and we’ll get a full list later on in 10:1-4. But this doesn’t mean that the other kind of discipleship is of no importance. The specially “called” have a particular role in Matthew’s story: to learn, yes, to assist Jesus, yes; but also to make mistakes, to misunderstand, and, finally, to betray or deny or desert Jesus. Theirs isn’t the only pattern of discipleship, though it is critical to Matthew’s narrative. They are there as much for the sake of us, the readers, as anything else. So it’s this inner group alone who witness the stilling of the storm?
Yes. And notice that they don’t know what to make of it. The inner circle were not necessarily the most perceptive people that Jesus came across. Jesus gives most of his high praise to people he encounters only tangentially, like the centurion we just met (8:5-13). The disciples often get things wrong, which gives Jesus a chance to teach them something more, which they may then misunderstand in some new way. Their response to the stilling of the storm is part amazement—as is proper when you’ve just witnessed a miracle—but mostly, at base, incomprehension: “Huh! What was all that about? How did he do that? Who is he, really?” Then they come to Gadara and Jesus gets into trouble in Gentile territory as easily as Jewish.
He’s good at it, isn’t he? He can rile almost anybody up. They must be out on the outskirts of the town in this story. Burials weren’t allowed within ancient city limits. It’s an uncanny place with nobody around except a few swineherds and a couple of demoniacs. Greek tombs were often above-ground structures like small temples or houses. It sounds as if they may have broken into one of these tombs and are living in it. And they’re a major public problem. Jesus exorcises them at the very high cost of a large number of pigs, belonging to unnamed citizens of Gadara. (Had there been a Jewish crowd present, they would have thought it perfectly appropriate for the demons to drown a bunch of unclean animals; it might even have seemed a good joke,)
One might have thought the Gadarenes would have found it worth the price to have these two public menaces restored to a peaceable frame of mind. Yet, it comes as no surprise that the citizens beg Jesus to leave. He’s not only expensive; he’s unpredictable and far too powerful.
The story isn’t altogether different from the way Jesus trespasses purity boundaries in the Jewish community. These Gentile demoniacs have been pushed away from the respectable society into the uncanny territory of the dead. All societies, all cultures, have purity rules that serve, among other things, to keep some people on the margins and confirm the social standing of others. The story continues Jesus’ insistence that God loves the unloved. But this love isn’t cost-free in any culture; it disrupts familiar expectations and can cost the respectable more than they want to give. And then Jesus just goes home to Capernaum again. Isn’t that the very place he was trying to get away from?
Yes, the trip to Gadara seems to have been just a dress rehearsal for the wandering life he’ll soon take up in earnest. But his return lands him in an even tenser series of confrontations that will end in a decisive break with the local religious authorities.
Perhaps the flowers only know that it is high spring in the northern hemisphere. If so, that’s quite enough. They still echo the new life of the Resurrection:
CymbidiumsOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Ranunculus OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Ixia — South African Corn LilyA small orchid whose name I don’t know
We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:
The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.
In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.
“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”
“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.
The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.
Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .
They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.
At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.
They tell their story to the doubting elders: “Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”
All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes: Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.
It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.
But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.
And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.
This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.
Probably you wouldn’t have spent money to hear a piece of music called “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” Maybe the title makes more sense in Czech, but still. . . . I did it for two reasons. One is that it was written by Bohuslav Martinů, whose music I have long liked and admired. The other is that the recording got a rave review in BBC Music Magazine a few months ago. The album is Cantatas (four of them, all by Martinů), performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir, directed by Lukáš Vasilek (Supraphon).
Martinů’s music can be zany, like his early ballet, Revue de cuisine (another curious title) with its charleston episode—”charleston” as in the 1920s dance craze. It can go deep, as in the four symphonies he wrote while he was in exile in America during World War II and the subsequent communist takeover of his homeland. It can be highly rhythmic. It can have a folk-like quality. It can be emphatically modern. But I always find it both accessible and rewarding.
So I took a flyer. And I’m glad I did.
“Legend” is for choir and three soloists accompanied by a small ensemble of recorder, clarinet, French horn, accordion, and piano, giving it the clarity and transparency of chamber music. The text is a poem by the Czech poet Miloslav Bureš that begins with folk traditions and draws broader meanings out of them. (Quotations here are adapted from the English translation of Hilda Hearne.)
Reading between the lines, I take the “smoke from potato tops” as referring to a practice of burning off the foliage in the village potato fields—maybe as a defense against potato blight. The “legend” part is a story about the Virgin Mary deciding to get down off her pedestal in the village church and go out to spend a warm, sunny day with the young men who are burning the fields.
The story takes a turn particularly interesting at the moment when I write this, with Holy Week not far off. Mary meets her son in the field, looking like another statue escaped from the church: “The blood on his hips had long gone rusty, / and the wounds by the thorns pained the mother’s heart.” She asks him, “Why your and my own plight / is so often graved in stone, / and at my feet cold candlesticks are placed.”
Jesus answers: “Sweet mother of mine, / I wish that not my blood but love would save mankind.” And he envisions a fulfillment of such love with all the statues emerging from the church, the saints becoming real people.
But when the pious discover that their statue is missing, they rush out to find it—and pass right by Mary without recognizing her. They suppose she is some ignorant peasant woman. After all, “like thrifty peasants do, / she took off her sandals” as she left the village. After searching for her all day, they come back to the village. “Then, in compliance with the official rules, / they blamed the verger”—only to be interrupted by the news that some lads grazing goats on the hills have found her.
The music for all this never strikes a false note. The instrumental introduction strikes a pastoral note that continues as the opening chorus sets the scene. This shifts to a hymn-like melody as a soprano soloist describes Mary descending from the altar. Reminiscent of Bach’s pairing of solo instruments with human voices, the clarinet accompanies Mary’s lament (alto solo), while the piano takes over to accompany Jesus’ response (baritone).
The accompaniment shifts into a bustling mode as the pious discover the Virgin’s absence and run off to look for her. The soprano describes Mary’s emergence into the natural world “in a robe of ripening rye” with a simple monodic chant, then joins chorus and alto in almost jaunty mode as the crowds push past her, dismissing her as “a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave.”
At length, the searchers give up, only to be surprised by increasing musical energy as the “bold lads” who have seen her ignore their elders and recount what’s happened to them. I can only describe the music as music of miracle–but of a completely modest and unostentatious kind. The music returns to monody and dips lower and lower as it describes the reaction of the elders, their faces “mirrored all askew” in their half-empty beer mugs “as after a funeral wake.”
The conclusion is a prayerful celebration of the Virgin who, surrounded by “lads who trot around her barefoot, / returns to the rocks and to the trembling aspens, / with human heart.” Martinů makes a very satisfactory “amen” out of those last three words. All the sophistication of a Paris-educated composer has poured into creating the elegant simplicity of this music. He wrote it in the 1950s, not long before his death.
I love this piece of music. And I suspect a whole lot of people would if they ever had a chance to hear it. So, if you like choral and vocal music or if you know and like Martinů s music or if you’d like to see more of Bures’s interesting folk/ecological theology or if you’re just adventurous, buy this CD! I say “buy the CD” because it has an excellent booklet with texts and translations. But if your Czech is fluent, maybe the performers’ excellent diction will be all you need.
And, by the way, the other three cantatas are also wonderful. Maybe I’ll write about them later on.
After Jesus finishes his great Sermon, he comes down from the mountain—followed now by crowds of people—and begins performing a series of miracles. Matthew had mentioned earlier (4:23-25) that Jesus was healing and exorcising people, but there were no actual miracle stories until now. And they are odd miracle stories. Yes, looking ahead, I notice something odd in the story of the Gadarene swine (vss. 28-34). I remember it as being a longer and more detailed story than this. And I thought there was just one demoniac, but in Matthew there are two.
Good observation! Mark and Luke both narrate this same episode and, frankly, make a more gripping story of it. Matthew doesn’t seem very interested in the human details here, and the way he uses two demoniacs in his version instead of one is rather like a story-teller in English starting off with “There were a couple of . . . ” The individuals aren’t important in themselves; they’re types. Matthew also keeps his telling of the story (and of other miracle stories, too) quite brief and shapes the stories in a way that underlines the troublesome quality of Jesus’ actions—troublesome from the point of view of the very pious and the religious authorities. Why would they be troublesome?
For a variety of reasons, many of them centering on questions of purity. In the first story—the cleansing of a leper—Jesus touches the man, thereby violating the most basic principle of purity systems, namely that impurity always trumps purity. That’s why lepers were exiled from their communities—so that they wouldn’t make everybody else unclean. Touching a leper makes you dirty, but it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t make a leper clean by touch. Except that Jesus can and does! With him, the “contagion” flows the other way; he makes cleansing contagious, not dirt. Interestingly, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to want to make a public issue of this. He tells the cleansed leper to keep matters quiet and just go to the priest to perform the ritual that will certify that he’s no longer a leper and can be welcomed back into the community. So Jesus isn’t going to abide by the rules. But does he really expect to go unnoticed?
Perhaps not. He certainly doesn’t avoid awkward situations in this chapter. But breaking the rules isn’t the point in itself. It’s an expression of his message that God loves everybody, even the unclean and sinful. Even Gentiles—a potentially divisive claim in a Jewish community that had been subject to the domination of Gentile empires for centuries. Gentiles like the centurion in Capernaum?
Exactly. It’s interesting that Luke also tells this story (7:1-10), but carefully buffers the interaction between Jesus and the centurion by saying that the centurion sent local Jewish leaders to plead with Jesus on his behalf rather than coming himself. Matthew, however, (who in many ways seems the most self-consciously Jewish of the four gospel writers) brings the two men into direct interaction with each other. Jesus even volunteers to go to the centurion’s house. To understand how unsettling this suggestion was, just re-read the story of Peter’s visit to the house of the Gentile Cornelius, also a centurion, in Acts 10. Peter hated the idea of entering a Gentile house so much that he had to be given a special revolution to persuade him to do it. And the revelation had to be repeated three times just so he’d be sure God really meant it.
Jesus not only grants the centurion’s plea for help. He announces to all within hearing distance that this Gentile has just shown more faith than any one Jesus has met in the Jewish community. Jesus even has the temerity to suggest that people like this man might well replace some of the less faithful of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hard words for his hearers! It’s like suggesting to modern Christian that some non-believers may get better seats at the heavenly banquet than they will. So Jesus isn’t evading controversial issues. He’s quite willing to address them as occasion warrants. I see that there are some other big miracle stories ahead—Stilling of the Storm, Gadarene Demoniacs, the Paralytic—but the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a disappointment. It’s so short it’s barely a story.
I agree. Even by Matthew’s standards, it seems like a nub, not a real story. Still, there’s more to it than first meets the eye. It’s not a flashy miracle and it’s done in private, not on the street. But Jesus’ touching of this woman is problematic in its own way. She could have been in a state of contagious impurity—something that menstruation occasioned. There seems to have been a widespread expectation that male religious leaders would avoid contact with women outside their own households—if only as a defense against becoming accidentally unclean.
Of course, there’s also an element in the story that can irritate modern readers—the phrase “and she got up and began serving him.” Some see it as one more reduction of a woman to a servant’s role. I always wondered if she shouldn’t at least have gotten a bit of recuperation time. Perhaps part of the point is that the healing was so complete that it was as if she’d never been sick at all. But, as I grow older and experience a bit more infirmity myself. I find myself reading it another way. Now I think, “Yes, exactly.” When I’ve been under the weather and unable to work, this is exactly what I want—I want to be out working in the garden. Maybe in honor of having a guest and a miraculous healing, I’d have gone a step further: “and he got up and served tea in the garden.”
Now, we’re not through with this series of troublesome miracles. But the scope of the trouble is about to broaden out. It isn’t just the pious and the religious authorities of Israel that Jesus is disturbing. He’ll be doing it to his own disciples and to some neighboring pagans, too.
A SERMON FOR THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, 2018
Mark 9:2-9
We hear this story of how Jesus became transfigured by dazzling light every year on this Sunday right before the beginning of Lent. That means it’s grown familiar for us. And, as often happens with familiar things, we no longer notice how unusual it is. Well, to be sure, shining with a dazzling light is pretty unusual. But there are other things to notice as well, things you don’t find elsewhere in the Bible.
For one, who else in the Bible lights up like this? The only example would be Moses, whose face glowed with light after all the time he spent with God on Mt. Sinai. It gave the Israelites a proper fright, and he had to wear a veil before they’d get close enough to listen to him. (Exodus 34)
And where else in the Bible do departed saints volunteer to make conversation with the living? The closest thing (though definitely not voluntary) would be the story about the witch of Endor: King Saul forced her on threat of death to call up the shade of Samuel from Sheol. Samuel was not at all happy about it. And, far from giving Saul the comfort Saul was looking for, he just tells him he’s doomed. He actually seems to take a certain vengeful pleasure in delivering that message. (1 Samuel 28).
But the thing that interests me particularly this morning is that the Transfiguration is so different from the other key events in Jesus’ story. In all the rest, Jesus is essentially alone. At his baptism, nobody but John recognizes what’s going on. At his temptation, he’s on his own. In Gethsemane, the disciples are all asleep. At his trial, the only people around are enemies. At the crucifixion, a few supporters are present, but unable to help. And the resurrection has no witnesses but the guards—and they seem to have fainted. This event is different. The story of the Transfiguration has a bigger cast—Jesus plus five saints. And with two of them, he’s in intimate conversation.
What do you suppose they were talking about? Mark, whose account we read this morning, doesn’t tell us, but Luke gives us a hint. He says “they were talking with him about his departure which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.” (Lk 9:31) His “departure in Jerusalem”—it must certainly mean his death. Now, Jesus has already told his disciples to expect this; but they refused to believe it. Peter even protested that it couldn’t possibly happen. (Mk. 8:31-33) Maybe Moses and Elijah were the only people who could possibly have anything to say to Jesus on this particular occasion. It’s often said that the two were there to represent the Law and the Prophets—in other words the deep, scriptural background of Jesus’ ministry. True enough, but there’s more to it than that.
Think for a bit about these two old men. Moses we know. He started off in a persecuted minority and became an adopted child of the persecuting majority. He couldn’t live with that tension and one day when he saw a guard beating an Israelite slave, he killed him.Then he had to run for his life. When God confronted him years later in the burning bush and told him to go back to Egypt and lead the people out, he knew it was a crazy project. He’d been there! Still, he did it and it worked. But he spent the next forty years problem-solving for a big crowd of people wandering around in the wilderness—while also serving as God’s messenger to give them a new identity, a new law, a new religion. The people sometimes agreed to it all but, according the Biblical account, mostly they complained and occasionally they rebelled. Moses got precious little thanks for all his work. And then, at the end of his life, he didn’t even get to enter the Promised Land. He died in sight of it, in Moab, and was buried there—in a grave whose location was promptly forgotten (Deut. 34:6).
Elijah, too, had a difficult time of it. He was a passionate advocate of the God of Israel, and he spent his life fighting the king’s efforts to blend the religion of Israel, with its focus on justice, into the fertility cults of Israel’s neighbors—all for the sake of enhancing royal power. Elijah had such a rough time of it that, at one point, he complained that he was the only faithful person left. God promptly disabused him of that rather egotistical notion, but it tells you what he was going through. And, perhaps because of his immense frustration, he wholeheartedly embraced violence as a way of forcing people to be faithful: he slaughtered the priests of Baal and brought a devastating drought down on the whole country—a drought that sent thousands of Israelites as well as Gentiles to death by starvation. St. Romanos, in the sixth century, speculated that God sent the fiery chariot for Elijah because, in his zeal for God, Elijah had forgotten that God actually loves human beings, even in our imperfection. The only way to save the people who were left was to yank Elijah off the stage.
So Elijah and Moses had both known struggle, opposition, disappointment, the futility of violence, the difficulty of getting their message across, the willingness of people to trade their principles for what looked like an easier path. Moses died in Exile; Elijah was translated to the heavens by fiery chariot. But both knew about struggle and suffering, and each had had to leave a lot of unfinished business behind him.
Jesus, at the moment of the Transfiguration, is about to turn toward Jerusalem—in full awareness of what lies ahead. And I can’t imagine any two people better suited to talk with him about it. His disciples are busy arguing about which of them will get to be prime minister in Jesus’ new kingdom. They’re listening to him, but they’re not getting much of it. And they’re the ones he will leave to carry on his work.
We know that he’s afraid of what is to come. He never says it to to his followers, but it comes out in the words he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane—a prayer that they, of course, slept through. But the fear is there. And so he turns to the two people who have been through some of this already, the two who can reassure him that a work that feels unfinished isn’t necessarily altogether lost, the two who can tell him that it is worthwhile to go on with his mission no matter how daunting the challenges.
After Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, angels came to minister to him (Mark1:13). But there are some things that no angel could tell him. No angel could tell him what it was like to live with human uncertainties, with the incomprehension and wavering of human followers, with the difficulty of seeing beyond the next step, the next moment. He needed a couple of wise old folk—wise because of long experience, wise because of their own sufferings and failures.
But, of course, they’re not the only ones present, are they? Jesus could have had a conversation with Moses and Elijah without bringing Peter and James and John along (though I guess there’s no way we would ever have heard about it). But here they are, and they must have a role to play, too. What is it?
I suppose they’re there partly because they needed to be overwhelmed again by God’s beauty and power and get a renewed sense of their own puniness in comparison. They played that role pretty well. But they didn’t like it at all. Peter’s instinctive response was to try to take charge. If things like this were going to happen, well, somebody needed see to that they were properly noted, commemorated, categorized, institutionalized, and generally taken care of. So I guess they were also there so that they could make some mistakes on behalf of the rest of us.
And I suppose they were also there to be reminded of how much they didn’t understand. Afterwards, as they head back down the mountain, Jesus goes back to talking about his death and resurrection again. And, once again, they can’t figure out what he’s getting at. So, if Moses and Elijah are there to help, Peter and James and John are there to make mistakes and to misunderstand. They’re there to confirm that our inexperience and foolishness have a place here, too.
And, finally, there is yet a further dimension to all this of immediate importance to us. We have, in the Transfiguration, a picture of the church—helpful at any time but perhaps particularly as we step into Lent. Jesus stands in the center, the Word who brings Good News, gleaming with the beauty of God’s inexhaustible love for humankind. Gathered as church, we hear him in the scriptures and sing the good news in hymns and respond in prayer. The old wise folk, who have seen it all, survived disappointment and suffering and still have hope—they can stand alongside Jesus in communion and understanding. The three newbies, the disciples, cower down below, shielding their eyes, still trying to figure out what this is all about.
It reminds us that understanding life and God isn’t a solitary business; we need one another for it. At one moment you may find yourself flailing away with the neophyte disciples. At another, you may discover you are one of the wise elders who can draw hope out of your own experience to sustain someone else. There’s something of Moses and Elijah in each one of us—and something of Peter, James, and John. And the three callow disciples, remember, will grow into the next generation of Moseses and Elijahs.
And whether we find ourselves nodding our heads and thinking, “Oh yes, I’ve been there; it can be very difficult,” or whether we just feel confused and uncertain, the light of God keeps on shining on all of us just as it did on the Mountain of Transfiguration. And we all have parts to play and, together, we can all increase in understanding and in love.
Where does this language about “false prophets” come from? I thought prophets belonged in the Old Testament.
The word “prophet” means someone who claims to be speaking on God’s behalf—in other words, almost any religious leader. Mostly, Jesus’ contemporaries used the word to refer to people who lived hundreds of years before their time, but Jesus is using it here in its more basic sense.
And there was a revival of prophetic claims at the time—especially among Jesus’ own followers, after his death. Sometimes, scoundrels found it pretty easy to impose on innocent Christian congregations by claiming to be prophets. The second-century Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (not himself a Christian) tells an intriguing story about just such a “prophet” in his satire “The Death of Peregrinus.” One might almost feel that Jesus was warning, in advance, against exactly such people.
Prophets made their impression through speech, often with the suggestion that they were in a trance or had been taken over by a spirit that was merely speaking through them. Accordingly, they claimed a degree of authority that was more than human. Jesus says, in effect: “Don’t get swept up in the words; wait to see how your ‘prophet’ lives.” That means making judgements about people.
Yes, even after we just heard “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged” (7:1). But the judgement is to be based on works of love. Just as we can tell good fruit from bad, we’ll know the true prophet when we see that this person is motivated by God’s love and does works expressive of that love. Jesus threatens the impostors with hell-fire! Not so very loving, is it?
He gets very angry about abuses done in the name of religion by religious leaders. And it’s clear that he fully expects that such abuses will crop up among his own followers, just as in other religious groups. (Of course, he’s been proven right again and again.) He was also talking about this in chapter 6, where we saw warnings about religious behavior being misused for personal aggrandizement. He sees that no arena of human existence is immune to abuse. That includes religion. Is he against religion?
No. His teaching is itself religious. It’s about our relationship with the God who is the power behind the creation, the lover of the world, and the Pole Star of our human lives. But he has no illusion that religion is always good in itself. And he’s trying to give us a way to distinguish good from bad in it.
Later Christians have sometimes treated Jesus’ attacks on religion as attacks on one particular religion—Judaism. It’s a nice trick for shifting people’s attention away from our own misdeeds. But it’s nonsense. Jesus never separated himself from Judaism. That separation between Christians and Jews happened only in the generations after Jesus. His strictures apply equally to all religions. In fact, he applies them quite explicitly in this passage to his own followers as well. The people who say, “Lord, Lord”?
Exactly. And this applies not just to ordinary believers but quite specifically to the elite who have prophesied in Jesus’ name and exorcised and worked miracles. If they haven’t done the will of the Father—haven’t led lives founded on love—he rejects them absolutely: “I never knew you.” We’ll hear a strong echo of this same attack on loveless piety near the end of Matthew’s Gospel in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (25:31-46). He’s getting quite peremptory here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Everything seems to be either/or, doesn’t it? He didn’t seem so angry at the beginning of the sermon.
Yes. He says, in effect, that either we hang on to what is really central or our lives will fall apart like the house built on sand. The point, though, isn’t that we have to reach perfection immediately. Jesus’ inner circle of disciples certainly didn’t, as Matthew will point out again and again. In practice, human beings are seldom if ever completely good or evil. We are a mix of wisdom and folly—a constantly shifting mix. But the question remains: Where do our central commitments lie? Where is the foundation?
Remember, too, that God sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous (5:43-48). God continues to love us, even when we misstep. But Jesus wants us to understand that the foundation for a wise, centered, enduring human existence is here in these teachings, waiting for us to explore and learn and practice more and more deeply with our lives. I can see why “the crowds were astounded.”
Yes. These three chapters that make up the Sermon on the Mount still astound. And the attentive reader never gets to the end of finding new insight into them. Each return to the text is apt to open up something we hadn’t noticed or understood before. Was this really so different from what other religious authorities were teaching?
There is much in the teaching of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries that agrees with the Sermon on the Mount. The difference isn’t primarily one of content, but one of focus and certainty. Matthew’s phrasing here is key; “he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” The scribes, like the clergy of other religions, taught on the basis of an existing religious consensus, which existed in written form in the scriptures of Israel and also orally in the form of opinions offered by a long series of esteemed leaders. The scribes would have been less likely to say “I tell you” than to say “The Torah tells you.” That can tip over all too easily into the creation of an inflexible system that demands obedience and is willing to skimp on less sharply defined values such as love.
Jesus speaks like a prophet himself, claiming direct access to God. He was even wiling, back at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, to contrast what he said with what “was said to the men of old.” No wonder he was willing to make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic prophets! Unlike the false prophets, he is transparent to the gospel of love. The fruits of this tree are good. And they are on display for all to see. In fact, we’ll be seeing more of them in the next two chapters of Matthew. So that’s the Sermon on the Mount? It’s very dense, and it doesn’t exactly leave you with three clear points or an agenda for concrete action.
You could say it even resists being reduced to a few clear points. Oh, the Golden Rule is clear enough. But putting it into action requires a lifelong process of learning how to love one another, of understanding the peculiar circumstances in which each of us lives, and choosing the loving course in those circumstances. We don’t find a simple set of rules either here or elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew.
Still, we will come back again and again to the themes that these chapters have raised for us, and it is worth the time we’ve taken to look at them closely as part of trying to understand this gospel. Next, Matthew will turn to showing us how Jesus behaved toward the larger public. Here are the “fruits” that authenticate his prophesy.
