Biblical interpretation

MATTHEW, 25: MORE PARABLES (13:24-58)

November 15, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

Like chapter 12 of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 13 is crowded with important material. And since I’ve broken it up into two posts here, it maya be helpful to remind ourselves of how parables work. They are images and stories—some strange, some quite ordinary—that can be read in many ways, but one thing they consistently do is to challenge us to think about where we might locate ourselves in relation to the story. There is no single answer to that. We may find ourselves in various places at different times—or even at any one time.
But Jesus says that the next series of parables are specifically about the kingdom of heaven. Isn’t it a little presumptuous to assume they’re about us?
It might be if Jesus hadn’t already said that the kingdom of heaven has a great deal to do with us: “Repent [or, better, Turn around!], for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (4:17) The better we understand the kingdom, the better we can imagine the meaning of our own lives in terms of the good news.
I’m not so sure about the parable of the wheat and weeds (vss. 24-30). It has more to do with the Last Judgement than with present life—like a preview of the Sheep and Goats in chapter 25, especially if I look ahead at the “explanation” of it in vss. 36-43.
Yes, it deals with judgement as an aspect of the kingdom. But what is it saying about judgement? We start with a farmer who has a field and sows it with wheat. An enemy, by night, throws some weed seed in among the wheat. The older translation “tares” doesn’t mean much to most of us, but it was more precise because tares are closely related to wheat and the two are hard to tell apart when the plants are young. The farmer’s work crew has what they think is a good idea–weed the field immediately. The farmer says, “No, you’ll wind up pulling up too much wheat. We can separate them at harvest time.” It’s a very ordinary, practical little story, but why tell it just now? What does it mean for the people with Jesus?
The explanation applies it to the fact that sin is a powerful force in every community but can’t ultimately have any place in the kingdom. How do we make sense of this in the community of faithful people today? Jesus begins by claiming ownership of the field for himself, “the Son of Man.” Without that explanation, we might have assumed that the owner is God—just as God appears in Isaiah 5 as owner of the vineyard that is Israel. Jesus dares to place his human self in the same position here because his ministry embodies the kingdom—God’s love and care for humanity.
But how does a community of this world (e.g., Israel or the church) with all its evils become fit for the kingdom of heaven? The workers want to start sorting it all out right now. Jesus says that, no, he will take care of that at the end of the age
So it really is about the Last Judgement. Is that when the kingdom begins?
No. The kingdom is here from the start. The good seed is already planted and starting to grow, but there are weeds mixed in, as in every human life. And the workers have a very human reaction to it: “Let’s throw the sinful and imperfect out.”
The desire to create perfection in the community right now crops up again and again in religious and quasi-religious communities (such as fascism and communism). It sometimes takes on repressive and even bloody forms. Right now, we may be aware of this mainly in terms of some developments within Islam; but the church has had its own deeply shameful passages of history. And Jesus’ critics among the scribes and Pharisees, too, are looking precisely for this—for some way to purge him as an evil influence. The parable warns us against taking this authority on ourselves. The final separation of good and evil belongs to Age to Come.
Why do the devout keep falling into this trap?
Because we want so much to see ourselves as children of the kingdom! So it’s very tempting to identify those we disagree with as children of the evil one. We ourselves are in danger of turning into the workers, ready to rip up the whole field in our effort to purge it of tares. The whole history of the church would have been a great deal less destructive and bloody had Christians heeded this parable more carefully.
Jesus—and Matthew—must have known we would find this warning hard to accept, for there’s another parable here, The Fish of Every Kind, that makes the same point in another way (13:47-50). We are all in the net together whether we like it or not. It is for the angels to sort us out in the Age to Come. We should be cautious about trying to impose all our own definitions of purity on the church here and now.
What about the four parables we just skipped over? They’re very different.
Quite different, because they’re focused on the discovery of the kingdom and its cost. And their placement is interesting: the experience of discovery and conversion is placed squarely between the two warnings about one of the dangers in embracing the life of faith. Here, bracketed by the two warnings against premature judgement, Jesus encourages and celebrates the joy of falling in love with the good news.
The Mustard Seed and The Leaven (13:31-33) both speak of a contrast between the smallness of the kingdom’s beginnings among us and the disproportionate size of the result. The Leaven is one of the “ordinary” parables—nothing new or strange, just a summons to pay attention: even a tiny thing, like hearing the good news, can transform one’s whole life. The Mustard Seed, on the other hand, is a “strange” parable. It communicates the same message through exaggeration—turning the mustard plant, which is really just a large bush, into a great tree with birds nesting in the branches. (Mark 4:30-32 has a more “ordinary” version: the mustard is “the largest of garden plants” and the birds “live in its shade.”) The exaggeration in Matthew serves to underline the astonishing power of the good news. It may turn you into something you couldn’t even have imagined!
The Treasure Found in the Field and The Pearl of Great Price are different again. They celebrate the joy of being touched by the good news. Both treasure and pearl are of immediately recognizable value. The same is true, for the one who truly catches its meaning, of the good news. It transforms our sense of the possibilities and blessings of human life. But the point isn’t just the intrinsic value of God’s love, but the joy its discovery inspires in us—and the willingness to sacrifice other things to lay hold of it. It recalls Jesus’ summons to the disciples to abandon everything for the sake of the kingdom (10:37-39). “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (10:39) In the same way the two seekers in these parables sacrifice everything for the wonderful treasure they’ve found. They aren’t acting out of duty, but out of joy and delight.
You jumped over another bit here—about why Jesus was teaching in parables (13:34-35). It’s very different from the passage we had back in 13:14-17.
Yes, it is. This time, Jesus, with a quote from Psalm 78:2, speaks of the parables as a means of revealing the mystery, not (as in 13:24-15) as a way of obscuring it.
How can both of these be true?
As we said earlier, understanding a parable is bound up with understanding one’s own life in relation to the kingdom of heaven. Parables will be quite opaque until we begin to make this connection. They do offer understanding, but it isn’t simple “objective” knowledge. It is understanding of mysteries, which become intelligible to us only as we ourselves begin to be shaped by them. These mysteries don’t come clear by means of information, but through lived knowledge. Parables, then, wind up both concealing and revealing, depending on our own interaction with their meaning.
You may notice that we get another reference to the privilege of the disciples, as in vss. 16-17. Jesus asks them (13:51), “Have you understood all this?” And they answer, “Yes.” But there is a note of irony here. Knowing, as we do, what is yet to come, we can only question their self-assurance. And this is a reminder to question our own, as well. However well we may think we have comprehended the message of Jesus, we need to remember that even his immediate disciples stumbled again and again. The good news is something to be learned over and over in the course of a lifetime.
“Things new and old” from the household treasure? (13:52)
Yes. Some have suggested that the “scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven” is a good image of Matthew himself, drawing freely as he does on both the scriptures of Israel and on Jesus’ teachings. But it’s more than a self portrait. It offers all of us a pattern for trying to understand what Jesus was telling us. The old treasures—those from the past, such as scripture—and the new—the ones we discover only by living them—are both important. The process of understanding is one of renewing and deepening a conversion that we have only half understood at the beginning.
But then we suddenly jump back to family problems when Jesus goes to his hometown.
Those who knew him as a child, it seems, want to keep him in his place, which means identifying him as part of his particular family. The implication is that, since they know how to pigeonhole him, he can’t be the person of great importance they’ve been hearing about. “Old” knowledge, in effect, excludes “new.” And Jesus responds, in effect, “You won’t grasp who stands before you until you are prepared to hear something new.” There are no miracles in Nazareth, then, because they can only hold on to the old and have sacrificed their capacity to embrace the good news, whether in word or in deed
But why does the issue of family keep cropping up?
Because it was and is so difficult. Learning the Kingdom of God, as we’ve noted, involves a lifetime of deepening and renewed conversion. The existing verities of our lives and times—all the things we are sure we already know—easily become barriers to grasping the newness of the gospel. That’s why believers so easily fall into the trap of thinking we have it all figured out and demonizing anyone who questions. At the same time, merely abandoning the past for some new way of thinking doesn’t help. The treasures we need are both old and new.

Next up: DANGER, MIRACLE, FRAGILE FAITH (chapter 14)

MATTHEW, 24: PARABLES (13:1-23)

October 22, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

Jesus’ parables are self-contained, independent of context. They’re relatively brief images or stories, capable of a broad range of meanings. When the early Christian teachers retold them, they necessarily placed them in the new context of their own churches. Like them, Matthew has highlighted some aspects of them as he gathered some of them together here.
It’s worth noticing that Matthew groups much of Jesus’ teaching into three major “addresses.” The first is the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), the second the instructions to the disciples in chapter 10. The collection of parables in chapter 13 forms the third address, found right at the peak of Jesus’ public ministry. In fact, his popularity is so great that all he has to do is walk out of the house to gather a crowd—a crowd so large that he then has to retreat to a boat on the lake, whether to keep from being crushed by them or to gain a slightly higher vantage point from which he can better be heard (13:2).
But is the parable of the Sower (13:1-9) really that open to varying interpretations? It seems pretty clearcut, and the explanation of it later on is quite detailed (18-23).
There’s still room for varying interpretation. Think, for example, about the amount of seed that’g going to waste here, landing in places where it can’t grow. Is that unusual? Was the sower careless? even extravagant? Or was that unavoidable in broadcasting seed by hand? Either way, it might make one think of Jesus’ willingness to talk to anybody and share his gifts freely.
I suppose sowing is always a risky investment, no matter how well farmers till their land. I remember my Uncle Bill giving a tour of his High Plains wheat farm to some visitors. At one point, he said, “Now we’re coming to the hilly part.” We all stared out the windows of the car and were completely befuddled since it looked absolutely flat—just like the rest of the farm. But Bill could tell that there was some variation of elevation here, because the rain water collected in the lower parts of the field and the soil would become muddy. He still had to sow it every fall. In a dry year, it might outproduce the other fields; in a really wet year, wheat might never flourish there at all. The sower just has to assume the best.
It looks to me as if the focus is really more on the different kinds of soil.
That’s certainly what gets the most detailed attention. Some have even suggested renaming it “The Parable of the Different Soils.” The sower gets different responses from different patches of land. And we can probably connect this with the variety of responses Jesus is getting to his ministry. Some people accept it, some reject it, some lose interest and wander off. And Jesus doesn’t do much to control their responses. He heals people and sends them away. He teaches, and either they listen or they don’t. Whatever happens, he’s just the Sower.
That reminds me of what he told the disciples—if a town receives them, they should stay there; if not, just “shake their dust off your feet” (10:11-14). It’s up to the hearers.
Exactly. He can even sound rather callous about it: “those places will be worse off than Sodom and Gomorrah in the judgement, but that’s not your problem.” It may shock us to realize how little Jesus is interested in controlling the response to him. But before we get the “explanation” of the parable, we first come to a disturbing conversation with the disciples about the purpose of parables (13:10-17).
Yes, I don’t like this passage. It’s a real insiders/outsiders thing. “You lucky disciples get to know the secret. Everybody else is left guessing!”
It seems particularly ungenerous to us, living in a world where we generally want education to be widely available and hope that everybody can have access to literacy and learning. In antiquity, though, learning was harder to come by. Most education was done in small groups gathered around a teacher—like the disciples around Jesus. Only the disciples would really get an extensive exposure to it. This was true, for example, of philosophical as well as religious schools. Books were simply not available enough for most people to do much learning on their own. So Jesus starts off by acknowledging his disciples’ privileged status. But that’s not the whole story. Jesus, after all, does a lot of public teaching, not to mention public disputations with his opponents.
Yes, and the disciples, as I recall, actually have a hard time getting anything right in this story. But what about all the parables where the secret isn’t explained? Are we for ever in the dark without an official explanation?
Our NRSV translators might better have used the alternate translation they put in their footnote here and spoken not of “the secrets” of the kingdom of heaven, but of “the mysteries.” The English word “secrets” suggests factual kinds of information that are being withheld or hidden. “Mysteries” aren’t just hidden information; they’re things genuinely difficult to comprehend. The ancient Greek mysterion is more like English “mystery” than “secret.”
Still, it sounds as if Jesus is arbitrarily punishing those “who have nothing.” Is it their fault they’re poor or haven’t been included in the elite group?
This has to be ironic. After all, who are the people most resistant to Jesus’ message? Matthew has made that pretty clear. It’s not the general public; it’s the religious authorities and the particularly devout. They would be appalled at any suggestion that they were religiously impoverished. But Jesus’ teaching constitutes a mystery for them. Since they have defined religious faithfulness entirely in terms of abiding by their well-defined ru;es of belief and conduct, they cannot comprehend the mystery of what God is really up to. They’re the people, Jesus says, of whom Isaiah had spoken (6:9-10), and they won’t understand as long as they refuse to sacrifice their present certainty.
And understanding a parable isn’t simply a matter of figuring out the “key.” It’s figuring out where you yourself might fit into it. Where do you stand in relation to God and God’s newly arriving reign? The real issue here, as Jesus says in vss. 16-17, is that the disciples will see, in Jesus himself, the complete revelation of the mystery. All the clues seen by the prophets and the righteous people of old are coming together in him. The religious leaders who think they already know everything of importance about God’s work won’t be able to recognize that.
By comparison, the explanation of The Sower seems a little pedestrian—even if easier to grasp.
It seems exactly that to many readers. Many scholars are convinced that it couldn’t come from Jesus and must come from some later, less inspired Christian teacher.
It’s possible, but the explanation still gives a pretty good account of Christian experience. Some people catch a hint of the good news but retreat when they hear it criticized. In other cases, people may get very engaged at the start, but are just as quickly scared off when the Christian life becomes troublesome or even dangerous—standing as it does in potential conflict with the demands of the world-as-usual and religion-as-usual. As for the “lure of wealth,” even the daily challenge of keeping one’s head above water financially can crowd out matters of the spirit—matters of deep human and divine meaning. But, despite all the challenges, the amazing thing is that sometimes people do catch the wonder and beauty of God’s love and begin to bear fruit—sometimes in astonishing ways and far beyond any normal expectation.
How does all that happen? Apparently, it isn’t just a matter good intentions vs. bad intentions.
I agree. The parable is sometimes taken as an admonition: “Work harder and you can be a good seed.” But that isn’t how it’s written at all. Jesus seems to be saying that it may not always be a question of our own virtue. The seed itself, after all, is a gift distributed by the sower, while other powers crowd around trying to distract us. But Jesus keeps sowing the same message he started with: “Turn around! For the kingdom of Heaven has come near.” (4:17) And there’s always the chance that, next time, it may sprout.
Even the explanation acts as a kind of parable, asking you where you find yourself in this story. Of course, that might also mean asking yourself where you want to find yourself in this parable—and what factors in you and your environment might be hindering that.
Then, if it’s not all up to us, is it a matter of divine predestination? “You’re a poor, rocky excuse for a piece of ground. Too bad!”
I don’t think it’s exactly that, either—at least not in the systematic sense developed later by Augustine and Calvin. I think the point is, rather, the importance of humility. The Parable of the Sower, among other things, reminds us not to think we’re all that special because we happen to have heard the good news and have responded with some degree of fruitfulness. It fell on you at the right moment. It may yet fall on your neighbor. Pride in possessing the whole truth or pride in my own goodness belongs to the religion not of Jesus, but of his enemies. Nobody is a self-made saint. We live by grace, by the recklessness of the sower, scattering seed everywhere.

Next up: MORE PARABLES (13:24-58)

CAN THE RICH BE SAVED?

October 15, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

A Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, CA
21ST SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, OCTOBER 14, 2018
Proper 23B: Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Psalm 22:1-15; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

So, can anyone be saved? Whether we think of ourselves as rich or not—mostly not, I imagine—I suspect, from years of conversations about this text, that most of us were probably a little unsettled by today’s gospel reading. What does Jesus really demand of us? How much is enough? What am I required to do?
You know, we have a long tradition in the church—it goes way back to our ancient Roman forebears in the faith—to read everything in the Bible as if it were a law, a direct moral demand. And the next step beyond that—and this goes back to our almost-as-ancient Irish forebears—is to follow that up with a personal self-examination to calculate how well we’re doing. Well, sometimes that makes sense, but not always. And this story about Jesus and the rich man is actually much more interesting and subtle than that. So instead of jumping directly to guilty conclusions, I want us to take a closer look at the story itself this morning.

I try to picture the situation. And, first off, I notice that Jesus is talking to one particular individual here. This doesn’t start out as a speech to his disciples, much less to the general public. It starts with a particular rich man who is behaving very strangely. First, here he comes running up to Jesus. Very bad form! He’s a man of high status; in antiquity no man of high status ever ran for anything or anybody. (Come to think of it, I don’t suppose you’d see many rich people today making such a spectacle of themselves.) If the rich wanted to talk to someone, they sent for the person—or strolled up calmly, surrounded by their entourage of friends and retainers.
Worse yet, the rich man then kneels before Jesus. Kneeling was the posture of someone in deep distress and need, someone begging for a favor. Very inappropriate for a person of such standing! All his behavior expresses great agitation. And he’s doing it all right in front of a whole crowd of people. The loss of face is astonishing. But he has some question so important to him that he’s prepared to sacrifice all dignity to have Jesus’ answer.

And what, exactly, was the question? That’s a translation problem in its own right. The NRSV starts off this way: “What must I do?” What must I do? That feeds right into our rules fetish, doesn’t it? But it’s not really the best translation of the Greek. The KJV, for example, said “what shall I do?” as if it were a matter of free choice. Closer to the nuance of the Greek here (and the best translation I’ve found) comes from David Bentley Hart: “What may I do. . . .” (The New Testament [Yale UP, 2017]) This isn’t a question about rules; it’s a question about opportunities and choices.
And the goal he aims at? The familiar translation is “to inherit eternal life.” But that is likely to be misleading. It can suggest that he just wants to live for ever or that he’s concerned about going to heaven and escaping hell. But it’s not primarily extent of life that he’s talking about; it’s a kind of life. The Greek phrase has no easy English translation. It signifies a life of peace and joy, a life in communion with God, our neighbors, and our world, a life truly worth living. Sometimes we call it “the life of the Age to Come,” but we also experience it at least occasionally here and now. There are moments when it breaks in on us with beauty and peace and joy, disrupting the everyday failings of this world—the falsehoods and cruelties that have become common currency in this present age.
Again, David Bentley Hart may offer the best translation, though it’s a bit cryptic: “What may I do to inherit the life of the Age?” “Age” with a capital A; the true and lasting human life in sharp contrast to what we so often have to settle for. Jesus’ rich visitor is asking how he can live a life that will satisfy the deepest possible spiritual longings.
And Jesus’ first response is “You already know the answer: it’s all laid out in the Ten Commandments.” And, yes, leading a decent, humane life already brings us a long step toward “the life of the Age.” But the rich man is looking for something more—because rules are never enough. They can shame us and make us feel guilty, but they don’t empower us. He wants more; he’s looking for a deeper communion with God. He wants a pathway that will take him into the life of the new age, into the presence of God and the kingdom of God. This person, defined by his wealth and public standing, is actually in love with God and the beauty and wonder of human life in this world that God has created, and he wants to live in it now.

And Jesus understands all this—understands what would prompt this unlikely person to run up and kneel before him. He’s come to Jesus because he senses that God and the age to come are alive and present in him and his ministry. And Jesus teases him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” He’s saying, “You sensed God at work here, didn’t you? You sensed the Age to come arriving in my ministry. You’re right. It is indeed here. And the direct way for you to satisfy your longing for God and your longing for the new life, is to offer yourself up completely to it. You are welcome to become one of us, but you’ll have to come stripped of your this-worldly entanglements.”
The rich man is torn. He wants so much to stay, but he’s in a terrible bind. Wealth, in Jesus’ time, wasn’t an individual possession. If you had wealth, it belonged to your household, your extended family. It carried with it responsibilities to them and for them. If Jesus had told him to give the wealth to the rest of the family, he could have done that. (Other people of the time sometimes did that if they wanted to withdraw into a simple, philosophical life.) But Jesus saw that this was not what the rich man wanted. What he wanted was God, the immediacy of God in his life, the love of God, the companionship of God. He wanted to be a St. Francis of Assisi before there was such a person. But, dutiful as he was, those riches and the family to which he and they belonged would always have a hold on him. His passion for God and his duty to his family could not readily coexist with each other.
Peter, who can be relied on to say something awkward, piped up to say, “We’ve left everything.” And they had, but not like what this person would have to doing. They weren’t wealthy to start with. They were working folk. Their families went on working things out in their absence. Peter, it seems, still had a house in Capernaum, where Jesus stayed when they were in town. The disciples could see that what Jesus asked of the rich man would be even harder than what they’d done. And Jesus’ response was, “Yes, virtually impossible. But God has ways.”

And, indeed, even if the rich man could not take that huge step and become a Saint Francis, that doesn’t mean that he was completely shut out of “the life of the Age,” only that his path would be less direct. As Jesus had already told him, being a good human being is the basic thing. And he knew how to do that. He was already doing it. No one is required to give up everything. Most of Jesus’ followers went on living where they were and working at their jobs and thronging to hear him speak and going to him for healing and hope. When he asked so much more of the rich man, it was because he saw in him a passion for God and the life of the Age to Come that could be fully satisfied in no other way.
And why would anyone long, like the rich man, to plunge so deeply into this risky love affair with God? Because there is no greater good, no greater beauty, no greater delight than to be loved by God and brought into that life of grace that God has always wanted for humanity, which we call “the life of the Age to come.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all spiritual garment, no one map for everybody. Each of us finds our own path. Some, like the rich man, want the direct one. Even so, we may not be able to take it up as we would wish. Most of us, like most of Jesus’ followers in every age, will follow more familiar paths, learning slowly to let the radiance of the Age to Come shine through us in this age. If our paths are less dramatic and direct, if we meander a lot and learn slowly, like Peter (thank God for Peter!), it is still the same goal and God has ways—ways to sustain us and draw us onward till we, too, inherit that Age of grace and peace and joy. If the highway to “the life of the Age” is not for you, there are lesser paths as well, paths of faithfulness and generosity and hope in a troubled world. Take those—with God’s blessing.

MATTHEW, 23: SOME CONCLUDING WORDS AGAINST RELIGION-AS-USUAL (12:38-50)

October 2, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

There’s so much to think about in chapter 12 of Matthew’s Gospel that I’ve split it up into relatively short segments for these posts. Unfortunately, given the interruptions in posting, it would be easy to lose the connection between the previous two installments and this one. So—a reminder.
The previous segment concluded with a sweeping denunciation of the Pharisees. It’s important here to say once again that the Pharisees were not “bad” people. Indeed, there were great teachers of the faith among them, such as the much admired Hillel, and the entire group was dedicated to practicing their faith with great seriousness. Their conflict with Jesus, as Matthew presents it, arises from disagreements about how this was to be done. Because they disagreed radically with his approach to interpreting scripture (as did he with theirs), they came to see him as an enemy of truth and righteousness—and a dangerously successful one. This, in turn, led them to brand his miracles and exorcisms as covert disguises for hidden evil, even accusing him of being in league with Beelzebub.
This is why he accused them (12:31-32) of having moved to the extreme of evil themselves, a state in which the poles of good and evil have become reversed and one may no longer be able to recognize or repent of one’s misdeeds. But these are not deliberately evil people. To the contrary, they are pillars of society, deeply responsible, and very religious. Jesus is making the astonishing claim, then, that even our human endeavor to be the best possible people can actually lead to something profoundly destructive. These warnings are not aimed at them because they were Pharisees and certainly not because they were Jews like Jesus and his followers. They are applicable to devout and committed religious people of any religion—and of all the various political and philosophical “isms” that function as religion equivalents in our own time.
In the verses covered by this post, we have a kind of concluding statement for this stage of the developing conflict with the devout. The conflict will continue in later chapters, but, here, Jesus sets out a fundamental challenge to the sins of religion-as-usual and to the devout who mistake their devotion as a guarantee of their goodness and their favor with God.
But, in vs. 38, the scribes and Pharisees sound reasonably respectful. They address Jesus politely as “teacher.” And since he’s been doing signs all along, why is he angry when they ask for another one?
This group does approach Jesus more respectfully than the last one. And, for that matter, they may be different individuals, for neither scribes nor Pharisees were monolithic groups. Opinions about Jesus undoubtedly varied among them, and there may well be a hint of that here.
But he speaks of them as “an evil and adulterous generation.”
The problem here is partly one of timing. Why are they asking for a sign now? Why now, when so many signs of God’s love and generosity have already been performed? Another part of the problem is context. The request is, in a way, a rejection of Jesus’ arguments from scripture (e.g., 9:10, 12:1-8). Since they reject Jesus’ way of interpreting Torah through Israelite history and prophetic insights and, above all, the gospel of God’s love, they imply, in effect, that the only way he can establish his authority would be through some particularly astounding sign. Under the circumstances, it is hard to imagine what kind of a sign they would accept as adequate.
When he calls them “evil,” he implies that they are infected, to some degree, with the reversed polarization of good and evil we saw in the previous post. When he calls them “adulterous,” he suggests that they have, in effect, abandoned the real worship of God for something else, for “adultery” is a common metaphor for the worship of false gods in the Hebrew scriptures.
But what sort of idol does he think they’re worshipping?
Given all that we’ve read in the last few chapters, it seems to be a conviction that their own interpretation of Israelite faith—and thus their own righteousness—is unassailable.
So he just gives them riddles instead of the sign they want?
That’s about it. The phrase “the sign of Jonah” has no one clear meaning in itself. The prophet Jonah was a very reluctant servant of God. He didn’t want to preach judgement and repentance to the people of Nineveh (capital of the bloody and tyrannical Assyrian empire) because he was afraid they really would repent and God would spare them. As he tried to escape to Spain, God sent a great storm, which Jonah finally had to admit was directed at him. Having told the ship’s crew to throw him overboard in order to still the storm (which they did only with great reluctance), he was swallowed by the “great fish”—which helped him learn that he needed to become more humble and to cooperate with God’s love of the world. Each of these events was a sign.
At last, Jonah goes to Nineveh and preaches. The people do repent, but he goes out to a spot where he hopes he’ll be able to watch the city’s destruction. Trying to bring Jonah to see things another way, God shows him an example: first God makes a bush grow up to shade him. But at dawn God sends a worm to destroy the bush and Jonah gets very hot and cranky as he sits in the broiling sun waiting for the city to be destroyed. But God calls his attention to the bush and how much he misses it, even though he did nothing to grow it. Why should not God love and rescue the people of Nineveh—not to mention all the animals there—all of them God’s creations (Jonah 4:11)?
The “sign of Jonah” could be any aspect of this story.
But Jesus singles out the time Jonah spent in the belly of the big fish—or whale or sea monster or however it should be translated.
Take your choice! Nobody knows exactly what image the author had in mind. But the interesting thing about this is that it was a sign only to Jonah himself! There were no witnesses. Even if the sailors had seen him get swallowed (unclear that), we hear nothing of any witnesses to see him vomited up on the beach. (He was probably grateful for that. I imagine him as rather smelly and covered with slime.)
In other words, it’s a hidden sign? If that’s a possible notion. . . .
Yes, a good phrase for it. Matthew understands Jesus as alluding to his death and resurrection. But we only know that because we know the rest of the story. There’s nothing to suggest that this meant anything at all to his audience. (Later on, he’ll begin to be more explicit with his disciples and, even then, they still can’t make any sense of it.)
But the mention of Jonah is a chance for Jesus to raise once again his repeated topic of the Gentiles: some of them may turn out to be better, more faithful, more worshipful people than his very devout interlocutors. The Ninevites heeded Jonah and repented. This is a “sign of Jonah,” too. And the Queen of Sheba came to hear the wisdom of Solomon.
And “something greater” than either Jonah or Solomon is here. What does that mean?
Interesting that he says “something” not “someone.” The neuter gender would apply most naturally to Jesus’ message or mission (or both, since they’re intimately tied together). As in 12:37, he’s not demanding respect for himself. The respect he demands is for the gospel he carries.
Then we have another of Matthew’s annoying jumps. What is this little technical discussion of unclean spirits doing here?
The clue is at the end of vs. 45: “So will it be . . . with this evil generation.” Remember that the audience is still the one we met in vs. 38: “some of the scribes and Pharisees.” Whether their request for a sign was an expression of an honest willingness to be persuaded or a device to entrap Jesus, they are missing the point of all the signs he’s already done.
Are they the empty house?
Yes. And the world is full of unclean spirits happy to take up residence. And what sort of house better than one that has been kept scrupulously clean–”swept and put in order”? It is a parody of our human hopes for purity–whether physical or doctrinal or liturgical—hopes that are so close to the hearts of the religiously devout and, for that matter, the ideologically militant of all sorts. Obsession with purity, Jesus says, leaves you open to all sorts of demon possession.
Okay, you managed to connect that with the preceding verses. But what about vv. 46-50 and Jesus’ rejection of his family?
The point doesn’t seem to be any personal rejection of his family. It’s something much more radical—a reversal of prevailing assumptions about family. In Jesus’ world your identity depended above all on your family. He replaces that with a much deeper kind of identity: we become family to one another by virtue of our equal connection with God. This doesn’t make his words any less shocking, however. Jesus is overturning one of the most basic concepts of his society, sanctified by the commandment to honor father and mother.
This is as radical as Jesus’ stance on purity. And it’s a repeated theme in Matthew. We’ve already met it when Jesus said to his disciples: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. . . .” (10:37) And it’s of a piece with the way he places the gospel of God’s love above all human convictions and conventions, however sacred they may be. We’ll encounter it yet again at the end of chapter 13, when Jesus visits his hometown.

Next up: PARABLES (13:1-23)

MATTHEW, 22: OPEN CONFLICT—FROM SABBATH TO EXORCISMS (12:22-37)

September 24, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

So Jesus has moved out of the public eye, but that doesn’t seem to have defused the situation.
Right! The devout Pharisees have decided that he is an enemy of all that is good and true and are looking for ways to persuade the broader public of this. His success in healing and freeing people from their demons makes this more difficult—and makes them all the more determined to expose him for the evil influence they believe he is. One effort was to draw his audience away by criticizing him for laxness in keeping the Sabbath, and that hasn’t accomplished much.
But they’ve already suggested a more damning critique: “By the ruler of the demons he casts out the demons” (9:34), they say, implying that he was practicing a kind of witchcraft—or even operating as an agent of Satan (or Beelzebul, an alternative name by which Satan is called here). When the Pharisees hear that he’s cured a man of blindness and deafness by casting out his demons, they decide to make their opinion public. After all, the people are now beginning to think that Jesus might be “the Son of David,” the promised heir, the anointed one who would restore Israel. So far from thinking him demonic, the public see him as the person who can bring about a new beginning for Israel.
But how does Jesus know what the Pharisees are saying? Matthew just says that “Jesus knew what they were thinking.”
Matthew’s language makes the point that the Pharisees were talking openly to others, but not confronting Jesus directly with their accusation. The phrasing could mean that Jesus is reading their minds; or, it could well mean that he’s hearing reports from others of what they’re saying. Either way, he takes them by surprise when he challenges them on what they’ve said out of his earshot—taking the offensive, you might say.
But his argument seems rather jumbled to me.
Yes, it does at first, because it’s actually three distinct arguments presented without a break, which can make for confusion if you’re not used to this kind of discourse. But his hearers would have recognized a kind of abbreviated argumentation that you can also find in later documents of rabbinic discussions such as the Mishnah.
His first argument (12:25-26) points out the absurdity of the idea that Satan is allowing one of his agents to cast out others. The Pharisees have characterized Beelzebul as the “ruler” of the demons. In other words, he is a king and the demons form his kingdom. He is a kind of evil parody of God, whose kingdom is that of the heavens.
Jesus says, in effect, “You’re talking as if there were civil war in Satan’s kingdom.” Now, civil wars were all too familiar in the ancient Mediterranean world. Many a Greek city state had been torn to pieces by them, some never to recover their former prosperity and power. The Roman Empire had also been through repeated episodes of civil war as recently as the generation before Jesus; and for all the resentment of Roman power among their subject nations, there was also a widespread and apparently quite genuine gratitude to the Emperor Augustus for having brought these horrible conflicts to an end.
In civil wars, ancient or modern, no one is safe. Security is lost, lives are lost. Famine and disease kill multitudes. Homes, farms, and businesses are destroyed. Anyone who has followed the news about modern Syria will have some sense of how devastating and embittering such wars are. And Jesus here is laughing at the idea that Satan would be so incompetent and weak that his kingdom was falling to bits around him.
What’s more, if Satan’s kingdom really is falling apart, fine! That should just leave the field open for the Kingdom of the Heavens. But Jesus doesn’t pursue this implication because he doesn’t think there’s any civil war at all in Satan’s realm.
Okay. Then what’s the second argument?
Jesus argues (12:27-28) that the Pharisees’ accusations are dishonest. They, too, have people belonging to their party (“your sons”) who perform exorcisms. Jesus’ activity in this field wasn’t unusual in his time. We might appropriately think of it as one basic strand of healthcare in a period when medicine lacked many of our modern resources.
And Jesus isn’t really doing anything radically different from the exorcists who were Pharisees— except that he’s extraordinarily successful. How can they say it’s right for their people to exorcise, but wrong for Jesus to? The question makes their dishonesty obvious. They’re really attacking him for quite different reasons and suggesting a connection to Beelzebul purely as a way of “spinning” the news (to use the modern term). They want to make what is in itself good seem like something bad.
They come across as evil themselves, then.
Yes. But notice that this isn’t an exceptional kind of evil. It’s something that most of us have probably done at one time or another—grabbed hold of an argument that we think will win our point for us, even though we know that it is either meaningless or devious. But Jesus pushes their mistake toward a different conclusion—his third argument. “But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons,” he says, “then the kingdom of God has come to you.” (12:28) It’s the very thing Jesus has been declaring from the start of his ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (4:17) And there’s an implicit threat that they will find themselves on the wrong side of God’s kingdom. Jesus even twists the knife a bit by saying that his critics’ own exorcists will judge them guilty in this regard.
In fact, as he says in the brief parable that follows (12:29), his exorcisms are part of the arrival of God’s kingdom. Jesus’ ability to plunder Satan’s household—to turn it upside down—is a manifestation of the kingdom of heaven.
And then we get to some verses that seem quite scary—particularly the business about the sin against the Holy Spirit. What are we to make of that? And what’s it doing in this context anyway?
We’ve seen before that, even when Matthew seems to switch gears rather suddenly, there’s always some reason for it. Sometimes it harks back to related materials from an earlier context; sometimes it’s an extension of the current subject. Here we probably have a continuation of what we’ve just read, and we should understand the sin against the Holy Spirit in relation to the argument over exorcisms.
They’ve misinterpreted the work of the Holy Spirit as the work of demons?
Yes. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t a casual misjudgment; it’s a deliberate misrepresentation. The opponents are looking at good, gracious, generous actions that confer great benefits on their recipients and calling them evil purely as a way of calling Jesus’ teaching into question. To put it in broader terms, they’re reversing the moral poles and calling good evil.
And that’s the one thing that can’t be forgiven?
This statement really seems strange in the context of Matthew’s Gospel, doesn’t it? Matthew’s emphasis is on God’s readiness to forgive, not God’s eagerness to punish. But I think we’ll get further illumination on the matter when we come to the famous parable of Sheep and Goats in chapter 25. Even though there’s no actual reference to the sin against the Holy Spirit there, a great judgement and division is being made between those who have done loving acts for others and those who have not. And those who have not are stunned! Why? Perhaps because they couldn’t tell good from evil in their own lives.
I get the connection. The goats are all hustled off to the bad place. But why is it unforgivable?
Matthew doesn’t tell us, but my understanding of this dynamic is that if we get our moral values so completely reversed that we can no longer tell good from evil, then we can’t even recognize, much less repent, our own evil actions. It’s the same process that allowed Medieval inquisitors to inflict such horrors in the name of Jesus. And it still flourishes among modern Christians and, for that matter, people of all religions and none.
What I think, then, is that this sin is unforgivable not because God refuses to forgive, but because we can become so warped that we cannot understand our behavior as sinful. We don’t know how to repent. And if we don’t know that we’ve sinned, we can’t accept the forgiveness God is ready to offer.
But “Whoever is not with me is against me” (vs. 30) sounds more specific than that. Is Jesus saying that only Christians can be saved? I think that’s how it’s usually read.
Yes, many Christians do read it that way. And I think that’s a serious misunderstanding. The context here has to do not with doctrine or belief but with a willingness to tell good frm evil. Notice the phrasing of the second half of vs. 30: “whoever does not gather with me scatters.” What Jesus condemns in the Pharisees here is not their disagreements with him about Torah. It is their lack of concern for the people he is healing and exorcising. They want to scatter his following even at the cost of depriving people of these blessings.
Ah, that helps with vs. 32. It’s all right to speak against Jesus—but not to call good evil.
Yes, exactly! Say what you like about Jesus and Christianity, but don’t confuse good and evil in the process. And if we read these verses as we just have, they lead quite naturally to what follows, where Jesus returns to the theme of good fruits that he introduced as a test of true prophets in the Sermon on the Mount (7:15-20). As he said there, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” (7:18)
Jesus even reverses the argument used against him. His attackers have said that his miracles can’t really be good because what he teaches is wrong. He replies that his attackers are incapable of speaking what is good because they themselves are corrupt. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Calling them a “brood of vipers” is a way of saying that their speech is poisonous. Or, in the words of the old Tennessee proverb that I heard long ago from a beloved elderly friend, “Nothing spoils a snake but its mouth”
In fact, so related is the mouth to the heart that Jesus can wind up sounding almost as if he’s reversing himself. Instead of “by your fruits,” he now says, “By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” He’s not talking about doctrinal correctness here. He’s talking about words as moral (or immoral) actions—as the equivalent of “fruits,” by which we can tell good from evil.

Next up: SOME CONCLUDING WORDS AGAINST RELIGION-AS-USUAL (12:38-50)

SOMETHING DEEPER THAN GOOD BEHAVIOR

August 20, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Berkeley
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, August 19, 2018
Proper 15C: 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14; Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise. . . . Do not get drunk with wine, . . but be filled with the Spirit, . . . singing and making melody to the Lord in your heart. . . . (Eph. 5:15, 18)

That’s good advice. Let me commend it to you. As a choir person, I particularly like the part about “singing and making melody.”
But there’s also a kind of hidden trap here, one that we Christians have been falling into for centuries. We begin to think that being a Christian is all about behavior. Keep your nose clean. (Some would also say, “Keep a smile on your face.”) And you’re good.
Is that right? Is the Gospel really just about being good? Being good can actually turn into a real problem. When we get too attached to how good we are, we are apt to start using it to beat up on people we disagree with. Conservative Christians beat up on liberals who want dreadful things like wedding cakes for a gay marriage or a pink-and-blue cake to celebrate a transgender person. And, yes, we liberals beat up on conservatives for trying to impose their ideas on us and for what we see as their ignorance. And then we shun each other and avoid conversations because they might end in fights.
Not that the advice we hard from Ephesians is bad. Being good is, in fact, a good thing—you know, as opposed to a bad thing. But it’s not the central thing, not the great message of the gospel. It’s not the place where we need to start.

And where is the place to start? Our Psalm this morning gave us a good account of it:
Holy and awesome is God’s name.
The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. . . .
We’re not talking about “fear” in the sense of “cowering behind the sofa and hoping not to be noticed.” Awe does indeed have an element of fear in it, but combined with an element of amazement, astonishment, fascination, the recognition of deep mystery—and also an element of feeling that we belong there. Awe recognizes God’s incalculable difference from us—not unlike the feeling you may get under a true, clear, starry night sky (if you can find one that’s not polluted by city lights) or looking out over the ocean on a really windy, foamy day or standing at the brink of a great canyon with the ground suddenly dropping away at your feet. Even if you know a lot about astronomy or meteorology or geology, you don’t just stand there and contentedly enjoy knowing the science of it all. You also have to deal with your own place in it—and with your own puniness, the puniness of humanity in general. That’s the awesomeness of that moment. It’s godly fear.
So awe is the place to begin—awe as we stand before the ungraspable mystery of God, experience the strangeness of God’s ways, recognize that this is not a world where we’re the ones in control. Yes, we have things to do that are worth doing, things that we can and need to do. But, no, we are not the ones ultimately in charge.

Our other two readings have something to say about this God we meet and this awe we feel. The story of Solomon is a textbook case in the strange ways God works. At first, we might take our reading from 1 Kings as a story of good behavior rewarded. Solomon made the right choice. He asked God for “an understanding mind” so that he would be a good ruler. And God rewarded him with that and much more besides.
Well, that’s part of Solomon’s story, but not all. As always, there are things that the lectionary leaves out. It has to leave some things out, of course, or we’d be in church all day. And it’s understandable if the less edifying bits sometimes drop by the wayside.
So let me remind you briefly of who Solomon was and how he came to the throne. He was the second son of David and Bathsheba. The first child died as punishment for David’s terrible crime of taking Bathsheba for himself and having her husband Uriah killed to cover things up—Uriah who was also David’s own loyal and trusting adjutant. Not an auspicious origin for a wise and godly king.
What’s more, Solomon came to the throne not by right of succession, but by means of a palace coup that sidelined various half-brothers who might well have had better claim on the throne than he. (Remember that the polygamous royal household of David looked more like with the modern Saudi family than, say, the House of Windsor—though the House of Saud, it seems, is generally better behaved than the House of David.) So, young as he was, Solomon would never have been king had not his mother been a superb and ruthless politician—something she’d had to learn to survive her own very difficult life.
So, yes, Solomon did make the right choice when he asked for understanding. But it’s clear that God isn’t motivated by the righteousness of Solomon’s origins or even his outstanding personal virtues. God is motivated . . . by what?
The great answer to that, throughout scripture, is that God is motivated by love, generosity, even, we might say, hope in our human potential. God has a way of choosing some very unlikely human partners—people no better than us: Jacob, the jealous younger brother who took advantage of his father’s blindness, for example, or Simon Peter, the awkward, impulsive fisherman. Solomon, the younger offspring of a notorious criminal act, put in place by a palace coup, fits the pattern. God doesn’t start with our goodness, but with God’s own love.
And the wonderful thing is that Solomon saw all this—had a sense of God’s mysterious greatness and generosity and a sense of his own inadequacy to the task he had been thrust into. And he had the humility to ask not just for goodies but for help. Awe before the mystery of God was the beginning of his wisdom—a much better fit, as it turns out, than simple good behavior would ever have been.

Now, if we turn to our reading from John’s Gospel, you wouldn’t think it has anything to do with my topic here. But, of course, it’s all about God’s love for us, even if we may be profoundly undeserving of it. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” Jesus says. “Whoever eats of this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
This is the voice of God speaking. John took great pains at the beginning of his gospel to tell us that Jesus is the Word of God become flesh (1:1-14). When Jesus speaks here of “bread” and “flesh,” our minds tend to jump directly to the Eucharist: “This [bread] is my body, given for you.” That’s natural enough, given how well we know that story. But, oddly enough, John’s Gospel doesn’t include it. And, in this passage, John’s getting at something bigger and more basic.
God is saying here, “I am ready to feed you with my own life.” And it isn’t as if Jesus was talking to perfect good-doobies. His disciples were a motley assortment, as we know. And, in any case, he’s talking here to a whole crowd of people. Some of them were even his enemies. He’s not rewarding goodness. He’s offering people the self-giving generosity of God—the God who loves us even when we’re not behaving well, even when we fall far short of the good advice we read from Ephesians.
The Eucharist is the great sacrament of this. We receive this bread and wine with the kind of reverence and awe that we accord to God’s own self. But Jesus was talking here about something greater, more fundamental than the sacrament—about God’s indefatigable determination to do us good.
Our part is to accept it, like Solomon—to be fed by it and to build our lives on it. If we don’t, God won’t force it on us. You can’t compel love. But God will go on loving us and feeding us and hoping that eventually we’ll wake up to all this, feel the beauty and awe of God’s presence, and begin to learn wisdom.

So goodness is a good thing. But awe comes first. And then the gift—a gift to us from God, not the other way around. Then the accepting of that gift with gratitude. This is the beginning of wisdom. And as we grow in this wisdom, we may well find that other virtues grow along with it. We may even start behaving better. Just remember not to get a big head about it. Even our goodness is really a gift of God’s loving and awesome grace.

(The quotation from the Psalm is from The Saint Helena Psalter; other biblical quotations from NRSV.)

MATTHEW, 21: OPEN CONFLICT—MORE ABOUT THE SABBATH (12:9-21)

August 13, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

The episode about plucking grain on the Sabbath must have happened out in the open field, where the disciples’ action could be seen by the authorities. But now, we read, “he left that place. . . .”
“And entered their synagogue”! That ominous “their” again.
Yes, Matthew is making it quite clear who’s in charge in the synagogue. And we’re back in town now, since that’s where synagogues were located. And what follows looks very much like a set-up. The authorities are hoping to catch Jesus in a clearcut violation of the Sabbath law.
I don’t mean that the paralyzed man was a “plant.” He was probably just a regular member of the community. He may even have hoped for a cure when he learned that Jesus was entering the synagogue.
They do rather put Jesus on the spot with the question “Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?” If he does so, he can be charged with working on the Sabbath. Doctors don’t charge for no reason; what they do is work!
Yes. And if he doesn’t heal the man, would that mean that the Good News his miracles exemplify is out of order on the Sabbath? He’s in an awkward spot.
And he counterattacks.
Yes, essentially. He poses a challenge to his critics based on their own practice, since they would think it normal to work on the Sabbath in order to rescue an endangered animal—particularly if it’s your only one. The paralyzed man, to be sure, isn’t a perfect parallel, since his condition isn’t life-threatening. But Jesus counters that possible objection by saying that a human life is more valuable than that of an animal. At least, that’s how the NRSV translators have it. I think one could translate the Greek more literally as simply “A human being is quite a different matter from an animal!”
So he heals him on the Sabbath?
Yes, but he does it in such a way that, his opponents have no proof. There can be no real doubt as to what has happened and yet no one has really seen Jesus do any work on the Sabbath. He didn’t so much as touch the man, just said “Stretch out your hand.” It reminds me of the story of Elisha healing the enemy general Naaman (2 Kings 5). Elisha just sent his servant out to tell Naaman to go wash his leprosy off in the Jordan. Naaman was irate: “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” Miraculous healing wasn’t supposed to be this simple, quiet, inconspicuous!
So the set-up didn’t work.
And that makes the devout really angry. After all, he’s neatly foiled their plan. “The Pharisees went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.” This is a major step in the developing conflict. They’re no longer just criticizing him behind his back or debating with him in public. They want to see the end of him. Does this mean they want to see him dead at this point? Not necessarily. But they at least want to deprive him of his audience. Since they are sure that their own interpretation of the Torah is correct, they are determined to be rid of this person who challenges it.
This, of course, is an age-old problem among religious folk. We confuse our fallible and sinful selves with the God, the ultimate Truth, to which we owe allegiance. We lose track of the distance between our finitude and imperfection and God’s boundless perfection. And we are capable of coming down with great fury on anyone whose interpretation differs from ours. I’m not talking just about religious conservatives; religious liberals are also prone to write off or condemn those who disagree with us. Nor is this dangerous propensity found only in the context of religion. People with strong commitments to communism, capitalism, environmentalism—any ‘ism you can think of—are just as capable of working up a hatred for those who disagree with them.
So what we have here is a first, fatal step toward crucifixion—though that cannot have been the conscious intent of any one at this point.
And Jesus leaves the arena!
Isn’t that interesting? Matthew specifies that he withdrew because he recognized exactly what was going on. Angering the Pharisees doesn’t seem to have been his purpose. But he isn’t willing to refrain from healing in order to satisfy them, either. So he simply moves his work away from them.
The Greek word for “departed” here is often translated “withdrew.” It’s the word used later on for what hermits and anchorites like St. Antony of Egypt did. They left the towns and withdrew from the crowds to live out in the open country—even in deserted, uncultivated “wilderness.” “Withdraw” might be a better translation than “departed” here. What Jesus is doing is moving away from conflict. His opponents will now have to come looking for him—as they do later on in Chapter 12.
But for now, he’s back with the crowds who’ve come to be cured.
But why does he order them not to make him known? It would hardly be possible to keep all this a secret when people start coming home cured and everybody insists on knowing what’s happened.
One part of it is to underline that Jesus didn’t using healings to gain popularity. Another part of the answer lies in the quotation from Isaiah 42:1-4 that follows. It describes a person who doesn’t “wrangle or cry aloud,” who wouldn’t so much as “break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick.” This is a peaceful and harmless person. But one who comes with an utterly serious aim that could indeed be dreaded by many: to bring justice to victory.
The ongoing conflict here is not of Jesus’ instigation. But perhaps it is an almost inevitable reaction—given the depth and complexity of human sin—to all that he stands for.
And here we have those Gentiles again. . . .
Yes, Matthew keeps pointing us to this dimension of Jesus’ teaching. Even though few Gentiles have actually crossed his path, he keeps making challenging comparisons between the devout of Israel and Gentiles who may be more righteous than they—despite being, by definition, impure and unholy.
It’s worth reminding ourselves again that this isn’t an issue of Judaism vs. Christianity. As we’ve noted before, Matthew is very much a Jewish writer, concerned with how to interpret the Law and Prophets—how to understand and practice the Jewish religion. For him, Jesus has shown the right way to do this. Mtthew is a Jew who follows Jesus’ understanding of Judaism rather than that of the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees or any other group. It’s quite possible that his own Christian community didn’t include any Gentiles. But the contrast here is not primarily ethnic, even though Jesus uses ethnic terms in describing it. The contrast is between those who seem to themselves “wise and intelligent” and those whom they despise as “infants” (compare 11:20).
And note that, even with all this talk about the possibility that Gentiles may surpass Jews in righteousness, Jesus is in no hurry to address Gentiles directly. He even told his disciples to stay away from Gentile towns (10:5). What he’s trying to do here is foster the development of humility among the pious!

Next up: OPEN CONFLICT—FROM SABBATH TO EXORCISMS (12:22-37)

MATTHEW, 20: OPEN CONFLICT BEGINS—THE SABBATH (12:1-8)

July 30, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

So you suggested that the prophecies of doom in 11:20-24 aren’t aimed at the Galilean towns as such, but at the religious authorities whose influence pervades them. Doesn’t that bring the conflict between Jesus and the authorities out into the open?
Close, but it’s not yet been framed in so many words. This will change in the first part of chapter 12, where Jesus has two disputes with the authorities about the keeping of the Sabbath and then a direct confrontation over exorcism. The Pharisees were already speculating that he was in league with the “ruler of the demons” back in 9:34. But, in chapter 12, the conflict breaks out into the public sphere. For this post, however, the dispute about how to keep the Sabbath will give us quite enough to deal with.
The Torah says “No work,” right?
Definitely. “You shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns” (Exodus 20:10) And the text goes on to explain that this is a way of joining in God’s own rest on the seventh day after completing the creation. Here, however, Jesus argues that this commandment does not stand alone and that human needs can justify breaking at times.
The controversy arises because the Pharisees noticed that, as he walked through the fields, his disciples were plucking heads of grain.
The Twelve?
Possibly, but we can’t tell for sure. Matthew has never mentioned whether they’ve returned from their mission. Perhaps he wants the matter to be a little unclear so as to discourage us from drawing too sharp a boundary around “the disciples.” In any case, it suggests the Jesus’ disciples included people who were not particularly strict about the Sabbath.
But was this really work that they did—plucking a few heads of wheat to chew on? Can you even eat raw grains of wheat?
I remember, from when I was younger, my Uncle Bill, a wheat farmer, handing me some newly threshed grains of wheat to chew on. He said it would be a bit like chewing gum, and it was. But I suppose that I absorbed a few nutrients out of it. In any case chewing it might help relieve hunger.
The issue here is the problem of distinguishing precisely between what is work and what is not. I notice that, in my own life, I distinguish work partly by how much energy it requires, but partly by how voluntary it is. Gardening that might be work if it were my job becomes recreation if I’m doing it purely because I enjoy getting dirty in the garden.
But if I define work purely in terms of physical exertion, then any gardening would certainly be work. My Methodist grandfather was not alone of his generation in forbidding family members to mow the lawn on the Sabbath (which, for him, meant Sunday rather than Saturday). Again, one could define work in terms of productive activity—activity intended to issue in a practical result. Lighting a fire, in an era when that meant using flint and steel, say, would qualify as work in terms of effort expended. But turning on the electric heat today, though much easier, would still qualify as work on the grounds of its being productive activity.
In other words, the definition of “work” is intrinsically slippery, which is probably the major reason why some orthodox Jewish Sabbath restrictions seem excessive to other people. (I don’t assume that they seem so for orthodox Jews. For them, it is simply the way they shape their lives in conformity with their faith.) You’ll notice, in any case, that Jesus doesn’t get into the questions of how to define “work” and whether the picking of grain was an example of “work.” He challenges his critics on quite different grounds.
He’s not even being attacked directly, is he? Matthew never says that he picked any grain himself.
Right! The Pharisees have noticed, though, that he doesn’t seem to disapprove; and they want him to discipline his disciples.
Instead of doing that, he argues with his critics about their singular concentration on the law of the Sabbath to the exclusion of other scriptural concerns. His first argument, isn’t even about the violation of the Sabbath itself; it’s about something much more extreme—a violation of the sacredness of the House of God. And here, too, he excuses the violation on the grounds of hunger.
The regulations in the Torah are very specific: The Bread of the Presence consisted of twelve loaves made from the finest wheat flour which were laid out week by week on a golden table inside the Holy Place—an inner chamber so holy that only priests were allowed to enter it. After the loaves had lain in God’s presence for a week they were removed; but because they were very holy, they could be disposed of only by having the priests consume them. And even this had to be done somewhere within the sanctuary. (Lev. 24:5-9)
In other words, the loaves could be eaten only in the holy precinct and only by holy people in a state of purity. Despite all these restriction in Torah, Jesus points out, David, who was no priest at all—(he wasn’t even from the right tribe)—was allowed to enter the sanctuary with his band of warriors and eat the loaves because they were hungry and in imminent danger. (1 Samuel 21:1-6)
But wait! Does it actually say in 1 Samuel that David entered the sanctuary?
No, but Jesus could deduce that, since the priest Ahimelech was stretching the rules to their limit and would surely not have tolerated having the holy loaves taken out of the sacred precincts.
The Pharisees might perhaps have countered by saying that a single action by David and the High Priest Ahimelech however shocking, could not serve as a precedent. But Jesus adds a second argument with specific reference to the Sabbath, which does establish an exception to the rule of “no work.” The priests in the House of God routinely did a great deal of heavy work on the Sabbath as they offered up the required sacrifices, but they’re never accused of Sabbath-breaking. Here is a case where one set of Torah instructions, the rules for sacrifice, conflict with another, the Sabbath law.
If anything, one might argue (though Jesus doesn’t), that the Sabbath law is weightier, since it comes from the Ten Commandments, while the sacrificial laws are from Leviticus. But the worship of the Temple was beyond chalenge at this point in time.
But Jesus doesn’t stick to arguing Torah against Torah. Instead, he makes the problem more difficult by his mysterious statement that “something greater than the temple is here.” Matthew probably expects us to recognize this as a reference to Jesus himself or, perhaps better, to the Good News of the Reign of Heaven embodied in his presence. (He speaks, after all, of “something greater” not “some one.”) From the Pharisees’ point of view. this is a deeply offensive suggestion, since there would no longer be any rules at all that couldn’t be called into question.
It sounds quite antinomian, doesn’t it? Does he mean that anything goes now?
Apparently not, for his third argument holds up a passage from the prophet Hosea (6:6)—a passage he also quoted earlier in 9:13. When Hosea said that God “desires mercy and not sacrifice,” that sounds in English like a complete abolition of sacrificial worship. In ancient Hebrew, it comes closer to just moving sacrifice down the hierarchy of values—below mercy. God values mercy above any purely religious regulation or observance.
Here, Jesus is placing scripture in opposition to scripture as a way of saying that it’s not enough just to argue about exactly what constitutes work on the Sabbath. It’s more important to understand how the Sabbath fits into the larger picture of how God deals with us. There are higher values in God’s eyes—higher than simple obedience to the laws. And, of these, mercy, an expression of God’s own love for us, ranks very high indeed.
But what does verse 8 have to do with this?
That’s not too clear, is it? Who is the “Son of Man” anyway? Since our translators have capitalized it, they must think it’s one of the titles of Jesus himself. And Jesus definitely does use it to refer to himself (see, for example, Matthew 8:20, 9:6, 10:23 to cite just a few examples). But it’s not clear where this phrase came from or what it meant to him or his hearers. There’s no clear instance elsewhere in scripture of it being used as a title for someone of particular importance. And it echoes a common phrase in Aramaic (probably the most widely spoken language in the area in Jesus’ time)—a phrase that means simply “human being.”
If Jesus is claiming authority here as “the Son of Man,” he’s claiming it not on the basis of his intimacy with God (the phrase for that would be “Son of God” as in Mt. 14:33), but simply as one human being among others. Humans are not the subjects, but the lords of the Sabbath. This doesn’t abolish the Sabbath, which after all is a mercy for hard-working humanity. But it calls us to observe it in ways that honor and express the divine mercy—even for hungry people walking through wheat fields. Anything less than that is wrong, no matter how precisely it may cleave to the rules.

Next up: OPEN CONFLICT: MORE ABOUT THE SABBATH (12:9-14)

BAPTISM: WHAT IT’S ABOUT, WHAT IT LEADS TO

July 16, 2018 by LW Countryman 1 Comment

Preached at Good Shepherd, Berkeley
EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, JULY 15, 2018
Proper 10B: 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:1-13

Today we’re celebrating the Sacrament of Baptism for Naya and Marilyn and Charles. And one person asked me last week why we do this nowadays at a Sunday morning service instead of privately, at the convenience of families and friends—which used to be the custom for Episcopalians and Roman Catholics and, I think, a good many others.
The short answer is that the current edition of our Book of Common Prayer wants it this way. And this change was based on the sense that Baptism is an important event for the whole congregation, not just for the people being baptized today. It’s important to all of us because of what it tells us about our relationship to God and to one another—about the great gift Baptism gives us in sacramental form.
There are two great sacraments that shape all of Christian life: Baptism in which we’re given new birth and the Holy Communion in which we’re fed again and again with God’s own life. In the ancient church Baptism was a very big event, held only a few times a year and particularly at the Easter Vigil. But it would be hard to schedule it that way in our world, where our calendars are crowded with so many different demands. So the people who shaped our present Book of Common Prayer settled for any Sunday morning that would work! And this way it puts all of us who witness it today back in mind of who we are as people of faith and what it means to have been born again through Baptism.

So I focus this sermon today on two questions about Baptism: What is it about? What does it lead to? And by providence or good luck (it’s always hard to tell the difference) our reading today from Ephesians goes a long way to answer both those questions.
You may be thinking, “Funny, I don’t remember anything about Baptism in that reading.” And you’d be right. It’s not mentioned at all. But it gives us an account of Christian faith that explains Baptism very well.
So, first, what is Baptism about? Our passage from Ephesians puts it this way: God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will . . .” God did it only because he wanted to!
God “destined us for adoption as God’s children.” We were already God’s children by virtue of our creation. What does it mean to be adopted on top of that? It can’t mean that we are loved more than we were. Ephesians tells us, God “destined” us for this adoption. The love has been there all along. God has always wanted to draw us close in this way.
So Baptism doesn’t cause God to love us. It is, rather, the physical and spiritual touch of that love. The water of baptism is like the water of the womb that each of us floated in in order to be born into the human family. Baptism says to us as we emerge from this “bath,” “Here you are! You are one of us, one of family that has been chosen by God’s own love.”
Some Christians, at times, have thought that God doesn’t love the unbaptized. But that can’t be true. Our text says that God’s love brought us to this point, this adoption. God loved us long before any of us was baptized and doesn’t need Baptism to love us still.
So Baptism is about being a part both of God’s created family and of God’s adoptive family. God says to each person through this sacrament, “I made you from the beginning as my child, and with this water I make you twice my child—my child of deliberate, individual choice. With this water, I assure you of my love: I mark you as beloved.” And that’s what Baptism is about.

And what does it lead to? What difference, really, does it make to a human life? As to the details, there is, for each of us, a whole lifetime of answers to that question. But perhaps the most fundamental one is that it gives us this individual, personal assurance of God’s love. In Baptism, God touches each of us. There is no way that you can say to yourself, “Oh, that love-note was meant for someone else.” No, it was meant for you. To live in the remembrance of this loving touch can give us courage and hope and the power to love even in our most difficult times.
God, after all, doesn’t promise that there will be no troubles in life. What God does promise is to stand with us through them. That’s what our reading from Ephesians means by the phrase “through the blood of Jesus.” It’s not blood offered to God. It’s blood that God shed in God’s selfless determination to draw as close as possible to us in love—even to the point of sharing not just our life, but our death, not just our joys, but our sufferings.
And there’s also a dimension in Baptism that reaches beyond each of as an individual. That’s why Ephesians also speaks of God’s “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth.” Baptism, by touching us with God’s love, points us forward on a journey together, a journey toward the kind of world that God longs for, a world where we shall be united both with God and with one another—and with a world of beings greater and more wonderful that we can yet imagine, “things in heaven and things on earth.” It is a world of trust, hope, and love—and if its full realization lies beyond anything we can imagine in this life, its beginnings lie right here in this moment when we are touched by this water, the sign of God’s love for us.
“This,” as the last verse we read from Ephesians puts it, “is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of [God’s] glory.” Maybe it’s too vast a goal for us to imagine. But we can still move step by step toward it in our lives. Baptism marks us as God’s beloved and points us in this direction.

Our passage from Ephesians is beautiful and right on target. But I have to admit that I find the language a bit high-flown and hard to follow. I found myself longing for some better image to sum all this up for you. And, indeed, one came to me. It is a passage from the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon—that amazing little book of love poetry that lies right in the middle of the Bible like a key to the whole thing. One of the lovers says to the other:
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave. (Song 8:6)
In Baptism, God sets you as a seal on God’s own heart, God’s own arm. And this love of God’s is stronger than any challenge you will ever face.

MATTHEW, 19: JESUS DEFINES HIS TRUE AUDIENCE (11:16-30)

July 9, 2018 by LW Countryman Leave a Comment

In the last post you wrote about Matthew, you seemed to say that Jesus was a kind of populist who was leading a rebellion—not violent, but still a rebellion—against the established religion. Did I get that right?
I may have overstated that a bit. For one thing, he wasn’t trying to overthrow the religion of the Jewish people. Rather, he was seeking to rebalance it and revive some overlooked aspects of it, as we’ll be seeing in chapter 12. At the same time, he was deeply suspicious of the motives of the religious authorities and the devout because their public standing was so closely identified with their religious stance. It is the problem that always threatens religious leadership when it becomes politically powerful; the leaders confuse the goal of maintaining their power and that of being true to their faith. Any one who questions their authority is doubly suspect
Again, I don’t think Jesus was a populist—certainly not in the sense of assuming that the crowd is always right. It’s true that the crowds have been relatively supportive up to now. But he has already warned the Twelve against expecting popular success (10:16-25). And one suspects that he was not entirely surprised, later on in Jerusalem, when the crowd called for his crucifixion. In the material we begin with today, he even makes fun of popular enthusiasms as childish and fickle (11:16-19).
John and Jesus were both celebrities—to use a modern term. That is, they attracted crowds of enthusiasts who then may have felt some “ownership” in these people they idolized because they were so identified with them. Hence Jesus’ acknowledgement that both he and John were popular figures, but with very different characteristics. But he doesn’t trust this kind of crowd psychology.
Still, Jesus’ criticism of “this generation” in 11:16 doesn’t focus primarily on the enthusiasms of children’s games, but on the equally common capacity of children to switch sides and sit in judgement on one another. It is this judgmental turn that Jesus sees in the devout and the religious authorities—the people who are starting to say that he’s in league with the devil.
He’s accusing all those very substantial and reputable people of behaving like children?
Exactly. Children playing games and arguing with each other about the rules and who’s in charge. And that’s exactly the issue. The scribes and Pharisees are in charge in Galilee and they are determined to stay in charge. They’re the people who make the rules. That means that they object equally to both John the Baptist and Jesus, since neither was willing to play by their rules.
And yet, as Jesus says, John and he are extremely different from each other. John is an ascetic figure. Jesus eats and drinks freely and with all sorts of questionable people. “Yet Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” he says. Each of these two, in his own way, was serving God’s Wisdom, and this is their vindication.
“Wisdom” started out as an attribute of God but, by this time, was often spoken of as almost a distinct persona. You can see this, for example, in Proverbs 8-9 and Wisdom of Solomon 6-8. (You’ll find Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament—not quite full-fledged scripture for most Christians today, but very much revered by early Christians.) God’s Wisdom was regularly conceived as female, perhaps because both the Hebrew and Greek words for “wisdom” were of feminine gender.
So he’s poking fun at the dignified religious leaders here? But then he really savages them in what follows.
Yes, 11:20 marks a drastic change in tone. He attacks cities in Galilee where he’s been at work—Chorazin, Bethsaida, even Capernaum where he’s been living. Matthew doesn’t tell us any details of Jesus’ activities in Chorazin or Bethsaida; but we had several stories from Capernaum in chapters 8-9. We also know that some of Jesus’ Twelve came from Capernaum. (The Gospel of John 1:44 says that some were from Bethsaida, too.) So the issue isn’t that everybody in these towns rejected Jesus. This attack must be aimed specifically at the religious leadership. And, just as in the story of the centurion (8:5-13), Jesus says, in effect, “Even Gentiles can do better than you people”—a point he will make yet again in chapter 12.
Whew! Even Sodom will do better! He’s really twisting the knife here, isn’t he?
Very much. And what was the great sin of Sodom? Not homosexuality, as was long claimed and is still believed by some. Not even same-sex rape, but rather their hostility toward foreigners (xenophobia) and their eagerness to take advantage of defenseless visitors. The religious leadership of his own time, Jesus is saying, is committing an offense worse than the very worst one recorded in the Torah. They are not only attacking strangers; they’re trying to keep their own neighbors from receiving the healing message of the Gospel.
But next we get another instance of whiplash from Matthew: with verse 25, the subject changes, the tone changes.
True. But it’s the other side of the same coin, so to speak. The people who see themselves as “wise and the intelligent”—the religious leadership, the people who should have welcomed Jesus’ message as authentic—are only trying to obstruct it. Who, then, actually “gets it”? The people you would never have expected—metaphorically described here as “infants.” Infants can’t argue the complexities of religion. But they know love when they experience it.
But then in verses 26-27, Matthew’s Jesus starts sounding very strange—more like he does in the Gospel of John than he usually does in Matthew.
It’s true, isn’t it? Jesus, in John’s Gospel, often speaks of his intimacy with God as that of Son with Father. Matthew’s Jesus usually speaks of God as “our father” or “your father.” But the language here claims an exalted status for Jesus as the perfect intermediary between God and this world: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” In John’s Gospel, this wouldn’t surprise us at all. In Matthew’s, it is really unexpected.
I have no explanation for how this brief “thunderbolt from the Johannine heaven,” as it has been called, came to Matthew. But, however it did, we already know that he arranges his materials with great care. Jesus asserts here that he has a distinctive, indeed a unique, closeness to God. And he makes this assertion precisely at the point when his opponents have decided that he’s an agent of the devil.
And the next question, I suppose, has to be “Who is this person to whom the Son reveals God and how does he go about it?”
Right on!
It must refer to the sort of people Jesus has just described as “infants.” They’re the ones prepared to hear Jesus’ proclamation of God’s love and see it enacted in his miracles and trust themselves to that love.
And then another case of whiplash! Verses 28-30 seem like a complete non sequitur.
It does seem that way in relation to what immediately precedes it, especially the woes of verses 20-24. On the other hand, Jesus’ invitation to the weary and promise that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” are very reminiscent of the end of chapter 10.
Both chapters, in fact, follow a similar pattern. Each begins with a positive depiction of Jesus’ ministry (the sending out of the Twelve in chapter 10; his response to the questions from John in chapter 11). Then the middle part of each chapter focuses on conflict. Finally, each closes with words of encouragement. We’ve actually been encountering this sort of dialogue between warning and encouragement all along, starting in the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7).
There must be something important to Matthew about this pattern. He doesn’t want us to forget that those who trust and follow the gospel of God’s love can expect opposition. But he is also certain that accepting the gospel of love makes for a uniquely rich and hopeful human life—a burden, of a kind, yes, but a life-giving one that is not, when all is said and done, difficult to bear. Why? Because it gives strength for difficult times.

Next up: OPEN CONFLICT BEGINS (12:1-8)

« Previous Page

Bill Countryman Talks About . . .

Scripture, Poetry, Gardens, etc.

Biblical interpretation

MATTHEW, 25: MORE PARABLES (13:24-58)

MATTHEW, 24: PARABLES (13:1-23)

CAN THE RICH BE SAVED?

MATTHEW, 23: SOME CONCLUDING WORDS AGAINST RELIGION-AS-USUAL (12:38-50)

MATTHEW, 22: OPEN CONFLICT—FROM SABBATH TO EXORCISMS (12:22-37)

SOMETHING DEEPER THAN GOOD BEHAVIOR

MATTHEW, 21: OPEN CONFLICT—MORE ABOUT THE SABBATH (12:9-21)

MATTHEW, 20: OPEN CONFLICT BEGINS—THE SABBATH (12:1-8)

BAPTISM: WHAT IT’S ABOUT, WHAT IT LEADS TO

MATTHEW, 19: JESUS DEFINES HIS TRUE AUDIENCE (11:16-30)

Skip links

Biblical interpretation