7C Epiphany
20 Feb 2022
I wonder what made Jesus tick. What drove him to say the things he did and do the things he did? Just what was this God incarnate thing? After reading and listening to the lectionary selections for today, I get an idea of what others thought might fit neatly into the Jesus package, the Good News delivered, but I wonder.
First, we have Joseph, the little brother who was so full of himself his older brothers tried to kill him. If he were in a public school today I suspect he would become a victim of bullying. And the writer of Genesis makes a bit of a fairy tale ending to the story, as Joseph put on his big boy pants, has Joseph save the family and they all live happily ever after, or at least for several generations. The point of the story, however, is not to extoll how Joseph matured and how his brothers regretted their decision, but rather to tell the story of God working with God’s people. God works with and through all of us, whether we are the brothers who commit an evil deed, or the boy who was self-absorbed.
I have a lot more concern with our psalmist. He, or she, is telling me the wicked will fade quickly and that if I do the right thing all will be well. My experience tells me otherwise; the psalmist is living in a land of make believe. But then he makes a more plausible claim: that there is a reward for righteousness and refraining from evil. The wicked will get their, as they say, just deserts. Hope lives, God will deliver. Sadly, living a godly life and doing justice may not reward us any time soon.
Jesus, however, is able to at once reconcile all of this and at the same time blow it out of the water. God’s design for humankind is not quite what Joseph told his brothers nor what the psalmist preached about the wicked and the righteous. The world is to be radically different than the honor and shame culture in which he lived. We live in a culture where material wealth is associated with power and good fortune. In Jesus’ time status was accrued by honor and lost by shame. If you had some means, you could accrue honor by assisting someone and they, in turn, would continue to repay you. Both parties gained in some fashion. In a positive light you might support and artist; in a negative one donate to a politician for return favors. Equals could mutually help one another, like a craft guild or business cooperative. Shame was to be avoided at all costs. If you did something reprehensible you lost prestige. This is where Jesus steps in with ideas that were very new, if not completely so. You did not gain status by loving those who were your enemies; that would be weakness and lead to shame. For instance, it was allowed to strike a servant once on the cheek, but for the servant to offer the other cheek was a way of nonviolent resistance that would shame the perpetrator. A soldier could compel someone to carry goods for a given distance, but to voluntarily carry them further was a way of shaming the soldier. Ghandi saw this clearly, as did Martin Luther King. Even earlier than those trailblazers of nonviolent resistance was a miner’s union president in the time of Theodore Roosevelt. John Mitchell was elected president of the UMW in 1897. In 1902 the anthracite coal miners went on strike for better wages and improved working conditions. The government basically had a hands-off approach to anything related to labor and business. After one incidence of violence where a deputy was killed, Mitchell would not continence any more violence from the miners. Not so the owners!! While the story is long and fascinating, in the end the miners got what they needed and wanted, in part due to the behavior of Mitchell, which garnered the support of many Americans. No one else was killed in the course of one of the least remembered but most crucial events in American history. Due to the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt, the government made its first intervention in a strike, and it was the start of fair labor practices becoming law. Love your enemy; do good to those who hate you. Turn the other cheek. This is not passivity, but a truly counter cultural form of nonviolent resistance to oppression. This is not telling someone who is abused to love their abuser and put up with it; God never condones the powerless remaining as victims to the powerful. This command comes to any and all who have any type of power or freedom. This is a revolution in the making!! Last week I found a quote from GK Chesterton.
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” ― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World
It certainly bears repeating again. Luke’s directives are up front, in your face, and almost impossible to live out.
Yet this is what keeps me as a follower, an always imperfect but hopefully steady follower, of Christ.
Do you think you cannot change the world? You are wrong. Every time you do anything to help another human being, or for that matter any of God’s good creation, you are ushering in the realm of God.
Any time you refuse to accede to anything evil, you are closer than ever to the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
I suspect the more Jesus preached, the more followers he gained and the more he lost. If you are in a position of wealth or power, his words are hard. If you are marginalized, they are just as hard. On the one hand who wants to accept a theology that tells you poverty is to be preferred over wealth. On the other hand, if you are poor it is a hard theology to accept because it seems hard to believe it could happen. Yet it has happened, it is happening, and it will happen.
Our faith is rich in so many ways. It opens wide the door of salvation, that is saving health, to all who desire it. You can grow as a person in faith and spirituality. Ultimately you may come to realize there is no need to define the world as “us and them”. It frees you to belong wholly to God.
Christianity is a corporate faith as well. We are the body of Christ, each and ever one of us. Those near to our hearts and those far from our hearts.
The Jesus we encounter in Luke is not an easy Jesus to follow, even as we pay lip service to everything he says. Perhaps as we approach Lent we can make a promise to try to follow him just a little bit more closely.
I don’t think I will ever get to place I would like to be in my own spiritual journey. But Jesus is here to remind me of the many ways to grow.
I think today’s lesson is the hardest one in all of the Gospels, even harder than following Jesus to death, for it goes against societal expectations now, just as it did in Jesus’ own time.
The Christian ideal has been found difficult; and left untried.
I suggest we try it.
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