September 30, 2012
When I realized what the scriptures were for this day that I picked to give the teaching, I thought, oh, man. I picked a doozie. But upon further thought, I figured why not try to unpack this reading from Mark a little.
So, what on earth is going on here? If it causes you to sin, cut off your hand, cut off your foot, pluck out your eye. Good grief, Jesus, what are you talking about? This sounds crazy to us. I’m pretty sure it also sounded even more nutso to the original audience. Jesus was talking to his Apostles, a bunch of manual laborers who can’t live without the work of their hands, their feet, the utility of their eyes. For medical care, they have access to their friend Jesus, but that’s about it. And possibly most importantly for context here, it is against Jewish law to maim yourself. Anybody who would do this to himself would risk being forbidden from the Temple all together. We churchy people who have heard these lines dozens of time and may cringe and try not to think about this very much, but I tell you, this sounds downright bananas to the original listeners.
So what the heck is he talking about here?
Let’s take the context of what has been going on recently here in Mark. As in a lot of other places in Gospels, Jesus has been healing people and teaching, and the Apostles are following him around, and persisting in really missing the point. In the previous chapter, this was the reading for the contemplative service two weeks ago, chapter 8 verse 29 Jesus asks the apostles, “Who do you say that I am?” Eventually Peter answers, “You are the Messiah” and Jesus forbids them to speak of this. Jesus explains instead that things are not going to go well for him. He tells the Apostles that he is going to be rejected by the elders, chief priests, scribes, and he is going to be killed, and then rise again in three days. This is not ‘coming in glory to defeat our enemies.’ This is failure and pain ahead on the way to rising again.
This upsets Peter who takes Jesus aside to rebuke him. Peter has this vision of what it means that Jesus is the Christ. There is a part of Peter believes that he’s in on a secret, that he’s been recruited to the winning team, that things for them are going to be great. But Jesus tells Peter “Get behind me Satan.” Holy mackerel. Jesus says, “You are not thinking the way God does, you’re thinking the way humans do.” The way that Peter is trying to categorize Jesus is within a system that is not relevant. Jesus seeks to sharply silence any association between himself and Davidic Kingship. He’s trying to get across to them the idea that we’re not going to win in the way you think we’re going to win.
Honestly, I can totally relate to Peter here. I think that Peter has this idea that following the Messiah would give him an edge somehow. Well, I kind of get that. There’s a part of me that approaches a lot of things in life wanting to know what the payoff will be, and that goes for my faith life too. I guess sometimes a big part of what we bring to our faith lives is all of our anxieties, and I confess to you, my brother and sisters, that sometimes what I have wanted out of my faith was that it would give me so much insight that I could kind of know the future. It took me a couple of years worth of the prayer discipline (which I confess, friends, I’ve been doing a lousy job of lately) until I kind of lowered my expectations and realized that that was not the point. For me, I think I realized that it is an immature faith that is looking for a winning strategy, or security, or for more answers than questions.
So, let’s get back to the apostles, and another thing that they just aren’t getting – here in chapter 9, when they finish a journey and are inside a house in Capernaum, Jesus asks, “So what were you guys arguing about while we were on the road?” And they stay silent and won’t tell because they know it was foolish but what were arguing about. They are arguing among themselves who will be first in the Kingdom. I kind of imagine Jesus sighing. He follows up this little episode with the teaching that, “If anyone desires to be first of all, he will be last of all and servant of all.” Mark 9:35
I find this theme similar to another one form the previous chapter here in Mark:
“Whoever desires to come after me, he should deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospels will save it.” Mark 8 34-35.
It stands to reason that the apostles themselves may be able to relate to this theme with some pride. We believe that they did give up their lives, leave behind their jobs and their families, to follow Jesus. Many of them were fishermen and the Roman government was routinely stealing their catch in order to feed the Roman armies. So maybe, for some of these guys, it was easier to give up their lives than it would be for some other people. But meanwhile, they are still hanging on to ideas that aren’t compatible with them picking up what Jesus is putting down.
So what is Jesus trying to get through to them? He’s is trying to create a community that’s going to allow them/ us to live outside of the exploitative values of the Empire. To see the Empire for what it is and resist. Prepare to be ready to hold one another up, love each other, love their enemies, and prepare for a relationship with YHWH that is outside of the institutional religion and the Empire, which, in the time of Jesus and the Apostles, are in cahoots. But the Apostles aren’t getting it.
For instance, our scene from today’s scripture. Here we find John telling Jesus, Hey, just want you to know that we saw some other guys casting out demons in your name, but, since he doesn’t follow us, we told him to cut it out.
And at this point, I think Jesus has kind of had it. Seriously? You’re going to stop a guy who is healing people. (When I read casting out demons I think that this is helping people with epilepsy or mental illness.) You’re going to stop someone from healing people because he’s not one of our followers? He’s not with our crowd? Somebody needs a membership card in order for you to let him do good stuff?
Jesus tells them whoever is not against us is for us. Don’t get in the way of other people’s good works or growth or liberation. And Jesus ramps up to this more gruesome, violent stuff – if it’s getting in the way, cut off your foot, pluck out your eye. Holy crap. But I think this is trying to drill home this alternative message – the first will be last and the last will be first. Whoever wants to follow me should deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. Like I say, these former fisherman who have been following him around may relate to that part, they’re still not getting it. But if your hand is getting in the way, cut it off. Jesus is trying to tell them, they still aren’t getting it.
What are they not getting? They aren’t getting that their life may just have to completely change before they will be able to really live the message that Jesus is trying to give them. They may have to really change themselves in order to be able to experience that. For one thing, they might have to cut off their old ideas of a Messiah. Clinging to old beliefs of the calcified institutional religion that has become enmeshed with the Roman Empire and lost touch with the values Jesus preaches. Among the people who are plotting against Jesus right now are the elders of the institutional church, which wouldn’t let you in to the Temple if you’d cut off your own hand. Jesus is distancing himself from the institutional religion. And he’s reminding the Apostles again that this whole project – it’s not going to bring us favor with anybody in power.
The Gospel of Mark was the earliest of the four gospels, we know. It was written around the year 70 at the time of the Roman siege of Jerusalem. It is possible that the people who wrote this Gospel might have been nearby when the great Second Temple was destroyed. This community’s life has been radically, apocalyptically changed. They are looking back on Jesus, 40 years ago, and seeing what he was trying to prepare them for. There’s urgency in everything. I think the urgency for the Marcan community, the writers of this text, also lends to the forcefulness of the language here.
Jesus was trying to prepare his followers for a different kind of community and a different kind of relationship with God that would be outside of the social and religious structures that were literally falling away, being torn away, in the lifetime of the writers of this Gospel of Mark.
When I was thinking about what Jesus might want us to cut off, as individuals, as a community, as a new kind of Empire, one of the things that came to mind was the recent celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. President Lincoln told some of the slaveholding states, you’re going to have to cut off your dependency on enslaved labor. You’re going to have to reimagine your whole society and economy with free people. This is biblical liberation, this is colossal change. And, this was just the BEGINNING of the American Civil War. Those changes came at quite a price, and arguably are still only partially accomplished to this day. But I think that’s an example of how radical Jesus was trying to be with the Apostles.
I have another example of Empire for you. Starting tomorrow, Monday October 1, the Supreme Court is going to be hearing a case that has roots in Nigeria. The Shell Oil company is suing that corporation is not held liable for human rights abuses. You may remember the name Ken Saro-Wiwa. He was a members of the Ogoni tribe. The Ogoni are an indigenous group in Nigeria, which is a country with enormous oil reserves. The Shell Oil company wreaked havoc on the environment of the land inhabited by the Ogoni people without sharing the oil wealth with the poverty stricken locals, and they rose up in protest to resist the destruction of their lands. The Shell Oil company got the corrupt Nigerian military dictatorship to suppress the Ogoni uprising, including the use of arbitrary arrest, torture, the destruction of villages. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Doctor Barinem Kiobel and 7 of their fellow community leaders were hanged as dissidents after a trial that was condemned by foreign governments, including the UK and the US. The Supreme Court case that will be re-heard this week, called Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum (otherwise known as Shell Oil) hinges on a law called the Alien Tort Statute, which allows citizens of other countries to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts for violations of international laws, including human rights laws. Shell is asking the Supreme Court to give corporations immunity from human rights litigation under the Alien Torts Statute. The plaintiffs alleged that Shell was liable for its complicity in torture, extrajudicial killings, and crimes against humanity, among other abuses. The Second Court of Appeals issued a decision that corporations cannot be held liable for human rights abuses, and the Supreme Court could very well uphold that decision.
We’ve got violence by a corrupt government and execution of political prisoners for the sake of a polluting, hugely profitable multinational corporation. And we have another government considering whether or not to continue to care about these kinds of human rights abuses. How entrenched is the darkness. This is not just a whiff of Empire. This is advanced, evil Empire. It seems clear to me that if we were to complacently accept this system, we’d be totally missing Jesus’ point.
Would you agree with me?
Of course you agree with me. I’m preaching to the choir. I think this community spends a lot of time trying to understand what the Apostles were missing. Jesus came to teach the liberation from the Religion of Empire, about resisting systems of exploitation, and about developing, in Wes Howard Brook’s words, “a covenantal bond between God and God’s people for the blessing and abundance of all people and all creation.” This is as opposed to, “a human invention used to justify and legitimate attitudes and behaviors that provide blessing and abundance for some at the expense of others.”
We know that we are called to look at all of life differently. To be outside of the mainstream. Being open to the experience of God is to view our whole lives outside of the values of the institutions of power.
This is a community of people who is really pretty good at thinking differently, pretty good at seeing institutions of power for what they are and being willing to question just about everything. I look out here and I see several people whose life work is on behalf of the poor. I see several people who don’t buy new clothes that were made in sweatshops. I see people who don’t eat meat, who minimize their use of fossil fuels as much as possible. I see lots of people who have left calcified institutional churches. I see people who have put their bodies on the line in civil disobedience. I see people who’ve work hard to teach others about resisting the values of Empire, about resisting systems that wildly overburden some people to benefit others. And I see people who have raised their children to with these values too.
As far as resisting Empire goes, and trying to create a resilient, alternative community, we’re trying. And that’s why I come here.
But here’s another challenge form this week’s readings – I think it’s actually a pretty big challenge for this community as we are envisioning what 8th Day’s next evolution might look like. He who is not against us is on our side, said Jesus about the other guy who was casting out demons. So too did Moses – “Would that everyone would prophesy.”
I know that these are part of our core values as a community – inclusiveness and valuing the contributions all kinds of people. But I want to call it out as a theme here because I think it’s a theme we can’t hear enough. God needs us – all of us. People who can make certain commitments and people who can’t, people of lots of faith and people of no faith. People from all kinds of backgrounds.
One of my favorite theologians is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous scholar and civil rights activist. I once heard him articulate this notion that God needs us, and realized that it is pretty central to the way that I see things too. Heschel’s doctoral dissertation was about the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. And something that the prophets hammered home was that God, who created the heaves and the earth, cares about widows and orphans.
Heschel said, 'This is somehow scandalous. This is beyond logic. How could it be that the great God of all the world cares about individuals and therefore about you and about me? Why would this be so?' But the way he read the prophets, apparently God needs us in some way. God wants something from us and that God needs us to help God make this world better.
The God of the Bible is really the parent of humanity and can't stand to see the suffering of God's children. God needs God's other children to take care of the suffering.
I think maybe we have to be willing to see our lives as simply as possible – in order to see what we’re capable of. In order to be the instruments that God needs.
Maybe it is really that simple. Maybe not.
But in order to live in the kind of place where Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum never happens, we are going to need all the friends we can get.