The least and the greatest

Mark 9:30-37

I was once in a sports bar with friends watching a game; it doesn’t really matter what kind of game it was. One of my friends was a mammoth fan of one of the teams playing—you know the sort, wearing the hat and jersey, cheering loudly, the whole drill. A few beers into the night and a fan of the opposing team a table over starts heckling him back. At first it’s good natured, then eventually less so. My friend is not one to stand down to a challenge, but he’s also not the type to get into a fight over sports. So, he hides that it’s bothering him until, eventually, he can’t stand it anymore, and, seething, he heads for the doors.

            I’ve been party to many such encounters between fans of various sports teams. I’ve seen it often from all the fans of teams I love to hate, but I’ve seen it also from Twins fans. I once helped get a Twins fan removed from a game for abusing a Yankees fan who was there with his family. I’ve seen it from Gophers fans, rioting in the street when I was in high school. I’ve even seen it from Bearcats fans, perhaps slightly less dramatically. Tribalism is alive and well in the sports world.

            I thought about this today as I was reading the disciples arguing behind Jesus’ back about who is the greatest. I don’t listen to sports talk anymore, but I did in a former life and this is the kind of banal bull they are talking about all the time. Who is the greatest? What team has the most storied history? It filters down to the way that fans talk about sports. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen fans of teams I love who run across the guy (let’s face it, it’s always a guy) who says, “Yeah, but my team has more championships than yours!” As if that means anything in the context of who I might cheer for.

            The idea that there are winners and losers is prevalent in sports and in politics and in business—in basically every aspect of our lives. The world is full of winners and losers, we are told. Is it any surprise that the church is struggling to find its place in such a world? Or, I think more likely, the church has never had a place in the world; it’s just that for a long time the church was considered one of the winners. If you wanted to move up in society you went to church. Nowadays, since the Christian faith is winning less over other tides in our society; the church must fall back on being what the church was actually supposed to be all along. The Christian church doesn’t call you a winner; the Christian faith tells you that you are dust. And dust doesn’t give a hoot about winners and losers. Dust is just dust.

The Cross and Type-2 Fun

Mark 8:27-9:8

The Gospel of Mark is my favorite Gospel for two reasons. (1) It’s direct and to the point, and (2) the disciples are really dumb. Those two things give me comfort because I need to be reminded of what matters most of all pretty much every moment; I cannot hear about the cross often enough. And I’m also comforted by these disciples because if these were the guys Jesus chose as his right-hand men, then following Jesus really is open to anybody. If the disciples had been super big-head geniuses we could never know if we are enough, but since they are complete dunderheads we can all have hope. I can have hope not just for myself but maybe more importantly for those other Christians who never seem to get it either, because, Lord knows, I have seen some Christians justify terrible positions in the name of Christianity.

Like the disciples and the Pharisees both, we are always obsessing about the wrong things. We quickly sort everything into good and bad, success and failure. Meanwhile, Jesus is standing on the mountaintop transfigured, having just told the blockhead disciples that he is more than the messiah they expected; he is, in fact, coming to die for the sake of the world and rise again. And the disciples watch him transfigured and they say to themselves, “Ya know, I think we should put this guy next to Moses and Elijah. He’s almost as amazing as them!”

We shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus called these guys from their work as fisherman and tax collectors, tradesmen and carpenters, merchants, but never scholars of the Torah. Those who practiced trades like these would have lacked even basic literacy. They were elementary school drop-outs, not smart enough to make the cut to continue toward a professional career as a scribe or a lawyer. They were practicing the family trades because they weren’t good enough to do anything else.

In light of their simplicity, it makes sense that the disciples didn’t want Jesus to die. The simplest faith is to say “Death is bad, and life is good.” If it weren’t such a loaded political term today, we could say that the disciples were “Pro-life,” while the life they were in favor of was ultimately meaningless. Their faith in Jesus was misplaced not because they were bad guys but because they could not imagine anything better. Simple faith is not bad faith because it is simple, but simple faith is no assurance that your faith is in the right thing either. The disciples have bad faith not because they believe too much about Jesus but because they believe too little. Yet, far from disqualifying them, this seems to be precisely why Jesus chooses them.

The laws Jesus wouldn't have you follow

Mark 7:1-23

            I want to talk today about the three different types of laws. This is not the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd use of the law in the classical Lutheran sense—(that’s a topic for a dreary day when you want to take a nap); instead, I am going to talk about the three particular types laws that you can find in the Bible and why we only concern ourselves with two out of the three anymore in the Christian Church. Understanding the distinction between laws will help you to grasp what is happening in today’s reading between Jesus and the Pharisees, but even if you don’t care about this particular story because it doesn’t seem all that thrilling, it’s just as important to understand what laws are applicable and why so that you know what God wants you to do here and now.

            In order to wrap our heads around the law, we are going to have to fast forward a bit to another part of the Gospels. In this scene, a legal expert comes to Jesus (when I say “legal expert” I do not mean a lawyer as we would understand them today but an expert on the Torah which was the law of the Jewish people), and this legal expert asks Jesus a rather important question.

“Teacher,” he says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25).

Jesus responds, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?” (10:26).

            This is the first thing of note: Jesus answers a question about the law with a question about what the law says. It’s not simply that the Pharisees are pro-law and Jesus is anti-law. In fact, as we discover, Jesus is much more into certain aspects of the law than the legal experts. Back to the scene: The legal expert answers Jesus, saying,

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (10:27), quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and adding that bit about a neighbor. 

Jesus responds, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live” (10:28).

We should note here that an important facet of the law, according to Jesus, namely that it has two parts: Love God and love your neighbor.

Sounds simple, right?

If the question is, “Which laws should I follow?” then the answer is the ones that tell you to love God and to love people. Straightforward enough for us, but this would have created a host of questions in the minds of these legal experts since a good portion of the Torah pertains not just to laws about loving God and loving neighbor but also to laws about being set apart as the Chosen People. This third group of laws is where we find the contention between the Pharisees and Jesus in our reading today.

Powerful people who play the victim

Mark 6:1-29

Last week I mentioned that at least four churches still claim to have the head of John the Baptist. Well, this week we get to find out why John the Baptist is missing his head.

There’s a lot to unpack here but I want to start a bit with Herod. There is this long tradition in scripture of powerful men being portrayed as victims. Two of the most powerful people in the land where Jesus did his ministry were Herod, who was the political leader of Galilee, and Pontius Pilate, who was governor of Judaea. Pilate served under the Roman Emperor while Herod ruled Galilee as a client state of the Roman Empire. This Herod was actually Herod Antipas, the son of the King Herod who so famously sent those kings to find Jesus so he could have him killed.

The historical account of these two powerful men is deeply intertwined. For example, when Jesus first comes before Pilate in the trial scene after he is betrayed Pilate sends him back to Herod Antipas since Jesus was most active in his territory. At this point, the Bible tends to lean apologetically toward these two men. Pilate famously washes his hands of Jesus’ fate handing him over to “his own people.” Herod Antipas similarly is “deeply grieved” by the request to murder John the Baptist. It’s as if the Gospel writers are trying to excuse their actions to soften the blow of their characters, but you have to understand the history.

Both these rulers are attested to in other historical documents. Josephus, the most well-known and prolific historian of the period, mentions both. Pilate is attested in historical records as one of the cruelest rulers of the age. He is eventually removed from his governorship after slaughtering a group of Samaritans on an archaeological dig. Herod Antipas, on the other hand, is hardly a lover of this movement of Jesus-followers. He had John the Baptist arrested simply for telling him that his incestuous marriage was not kosher. So, when Herod excuses himself because he took an oath to Herodias, the young girl he loved (and was related to), the reader has to be awfully naïve to take this at face value. We should ask ourselves: Why is it that powerful men are excused for terrible actions because of an oath when those same men are constantly violating their oaths?

If you can’t uphold oaths consistently then any oath you take is worthless. To swear an oath is not to promise to do something unless it is inconvenient. Oaths either matter to you or they don’t. This was particularly true for Pilate in the scene surrounding the trial of Jesus. After all, Pilate had been particularly cruel to these people. So, in that famous scene when he presents Jesus or Barabbas and asks, “Which one shall I free?” the people know the correct answer. It might seem awfully egregious of the crowds to shout “Barabbas!” but perhaps less so when you understand that at an order Pilate could have his soldiers raid and kill everybody in the court. If you believe the crowd has the power, then the story means one thing, but if Pilate has all the power, then it means something altogether. History suggests that this was exactly the kind of governor he was, dangling what the people want but demanding what would best serve him. He was not a sympathetic character—he was a brutal authoritarian.

So, we have these witnesses several times in the Bible where powerful men are excused for the worst kinds of actions, but that doesn’t answer the question of “Why?” I believe this is a probably of time. Readers of scripture in the 1^st century would have known exactly who these men were and the substance of their character. Pilate’s name would have been Mussolini to them or Stalin; they would have known exactly what it meant. So, too, we have Herod Antipas, who abuses his power to marry whoever he wants, flagrantly flaunting the Jewish law practiced by so many in his territories, and then he turns it around and blames the murder of John the Baptist on his mistress and niece. Stand up guy. And yet you wouldn’t be alone if you felt an ounce of remorse for him. Powerful people abuse their power to bend the narrative toward feeling sorry for themselves. Powerful people have blamed victims for as long as there have been victims to blame. Scripture portrays them this way, because that is how life works. Powerful people play victims over and over again.

Follow after Jesus, because you aren't Jesus

One of the most difficult parts of following after Jesus is learning how to be both a servant in the way Jesus served and to admit we cannot be Jesus. This is a more difficult line to walk than we might realize at first.

For example, I was looking through the library this past week as we are getting ready to clear things out for the daycare, and I noticed a DVD from a certain charismatic preacher that will go unnamed. I don’t doubt that this preacher—like many TV evangelists—got into ministry for good reasons—helping people, following after Jesus, the whole drill—but at some point things went awry. This man is most famous for bringing folks up on to the stage, dramatically striking them down with the purpose of healing them from their afflicions, but he’s equally famous for not allowing people with actual verifiable conditions (i.e. those who obviously need healing) to ever be among those who are on the stage.

I want to be careful with what I say about this because there are two things that may be true about healing ministry. 1) God can work miracles out of anything, and 2) Those who make it a show are likely to be frauds. The road to following after Jesus is wrought with pitfalls where we might imagine we are Jesus.