Tuesday in Holy Week • 12 April 2022

 Tuesday in Holy Week • 12 April 2022

As a preamble…

Once again, as tempting as it might be to read into the text from Isaiah overtones or presages of Jesus, we should not. Isaiah was speaking either in the first person, in which case these verses describe the prophet’s own mission... or the servant represents that nation Israel. Regardless, the servant announces that all the world will recognise the one God when the whole Israelite nation returns to its land. After decades of hearing this passage interpreted as Isaiah referring to Jesus (‘a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’), it is hard to let go of this interpretation, but we must.

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Mark’s Gospel rendition of the temple cleansing has oft been ‘given to the futile pursuit of trying to reconstruct a historical event.’1 Ched Myers in his pivotal book, Binding the Strong Man, argues that this scene is the centerpiece of Mark’s criticism of the political economy of the temple. As Meyers explains, Jesus first visits the temple on a ‘reconnaissance’ trip, to see what is where. The next day, he responds to what he assessed. He drives out those buying and those selling; he overturns the tables of the moneychangers (the ones who exchange currencies) and the seats of those selling doves, he prevents anyone from carrying any vessel through the temple and, most important, he teaches them.

Jesus acts in the spirit of Hosea who says, ‘I will drive them out of my house… and their rulers are disobedient’ (9.15). The temple was fundamentally an economic institution and dominated Jerusalem’s life. What incited Jesus’ ire were the ruling class interests, not the commerce itself, which was normal in his days. He was enraged by the systematic exploitation of the poor, especially women.

Thus, Jesus calls for an end to the entire system—symbolised by his overturning the tables. He repudiated the ruling class who took advantage of the weak, poor and those considered ‘unclean.’ He boldly forbade anyone to carry anything into the temple, effectively shutting down the operation for the day.

To justify Jesus’ actions, Mark resorts to Isaiah and Jeremiah (Is 56.7, the citation of the ‘house of prayer’; Jeremiah 7.11, ‘This is the temple of the Lord’). Jeremiah insists that G-D’s covenant with Israel grants them a dwelling ONLY if they seek justice toward the alien, the fatherless, the widow, and the innocent. If idolatry and exploitation replace this goal, then the temple will be destroyed (and Mark was writing in and around the time of the destruction of the temple in 70 CE).2

But, by his taking down the temple practices, Jesus’ actions provoke the leaders to seek his death. What we do not hear in this reading, but is essential to our understanding, is that after Jesus condemns the temple, believed to be where G-D resided, he exhorts his disciples to ‘Believe in God! (11.22). He assures his disciples that this monolith, ‘the mountain of the house,’ can be overthrown (11.23) and faith will deliver it from the powers that constrain it. 3
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What entity in today’s society, both secular and sacred, would Jesus overthrow? Surely, he would go after our economic system that is so tilted toward the affluent and away from the poor. 

Consider: even in Killington, the disparities between those who have housing and those who do not, are huge. Hedge fund capitalists have no problem whatsoever in plonking down $2+M dollars for the houses that will go up in a gated community at the foot of Bear Mountain. The average price of a home in Killington has soared to over $1M. And people are snatching up these houses with no problem. 4

Meanwhile, our hospitals are barely able to staff their departments because people cannot afford housing University of Vermont Medical Center is going to build housing and so is Rutland Regional Medical Center. The affordable housing supply is short these days that more and more people struggle to maintain a roof over their head.

Consider: Jared Kushner managed to get the Saudis to contribute $2B!!!!! to his nascent fund in which he stands to earn some $25M a year, whereas with the current inflation, some people might have $100 left over after rent and gasoline to buy food for the month.

There is something grossly wrong with an economic system where those at the top are raking it in and those in what used to be called the middle class are sinking further and further into depth and falling further and further and further behind.

Jesus preached a gospel of everyone’s dignity (he did NOT preach a prosperity gospel, a modern travesty). I cannot help but imagine Jesus in our faces telling us we need to overhaul our systems. They are far bigger than we are but, as San Oscar Romero de las Americas said: ‘Each of us can do something.’ Each one of us can act to improve the lives of others. If we are at the top of the economic pile, remember that there are no luggage racks on hearses. (Just what can one do with 200 billion dollars in the span of a life? That amount of wealth, beyond being unfathomable, is also obscene.) For those on the bottom of the economic pile, may we find ways to maintain our God-given dignity and not fall into the pit of despair.

May we, on this second day in Holy Week, ponder how in each of our lives we can contribute to the common good and learn from Jesus’ teaching in the temple about economic justice.

NOTES
1 Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 299
2 Ibid., 299-304
3 Ched Myers, “Say to This Mountain”” Mark’s Story of Discipleship (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 149.
4 The Mountain Times, special section, “Buy, Sell, Renovate: Local Real Estate Trends, Modern Vermont Living,” 6 April 2022, specifically pages 4-8, 10-11, 13; https://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2022/03/09/uvm-medical-center-to-help-build-apartment-complex-for-employees
5 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html; https://www.npr.org/2022/04/12/1092134413/inflation-food-prices-gasoline-gas-interest-rates

Monday in Holy Week • 11 April 2022

Monday in Holy Week
 • 11 April 2022

Year after year after year I return to these familiar readings, now very much old friends*. For the third year in a row, I am not reflecting on these readings in the context of the Holy Eucharist. For the third year in a row, these reflections have no audience. It is just the written text and me. For the foreseeable future, that is how it shall be. 

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As much as I love the reading from Isaiah, increasingly even now I am aware of the dangers of successionism, that is, reading a Christian interpretation into the original Hebrew text. God’s servant, as described in Isaiah 42, is not a foreshadowing of Jesus but, rather, the prophet, or Cyrus, or even the Israelite nation itself. According to The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition, ‘The term, “servant,” in most other passages in chapters 40-66 clearly refers to the nation Israel or to the faithful within Israel, and that is the most likely explanation here as well.… [T]his text looks forward to the ideal world in which justice will reign and the covenant between Israel and God will be observed perfectly.’** So, as cherished as our connection with the ‘suffering servant,’ interpreted to be Jesus, might be, we must let go of it. We will again hear from Isaiah tomorrow and on Wednesday and we must bear these comments in mind.

And, as dear to my heart is the story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair is to my heart (having anointed a dying person’s feet, but not wiping them dry with my hair), I am going to lay this one aside for this year, as well.

So, the reading from the Letter to the Hebrews remains. 

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This year, in the context in which we find ourselves, the final phrase of the final verse of the pericope calls my attention: ‘So you may not grow weary or lose heart.’

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews lays out in front of us all these amazing people—’patriarchs, [matriarchs], prophets and heroes of the old covenant.’ Unfortunately, with another tip of the hat toward successionism, these commended people fall short (‘though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect’). In this day and age, when we recognise how interconnected we are; how much God’s love extends to ALL (as Desmond Tutu would proclaim with his arms extended wide), can we set aside the idea that if you are not Christian, you are not complete? As our Jewish brothers and sisters prepare to celebrate Passover, which begins this Saturday evening, might we find ways to embrace everyone’s faith?

Yes, Jesus is the ‘pioneer and perfecter of our faith,’ the Christian expression of a belief in God. And, yes, Jesus ‘endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.’ Yes, we can celebrate that fact that lies at the centre of our Christian faith. But may we never disparage our Jewish and Muslim (and any other expression of faith) brothers and sisters, who believe in God, too.

All of us seek an assurance that things cannot get worse, that evil and sin will not have the last word. As the news points out tonight that Russian troops are gathering on the eastern border of Ukraine for a ‘major assault on the east’ of Ukraine and more and more news comes out from Bucha; as radical Buddhist members of the Burmese Army have seized a Roman Catholic church and are holding people hostage; as COVID-19 still won’t let go of us, as we worry about the price of basic goods, there is plenty to cause us to lose hope. 

That is where our faith comes into play, where we can look beyond it all to God, so that we may not grow weary or lose heart. The race we run now is exhausting, there are mountains beyond mountains (as the Haitian saying goes), but ultimately, we will arrive in a place of comfort. This is not to say that we accept passively the wrongs and challenges in this world; no, we are to fight for justice and mercy. But, we can take heart that when our time comes, there is a place prepared for us at the Table of Life, where our feet will be anointed, the house filled with nard, and where Jesus will join us.

* I continue to use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer lectionary.
** The Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 848-49.

Palm Sunday 10 April 2022

 Palm/Passion Sunday 10 April 2022

Saint Peter’s,  Bennington VT

Have you ever gotten caught in a crowd? Have there been so many people in the crowd that your body is caught in between other people’s bodies and your feet no longer touch the ground and you are carried with the flow of the people and you panic because you can see yourself falling to the pavement and the crowd moving on over you? Have you felt the energy of the crowd and gotten caught up in the emotions that surge from a collective cry? Have you caught yourself shouting out whatever the crowd is crying out, even if you don’t agree with what the crowd is saying, but since you are there you don’t think about the words, you just go along with what everyone else is doing?

Somehow I think this is what happened to the people who threw palms or large leaves on the ground to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem and then turned their backs on him and shouted out that he should be crucified. They lost sense of their own humanity in the frenzy that a crowd stirs up. They lost sight of boundaries and thus betrayed the one who would be their saviour. Instead, the crowd, made up of scores of individuals, became a monster without a heart.

That crowd mentality that contributed to, but did not cause Jesus’s death, was not new then and it is not new now. The horrific events of 6 January 2021 still reverberate in our collective consciousness. I have been reading Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. He writes in Chapter 8: ‘Stand Out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.’ (People standing out in the crowds in Jerusalem back when would not have changed the course of history, though it is an interesting thought to ponder. We, however, can make a difference.) 

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On Good Friday the ruling political forces, the Romans (not the Jews!) of the day tortured and executed an innocent man. The crowds that had welcomed him, turned on him. The powers-that-be sacrificed the weak and the blameless to protect their own status and power. On the third day Jesus was raised from the dead, revealing not only their injustice, but also unmasking the lie that might makes right.

In a country still living under the shadow of the lynching tree, we should be troubled by the violent forces being released by the current political rhetoric. Americans are turning against their neighbours, particularly those on the margins of society. They seek to secure their own safety and security at the expense of others. There is legitimate reason to fear where this rhetoric and the actions arising from it might take us. 

In this moment, we resemble God’s children wandering in the wilderness. We, like they, are struggling to find our way. They turned from following God and worshiped a golden calf constructed from their own wealth. The current rhetoric is leading us to construct a modern false idol out of power and privilege. We must reject the idolatrous notion that we can ensure the safety of some by sacrificing the hopes of others. No matter where we fall on the political spectrum, we must respect the dignity of every human being and we must seek the common good above all else. I could produce too many examples, as recently as this week, of situations where someone has not respected their neighbour’s God-given dignity.

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We are better than this, my brothers and sisters. We are made in God’s image. We are God’s beloved. As we walk the Way of the Cross this week, may we recognise ourselves in the passion narrative, as we acknowledge our complicity in systemic evil and then commit ourselves to a better way, Christ’s way of unconditional love. May we recommit ourselves to walking the way of love in order to hold onto and, more important, share hope. 

As Presiding Bishop Michael Curry writes, 

Imagine our homes and families when love is the way. Imagine our neighborhoods and communities where love is the way. Imagine governments and nations where love is the way. Imagine business and commerce when love is the way. Imagine this tired old world when love is the way. When love is the way — unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive — when love is the way, then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again. When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream, and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook.

When love is the way, poverty would become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty of room for all of God’s children. When love is the way, we actually treat each other, well, like we are actually family.

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Because, when all is said and done, we are one. And the way we walk this week, paradoxically, is the Way of Love. So let us be on our way.