Sermon on Mark 10:2-16
A Newsweek article came out last year about Russell Moore, former top official of the Southern Baptist Convention, now the editor of Christianity Today, who reported that many evangelical pastors he knew were reporting that their members were rejecting the Sermon on the Mount.
Moore is quoted in the article:
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—’turn the other cheek’— to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’”
“When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
There are many Christians today who feel that the immorality of American society has grown so great that “Jesus meek and mild” no longer works for them.
The issue, really, is status, and status is a lot of what Jesus has been talking about in this last chapter or two of Mark’s gospel.
The issue for some Christians today is that we don’t have the status we used to have in the popular culture, the power in particular to repress groups we feel inferior or immoral or dangerous to our privilege. Never mind that Christianity is still the majority religion in America, never mind that the majority of our political leaders and corporate CEO’s are Christian, these Christians nevertheless feel that the church is under an existential threat, and therefore the Prince of Peace is no longer a useful title for our savior. Instead they want a muscular, angry, militant Jesus, powerful enough to dominate and control.
In this, they are like the clueless disciples we’ve been hearing about ever since Jesus announced that he was going to Jerusalem to be killed and then to rise again. They are confused and resentful and sullen, disabled now from wielding the power Jesus had given them over evil spirits, all because they had signed up for greatness, and not for servanthood.
The Pharisees tried to trap Jesus by getting him to weigh in on the issue that got John the Baptist executed: divorce. John had condemned Herod’s divorce and remarriage to his divorced sister-in-law, Herodias. Herod didn’t really care about John’s criticism, but Herodias did, leading to John’s horrific beheading.
Rabbis of that day interpreted Deuteronomy 24 as God’s permission to men to divorce wives that displeased them. One rabbi famously wrote that a man could divorce his wife if the man didn’t like the breakfast she prepared for him.
But Deuteronomy 24 is not a law permitting divorce. It’s a law about the remarriage of people who have already divorced. In other words, the Hebrews were already practicing divorce before God gave them the law. And so Deuteronomy 24 was indeed a law predicated on the hardness of their hearts, as Jesus points out.
Jesus goes back further to the first two creation stories, specifically Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.
“God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” Somehow, “male and female” is God’s own identity. God is one, but God is not solitary. In God’s own identity, there is a unifying relationship, captured in Genesis 2:24:
“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
Becoming one flesh refers to sexual union, and here both Genesis and Jesus are making a point about the will of God for human beings. Adam says it: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
The sexual union of male and female points at the identity of God, God’s intention for humankind, and finally to Jesus himself, who frequently described the kingdom as a marriage feast. We are meant to be faithful to one another, to recognize in each other the bones of our bones and the flesh of our flesh. God desires we come together in unity, and this means the dissolution of the kinds of status that elevates some and diminishes others, that allows, for example, a man to divorce his wife over a bad-tasting breakfast.
Jesus clearly intends to be in solidarity with John the Baptist, and is unafraid of his fate. When he’s alone with the disciples, they once again ask him, shocked at his willingness to endanger himself, and he spells it out, as if for children, making sure to include Herodias in his condemnation.
Does this mean that Jesus is pronouncing condemnation for all who divorce? I would say his message is more profound than this. Many who walk down the wedding aisle have no idea what they are doing. No matter the civil law, I believe many who are legally married are not in any way spiritually joined. I also believe that anyone who has experienced the misery of divorce can understand why God is against it.
As if on cue, enter the children.
It would seem that the reason people were bringing children to Jesus was the same reason they brought adult friends and family, because they were in need of some kind of healing. But as I have said before, we need to understand that children were the bottom of the hierarchy of that time.
The disciples, preoccupied as they clearly were with status, believed that healing children was below Jesus. Just as they tried to shut down the exorcist who wasn’t following them, now they try to shut down these desperate parents.
They clearly had forgotten that Jesus only a little while before had taken a child in his arms and announced that welcoming a child welcomed him, and welcoming him welcomed God. Here Jesus expands on that saying, explaining that “to such as these belongs the kingdom of God.”
Through his study of Hebrew scripture and of course the gift of God’s own Spirit, Jesus saw that God consistently championed the lesser over the greater, that God brought the mighty down and the lowly up. By setting aside his will for himself and allowing God’s will to take its place, Jesus died to himself and rose to God. By becoming small, Jesus made God great.
I don’t think Jesus is telling us that we are meant to be like children in the sense of the more unpleasant childish qualities, like ignorance or rebelliousness. I think he’s talking about status. He himself chose to live among the poorest and most despised of his people. He gave himself in service to sinners and tax collectors, and even to Gentiles.
He is suggesting, I think, that we who desire to follow him, who desire to enter the kingdom of God, must place ourselves at the bottom of the food chain of society, and see things from that perspective. What if the leaders of nations chose to look at their choices and actions from the perspective of their children? What if we looked at what we do with our time and talent and treasure from the perspective of those who have little of any of those things?
The mystery of faith is that when we are weak, we are strong. When we are poor we are rich.
When we become small, God becomes great.
Amen.
A Newsweek article came out last year about Russell Moore, former top official of the Southern Baptist Convention, now the editor of Christianity Today, who reported that many evangelical pastors he knew were reporting that their members were rejecting the Sermon on the Mount.
Moore is quoted in the article:
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—’turn the other cheek’— to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’”
“When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
There are many Christians today who feel that the immorality of American society has grown so great that “Jesus meek and mild” no longer works for them.
The issue, really, is status, and status is a lot of what Jesus has been talking about in this last chapter or two of Mark’s gospel.
The issue for some Christians today is that we don’t have the status we used to have in the popular culture, the power in particular to repress groups we feel inferior or immoral or dangerous to our privilege. Never mind that Christianity is still the majority religion in America, never mind that the majority of our political leaders and corporate CEO’s are Christian, these Christians nevertheless feel that the church is under an existential threat, and therefore the Prince of Peace is no longer a useful title for our savior. Instead they want a muscular, angry, militant Jesus, powerful enough to dominate and control.
In this, they are like the clueless disciples we’ve been hearing about ever since Jesus announced that he was going to Jerusalem to be killed and then to rise again. They are confused and resentful and sullen, disabled now from wielding the power Jesus had given them over evil spirits, all because they had signed up for greatness, and not for servanthood.
The Pharisees tried to trap Jesus by getting him to weigh in on the issue that got John the Baptist executed: divorce. John had condemned Herod’s divorce and remarriage to his divorced sister-in-law, Herodias. Herod didn’t really care about John’s criticism, but Herodias did, leading to John’s horrific beheading.
Rabbis of that day interpreted Deuteronomy 24 as God’s permission to men to divorce wives that displeased them. One rabbi famously wrote that a man could divorce his wife if the man didn’t like the breakfast she prepared for him.
But Deuteronomy 24 is not a law permitting divorce. It’s a law about the remarriage of people who have already divorced. In other words, the Hebrews were already practicing divorce before God gave them the law. And so Deuteronomy 24 was indeed a law predicated on the hardness of their hearts, as Jesus points out.
Jesus goes back further to the first two creation stories, specifically Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24.
“God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” Somehow, “male and female” is God’s own identity. God is one, but God is not solitary. In God’s own identity, there is a unifying relationship, captured in Genesis 2:24:
“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
Becoming one flesh refers to sexual union, and here both Genesis and Jesus are making a point about the will of God for human beings. Adam says it: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
The sexual union of male and female points at the identity of God, God’s intention for humankind, and finally to Jesus himself, who frequently described the kingdom as a marriage feast. We are meant to be faithful to one another, to recognize in each other the bones of our bones and the flesh of our flesh. God desires we come together in unity, and this means the dissolution of the kinds of status that elevates some and diminishes others, that allows, for example, a man to divorce his wife over a bad-tasting breakfast.
Jesus clearly intends to be in solidarity with John the Baptist, and is unafraid of his fate. When he’s alone with the disciples, they once again ask him, shocked at his willingness to endanger himself, and he spells it out, as if for children, making sure to include Herodias in his condemnation.
Does this mean that Jesus is pronouncing condemnation for all who divorce? I would say his message is more profound than this. Many who walk down the wedding aisle have no idea what they are doing. No matter the civil law, I believe many who are legally married are not in any way spiritually joined. I also believe that anyone who has experienced the misery of divorce can understand why God is against it.
As if on cue, enter the children.
It would seem that the reason people were bringing children to Jesus was the same reason they brought adult friends and family, because they were in need of some kind of healing. But as I have said before, we need to understand that children were the bottom of the hierarchy of that time.
The disciples, preoccupied as they clearly were with status, believed that healing children was below Jesus. Just as they tried to shut down the exorcist who wasn’t following them, now they try to shut down these desperate parents.
They clearly had forgotten that Jesus only a little while before had taken a child in his arms and announced that welcoming a child welcomed him, and welcoming him welcomed God. Here Jesus expands on that saying, explaining that “to such as these belongs the kingdom of God.”
Through his study of Hebrew scripture and of course the gift of God’s own Spirit, Jesus saw that God consistently championed the lesser over the greater, that God brought the mighty down and the lowly up. By setting aside his will for himself and allowing God’s will to take its place, Jesus died to himself and rose to God. By becoming small, Jesus made God great.
I don’t think Jesus is telling us that we are meant to be like children in the sense of the more unpleasant childish qualities, like ignorance or rebelliousness. I think he’s talking about status. He himself chose to live among the poorest and most despised of his people. He gave himself in service to sinners and tax collectors, and even to Gentiles.
He is suggesting, I think, that we who desire to follow him, who desire to enter the kingdom of God, must place ourselves at the bottom of the food chain of society, and see things from that perspective. What if the leaders of nations chose to look at their choices and actions from the perspective of their children? What if we looked at what we do with our time and talent and treasure from the perspective of those who have little of any of those things?
The mystery of faith is that when we are weak, we are strong. When we are poor we are rich.
When we become small, God becomes great.
Amen.
