A Loathsome Stranger's Mercy (Proper 10C; Good Samaritan)

Rembrandt, The Good Samaritan

  A  Loathsome Stranger’s Mercy
Homily delivered Seventh Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 10; Year C RCL)
11 July 2010; 10:00 a.m. Morning Prayer Said
Congregation of the Good Shepherd
Beijing, China
Readings: Amos 7:7-17 and Psalm 82 or Deuteronomy 30:9-14 and Psalm 25:1-9; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Finding a dead body lying out in the open is a very disturbing experience.  When my wife and I lived in West Africa several years ago, one Sunday morning we were running of the beach.  She got ahead of me, as she usually does when we’re running.  I heard her start screaming in terror and hurried to catch up with her.  There beside us, in sand at the high tide mark, was what used to be a human being, now bloated in the heat and already a meal for the crabs.   We ran to get the port authorities, who recovered the body, identified it as a fisherman who had fallen from his boat a week earlier about 25 miles up the coast, and returned it properly covered to his grieving family.  It was not the only corpse I saw in Africa.  Once, on a trip into Lagos Nigeria, I spotted a body lying along side the road.  My driver refused to stop to try to get help, since the area was notoriously known as the haunt of criminal gangs who often would rob anyone who has the misfortune of having to stop their car. 

Today’s Gospel reading is a parable that describes such a disturbing scene. 

A lawyer asks Jesus a question of Jewish Law: “Master, of all the 615 commandments in the Torah, 365 'Thou shalt not's' and 248 'Thou shalt's,” what is the essential that I need to do to please God? “ 

Luke says the lawyer is asking Jesus the question trying to test him (10:25).  Jesus is cautious, and asks the lawyer what he thinks the Law establishes as its core (10:26). 

The Lawyer replies in these words: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deut. 6:4) and then “Love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 19:18). 

This epitome of the Law is probably Jesus’ own.  Matthew and Mark place it on the lips of Jesus himself as he replies to a lawyer or a scribe (Matt. 22:37-40; Mark 12:29-31).  The first of these commandments is part of the Shema, the basic creed of Judaism that every practicing Jewish male recites during morning prayer (Deut. 6:4); the second is a commandment found in Leviticus 19:18, part of dozens of rules enumerated in the  Leviticus Holiness Code (Lev. 17-26).

“Love God, then love your neighbor.”  Jesus agrees:  “That’s exactly right.  If you do that, you won’t have any problem pleasing God.” 

Then the story gets complicated.  The lawyer follows up with another question of law, seeking, as lawyers are wont to do, clear definitions of terms of law and the scope of their applicability.  “And who, rabbi, exactly is my neighbor?” 

Luke tells us that the lawyer asked the question in order to justify himself.  The point is clear.  The lawyer wants to know the exact scope of his obligation to love others so that he can have a clear idea of who it is that he is not obligated to love.  

Clearly other people had asked the same question about the Holiness Code’s commandment to love our neighbors.  The Holiness Code prescribes rules for God’s people living in God’s land, including special ones for God’s priests and their assistants in the Temple (Lev. 21-22).  It also gives rules regarding aliens living in the midst of God’s people, both how to treat them and what is expected of them.   It seems to distinguish between “Israelites" or “your people” from “aliens living in your midst” as well as “your neighbors.”  It is not completely obvious from the text whether “neighbors” includes only fellow Israelites, all resident aliens also, or only aliens who keep the rules.  One text, however, clearly also says “The alien who reside with you shall be to you as the citizens among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” (Lev. 19:34).  

So the legal question “who is my neighbor” was a point of discussion, and different people gave different answers to it. In the inter-testamental Book of Sirach, we read, “give to the devout, but do not help the sinner” (Sir. 12:1-7).   Here the distinction between your fellow countryman and a neighbor is whether one keeps the Law or has the reputation of being religious.  In the Manual of Discipline in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we read, “… seek God with all your heart and all your soul, . . . love all the sons of light, and hate all the sons of darkness” (1QS 1.1-3, 9-10).  Here, even fellow Jews, if they do not accept the legal interpretations of the Dead Sea Scroll sect, are considered beyond the pale of being “neighbors.”   On the other hand, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria two centuries before the common era wrote, “God asks ... [us] to love him . . . and serve him with . . .[our] whole soul” (Spec. Leg. 1.299-300) and says that this is a “duty to God as shown by piety and holiness, and a duty to men as shown by humanity and justice” (Spec. Leg. 2.63).   Neighbors here appear to be all fellow human beings. 

Jesus’ reply to the question is a story that turns many expectations of that time and place totally on their head.

 Dundee Parish Church (St. Mary's, Church of Scotland) 

Parable of the Good Samaritan

A man goes down the dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  Remember Jerusalem is 2700 feet above sea level while Jericho is 800 feet below it.  With only 17 miles between, it means there is a 200 foot drop every mile.  There are lots of switchbacks in the steep road where many nooks and crannies can easily hide crooks and baddies. 

He meets up with robbers, is beaten unconscious, stripped of all his clothing, and left for dead. 

But then by chance someone comes by.  It is a Priest, commuting between his home in Jericho and his intermittent work in the Temple in Jerusalem.  Surely a priest—a religious person and an example of doing the right thing—will help a fellow countryman who is almost dead, right?   But when he sees the man, he hurries to the other side of the road, and walks on. 

Then another religious leader, a temple assistant called a Levite, also comes along.   He too avoids what appears to be the naked corpse on the side of the road.  

Now we mustn’t think too ill of the Priest or the Levite.  The Law of Moses stipulated that Priests and Levites had to be ritually pure for their service in the Temple, and also clearly stated that any contact with a corpse contaminated and brought with it ritual impurity.  

It is probably just about at this point in the story that Jesus’ listeners realized that the fact that the man looked dead might in reality cause his actual death through lack of care, and all because of religious people scrupulously trying to follow the commandments of God. 

To be sure, the Law did provide over-ride clauses where saving someone’s life or even helping them save their ox from the mire took precedence over purity requirements.  But even here, such acts of mercy and human sympathy did not get rid of the pollution thus incurred. 

Like good storytellers in any culture, Jesus here follows the rule of three.  We often hear jokes about an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scot, or other ones about a Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, and a Baptist Preacher.  Here is it a Priest, a Levite, and a…

Jesus’ audience knows it will be a normal resident of that part of the country, a Judean.  He won’t be constrained by the heavier purity concerns and he’ll save our poor victim, right? 

No.  The third traveler on his way is not a Judean.  It is a Samaritan.

Now to Jesus’ Jewish audience, having a Priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan being the three is like someone today telling story and having the three be the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and Usama bin Laden, or maybe Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, and the head of the Mafia.   

Samaritans were seen as contemptible half-breeds, heretics and blasphemers, allies with the foreign occupiers, and immoral.  They themselves were considered by Jews to be ritually unclean and contaminating.   The poor Jewish man who is about to die himself will be ritually polluted by accepting anything from the Samaritan.  But at this point, he isn’t particular about who he can accept help from.  Better unclean and alive and than unclean because you’re dead. 

When this Samaritan sees the wounded man, he stops, is moved to mercy, takes good care of him, and even provides for him as if he were a family member.  

Note that the Samaritans also had their own version of the Torah, and the same basic rules about corpses were found there.  But this Samaritan risks contamination by his own lights and helps the half-dead person on the side of the road. 

Jesus closes his story answering the Lawyer’s question “who is my neighbor?” by saying, “Who do you think acted like a neighbor to that unfortunate man?”

The lawyer can’t even bring himself to say, “The Samaritan.”  He replies abashedly, “the one who showed him compassion.” 

“Go and do likewise.  Be like that Samaritan,” is Jesus’ reply. 

This answer by Jesus places him squarely on one side of a major division within the Biblical tradition. 

Walther Bruggemann, in his magisterial Theology of the Old Testament, points out that throughout the Hebrew scriptures, one finds two great thematic threads. On the one side, there is the striving for purity and ritual holiness, for being special and set aside for God’s service.  “You shall be holy for I am holy,” we read in Leviticus, and there follows hundreds of detailed rules setting boundaries and defining categories to help achieve holiness.  On the other side there is striving for justice, for treating people, especially the marginalized, decently and fairly. 

The two themes often seem in opposition.  The priests and the Law tend to talk a lot about purity and holiness.  The prophets tend to talk about dealing with others justly, especially those most in need.  For Samuel, Amos, Isaiah, Micah and others God says things like:  “I expect obedience, not sacrifice.” “I hate your sacrifices because you mistreat the widow and the orphan.”    “All I really ask of you is to treat the poor fairly, and to walk humbly with me.”  For the priests and teachers of halachic law, however, God say things like, “You will be Holy for I am Holy, says the Lord.”  “You shall not pollute the land with impurity, or I will destroy you.”  “You shall drive out pollution from among your midst and separate yourself from uncleanness.” 

Bruggemann says that the two traditions are both important and mutually corrective. The boundaries established by the Law are what define and preserve the People of God, and allow ethical monotheism to flourish.  But if holiness is not tempered with the call for social justice, it becomes empty ritual, a mode of oppression, and dies.  On the other hand, calls for social justice in the absence of an authentic call to holiness rapidly degenerate into the most obvious self-serving form of interest-group politics.  That’s why it’s love God first, and then love one’s neighbor.  

It is very important to note that in the Gospels, whenever social justice is placed in conflict with ritual purity and Jesus is asked to decide between them, in every single case he opts for social justice.  For him, justice trumps purity and holiness in this sense every time.  

It has to do with his understanding of God as the God of everyone, not just of the Jewish nation, or righteous people.  “God makes the sun shine and the rain fall on both the righteous and the wicked,” he says (Matt. 5:45).  “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbors and hate your enemies, but I say, love your enemies’,” he says (Matt. 5:43). Thus his answer about “who is my neighbor?”  

Jesus sees that the Lawyer’s question has framed the world wrong.  The commandments to love God and to love neighbor are, above all else, commandments to love. When the lawyer tries to interpret them by asking in essence “and who exactly is it that I don’t have to love,” Jesus throws a parable at him.  The intent is to shake his world view.  Like a Zen koan, the parable is meant to shock the lawyer into a new way of feeling and perceiving. 

Professor Klyne Snodgrass in his recently published master work on the parables Stories with Intent says this:  “This parable is evidence of what is obvious elsewhere:  Jesus will not allow boundaries to be set so that people may feel they have completed their obligation to God.  Love does not have a boundary where we can say we have loved enough, nor does it permit us to choose those we will love, those who are ‘our kind.’ With this parable, Jesus in effect says, ‘You should know already from Lev. 19:34 that the love commandment extends to the stranger (or traveler) in your midst.’’” 

Love knows no boundaries, and, in the words of St. Paul, “love never ends.” 

All of us have our ways, like the lawyer, of seeking to justify ourselves and say to the God who calls us to love, “Enough, already!”  We all too often use boundaries as a means to do this, whether national, ethnic, political, gender, or even what we consider to be moral boundaries. 

We do this because it is easy.  It is, in fact, too easy, since we know that we as creatures live and die by boundaries.  We need definitions and limits, or our lives are chaotic and unordered.  Boundaries are generally good, and something we all need.   And this is the case whether we are talking moral boundaries, legal boundaries, or personal space and autonomy boundaries.  We need them because without them we are messes. 

But we must never let boundaries become a strait-jacket that makes us unable to reach out our arms in love to those in need.  

Good fences may indeed help make good neighbors, but not if we do not chat across the fences, and as needed reach over them. 

I challenge each of us this week to look at ourselves.  Take 10 or 15 minutes during your prayer time or meditation time, or even exercise time, and ask these questions:  1) Where am I transgressing boundaries with resulting harm to myself or others? 2) Where am I using boundaries as an excuse to not do the right thing?

Once you have some answers, then look again at this story. 

Remember that lawyer and his self-justifying question.  And then really think about the story of that loathsome stranger doing kindness to a fellow human being, no matter how different, no matter how alien.

And go and do likewise. 

In the name of God,  Amen. 

Salted with Fire, Living Peace (Proper 21 B RCL)

Salted with Fire; Living Peace

17th After Pentecost (Proper 21 B RCL)
27th September 2009
Congregation of the Good Shepherd, Beijing China
10:00 a.m. Liturgy of the Word without Communion
Psalm 124; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

In today’s Gospel in Mark 9, Jesus is having a bad day. The disciples have just argued about who was most important (Mark 9:33–37). Just after this story, they will start to argue again when James and John ask Jesus for promotions (10:35–45). In the middle of all this, John comes to Jesus and complains about an otherwise unnamed healer who is casting out demons in Jesus' name.

"He is not one of us," the disciples whine, "so we told him to stop." They presumably want Jesus to tell the man to stop, and maybe punish him in some way. After all, he is using the name Jesus to perform the healings.

Why are they so concerned about this stranger doing unauthorized healings? It is clear that Jesus’ uncanny ability to heal was what attracted the large crowds to him to hear his message of the arrival of the kingdom of God. Healing was part and parcel of his proclamation. “If by the spirit of God I cast out demons” and illness, he says, “then the kingdom of God has come within your midst” (Matt 12:28, Luke 11:30). When he gives instructions to the twelve he has chosen to send out to spread his joyous proclamation wider, he gives healing the sick and casting out demons as their principal work (Mark 6:6-13).

The disciples thus see themselves as defending the integrity of Jesus’ core ministry. In modern commercial terms, they are complaining about this strange exorcist because he is encroaching on their market niche by infringing on their trademark. They are worried about brand integrity and don’t want anyone claiming credit for deeds of power done in Jesus’ name without a proper connection to them. They see themselves as Jesus’ exclusive agents, the sole proprietors of the franchise.

Mark portrays their complaint somewhat ironically: the disciples have just failed to drive out an evil spirit from a boy afflicted since childhood (Mark 9: 14-28), but this interloper seems to be succeeding just fine.

Many of us recognize the dynamics of the scene instantly. When Elena and I were raising our four kids, we often had one or another of them coming to us indignant, complaining of some misdeed by a sibling, with the outraged and sometimes tearful demand, “Punish him.”

Most of us who are managers of workers have had the experience of being mediators between quarreling employees, trying to get people to make nice with each other, to restore the calmness of the group, if not its peace, so it can get back to productive work.

You would think that Jesus would see the logic of the complaint.

But no, says Jesus, don't stop this man. Don’t stop interlopers at all. Just using Jesus’ name might bring the stranger closer to the announced kingdom. “Whoever is not against us is for us,” he says, adding, “after using my name and successfully driving out the evil spirit, the stranger certainly won’t speak ill of us.”

This inclusive attitude of Jesus clearly did not find universal welcome among his followers. Some probably thought it was altogether too naïve. The early source of Jesus sayings used by Matthew and Luke (Q), for instance, has Jesus actually saying the opposite: “whoever is not with me is against me” (Matt 12:30; Luke 11:23). To his credit, Luke also includes Mark’s story of the strange exorcist together with its version of the saying (Luke 9:49-50), while Matthew drops the whole story as inconsistent with what he believed Jesus would have said.

The story as told in the Gospels of Mark and Luke, however, preserves what almost certainly was Jesus’ position: “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Mark’s version of the story places these words in the context of several other sayings of Jesus that Matthew and Luke put in other contexts or delete. In Mark, Jesus comments on the strange exorcist and adds that 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.

The Greek word used for “place a stumbling block before” here is skandalizo or “scandalize.” In Matthew’s separate use of the same saying, it refers to non-believers tripping up Jesus’ disciples (Matt. 18:6). Here in Mark’s context, it refers to the offense caused by Jesus’ own over-zealous disciples running roughshod over the feelings and sensitivities of people like the unnamed healer and the people he has successfully healed.

And then comes one of the so-called “hard sayings” of Jesus. None of these are more macabre than the command to pluck out one's eye, or cut off a hand or foot (Matt 18:8-9; Mark 9:42-48). The image is so grotesque that Matthew, who normally follows Mark when he uses material from that Gospel, reduces it from Mark's seven verses to two, while gentle Saint Luke omits it altogether (cf. Luke 17:1-4).

Origen (but not St. Origen)

The saying is often misread as if it were a pronouncement of ethical law, a misreading promoted by the fact that Matthew places it in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:27-37). But read this way, it is a very troubling and sick pronouncement. Taken literally, it actually led third century Church father Origen to severely mutilate himself in an effort to obtain chastity. This rash and extreme act led both the Eastern and Western Churches to never consider Origen—one of the age’s best preachers and scholars of scripture—as a saint or a doctor of the Church.

But the context in which Mark places this harsh command gives a clue to its most likely meaning on the lips of the historical Jesus. This answer about cutting members off is indeed cutting: an ironic and overstated argument that if you want to call for punishment, then you must remember that all deserve to be punished, including you.

“Bad people?” says Jesus, “You want me to punish them, to cut them off?” “Well, then, if it’s punishment you want, it’s punishment you’ll get. And not just of those for whom you ask it. Cut those people off? You might as well cut your own body parts off.”

Remember that even when the saying appears in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is arguing for a moral law far beyond the human norm, as if to underscore the point that it is only with God’s help that we can live as we should, and that there is little hope for any of us if “Rules are rules, law is supreme; no exceptions, mercy, or grace allowed.”

Jesus wraps up the little speech here in Mark with the curious expression, “"For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

This image, so puzzling at first glance, draws on commonplaces well known to the people in Jesus’ culture.

Salt and fire were powerful images, both related to the idea of change and stability. Another powerful image in this complex of ideas was that of yeast, or leaven.


Any of us who have made bread know how amazing yeast is. If you don’t add the right amount and give it adequate time and sugar for food, your bread will come out flat, heavy, and ruined. Without any yeast at all, it will simply be a hard, inedible clump of baked dough. Spread out thin that way, it might make crispy crackers; but unleavened bread is not really what most people call bread. Too much yeast, or too long a rising time, makes the dough sour and turn bad. Adding salt for a tastier bread slows down the yeast; if you add too much salt, it kills the yeast altogether.

The whole process seemed somewhat mysterious to the early Hebrews, and this almost magical agent of change was early on identified with the processes of change and resistance to change that they saw as evidence of their God’s ongoing creative work in the world. It was akin to the mysterious difference between a living animal and a dead carcass, that so quickly would turn bad and rot.

Matzos (unleavened bread) and Wine

This sense of awe and wonder at change versus stability, decay versus life, fermentation or leavening versus stillness and preservation, lies at the heart of many of the distinctions between the ritually pure and impure in the Law of Moses, particularly the Levitical Code. Little details jump out at you when you read these codes with this in mind. No yeast is allowed during the Passover—God’s covenant time should not be corrupted by change. Wine, fermented though it is, has reached a stasis and the alcohol in it preserves it from further rapid decay. It is used at Passover, and indeed is a symbol for the covenant, making hearts glad and being an important part of celebration.

Animals being sacrificed in the Temple must be killed quickly in ritually prescribed ways that of themselves delay the process of decay. Salt, that great preservative and inhibitor of decay, is added to all meat sacrifices. They are to be put into the fire almost immediately, and the parts of the sacrifice that are not to be burnt up wholly are to be eaten by the priests and Levites quickly after the rite.


Fire itself—able to change things totally by reducing them to ashes—is also seen as purifying, since it seemed mysteriously to inhibit change and decay after it had touched an object. (Obviously, after Louis Pasteur, we recognize that many of these qualities of yeast, salt, and fire seen by ancient Jews as mysterious relate to the encouragement or inhibition of microbial activity.) But for the people who wrote the Levitical Code, fire meant purification either through radical change (things burnt to ashes) or through its ability, like salt, to preserve against change seen in the process of fermentation and rot.


Salt, seen also as purifying, was seen as a symbol of steadiness and unchanging stability. So sharing it at table was the ultimate sign of friendship and hospitality. Often a ritual sharing of salt sealed covenants and promises.

The ancient Jews realized, to be sure, that not all change was bad or in the direction of decay. They also liked their leavened bread and wine. It was in this spirit that Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a little lump of yeast in a large mass of flour dough—only a little bit would make the whole loaf rise (Matt. 13:33; Luke 13:20-21). But those welcoming the Kingdom were for Jesus also the salt of the earth—what would make it tasty and pleasant, but also what would preserve it from overall rottenness (Matt. 5:13). But leaven for Jesus could be bad also, as when he told his followers to beware of the “leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod” (Mark 8:15).

Saint Paul also used the image of yeast in both ways—good leading to nice bread and bad leading to rottenness—when he advised the Corinthians to discipline a notorious sinner in their midst whom he saw as likely to corrupt the Church (1 Cor 5:1-8). Using the image of cleaning out leaven from the house before the Jewish celebration of the Passover, he wrote, “Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch . . . Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

Valley of Hinnom

Again, change is what yeast is all about as a symbol—change for good or for bad. Salt is a symbol for inhibiting bad change, for steadiness, unchanging stability, and purity. Fire similarly is about eradicating bad change, whether through destruction or through purification and inhibition of bad change. The great garbage dump just outside of ancient Jerusalem’s city walls in the Valley of Hinnom (in Aramaic, Geihenna) was marked by the continually burning fires there for reducing to ashes and disinfecting the foul detritus of the city. These fires became of symbol for the purifying burning of the Day of Judgment or the eternal punishments of the damned. Gehenna is the Greek word translated as “hell” in today's Gospel. The quotation in today's Gospel from second Isaiah about "their worm never dies, their fires never cease" is used by Jesus to describe the state of those who refuse God's call. It is vivid image of continued corruption and rottenness despite ongoing purification and disinfection.

So when Jesus in Mark says, “Everyone will be salted with fire, therefore live in peace,” he is saying this: We need to live in peace with each other, and not constantly go about seeking the punishment or correction of others who may seem to differ from us or not meet the standard we think God has set. And why? Because purification is a serious business that must touch all of us, and eventually will touch all of us, regardless of who we are or what group we now appear to belong to. Purification will come to all, either through preservation or destruction, either through saving change for the good or damning change for the bad.

As C.S. Lewis said, in the end, there will only be two groups: those who say to God “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God finally must say, “Alright, then, have it your own way.”

Why is that a warrant for living in peace? Is this just another way of saying “Do not say to your neighbor ‘you have a speck in your eye’ while you ignore the log stuck in your own eye” (Matt. 7:3)? No, there is more to it than that.

Jesus’ demand that the disciples accept marginal believers or even possible competitors is rooted in his understanding of God.

God is not a mere tribal deity. God is not a petty partisan. God makes the sun rise on ands 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 (Matt. 5:14-16). As the unshakable Rock, this God provides the reliable unmoving ground for pathetic creatures caught up in the confusion, decline, and suffering they see about them. And that, not just for Israel, but for all. Not just for Jews, not just for Jesus’ authorized franchise-holders, but for all. Because we are all in God’s hand, we must be tolerant of difference.

That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the tares (or the wheat and the weeds) is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because by pulling up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God and his angels will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30).

Jesus recognizes our common stance as God’s creatures in a world where we can say, in the words of the hymn, “change and decay in all around I see.” Jesus recognizes that God is creator and parent to all, and that we are all beggars before God. Though he sees his announcement of the arrival of Kingdom as addressed to Israel, this is so Israel can be a light to all.

All are invited to God’s great feast. All of God’s creatures are called to respond to the Kingdom’s arrival. So 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 in Mark talks about the strange exorcist as if he were one of his own “little ones” in need of protection from being tripped up.

We all have our buttons that people can push that really set us off, that make us want to go running and demand “punish him.” Even the most sterling “righteous” anger in most of us is mixed with self-interest and fear. Think about it carefully. In this messed up world, why is it that only some things cause us to lose our serenity and calm?

In my office this week, I became outraged when I saw a colleague behaving in a way that I thought was deliberately petty and hurtful toward a subordinate. This totally pushed one of my buttons. I was flummoxed and undone. I wanted bureaucratic vengeance, I wanted to beat the person into submission so he would learn to play well with others. I wanted to humiliate and make an example. I realized that this had truly upset me, and unreasonably so. I have learned as part of my spiritual discipline to identify things that throw me off as opportunities to learn about what is going on in my heart. I had a long talk with a close friend. My friend confessed that where I had a “hurtful behavior” button, he had a “that’s not fair” button. Instead of asking what was wrong in what the colleague had done (I had no problem coming up with a list for that), I asked what was it about me that made it so easy for me to lose my composure about this. Probably fear of losing my own sense of self-worth at work: I suspected that I had not adequately moved work along in a timely fashion and this had placed my subordinate in an untenable position vis-à-vis the badly behaving colleague. It was easier to get totally angry and blame the bad behavior than to realize that what motivated my emotions actually was fear rooted in my own sense of not measuring up.

But this saying of Jesus isn’t just about overcoming the buttons we have that people can push. It is about how we deal with true evil as well.

It is really hard to be magnanimous to people we know are doing evil, especially when the evil is patently hurtful to others. Our hearts rightly cry out “punish them.” Ignoring evil or making nice with it can be a subtle form of enabling such evil, and helping perpetuate and compound the harm.

With even such, Jesus says, “live in Peace.”

But living in 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 forget about the past and try to make up.”

It is about honestly addressing real problems and real differences. It is about doing so in a spirit of shared endeavor, a sense of being in a common plight, of mutual desire and effort to let common desires and aspirations force us to listen carefully to our own story and the story told by the other party.

Jesus teaches us, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.” Wish well for those who spitefully use you. (Matt. 5:44)
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Police photograph of Solzhenitsyn, 1953.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the Gulag Archipelago, talks about the moment during his decades in Stalin’s prison camps that he recovered his Christian faith, and began to heal even while in prison. In the chapter, “Resurrection,” he notes that he realized that no matter how tightly his interrogators pressured him, he still had some choice, however limited, however constrained. While tortured, he was always forced to tell his tormentors what they wanted, but he still could do this willingly or unwillingly, hatefully, or with empathy. This led him to realize that even his interrogators themselves were constrained. They too enjoyed, even within the constraints placed on them by their roles, small choices between good and evil.

He realized that it wasn’t an issue of good people versus bad people. The line between good and evil did not lay between interrogator and prisoner, between political parties, between economic classes, countries, or religions. It did not lay between any groups of people, however defined. It lay in that small space of choice, no matter how tightly constrained, in each person.

He writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Solzhenitsyn understood the principle behind Jesus’ statements here in Mark. We are all God’s creatures and all bear God’s image, no matter how we may have distorted and twisted it. We are all in this together. And that is so regardless of what we think of each other, regardless of how right or wrong we may be in our judgments of each other.

Jesus proclaimed the coming of God’s rule. Through his perfect submission to God, he showed the way for the kingdom to fully come.

He continues today to call us to be good yeast leavening the loaf of the world, bright lanterns of fire enlightening the world. He calls us to be salt for the world, effectively enriching and preserving its good. He does not call us to demonize, exclude, or ostracize. These things are bad leaven that leads to rottenness and decay. He calls us to include, reach out, and leaven the whole loaf.

God himself will bring this world right. We will be rubbed through and through with God’s salt. We will be put through God’s fire. And because of this, we simply must live humbly, pray for each other, including our enemies, seek to help each other, work for justice, and live in peace. Pray God that we may do this.

In the name of God, Amen.