What does the promise of eternal life mean to you? In chapter 10 in Mark’s gospel, we eavesdrop on an encounter between Jesus and a young man who asks Jesus: what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Picture the scene if you can. Jesus is going about the countryside, preaching and teaching about making the kingdom of God a lived reality in this world. He’s drawing quite big crowds, made up of a mixture of rural peasants, townsfolk who have journeyed out to view the latest entertainment attraction, and the better off, those with time to kill. Among the better off there were those who had a particularly religious interest in Jesus’ message – the religious elite with an anxious ear for anything that challenged their hold over hearts and minds.  The gospels cover many such encounters between Jesus’ and this group. In the story of the young man, we catch glimpse of another constituency among Jesus’ following, i.e. the spiritually curious.

There are people who view the practice of religion as a process of painting by numbers or painting within the lines. These are the complacent and prideful; those who feel very satisfied at their own ability to meet the religious demands. Viewed from this perspective we might see the young man as one who prides himself on his own achievements, as in: Look at me, see how I have kept the commandments since my youth. But his question reveals that he is not one of those who stand with head raised before God, extolling the virtues of his own spiritual self-sufficiency. For him, fulfillment of his religious obligations leaves him with more questions than answers.  His question reveals that his life of religious obligation leaves him wanting something more.

This young man in Mark’s gospel experiences himself caught in a spiritual-religious tension, a tension which I suspect is familiar to many of us to seek to live lives of faith that go beyond mere rule keeping, willing to risk giving up our spiritual self-sufficiency in favor of placing our trust in the energies of God’s grace.

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Asking Jesus questions is something of a perilous affair because as this man discovers, Jesus is the master of the unpredictable response. From the outset, the young man gets off on the wrong foot with his addressing Jesus and Good Teacher. Jesus looks at him and says: why are you calling me good? Don’t confuse the messenger for the message. In response, I can picture the young man as he makes an involuntary intake of breath and takes step back.

So, Jesus now has this young man’s number, as we might say. He begins to answer the question by asking him: You know the commandments?  The man affirms that he has faithfully kept the commandments since his youth, which given his age can’t have been a very long time. Jesus might have gone on the ask: so, in that case, what’s your problem?

However, Mark tells us that: Jesus looked at him and loved him. Seven eventful words that speak of Jesus profound ability to see straight into the depths of the human heart where he reads the true nature of this young man’s struggle within the tension between religious observance and spiritual longing.

The man’s opening question: what must I do to inherit eternal life might be reframed as: is obeying the commandments enough to inherit eternal life? because he already suspects that obeying the commandments is not enough to inherit eternal life.

Out of the Ten Commandments this young man has kept from his youth, only two are positive actions: keep the Sabbath day holy and honor your father and mother. The other eight are negative prohibitions prefaced by the words: you shall NOT.

Religion based on prohibition has a certain appeal, although it is, as the young man experiences, ultimately unfulfilling. Its appeal lies in the way it limits the area of responsibility, confining responsibility to essentially not acting. But its appeal is also its deficit. Religious practice based on non-action is ultimately unfulfilling. In refraining from doing that which is forbidden, responsibilities are met,  nothing more is required[1]. For those who long to love God and love their neighbor as themselves, which is how Jesus reframes the Ten Commandments, the religion of prohibition is not enough.

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Jesus looked at the young man and loved him because the young man wanted Jesus to help him to the next level of response to God. He is about to discover that the promise of eternal life rests upon positive action in this life. You lack one thing, Jesus tells him; go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor.

Heartfelt questions occasion heart stopping answers. Mark tells us that the young man is deeply disturbed by Jesus words and goes away troubled for he is a man of great wealth. In his response we see plainly that his longing for God was no match for his worldly fear; a predicament with which I suspect many of us can identify.

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As stewardship season approaches this story reminds us of an uncomfortable question: are we able to open our checkbooks as widely and we long to open our hearts? 

Jesus answers the young man’s question by emphasizing that eternal life is about action in this world not hope for the next. It’s not what he does to avoid committing sin in this life that will give him a reward in the next. It’s what he does in this life. The promise of eternal life comes to those who have the courage to participate as God’s agents in the divine dream for the coming of the kingdom in this world’s real time.

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October 21^st, next Sunday, is the kickoff of our Annual Renewal Campaign or as NPR calls it our fall pledge drive, but to call it so is to trivialize the deeper currents that sustain our annual renewal process, which go beyond questions of financial support into those of spiritual inventory. The four weeks of spiritual inventory will be supported by a 40-day program of daily Bible passages, questions, and prayers – exploring scriptural teaching on social justice.

In his answer to the question about eternal life posed by the rich young man, Jesus teaches his disciples about the fundamental connection between gratitude, generosity, and social justice. For the goal of following Jesus is not to ensure that we go to heaven when we die, but to make heaven a reality in this world before we die.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on this earth in real time as it is already so in heaven.

The 40-day Social Justice Bible Challenge which will run alongside our 30-day Annual Renewal Campaign offers to bridge the gap between knowing the Bible and living it.

For those of us already heavily invested in issues of social justice, the daily meditations will connect our compassion with God’s Word. For others among us, who already take Scripture seriously, the readings, questions, and prayers will help us to shape a renewed vision for action.

Whether our need is to connect our commitment to social justice with God’s Word or let our love for God’s Word shape a renewed vision for social justice in this world, the resources of life are given to us not to hoard and protect but to enjoy as good stewards. Stewards of the kingdom do not hoard, they share. They are not motivated by fear of scarcity, but by the promise of abundance. Our individual prosperity is inextricably linked with the flourishing of our neighbor’s wellbeing. Do good and share what you have for the promise of eternal life is predicated on the practices of social justice.

In today’s America, rising inequality of wealth is reflected in plummeting commitment to wider issues of social justice. In his Atlantic article, which the men’s Op-Ed discussion group will review this coming Tuesday evening, Matthew Stewart writes:

Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.

That’s why Jesus says it’s easier for the camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

[1] Even today some Christian traditions still preach obedience to the Ten Commandments. This is very strange because Jesus in effect abolished them for his followers by reframing them in the Two Great Commandments of love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Yet, the continued appeal of religion based on prohibition is because the religion of prohibition limits our personal responsibility. If you can refrain from doing that which is forbidden, your responsibilities are met and nothing more is required of you. We see the tone and effect of this kind of religion all around us in the so-called Christianity of the cultural-conservative right. The battle in some parts of the country over whether the Ten Commandments should appear in our courtrooms is put in perspective when we realize not only should they not appear in our courtrooms, but they have no place in our churches either.

 

20 Pentecost Year B Proper 22                                                        7 October 2018

Mark 10:2-16     A sermon from The Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs

Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”

The first advice that I came across as I began preparing to preach for today was, and I quote: “Beware this week.  As soon as you read the word, “divorce” aloud, a whole sermon will appear in people’s heads.”

The guy’s got a point. Sort of like saying, “Don’t think of an elephant”, there is virtually no way to read or hear this passage without becoming distracted from anything that immediately follows. (You are thinking of an elephant, aren’t you?) But this isn’t an elephant. It’s an emotionally fraught issue, almost sure to evoke a reaction to one’s own story or that of a loved one; of guilt, judgment, anger, loneliness, sadness—the opening of a wound of some kind. Because divorce is by definition the death of a relationship, and with death comes grief. This is why today’s Gospel is one of those passages that, tragically and too often, can be weaponized. And as a result, there are those whose experience of divorce has left them alienated from church and community. There are those who have been coerced to remain in an abusive marriage. There are those who hear Jesus’ words about marriage being between man and woman who have been led to believe that this is God’s judgment on gay marriage. The irresponsible use of the Bible as a cudgel to elicit cultural conformity is, unfortunately, more common than not, and this isn’t a new phenomenon. The thing is that people forget that there is a huge difference between seeing the Bible as a source of wisdom— wisdom that is admittedly often challenging– and seeing it as a way to confirm one’s own biases.  So here’s a little word to the wise: The more comfortable a passage like this makes you feel, the more likely it is that you should take another look. And then another.  And if you find that it disturbs you, keep reading, keep thinking, keep listening. God has something to say—it just may not be what you expect.

The key with today’s reading is that, as tempting as it may be to divide the text into two separate encounters, we need to look at the entire passage as a whole. Because the author of the Gospel of Mark has intentionally ordered and constructed his story in such a way that we see, not just random episodes and parables tossed willy-nilly on the page; we are meant to see a vision of the Kingdom—the Dream of God.  

“Some Pharisees came, and to test Jesus they asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’”

The idea of seeking to test Jesus is nothing new; it was a frequent pastime for Temple authorities. There were at least two ways that they might have been doing this, and both carried the potential to get Jesus in trouble (which is what they desired). Socially and politically, divorce was a hot topic during this period because of the scandal of the marriage of the Roman Tetrarch Herod Antipas to his brother’s ex-wife Herodias. When John the Baptizer pointedly criticized them for this he was specifically talking, not just about divorce per se, but about the fact that they had obtained a divorce for the purpose of marrying another.  As you may remember, John’s criticism resulted in the loss of his head; perhaps the Pharisees hoped for a similar outcome for Jesus, that upstart Nazarene?

Or, thinking from the standpoint of scripture, the Pharisees might have been trying to involve Jesus in an argument regarding the law of divorce as stated Deuteronomy 24:1, which says that a man may divorce his wife if he found “indecency” in her—he can then write her a certificate of dismissal, as they called it, and divorce her. The argument among different groups of Pharisees was how strictly or loosely to interpret the term, “indecency”.  Some felt that it meant unchastity, while others interpreted it more loosely as “indecency in anything”, as in; she burned dinner or forgot to buy lamp oil, or she dared to “speak as any foolish woman would speak”, as we heard from Job in the first lesson. Regardless of how ‘indecency’ was defined, a husband could divorce his wife pretty much at will, which effectively left the woman tossed out on her ear with nothing; no voice and no recourse. It wasn’t that a woman could never initiate a divorce—she could. But her husband was free to refuse it, whereas the woman had no choice but to accept the consequences of dismissal from her home. The possibility of being left destitute put women in an extremely precarious position, while their husbands had the security of being able to do what they wanted. Such is the nature of patriarchy.

So, whether it was the question of the legitimacy of Herod’s marriage or the validity of the Law of Moses or a combination, the Pharisees put Jesus in a tricky spot. But interestingly he responds by diverting the line of questioning away from that of divorce instead toward that of marriage. He says that the only reason the Law of Moses in Deuteronomy allows for the certificate of dismissal is because of “your hardness of heart”. In other words, God’s intention was for two people to be in a faithful, respectful, mutually loving relationship, period.  One flesh. But since people, fallible creatures that they were, kept screwing that up, the Law of Moses allowed a way for the relationship to be dissolved if necessary. And then, as it turned out, people had even managed to mess that up by skewing the divorce arrangement in favor of the man. So Jesus sought to get back to the basics, that is, what marriage was about in the first place; that two become as one.

I’d like to digress just a bit here because, like the word, ‘divorce’, the statement from Genesis 2 that Jesus cites– ‘God made them male and female…’– is a potential red herring; a distraction from the main issue. In order to avoid the trap of seeing this as an argument against gay marriage, you have got to remember one simple thing: This is not what this passage is about. The question to Jesus is about divorce. Divorce is about marriage. Marriage at that time was seen a legal arrangement between families of men and women to achieve financial security and a prosperous legacy. Jesus’ point in citing Genesis was not to promote heterosexual unions but to make a statement about a relationship between two human beings; a relationship intended from the beginning to be a mirror image of God and of God’s loving care for Creation.

For Jesus, a marriage relationship was not just a legal arrangement; it was a covenant relationship of mutual generosity, wholeness and healing.

For Jesus, this Kingdom view of marriage is a template of what God desires for couples when they marry.  But we have to acknowledge the fact that the Kingdom that is not yet still needs to allow for human brokenness. Sometimes relationships cannot be saved. Sometimes they need to end in order to ensure the well-being, dignity, and healing of everyone involved, especially those left most vulnerable.

Jesus simply acknowledged this need by leveling the playing field when he said that not just women, but men too were held to the standard of not being allowed to divorce in order to marry another. It may seem a small thing to us now, but it was a sea change for married women. For Jesus, the inbreaking Kingdom offered a measure of fairness toward the most vulnerable that had been missing.

That is what the Dream of God is about: raising up the downtrodden and cherishing those who are the most invisible and the most silenced. And here we find the thread that connects the first part of this passage to the second.  For Jesus, this entire encounter was so much broader than the mere fine points of Mosaic Law. The Kingdom is first and foremost about relationship. How do we see God? How do we see one another? What do we honor in one another? Perhaps more to the point, where do we fall short?

People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them… And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them. 

If you’ve been following the lectionary, this is the second episode in the past three weeks, and the second time in the space of chapters 9 and 10 of Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus takes children in his arms. And it is the third consecutive week that your clergy have stood in this pulpit and spoken about the vulnerability of women and children in society.  When the Gospel repeats something, and when it calls preachers to say pretty much the same thing for three weeks in a row, that means someone is trying to get our attention. 

Notice that when Jesus focuses his audience on children, he doesn’t do it through his usual teaching medium: Parables. With the exception of the Prodigal Son, which is about grown children, Jesus does not offer parables about children. Why? Might it be because, as good as parables are for illustrating a point, showing is always better than telling? Nothing communicates God’s love for children more effectively than the image of Jesus holding a wee one in his arms and offering a blessing. So if Jesus is offering us something even more vivid than his parables, he is trying to get our attention.

To honor children in the way that Jesus does here was as radical as offering women more of a voice in marriage. Children in first century Palestine were of no account until they were old enough to pull their own weight, at which point they were pretty much seen as miniature adults. What Jesus does here is revolutionary—something that doesn’t actually get fully acknowledged in western society until the 19^th century—and it’s this: Jesus treats a child as something special.  Jesus actually looks at children developmentally. He sees childhood as a distinctive and valuable part of life—an aspect of human development that can teach us something in particular, which is that those who are most fresh from God offer us a glimpse of our true calling as creatures of the Kingdom.

When he looks at the children Jesus sees trust, honesty, generosity, and wonder.

He sees in them the creativity, spontaneity, and courage that comes from not yet knowing what they can’t accomplish. He calls us to see with the eyes of the Kingdom; to honor and protect those gifts of childhood in every person, and in ourselves. But to see with the Eyes of the Kingdom is something else as well: It is also to see the victimized and the invisible. It is to defend and protect those whom the world would dismiss.

God is calling us to open our eyes once again, to remember who and whose we are; to see the world through the eyes of the One who came to us as a vulnerable infant.