The Power and the Wisdom (Epiphany 3A)

 

The Power and the Wisdom
Homily delivered the Third Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
25 January 2020; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings:  Isaiah 9:1-4; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 27:1, 5-13

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

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

In a week full of horrible and depressing news items, two things jumped out at me, small symptoms of the sorry state our nation has sunk to through its bitter partisanship and cult of violence: reported threats by a close confidante of the U.S. President that Republican Senators who voted against the President would “have their heads put on pikes,” and a tape clip of the President last year ordering the firing of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch with the words of a Mafia don ordering a hit, “take her out!”   The left has been known on occasion to use similar violence-laden imagery in its critiques of party opponents, or the not sufficiently “woke” in their own ranks.  Bullying and power-posturing has become the coin of the realm.  There is a certain karmic justice in this: we have sown the wind of our belief in the redemptive power of violence—be it gun rights, military power, or Die-hard fantasy—and we are reaping the whirlwind of the law of the jungle.   We have planted hatred of the other and “we are number one!” and now are reaping Might-makes-right killing any hope we may have had of building community.

Today’s lessons are about loss of hope and community and how trust in God can heal, bringing light and life. 

Isaiah is writing in the 730s BCE.  A new thing in history had appeared: the first transnational military Empire, Assyria under its aggressive new leader, Tiglath-Pileser III, who was conquering all the Middle East.  Whole countries simply ceased to exist, their leaders slaughtered and populations deported far away in the name of national security and political order.  Among the first in Palestine were the regions Zebulun and Napthali, near the Sea of Galilee, turned into an Assyrian province early on.   Eventually, all of the Northern Kingdom would disappear.

Isaiah says, “In past days, [God] brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future, he will make glorious … Galilee of the gentiles.  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”  This light will bring liberation: “For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.”  Gideon’s defeat of the huge army of Midian with just 300 warriors was for these people an icon of victory against overwhelming odds. God is the one who gives victory and light—this is the message too of today’s Psalm. 

Zebulun and Naphthali, along with the rest of the North, were never reconstituted historically—they became the proverbial “lost ten tribes.”  This left a feeling of an unfulfilled prophecy or broken promise: this is why the Gospel writers make such a big deal over the fact that it was in Galilee that Jesus began and performed most of his ministry.  The great light seen by those who sat in darkness, the great liberator, is understood as Christ. 

Christ’s ultimate victory over death and the grave is also seen by St. Paul as a victory against overwhelming odds.  In today’s epistle, he argues against divisions and factions in the Church, divisions based in clever arguments, appeals to wisdom, authority, and group identity.  Christ and no one else is the source of unity, Paul says.  That’s why using Christ as an identity group banner is so wrong. 

Paul, addressing a bitterly divided church at Corinth, says true unity comes only from the “power of Christ’s cross.”  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  A few sentences later, he adds, “[W]e proclaim Christ on the cross, a stumbling block … and foolishness” to the two main identity groups of his world.  But to those who follow Jesus, regardless of identity and background, “Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor 1:18, 23-25)

Jesus, dying on a public torture board of the Empire, is strong?  Christ, abused and outcast, is wiser than the deepest tradition of the sages?  Paul admits it:  if you don’t have faith in Christ the cross can only be seen as nonsense.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Christianity was the religion of the weak, of victims, or losers.  Its emphasis on compassion and pity, he said, simply put a guilt trip on the strong and victorious, who really had nothing to be ashamed of.  The will to power was all that mattered, not artificial concepts of sin and noble suffering.  God on the cross, for him, indeed was a god who was dead.  Any other way of seeing the cross, he said, was self-deception and foolishness.  This idea was taken up fully by objectivist writer Ayn Rand, who instead of supermen made free by the will to power and victim sub-humans rather speaks of the “producers,” and “creators” of society and wealth on the one side, and “parasites” and the dregs on the other.   

For Nietzche and Rand, it’s all about the strong overcoming the weak, the winners beating the losers. It's about “really great” people, “quality” people, casting aside and excluding “losers.”  

For Christ, it’s all about welcoming, inclusion, and service.  It’s about the strength found in vulnerability.  It’s about wisdom in marginalization. As Oscar Romero once taught, “only eyes that have cried can see certain things.”   It is those who sit in darkness that see the Great Light. 

Our confident hope is that in the end, right and justice, truth and love will prevail.  If they have not yet prevailed, that is because it is not yet the end.   Nikos Kazantzakis, in his great novel The Last Temptation of Christ, says, “A prophet is one who, when everyone else despairs, hopes. And when everyone else hopes, despairs. You’ll ask me why. It is because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

Living life as one great conflict and struggle for power is the shortest way for making life a hell on earth.  Those who live by the sword die by the sword.  A winner of the rat race is still a rat.  Nietzche and Rand’s argument for striving to be a winner, quality people, at all costs is the death of our humanity.  Says Jesus, “those who seek their life will lose it and those who give up their life will win it.”

Beloved, the cross is the way we follow Jesus: suffering for others, accepting shame, pain, and even death in pursuit of God’s reign.  But Christ on the cross is the power and wisdom of God.  We may want an easier, softer, more ego-flattering path.  But there is none.   On the way of the cross, we experience death and sit in darkness.  Embracing and accepting the way of the cross is the way we can get out of the rat race, out of the constant division, conflict, and turmoil.  Because on it, even as we sit in darkness, we see a great light.

In the name of Christ, Amen.