Perhaps the flowers only know that it is high spring in the northern hemisphere. If so, that’s quite enough. They still echo the new life of the Resurrection:
Cymbidiums
Ranunculus 
EASTER FLOWERS IN THE GARDEN
THORNS
Thorns mockingly crown you—
blossom with your blood,
a presage of
the Spirit’s
holy
fire.
ANOTHER STORY
We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:
The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.
In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.
“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”
“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.
The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.
Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .
They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.
At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that
Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.
They tell their story to the doubting elders:
“Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”
All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes:
Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.
It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.
But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.
And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.
This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.
A MUSICAL TREAT YOU MIGHT NEVER HAVE EXPECTED
Probably you wouldn’t have spent money to hear a piece of music called “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” Maybe the title makes more sense in Czech, but still. . . . I did it for two reasons. One is that it was written by Bohuslav Martinů, whose music I have long liked and admired. The other is that the recording got a rave review in BBC Music Magazine a few months ago. The album is Cantatas (four of them, all by Martinů), performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir, directed by Lukáš Vasilek (Supraphon).
Martinů’s music can be zany, like his early ballet, Revue de cuisine (another curious title) with its charleston episode—”charleston” as in the 1920s dance craze. It can go deep, as in the four symphonies he wrote while he was in exile in America during World War II and the subsequent communist takeover of his homeland. It can be highly rhythmic. It can have a folk-like quality. It can be emphatically modern. But I always find it both accessible and rewarding.
So I took a flyer. And I’m glad I did.
“Legend” is for choir and three soloists accompanied by a small ensemble of recorder, clarinet, French horn, accordion, and piano, giving it the clarity and transparency of chamber music. The text is a poem by the Czech poet Miloslav Bureš that begins with folk traditions and draws broader meanings out of them. (Quotations here are adapted from the English translation of Hilda Hearne.)
Reading between the lines, I take the “smoke from potato tops” as referring to a practice of burning off the foliage in the village potato fields—maybe as a defense against potato blight. The “legend” part is a story about the Virgin Mary deciding to get down off her pedestal in the village church and go out to spend a warm, sunny day with the young men who are burning the fields.
The story takes a turn particularly interesting at the moment when I write this, with Holy Week not far off. Mary meets her son in the field, looking like another statue escaped from the church: “The blood on his hips had long gone rusty, / and the wounds by the thorns pained the mother’s heart.” She asks him, “Why your and my own plight / is so often graved in stone, / and at my feet cold candlesticks are placed.”
Jesus answers: “Sweet mother of mine, / I wish that not my blood but love would save mankind.” And he envisions a fulfillment of such love with all the statues emerging from the church, the saints becoming real people.
But when the pious discover that their statue is missing, they rush out to find it—and pass right by Mary without recognizing her. They suppose she is some ignorant peasant woman. After all, “like thrifty peasants do, / she took off her sandals” as she left the village. After searching for her all day, they come back to the village. “Then, in compliance with the official rules, / they blamed the verger”—only to be interrupted by the news that some lads grazing goats on the hills have found her.
The music for all this never strikes a false note. The instrumental introduction strikes a pastoral note that continues as the opening chorus sets the scene. This shifts to a hymn-like melody as a soprano soloist describes Mary descending from the altar. Reminiscent of Bach’s pairing of solo instruments with human voices, the clarinet accompanies Mary’s lament (alto solo), while the piano takes over to accompany Jesus’ response (baritone).
The accompaniment shifts into a bustling mode as the pious discover the Virgin’s absence and run off to look for her. The soprano describes Mary’s emergence into the natural world “in a robe of ripening rye” with a simple monodic chant, then joins chorus and alto in almost jaunty mode as the crowds push past her, dismissing her as “a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave.”
At length, the searchers give up, only to be surprised by increasing musical energy as the “bold lads” who have seen her ignore their elders and recount what’s happened to them. I can only describe the music as music of miracle–but of a completely modest and unostentatious kind. The music returns to monody and dips lower and lower as it describes the reaction of the elders, their faces “mirrored all askew” in their half-empty beer mugs “as after a funeral wake.”
The conclusion is a prayerful celebration of the Virgin who, surrounded by “lads who trot around her barefoot, / returns to the rocks and to the trembling aspens, / with human heart.” Martinů makes a very satisfactory “amen” out of those last three words. All the sophistication of a Paris-educated composer has poured into creating the elegant simplicity of this music. He wrote it in the 1950s, not long before his death.
I love this piece of music. And I suspect a whole lot of people would if they ever had a chance to hear it. So, if you like choral and vocal music or if you know and like Martinů s music or if you’d like to see more of Bures’s interesting folk/ecological theology or if you’re just adventurous, buy this CD! I say “buy the CD” because it has an excellent booklet with texts and translations. But if your Czech is fluent, maybe the performers’ excellent diction will be all you need.
And, by the way, the other three cantatas are also wonderful. Maybe I’ll write about them later on.
MATTHEW, 12: SOME TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:1-17)
After Jesus finishes his great Sermon, he comes down from the mountain—followed now by crowds of people—and begins performing a series of miracles. Matthew had mentioned earlier (4:23-25) that Jesus was healing and exorcising people, but there were no actual miracle stories until now. And they are odd miracle stories.
Yes, looking ahead, I notice something odd in the story of the Gadarene swine (vss. 28-34). I remember it as being a longer and more detailed story than this. And I thought there was just one demoniac, but in Matthew there are two.
Good observation! Mark and Luke both narrate this same episode and, frankly, make a more gripping story of it. Matthew doesn’t seem very interested in the human details here, and the way he uses two demoniacs in his version instead of one is rather like a story-teller in English starting off with “There were a couple of . . . ” The individuals aren’t important in themselves; they’re types. Matthew also keeps his telling of the story (and of other miracle stories, too) quite brief and shapes the stories in a way that underlines the troublesome quality of Jesus’ actions—troublesome from the point of view of the very pious and the religious authorities.
Why would they be troublesome?
For a variety of reasons, many of them centering on questions of purity. In the first story—the cleansing of a leper—Jesus touches the man, thereby violating the most basic principle of purity systems, namely that impurity always trumps purity. That’s why lepers were exiled from their communities—so that they wouldn’t make everybody else unclean. Touching a leper makes you dirty, but it doesn’t work the other way. You can’t make a leper clean by touch. Except that Jesus can and does! With him, the “contagion” flows the other way; he makes cleansing contagious, not dirt. Interestingly, though, Jesus doesn’t seem to want to make a public issue of this. He tells the cleansed leper to keep matters quiet and just go to the priest to perform the ritual that will certify that he’s no longer a leper and can be welcomed back into the community.
So Jesus isn’t going to abide by the rules. But does he really expect to go unnoticed?
Perhaps not. He certainly doesn’t avoid awkward situations in this chapter. But breaking the rules isn’t the point in itself. It’s an expression of his message that God loves everybody, even the unclean and sinful. Even Gentiles—a potentially divisive claim in a Jewish community that had been subject to the domination of Gentile empires for centuries.
Gentiles like the centurion in Capernaum?
Exactly. It’s interesting that Luke also tells this story (7:1-10), but carefully buffers the interaction between Jesus and the centurion by saying that the centurion sent local Jewish leaders to plead with Jesus on his behalf rather than coming himself. Matthew, however, (who in many ways seems the most self-consciously Jewish of the four gospel writers) brings the two men into direct interaction with each other. Jesus even volunteers to go to the centurion’s house. To understand how unsettling this suggestion was, just re-read the story of Peter’s visit to the house of the Gentile Cornelius, also a centurion, in Acts 10. Peter hated the idea of entering a Gentile house so much that he had to be given a special revolution to persuade him to do it. And the revelation had to be repeated three times just so he’d be sure God really meant it.
Jesus not only grants the centurion’s plea for help. He announces to all within hearing distance that this Gentile has just shown more faith than any one Jesus has met in the Jewish community. Jesus even has the temerity to suggest that people like this man might well replace some of the less faithful of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Hard words for his hearers! It’s like suggesting to modern Christian that some non-believers may get better seats at the heavenly banquet than they will. So Jesus isn’t evading controversial issues. He’s quite willing to address them as occasion warrants.
I see that there are some other big miracle stories ahead—Stilling of the Storm, Gadarene Demoniacs, the Paralytic—but the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is a disappointment. It’s so short it’s barely a story.
I agree. Even by Matthew’s standards, it seems like a nub, not a real story. Still, there’s more to it than first meets the eye. It’s not a flashy miracle and it’s done in private, not on the street. But Jesus’ touching of this woman is problematic in its own way. She could have been in a state of contagious impurity—something that menstruation occasioned. There seems to have been a widespread expectation that male religious leaders would avoid contact with women outside their own households—if only as a defense against becoming accidentally unclean.
Of course, there’s also an element in the story that can irritate modern readers—the phrase “and she got up and began serving him.” Some see it as one more reduction of a woman to a servant’s role. I always wondered if she shouldn’t at least have gotten a bit of recuperation time. Perhaps part of the point is that the healing was so complete that it was as if she’d never been sick at all. But, as I grow older and experience a bit more infirmity myself. I find myself reading it another way. Now I think, “Yes, exactly.” When I’ve been under the weather and unable to work, this is exactly what I want—I want to be out working in the garden. Maybe in honor of having a guest and a miraculous healing, I’d have gone a step further: “and he got up and served tea in the garden.”
Now, we’re not through with this series of troublesome miracles. But the scope of the trouble is about to broaden out. It isn’t just the pious and the religious authorities of Israel that Jesus is disturbing. He’ll be doing it to his own disciples and to some neighboring pagans, too.
Next up: MORE TROUBLESOME MIRACLES (8:18-9:1)
JESUS—WITH FIVE SAINTS
A SERMON FOR THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, 2018
Mark 9:2-9
We hear this story of how Jesus became transfigured by dazzling light every year on this Sunday right before the beginning of Lent. That means it’s grown familiar for us. And, as often happens with familiar things, we no longer notice how unusual it is. Well, to be sure, shining with a dazzling light is pretty unusual. But there are other things to notice as well, things you don’t find elsewhere in the Bible.
For one, who else in the Bible lights up like this? The only example would be Moses, whose face glowed with light after all the time he spent with God on Mt. Sinai. It gave the Israelites a proper fright, and he had to wear a veil before they’d get close enough to listen to him. (Exodus 34)
And where else in the Bible do departed saints volunteer to make conversation with the living? The closest thing (though definitely not voluntary) would be the story about the witch of Endor: King Saul forced her on threat of death to call up the shade of Samuel from Sheol. Samuel was not at all happy about it. And, far from giving Saul the comfort Saul was looking for, he just tells him he’s doomed. He actually seems to take a certain vengeful pleasure in delivering that message. (1 Samuel 28).
But the thing that interests me particularly this morning is that the Transfiguration is so different from the other key events in Jesus’ story. In all the rest, Jesus is essentially alone. At his baptism, nobody but John recognizes what’s going on. At his temptation, he’s on his own. In Gethsemane, the disciples are all asleep. At his trial, the only people around are enemies. At the crucifixion, a few supporters are present, but unable to help. And the resurrection has no witnesses but the guards—and they seem to have fainted. This event is different. The story of the Transfiguration has a bigger cast—Jesus plus five saints. And with two of them, he’s in intimate conversation.
What do you suppose they were talking about? Mark, whose account we read this morning, doesn’t tell us, but Luke gives us a hint. He says “they were talking with him about his departure which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.” (Lk 9:31) His “departure in Jerusalem”—it must certainly mean his death. Now, Jesus has already told his disciples to expect this; but they refused to believe it. Peter even protested that it couldn’t possibly happen. (Mk. 8:31-33) Maybe Moses and Elijah were the only people who could possibly have anything to say to Jesus on this particular occasion. It’s often said that the two were there to represent the Law and the Prophets—in other words the deep, scriptural background of Jesus’ ministry. True enough, but there’s more to it than that.
Think for a bit about these two old men. Moses we know. He started off in a persecuted minority and became an adopted child of the persecuting majority. He couldn’t live with that tension and one day when he saw a guard beating an Israelite slave, he killed him.Then he had to run for his life. When God confronted him years later in the burning bush and told him to go back to Egypt and lead the people out, he knew it was a crazy project. He’d been there! Still, he did it and it worked. But he spent the next forty years problem-solving for a big crowd of people wandering around in the wilderness—while also serving as God’s messenger to give them a new identity, a new law, a new religion. The people sometimes agreed to it all but, according the Biblical account, mostly they complained and occasionally they rebelled. Moses got precious little thanks for all his work. And then, at the end of his life, he didn’t even get to enter the Promised Land. He died in sight of it, in Moab, and was buried there—in a grave whose location was promptly forgotten (Deut. 34:6).
Elijah, too, had a difficult time of it. He was a passionate advocate of the God of Israel, and he spent his life fighting the king’s efforts to blend the religion of Israel, with its focus on justice, into the fertility cults of Israel’s neighbors—all for the sake of enhancing royal power. Elijah had such a rough time of it that, at one point, he complained that he was the only faithful person left. God promptly disabused him of that rather egotistical notion, but it tells you what he was going through. And, perhaps because of his immense frustration, he wholeheartedly embraced violence as a way of forcing people to be faithful: he slaughtered the priests of Baal and brought a devastating drought down on the whole country—a drought that sent thousands of Israelites as well as Gentiles to death by starvation. St. Romanos, in the sixth century, speculated that God sent the fiery chariot for Elijah because, in his zeal for God, Elijah had forgotten that God actually loves human beings, even in our imperfection. The only way to save the people who were left was to yank Elijah off the stage.
So Elijah and Moses had both known struggle, opposition, disappointment, the futility of violence, the difficulty of getting their message across, the willingness of people to trade their principles for what looked like an easier path. Moses died in Exile; Elijah was translated to the heavens by fiery chariot. But both knew about struggle and suffering, and each had had to leave a lot of unfinished business behind him.
Jesus, at the moment of the Transfiguration, is about to turn toward Jerusalem—in full awareness of what lies ahead. And I can’t imagine any two people better suited to talk with him about it. His disciples are busy arguing about which of them will get to be prime minister in Jesus’ new kingdom. They’re listening to him, but they’re not getting much of it. And they’re the ones he will leave to carry on his work.
We know that he’s afraid of what is to come. He never says it to to his followers, but it comes out in the words he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane—a prayer that they, of course, slept through. But the fear is there. And so he turns to the two people who have been through some of this already, the two who can reassure him that a work that feels unfinished isn’t necessarily altogether lost, the two who can tell him that it is worthwhile to go on with his mission no matter how daunting the challenges.
After Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, angels came to minister to him (Mark1:13). But there are some things that no angel could tell him. No angel could tell him what it was like to live with human uncertainties, with the incomprehension and wavering of human followers, with the difficulty of seeing beyond the next step, the next moment. He needed a couple of wise old folk—wise because of long experience, wise because of their own sufferings and failures.
But, of course, they’re not the only ones present, are they? Jesus could have had a conversation with Moses and Elijah without bringing Peter and James and John along (though I guess there’s no way we would ever have heard about it). But here they are, and they must have a role to play, too. What is it?
I suppose they’re there partly because they needed to be overwhelmed again by God’s beauty and power and get a renewed sense of their own puniness in comparison. They played that role pretty well. But they didn’t like it at all. Peter’s instinctive response was to try to take charge. If things like this were going to happen, well, somebody needed see to that they were properly noted, commemorated, categorized, institutionalized, and generally taken care of. So I guess they were also there so that they could make some mistakes on behalf of the rest of us.
And I suppose they were also there to be reminded of how much they didn’t understand. Afterwards, as they head back down the mountain, Jesus goes back to talking about his death and resurrection again. And, once again, they can’t figure out what he’s getting at. So, if Moses and Elijah are there to help, Peter and James and John are there to make mistakes and to misunderstand. They’re there to confirm that our inexperience and foolishness have a place here, too.
And, finally, there is yet a further dimension to all this of immediate importance to us. We have, in the Transfiguration, a picture of the church—helpful at any time but perhaps particularly as we step into Lent. Jesus stands in the center, the Word who brings Good News, gleaming with the beauty of God’s inexhaustible love for humankind. Gathered as church, we hear him in the scriptures and sing the good news in hymns and respond in prayer. The old wise folk, who have seen it all, survived disappointment and suffering and still have hope—they can stand alongside Jesus in communion and understanding. The three newbies, the disciples, cower down below, shielding their eyes, still trying to figure out what this is all about.
It reminds us that understanding life and God isn’t a solitary business; we need one another for it. At one moment you may find yourself flailing away with the neophyte disciples. At another, you may discover you are one of the wise elders who can draw hope out of your own experience to sustain someone else. There’s something of Moses and Elijah in each one of us—and something of Peter, James, and John. And the three callow disciples, remember, will grow into the next generation of Moseses and Elijahs.
And whether we find ourselves nodding our heads and thinking, “Oh yes, I’ve been there; it can be very difficult,” or whether we just feel confused and uncertain, the light of God keeps on shining on all of us just as it did on the Mountain of Transfiguration. And we all have parts to play and, together, we can all increase in understanding and in love.
MATTHEW, 11: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT (7:15-29)
Where does this language about “false prophets” come from? I thought prophets belonged in the Old Testament.
The word “prophet” means someone who claims to be speaking on God’s behalf—in other words, almost any religious leader. Mostly, Jesus’ contemporaries used the word to refer to people who lived hundreds of years before their time, but Jesus is using it here in its more basic sense.
And there was a revival of prophetic claims at the time—especially among Jesus’ own followers, after his death. Sometimes, scoundrels found it pretty easy to impose on innocent Christian congregations by claiming to be prophets. The second-century Greek writer Lucian of Samosata (not himself a Christian) tells an intriguing story about just such a “prophet” in his satire “The Death of Peregrinus.” One might almost feel that Jesus was warning, in advance, against exactly such people.
Prophets made their impression through speech, often with the suggestion that they were in a trance or had been taken over by a spirit that was merely speaking through them. Accordingly, they claimed a degree of authority that was more than human. Jesus says, in effect: “Don’t get swept up in the words; wait to see how your ‘prophet’ lives.”
That means making judgements about people.
Yes, even after we just heard “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged” (7:1). But the judgement is to be based on works of love. Just as we can tell good fruit from bad, we’ll know the true prophet when we see that this person is motivated by God’s love and does works expressive of that love.
Jesus threatens the impostors with hell-fire! Not so very loving, is it?
He gets very angry about abuses done in the name of religion by religious leaders. And it’s clear that he fully expects that such abuses will crop up among his own followers, just as in other religious groups. (Of course, he’s been proven right again and again.) He was also talking about this in chapter 6, where we saw warnings about religious behavior being misused for personal aggrandizement. He sees that no arena of human existence is immune to abuse. That includes religion.
Is he against religion?
No. His teaching is itself religious. It’s about our relationship with the God who is the power behind the creation, the lover of the world, and the Pole Star of our human lives. But he has no illusion that religion is always good in itself. And he’s trying to give us a way to distinguish good from bad in it.
Later Christians have sometimes treated Jesus’ attacks on religion as attacks on one particular religion—Judaism. It’s a nice trick for shifting people’s attention away from our own misdeeds. But it’s nonsense. Jesus never separated himself from Judaism. That separation between Christians and Jews happened only in the generations after Jesus. His strictures apply equally to all religions. In fact, he applies them quite explicitly in this passage to his own followers as well.
The people who say, “Lord, Lord”?
Exactly. And this applies not just to ordinary believers but quite specifically to the elite who have prophesied in Jesus’ name and exorcised and worked miracles. If they haven’t done the will of the Father—haven’t led lives founded on love—he rejects them absolutely: “I never knew you.” We’ll hear a strong echo of this same attack on loveless piety near the end of Matthew’s Gospel in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats (25:31-46).
He’s getting quite peremptory here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Everything seems to be either/or, doesn’t it? He didn’t seem so angry at the beginning of the sermon.
Yes. He says, in effect, that either we hang on to what is really central or our lives will fall apart like the house built on sand. The point, though, isn’t that we have to reach perfection immediately. Jesus’ inner circle of disciples certainly didn’t, as Matthew will point out again and again. In practice, human beings are seldom if ever completely good or evil. We are a mix of wisdom and folly—a constantly shifting mix. But the question remains: Where do our central commitments lie? Where is the foundation?
Remember, too, that God sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous (5:43-48). God continues to love us, even when we misstep. But Jesus wants us to understand that the foundation for a wise, centered, enduring human existence is here in these teachings, waiting for us to explore and learn and practice more and more deeply with our lives.
I can see why “the crowds were astounded.”
Yes. These three chapters that make up the Sermon on the Mount still astound. And the attentive reader never gets to the end of finding new insight into them. Each return to the text is apt to open up something we hadn’t noticed or understood before.
Was this really so different from what other religious authorities were teaching?
There is much in the teaching of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries that agrees with the Sermon on the Mount. The difference isn’t primarily one of content, but one of focus and certainty. Matthew’s phrasing here is key; “he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” The scribes, like the clergy of other religions, taught on the basis of an existing religious consensus, which existed in written form in the scriptures of Israel and also orally in the form of opinions offered by a long series of esteemed leaders. The scribes would have been less likely to say “I tell you” than to say “The Torah tells you.” That can tip over all too easily into the creation of an inflexible system that demands obedience and is willing to skimp on less sharply defined values such as love.
Jesus speaks like a prophet himself, claiming direct access to God. He was even wiling, back at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, to contrast what he said with what “was said to the men of old.” No wonder he was willing to make distinctions between authentic and inauthentic prophets! Unlike the false prophets, he is transparent to the gospel of love. The fruits of this tree are good. And they are on display for all to see. In fact, we’ll be seeing more of them in the next two chapters of Matthew.
So that’s the Sermon on the Mount? It’s very dense, and it doesn’t exactly leave you with three clear points or an agenda for concrete action.
You could say it even resists being reduced to a few clear points. Oh, the Golden Rule is clear enough. But putting it into action requires a lifelong process of learning how to love one another, of understanding the peculiar circumstances in which each of us lives, and choosing the loving course in those circumstances. We don’t find a simple set of rules either here or elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew.
Still, we will come back again and again to the themes that these chapters have raised for us, and it is worth the time we’ve taken to look at them closely as part of trying to understand this gospel. Next, Matthew will turn to showing us how Jesus behaved toward the larger public. Here are the “fruits” that authenticate his prophesy.
Next up: TROUBLESOME MIRACLES
A LITTLE CHRISTMAS GIFT
Here is the Sermon I would have preached on Christmas Eve had I not come down with a nasty cold and, in the interests of public health, stayed home instead:
WHAT WERE THEY REALLY THINKING?
That’s a beautiful story we just heard from the Gospel of Luke (2:1-20). But, as so often, the Scriptures don’t offer to tell us much about people’s thoughts. We wind up filling those in for ourselves. I’m going to give it a try for a few of tonight’s players.
Picture, if you will, the old shepherd at the rear of the group, as they walk back into the hills to look after their sheep again. What’s he thinking?
“Well, that were a surprise. I didn’t think angels still came calling these days like they did back in Bible times. But we all seen it and we all heard it; so it musta happened. And when we got to that cowshed they sent us to, ’twasn’t all that much to see. Just a baby and a new mother, tired and excited the way they are, and a dad looking kind of frazzled. Was nothing grand about it—nothing like the show those angels put on. No. Now, you did get a feeling there—like somethin’ new was startin’ up—a feeling that maybe, just maybe after all this time something might go right with the world after all. A feeling that God was up to somethin’. I think we caught it from Mary and Joseph. Even in such a hard spot, they seemed hopeful and trusting and friendly and, unlike a lot of townsfolk, they made us welcome. But, really, you know? I don’t see how it’ll ever work.”
Or picture Melchior on camelback—a middle-aged Professor of Theological Astronomy on his way back to the University of Central Asia. What is he thinking?
“What was that all about? The signs seemed clear enough. And I thought the local people would have been right on top of it all, making observations and going to pay their respects. It should have been easy for us to find the child. But they acted as if we’d taken them by surprise when we arrived. Hmm! Probably a good thing, actually. I wouldn’t trust King Herod any further than I could throw him. Not far, I’d say, judging by all the gold he was wearing. We did find the child, yes, and we brought our gifts and we felt there was indeed a mystery there—a mystery worthy of being announced in the stars. There was a great sense of the presence of God surrounding and pervading that poor family. One almost dared hope that God might be about to do something useful in this crazy world. But, really, you know? I don’t see how it’ll ever work.”
And I wonder if you noticed, in the third row of the angelic chorus, that sort of middle-rank angel who seemed to be having a particularly fine time singing. What is that angel thinking?
“Wow! That was really thrilling. We’ve never done a better job, not even around the divine throne in heaven itself. But what, exactly, is God up to? And is it wise? I know I wouldn’t want to get this entangled with those problematic humans. It’s one thing to go distract a child so she doesn’t cross a collapsing bridge. I like the “guardian angel” gig. But becoming human—getting involved in actual human flesh and blood? They’re a dangerous race, you know. They can be cruel. They won’t take kindly to this, I’m afraid. I hope God has a Plan B—or C or H or Q or whatever it is at this point—because, really, you know? I don’t see how it’ll ever work.”
And what about Mary and Joseph? Luke actually does tell us something about Mary’s thoughts: “she treasured all these words [of the shepherds] and pondered them in her heart.” She had made her leap of faith nine months before. Joseph made it along with her. And their faith, intertwined with hope and love, buoyed them up through their long trek and the birth of their child. And yet, they didn’t know exactly what God was doing or what further part they might be called on to play. Instead, they pondered, they hoped, they loved. And they wondered, “How will this ever work out?
And what about God? What is God thinking at this moment in Bethlehem? That’s tricky to imagine because God’s relationship to time and space isn’t like ours. But we have hints scattered all through holy scripture. Maybe we can risk it. God is thinking:
“This isn’t all going to be pretty. The angels think I should give up on these human beings. What they don’t get is that I love them even with all their problems. The humans don’t get it either. First they tried to confuse me with the forces of nature. They credited me for good harvests and blamed me for hurricanes and earthquakes. Then they tried to commandeer me to take responsibility for their cities and religions and wars and got upset when I didn’t help them. I keep trying to get them to see me as a lover. I even sang love songs to them. But mostly they just ignore me except when they’re in trouble. And then they come and quake before me as if punishing them were my favorite thing to do.
“Well yes, it isn’t going to be pretty. But there’s some comfort in being able to see the whole story already. I can see that some people will start catching the invitation to love—that young fellow John who’s going to be a disciple, Mary from Magdala who’ll be first to figure out what’s really going on and, above all this Mary here and her Joseph, who’ve consented to be my partners in what sounds, admittedly, like a crazy scheme. And, really, you know, I think, in the long run, it’ll work.”
MATTHEW, 10: THE NARROW GATE (7:1-14)
Aren’t we getting another sudden leap from one subject to another here?
Yes, it’s a big jump from not worrying to not judging. There’s no obvious continuity with the latter half of chapter 6. But if we look just a bit further back, we’ll find one. “Do not judge so that you may not be judged” is very reminiscent of “If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (6:15).
Even so, how can Christians live up to these commands? There are occasions when judgments have to be made. Sometimes other people’s thinking really is screwed up. Sometimes their actions really are bad.
Part of the point, I suppose, is that word “other.” We all like to think of ourselves as free of the faults we condemn in others, when in fact we are often guilty of the same things or, if not the exact same, at least equally screwy ones.
If we take these sayings with excruciating literalism, Christians would have to refuse almost any public office, especially juridical ones. But quite apart from that kind of literalism, we all spend a sizable chunk of our ordinary time judging one another and questioning one another’s sanity. It’s worse than ever in American culture right now, but it’s hardly new in our world—just more exaggerated.
Given the overall context of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to be aiming here at broader issues. He’s doing what he does all through the Sermon on the Mount—trying to change our basic perspective on life and religion. We’re all familiar with the tendency of the religious, both on the right and on the left, to become judgmental—not just willing but eager to pass judgment and ready to do so in perfect confidence that they’re right. After all, God told them so. Jesus is saying, “No, God did no such thing.”
So, should we get rid of religion?
It might be worth a try if it had any chance of success, but there is plenty of evidence to show it doesn’t. Generally, if you drop one religion, something else will show up pretty quickly to replace it. And the religions of consumerism or free marketism or ethnic purity or Marxism have proven at least as deadly as Christianity or Islam or Judaism or any of the other traditional offerings. We human beings can work up the enthusiasm for judgment in all areas of life and we can always find something in our current ideology to justify it. To date, fascism and soviet Marxism seem to hold the world championship for sheer bloodiness.
In other words, this is a universal problem of the human spirit?
Yes. It’s part of the same picture with our eagerness to prove our piety in public, our temptation to fudge our bets by worshipping all the available gods of Mammon (just to keep on the safe side, of course), and our propensity to worry ourselves into a stupor. What better companion to these traits than our willingness to jump on the failures, mistakes, and inadequacies of people who don’t see things our way? That gives us a kind of catalogue of what Jesus has covered in the sermon.
Christians are not exempt. There’s ample documentation in the New Testament of people judging one another over issues of leadership, spiritual gifts, circumcision, keeping kosher. And, of course, the people judged their leaders and the leaders their people. Nowhere in Matthew’s Gospel does Jesus accuse Judaism of being specially prone to judgmentalism. Every thing he says on the subject is equally applicable to every human being on earth of any religion or (if that’s really possible) none.
Okay! Okay! But then there’s another leap. Where do these dogs and swine come in? And what are these holy pearls we’re not supposed to throw before them? And how do you recognize them if you’re not allowed to pass judgment?
Hmm! Being a bit difficult, aren’t we? Do I need to have a look in your eye to see if there isn’t a speck there?
Well, no. Actually, I’ve always had the same reaction to vs. 6. But, lately, when I ask myself, “What does Jesus treat as holy here in the Sermon on the Mount?” the answer that keeps coming back is “the intimate relationship of love and trust that God is offering you.” It’s the holy center of true human life. And taking it seriously means that our lives become centered on it.
Jesus has been telling us not to risk this relationship by seeking a reputation for public piety, or by building up this-wordly credits, or by falling into anxiety and the worship of idols or—just now—by setting up as the arbiters of good and evil for everyone around us.
“Do not cast your pearls before swine” is another way of saying “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” The love of God on Tuesdays and the love of shopping or the workers’ paradise or my own wonderful self the rest of the time? No. No effort at compromise will succeed. You will only lose your relationship with God without gaining anything in its place.
But life is more complicated than that. You can’t just go to church and skip the rest of life. There are real dangers and real responsibilities.
Well, Jesus seems to sense the need for an answer to that, as he goes right on with “Ask, and it will be given to you.” But it may not be quite the answer we’d like. What, exactly, will be given to us? Not wealth, not security, no guarantees of long life and easy circumstances. Jesus, after all, had none of these. Rather, it’s the things we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer: that God’s kingdom will be realized to some degree in our lives, that God’s will for peace and justice will be done, at least within the ambit of our lives, that we will find the day to day sustenance that makes life worthwhile, that God’s great gift of forgiveness will spread through the human family, that we will find strength for the tests we cannot evade and freedom from even those evils that we cling to most tightly in our lives. Maybe at some point we’ll even get the bonus of finding that we’ve lost the log in our own eye.
The Golden Rule (7:12) is the guide Jesus offers us for this life. When he says, “This is the Law and the Prophets,” he’s saying, “This is the whole message in a nutshell. Everything else has to be understood in terms of this one criterion.” In another place, he’ll say essentially the same thing about a similar formulation, the twin commandments to love God with our whole selves and to love our neighbors as ourselves (22:35-40).
That sounds awfully loosey-goosey. People use “love” to justify all sorts of mischief and mayhem—more like the road to Hell than the narrow gate to Heaven.
Which is easier, loving other people as we love ourselves or obeying a well-defined set of religious rules? And just think about those punctilious guardians of religion—the inquisitors of past and present—who have managed to persuade themselves that the rules require that they torture you and then claim they’re only doing it because they love you. If they started with love instead of the rules, they would have a much harder time getting to their ghastly conclusions.
And Jesus has already indicated that this business of loving our neighbors also involves forgiving a lot of things, some of them damned close to unforgivable. I suppose that inevitably follows if I hope to be forgiven my own wrong-doings and I’m trying to treat my neighbor as myself.
That’s hard to do.
Yes. as Jesus says, there are broad paths and narrow gates. The path of love has not, typically, been a crowded one. We often get Jesus’ image backwards here, assuming that the narrow gate is for the real sticklers, the people focused on the rules. Actually, no. The word “narrow” here applies to the gate, not the people trying to get through it. Narrow people are likely to have trouble sticking with the the path of love, and they won’t find the narrow gate easy to get through. Maybe they’d rather stick to polishing their reputation for piety. It’s either that or get a radically different perspective on life in this world.
Next up: LOVE, NOT RELIGION, IS THE POINT
READING MATTHEW, 9: THE PITFALL OF DIVIDED LOYALTIES (6:19-34)
Doesn’t the Sermon on the Mount seem rather miscellaneous—the way it jumps from topic to topic?
Yes, it can. That may be partly because it’s made up of separate sayings or groups of sayings that could have been handed on quite independently of each other among early Christians before Matthew brought them together in this form. But there’s another reason why the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t have a direct line of development. Jesus’ goal is to reshape our whole perspective on God, the world, and our own lives. His purpose isn’t so much to give us information as to point us toward new perspectives we must somehow come to and decisions we must make for ourselves.
Here in the latter half of chapter 6, we’re right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus started with beatitudes and told his audience that they, undistinguished as they were, were the light of the world. Then we had a series of sayings where Jesus both affirmed the Torah and began to reinterpret and refocus it on the generous God who makes rain fall on everybody, righteous and unrighteous alike.
Then, in the first part of Chapter 6 we found sayings that push us to take our relationship with God as absolutely central to our lives. Even being religious is a potential danger because then our public reputation may become more important to us than our relationship with God. Think, for example, of the way some contemporary Evangelical leaders shrink from criticizing the appalling morals of their congregations’ favorite political leaders. They do not seem to be willing to lose their supporters’ confidence.
But why this next shift? He was telling us to avoid religious hypocrisy. Now he’s telling us not to be concerned about basic survival!
It does sound that way. But the shift isn’t quite as abrupt as it first seems. What are the earthly treasures that Jesus dismisses in 6:19-21? Are they limited to material possessions? Or do they also include the treasures of ostentatious piety and the social credit one accrues thereby? Our earthly treasures include anything that obscures our focus on the centrality of God. When we are truly turned toward God we become full of light; we perceive things truly. The person focused on public standing is in the dark. (vss. 22-23)
And there are no half-measures?
Ultimately, that’s true. In reality, few if any of us—even the great saints—fully measure up to this ideal. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to watch Jesus’ original disciples stumbling over it again and again in Matthew’s Gospel. Our growth in faith is a long and sometimes faltering process. But, ultimately, we have to focus more and more on what we truly care about. The service of “Mammon” isn’t simply the possession of wealth. In fact, I think the NRSV translators were mistaken in translating it as “wealth.” If Matthew had wanted to say “wealth,” he had a perfectly good Greek word for it. Why does he use an Aramaic word instead? It suggests a broader significance. In fact, it sounds almost like the name of an idol. It’s what we are worshipping when the desire for wealth and reputation and power takes possession of us.
But what about responsibility for our own lives? Is Jesus really telling us to give up responsibility for ourselves? This “lilies of the field” thing sounds dangerously improvident—and lazy!
Actually, Jesus doesn’t say, “Don’t work.” He says, “Don’t be anxious.” Anxiety, he is saying, is the opposite of trust. And trust (Greek pistis, usually but perhaps misleadingly translated “faith”) is the core of our relationship with God. Anxiety, in turn, is what lies behind the effort to serve two masters. “Yes, I trust God—but, just in case, I will also worship the market, my social media, the gang I run with, my political party, my luck. . . .” And in the process, our side bets, as it were, wind up obscuring, compromising, or even replacing the trust, hope, and love that join us to God.
But Jesus does ask his inner circle of disciples to abandon their houses and families and jobs and live a wandering life with him—on the alms of others!
Yes, good point! But he doesn’t ask this particular kind of discipleship of everyone. Later on, he even turns down some people who volunteer but whom he perceives are not prepared for it (8:19-22). Remember that the Sermon on the Mount is addressed to the whole crowd of curious listeners, not just the inner circle of disciples who have left all.
For that matter, Jesus and his inner circle could live as wandering mendicants only because he had other followers who made it possible. Matthew will later mention a group of women followers, standing at the cross, who had come from Galilee for this very purpose (27:55-56).
Most of Jesus’ followers must have remained in their hometowns, working at their jobs, going out to hear him when he was near enough for them to do so, cultivating in their own context the trusting and loving relationship with God that he called them to. And to all his followers he addresses the same words: Don’t be anxious. Anxiety is a form of doubt, of mistrust—a temptation to betrayal.
The inner circle will fall into that pit repeatedly throughout the story. They will shy away from Jesus’ prediction of the cross. They will try to outmaneuver each other to be Jesus’ second-in-command. They will repeatedly fail to understand what he is telling them. One of them will betray him to death. Most of the rest will betray him by fleeing and hiding out. Even at the end of Matthew’s gospel, some will still be found doubting (28:17).
Worry is an invitation to start looking for or creating idols—little gods that we hope we can control better, that we hope will prove more predictable than our Father in Heaven. Polytheism always seems easier than relying on a single God. But it threatens to result in a fragmented life, one with no stable center. Happily, the God who sends rain upon just and unjust alike does not abandon us even when we fall into this pit.
Next up: THE NARROW GATE