Fire and Salt
30 September 2018
Proper 21B
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, Ph.D, SCP
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.
Amen
Yikes! “Hack off your foot, poke out your eye, chop off your hand—if any of these cause you to stumble!” How in the world to preach this saying of Jesus? It is not only harsh—insanely so!—but doesn’t even make sense. Your foot causes you to stumble, not your hand! Of course, stumble here is simply a metaphor for moral failing, for sin. But even as a metaphor, this is one of most macabre “hard sayings” of Jesus. The image is so grotesque that Matthew (18:8-9), who normally follows Mark when he uses his material, reduces Mark's seven verses to two, while gentle Saint Luke omits it altogether (17:1-4).
Taken literally, this saying
actually led third century Church father Origen to cut off body parts that had
gotten in the way of his efforts at chastity.
As a result, Origen—one of the age’s best preachers and scholars of
scripture—was never named a saint or a doctor of the Church. In fact, one of
the first canons of the Council of Nicaea was to ban such self-mutilators from
the priesthood.
The saying is not an announcement of
divine law, but a vivid and sarcastic reply to the disciples’ complaint that
starts the reading: “Jesus, look at that guy there! He is not one of us, but he uses your name to
heal people. We told him to stop but he won’t. You make him stop.”
They have just failed to drive out
an evil spirit from a boy afflicted since childhood (Mark 9: 14-28) and this
interloper seems to be succeeding just fine.
They want to be sole
proprietors of Jesus’ franchise, to defend their market niche and brand
integrity. They want to be good
partisans, followers of Jesus, and so they encourage him to cast out people who
don’t maintain the purity of the brand.
But as we saw in such disturbing
vividness this week in the Kavanaugh hearing, partisanship is not a good basis
for living the truth or seeking what’s right.
I wish we lived in a country where
people listen to women, and absent hard facts to the contrary, believe their
stories and their truth. I wish we lived
in a country where political partisans do not give a pass to moral failings in their
own leadership and then go for the jugular of their opponents for the same or
similar failings. I wish we lived in a
country where Judge Kavanaugh had testified, “I drank too much as a high
schooler and university student, and maybe since then. I don’t remember many things from those
times. If I did what Dr. Blasey Ford
says I did—and I have no recollection of this at all—then I must apologize for
having done a horrible thing. I am
sorry, and commit to be part of the solution to the problem of sexual assault
in the future, including protecting my two daughters from dangerous situations
and relationships." I wish. I wish.
Jesus replies to his disciples, “Don't
stop that strange exorcist. Just using my name might bring him closer to
the kingdom. Whoever is not against
us is for us.”
Clearly, not all of Jesus’ followers
agreed. The oral tradition turned the
saying into its opposite “whoever is not with
me is against me,” and this twisted
form of the saying shows up in both Matthew (12:30) and Luke (Luke 9:49-50; but
cf. 11:23).
The historical Jesus was more welcoming
and inclusive, less controlling and hierarchical, than his followers. “Punish that competitor!” they say. In
reply he says the strange exorcist is actually on their team! Even a simple kindness like giving someone a
sip of water advances the kingdom. And petty nastiness, sticking out your leg
to trip up any of Jesus’ “little ones” will lead to worse things than being
drowned in the ocean. This as a warning
to keep Jesus’ own over-zealous followers
from running roughshod over people like the unnamed healer.
Jesus is saying, “the truth does not
lie in partisan adherence.” He is
saying, “If you are unkind and unfair to others, that is bad enough. But if you do it supposedly in my name, to
protect my brand, well, then your simply are not following me. That strange healer is one of my little ones
whether you like it or not, whether he recognizes it or not. And doing harm to him is worse that being
drowned in the ocean with a millstone tied around your neck. You want me to stop him, to control him, cut
him off? Well if it’s cutting off you
want, you should start cutting off your own body parts.” Elsewhere he says it less gruesomely, but
still in vivid, grotesque imagery: “If
you see a speck in someone’s eye, don’t try to remove it until you have removed
the log stuck into your own eye!” If
you want to give someone hellfire and punishment, think about what you just
might be attracting for yourself by so doing!”
“Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.”
Jesus concludes, “Everyone will be salted
with fire.” The two great means in the
ancient world of purification and preservation, salt and fire, are going to be
the lot of us all. How to be saved from
suffering in that fire or drying up by that salt? You yourself must be salt for
the world, leaven for the loaf, light in darkness. “Have salt in yourselves, by
being at peace with one another.”
He is saying, We
need to live in peace with each other, and not constantly go about seeking the
punishment or correction of others. We
need to define ourselves not by whmo we exclude, but rather, by whom we
include. Purification is a serious
business, getting rid of faults is too. The only way we can do it without being
destroyed by it is by gently caring for others.
Be a light, not a judge.
For Jesus, God is not a mere tribal
deity, not a petty partisan. God makes the sun rise on and sends the clouds to
rain on both the righteous and the wicked (Matt. 5:45). He is Israel’s God, to
be sure, but only so that Israel can be a city on a hill, a light on a
candlestick, salt to give flavor to and preserve the world (Matt.
5:14-16). God is not just for Jews, not
just for Jesus’ authorized franchise-holders, but for all. Because we are all in God’s hand, we must
accept diversity.
That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the weeds is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because if you pull up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30).
That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the weeds is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because if you pull up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30).
It is also what the Hebrew scripture
is about: Moses’ deputies come to him and
ask him to silence the two commoners prophesying in the camp. They do not know that the two were part of
the 70 chosen to have God’s spirit but who failed to show up to meeting. “Silence them?” replies Moses, “Oh I wish
that all of the people were prophets like these two!”
Jesus urges solidarity among all
God’s creatures. That’s why even unbelievers’ offers of glasses of water build
the Kingdom. That’s why Jesus here says the strange exorcist is one of his own
“little ones” in need of protection from being tripped up.
Living peace doesn’t mean making
nice, papering over evil, or thickening our conscience with an amoral
detachment. Ask any marriage or family counselor, any labor mediator, or any
mediator or negotiator in international or inter-ethnic conflict. They’ll all
tell you that truly seeking peace is not easy, and not harmonious. It is not a
false “let’s all just get along.” It is
not keeping silence about real hurt or injustice, whether you suffered it or
caused it. It is about honestly addressing
real problems. It is about doing so in a
spirit of shared endeavor, of mutual effort to let shared desires and
aspirations force us to listen carefully to the other party.
Jesus calls us to be good yeast
leavening the loaf that is the world. He
calls us to be bright fires enlightening the darkness about us, and tasty salt
enriching and preserving all of life. He calls us to be prophets running
through the camp unfettered by dour hierarchs and controllers, alight with the
flame of God’s word. He does not call us
to demonize, exclude, judge, or ostracize.
God alone will bring this world right. We all will be rubbed through and through with God’s salt. We all will be put through God’s fire. And because of this, we must live humbly and simply, praying for each other, including our enemies, and seek to help each other, work for justice, and live in peace.
In the name of God, Amen
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