Readings from Proper 20B: Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

“A capable wife who can find?” This reading we heard from Proverbs is an elegant poem, a beautifully constructed alphabetical acrostic, which is to say that each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew letter, from aleph through tav. But its message doesn’t hold up all that well in our own time. Even worse if we read the King James Version, which runs: “Who can find a virtuous woman?” It’s interesting how quickly the human wisdom of one age can lose its value in another. And this was, indeed, highly esteemed wisdom in its time—so much so that our Hebrew editor copied it out, even though it was a piece of gentilewisdom, while giving full credit to its original authors. 

I say “authors” because there were actually two of them. The chapter we just read from begins this way: “The words of King Lemuel, an oracle that his mother taught him.” Or, perhaps more likely, “The words of King Lemuel of Massa that his mother taught him.” So the real source of this poem is the queen mother of the kingdom of Massa (probably somewhere in northern Arabia), telling her son what kind of wife he needs. 

She’d be a brilliant businesswoman, experienced in real estate, wine production, clothing manufacture, and international trade, a full partner with her husband in running a large and complicated household, an attentive mother to their children, a benefactor of the poor (very important in an era that had no “social service agencies”)—and very well dressed. She’d qualify as an impressive person in any age. And King Lemuel’s mother is telling him, “This is the partner you need.” It’s not a prescription for every woman nor for every spouse of whatever gender. It might work for anothr very wealthy household in the kingdom of Massa, but not for much of anybody else.

The poem reminds us that women have found ways, even in patriarchal cultures, to exercise their talents. But it certainly doesn’t mean that we ought to return to such a culture.Not every word of scripture is some sort of divine directive. Some of it has more to do with the human beings writing the scriptures than with God’s purpose for humanity us, unfolding over long ages. But even if these words don’t offer us much insight into God, we can still admire King Lemuel’s mother. (I give her double credit for being willing to invite a woman who was her equal in to her household!) And we can guess that Lemuel probably followed her advice. Either that, or he kept her poem to remind himself of his own capacity to make serious mistakes.

And why shouldn’t there be room in the scriptures for human wisdom? The scriptures are a joint operation between God and human beings. When God speaks, it’s the human ear and mind that have to catch the message. And we often start off by assuming that it’s just more of the same. It takes time, experience, and a kind of self-critical wisdom to hear something we hadn’t known or thought before. It takes conversion, the kind of change of perspective that shows us ourselves and our world from a different angle. A little human wisdom, especially if it reminds us that we don’t know everything, can be very helpful for that. It can help make room for the wisdom from above.

And we find both in our reading from the Letter of James. James is confronting major dysfunction in some Christian community that knows and respects him. It’s a community that includes rich people and poor people. It seems to be on friendly terms with its non-Christians neighbors. But, in this passage, he’s concerned that there is a lot of ambitious rivalry and tension within the community. “These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” Yes, internal conflicts can produce conflicts in families and churches and other human communities. Human wisdom knows about that. 

But then he goes on in a way that must have startled his readers. “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.” Wow! In a Christian community! Did they really do that? Well, not with their own hands. But James’s choice of words is not a mistake. A few verses further on (just after the passage we heard this morning), he writes this: “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. . . . Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. . . . You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.” (5:1-6) Some rich Christian landowners have been trying to cut their expenses by stiffing their workers. And James says to them, “That’s murder!” He even suggests that it’s equivalent to their having killed “the righteous one,” Jesus himself. 

The language is shocking. But there’s truth in it. We know there’s a history of it in our own country, given the way Christian people of the dominant, white majority have historically dismissed the claims of the native population of this country and of people brought here as slaves and kept in other kinds of bondage long after slavery was abolished and other people who may have seemed just too subversive of the status quo. And that doesn’t even mention all the generations of people who’ve been made to work for starvation wages.. 

Perhaps Christians have excused the situation with pleas of “Well, that’s just how the world works.” Maybe James’s Christian landowners argued that way: “Well, those people will get by okay without that money. They always do. And I can hardly spare it. Just look at my other expenses!” No! Only an evil, self-serving wisdom can argue that way. “The wisdom from above,” James says, is quite different. It is “pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” 

And what is this wisdom from above? For James, it’s all there in what he calls “the royal law”: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (5:8) James found this law in the Torah and saw it living and breathing in Jesus himself. And this morning, we heard in the gospel reading about what this was going to Jesus. Jesus has taken his disciples away from the crowds to teach them, in private, something of immense importance. He’s telling them, “The Son of Humanity is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” This isn’t the first time he’s told them this. But no matter how many times he reiterates it, they can’t figure out what he’s talking about. They’ve already recognized him as the Christ. For them, in their worldly wisdom, that means that he’s going to take over the world and set things right. But when Peter suggested this on another occasion, Jesus turned on him and said, “Get behind me, Satan.” So they’re not about to challenge him again. But they still don’t understand. They’re just trying to ignore it all.

But why does Jesus know that he’s going to die? Because he’s practicing God’s overflowing love that pours out on every soul in the universe. He’s healing people for free, cleansing lepers, rescuing people from demon possession. He’s even raised the dead occasionally. And the people are looking to him for leadership. Jesus knows that the powers that be are not going to stand for this. What would become of their own importance and power if people actually believe this message of love? What would become of religious distinctions: the pious, the clergy, the theologians? What would become of courts and armies and the other functions of government? They’d become an anemic shadow of their former, powerful selves. And those who benefit from them are not just going to stand there and take this!

And when they come for him, what is Jesus going to do? He cannot respond with violence. He exists to embody and proclaim the love of God. He won’t retaliate, no matter what they decide to do to him. He will not and he cannot. It would betray everything he is and does. But the disciples still don’t understand. And, as we saw in the Letter of James, Christians of later generations still struggle to believe in this love of God, to believe that God’s love is so lavish that they can afford to share it with others. The greatest power in the world—the power, indeed, that created the world—is expressed in love. And God’s love will not do harm, even in self-defense. 

Meanwhile, the disciples, having given up trying to understand all this, have shifted to a more interesting topic of conversation: which of them will get to be prime minister in Jesus’ coming kingdom. No doubt they’re being very quiet so that Jesus won’t hear them, but he knows what they’re talking about anyway. He calls them over and says to them a single sentence: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Period. Chew on that one for a while. And he offers them an example that I suspect did little to clear things up for them. He takes a small child in his arms and says, in effect, “The kingdom of God won’t come to the violent or the earnestly pious or the highly educated or the powerful. It won’t force itself on anyone. It will come as a gift—like someone to be loved, someone who calls forth your love, someone who claims no power over you at all except that of love. Because it is by loving that we become rich. And who is this loved and loving one who calls for our love? It is Jesus. It is God. 

And this is the heart of the wisdom from above. It’s all about the boundless love of God for us—even us. But to grasp this wisdom, we must help extend this love to everyone, those like us and those different from us, our friends and also our enemies. Jesus couldn’t respond with force to the people who wanted to kill him because it would have made a lie of his whole life and the good news he proclaimed. He became the least of all and the servant of all. And we Christians have been struggling ever since in the same way the disciples were struggling. How can we possibly believe and live out something so life-giving and so true and yet so scary? 

But when our love grows weak, God’s love remains strong. And God holds out a hand to us and says, “No, you’re not there yet, but we’ll keep trying.”

Preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California

17th Sunday after Pentecost, September 19, 2021