Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22, Psalm 124, James 5:13-20, Mark 9:38-50
Jesus! This Gospel lesson is a tough one. Mutilation, amputation, pull your eye out. A millstone on your neck and mafia-style be cast into the sea. Where’s the gospel in these sayings of Our Lord? It’s rather all law, all judgment, all condemnation, and hellfire. So much for the nice Jesus.
The translation doesn’t help. I wish it were literal. Our Lord did not actually say “hell,” he said “gehenna,” and by “gehenna” he did not mean “hell.” Gehenna was the garbage dump in the gully behind Jerusalem. In garbage dumps the fires never stop smoldering and maggots flourish. Gehenna was a disgusting place, and if the corpse of any deceased was tossed there instead of decently buried it was an end of ultimate shame. Gehenna became a metaphor, though not for eternal torture, but for exclusion, shameful destruction, annihilation, and unmourned oblivion. Such a deceased would have no part in the resurrection of Israel or the life of the world to come.
That only helps a little, and what the Lord Jesus says is still very hard. If you stumble by what you do–cut it off, if you stumble by where you go–cut it off, if you stumble by what you see–cut it out. Better maimed or crippled or half-blind than to miss out on the resurrection. His metaphors are gruesome and extreme. One strike and you’re out! But you’ve only got two hands, two feet, two eyes. You don’t want to have to do this twice! Is that why the warning is extreme? There is a cost to your discipleship.
Actions have consequences that you can’t escape, no matter how far back your actions were. An immature immorality from high school will find you out. You may well be forgiven of your sin, and by the atonement of Christ be freed from your guilt, but that does not exempt you from the long-term consequences of your sin upon the lives of others, or even of the effects of its shadow on your personal development while you were denying it. Full repentance means to reckon with the consequences of what you’ve done, and it’s better to not to stand upon your rights. Maybe that Supreme Court seat for which you are most qualified is what you must give up. To enter the Kingdom of God is the better deal.
That actions have consequences is the moral law. The natural law is that causes have effects. The difference between nature and morality is that human beings are given freedom, and your freedom includes the freedom to disobey the law—but not to escape the consequences! How much freedom? Freedom from the constraints of nature? Freedom to choose our own morality? Free to continually redefine ourselves?
This freedom is what we are testing these days in our post-modern civilization. How free should the President be from the immoral things he said on tape? How free from the sins of his youth can be a candidate for the Supreme Court? How free may a woman be with her reproduction? How free may we be with our respective sexualities? The answers on these differ, but the testing is similar. How free are we to have an economy that depends for its growth on expanding consumption before the effects of our consumption make the climate rise up in revenge? Why should we expect the environment to be merciful or even fair? The longer the sin is hidden or the actions undealt with, the more extreme and the less fair are the consequences.
“For freedom Christ has set us free”—that’s the Gospel, and yet so much in our lives is not our choice and beyond our control, and we have to live with it. How vulnerable we are, how fragile our security. I sense this vulnerability as an underlying theme among our lessons this morning.
In the Book of Esther, the whole population of the Jews, being subject to the Persian Empire, were defenseless against the slaughter of the pogrom being instigated by Haman, if not for the rescue achieved by Queen Esther, whom no one but her uncle knew to be a Jew.
Our Psalm this morning, 124, is also about the people of God being rescued just at the point of annihilation.
The Epistle of James assumes a cultural context of opposition and struggle behind its exhortations to sing and pray and confess your sins to one another. He exhorts the early congregations, in their difficult and challenging context, against passivity, against bitterness, against resentment. He exhorts forgiveness, reconciliation, and healing, anointing with oil and prayer for the sick, and yet without descending to the primitive belief in a cause and effect of prayer and results. The practice of prayer exposes us to the mystery of unanswered prayer, and prayers for healing expose us to the inevitability of death.
We live in the world of nature, so we have to live with the effects of the causes beyond our control. We live in the world of human power, so we have to live with the consequences of the actions and choices of others not ourselves. To follow the Lord Jesus makes you even more vulnerable and exposed to the resistance of the world. Shall we therefore be defensive, and circle our wagons, and see other people as enemies real and potential, or shall we keep ourselves open? Shall we not accept even the most minimal gift of a cup of water as offering of love and hospitality?
I think the Lord Jesus goes even deeper in the gospel. I think he’s saying that our most difficult and challenging context is the one inside ourselves, that your worst opponent is yourself. Yes, you have opponents in the world who cause you to stumble, but don’t you cause yourself to stumble? Do you not have a history in your own life from which, despite your freedom, you can’t be free—mistakes you have made, offenses committed, bad calls, momentary lapses, with consequences that endure, to which you are vulnerable, so that your greatest danger and insecurity is inside you.
And yet there is power in forgiveness, great power in reconciliation, the reversal of cause and effect, the lifting of ultimate consequences. Not ultimate power, for even when the elders anoint the sick with oil, that person still may die. But power for affirming life and affirming goodness and community even in the midst of painful memories and present losses.
When James says that reconciling a sinner has power to cover a multitude of sins, he doesn’t mean hiding those sins, he’s using the technical language of “propitiation”, of sprinkling blood upon the sacrifice, exposing the sins and treating them with both grief and active reconciliation. The Lord Jesus uses the metaphors of fire and salt, by which the ancient sacrifice for sin was purified. He tells us to have salt in ourselves, and judge ourselves, in awareness of our own stumbling, and not judge others, and be at peace with one another. That is the real power that you have.
Who shall be our judges? Who shall give judgment in the Supreme Court of our land? The issues are moral but the decision is political. Right now America is trying to work out its morality politically. I imagine it is both necessary and impossible, and we are finding it impossible.
So it is more necessary now then ever for you as Christians to witness to your vision of the Kingdom of God, received by us though not achieved by us, and to live your vision by your example.
Let me remind you of our draft new mission statement: Old First Reformed Church is a community of Jesus Christ for Brooklyn, offering a space of unconditional welcome, a practice of worship and service, and a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven. We haven’t settled on the exact wording, but our mission is clear that we offer the vision and we witness to it by our words and our actions.
This vision offers the hope of the gospel against the judgments of the law.
The vision of space for welcome, for healing, for reconciliation, forgiveness, restitution, rehabilitation, space for grace and even for human flourishing.
The practice of worship and service, to pray and to sing and to anoint with oil, and that to worship God is also to receive a cup of water from the least of these, to unify worship and service by our prayers for all the world and for each other, to share our cooking and our food and our Holy Communion.
To see the Kingdom of Heaven in the economy of love, the love of God for those who stumble, for all of us half-blind, the love of God for all who are lost and wandering.
It’s precisely in being embraced when we have stumbled that we know this love. And it is your mission in the world to share this love of God.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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