One Flock, One Shepherd (Good Shepherd Sunday; Easter 4B)

One Flock, One Shepherd

Easter 4B
29 April 2012; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Dr. Anthony A. Hutchinson 

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

“The day after they had arrested Peter and John for teaching about Jesus and the resurrection, the rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. When they had made the prisoners stand in their midst, they inquired, "By what power or by what name did you do this?" Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, "Rulers of the people and elders, if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’ There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:5-12) 

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

We have been having a lot of funerals here at Trinity in the last weeks.  At a couple of them we have used as the Gospel reading the passage from John 14, where Jesus says that in his Father’s House there are many way stations.  The passage is warm, reassuring, and comforting.  It ends with Jesus saying, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one comes to the Father, except by me” (John14: 6).   One of the deacons asked me somewhat abashedly if she could read the Gospel but end the reading before that last half-verse, “no one comes to the Father except by me.”  “It might be offensive to some of the visiting bereaved, who might not be Christians.” 

She asked as if she were afraid my response might be “But this is the BIBLE we are talking about here, and I’ll not have a verse of GOD’S WORD edited out because it might be offensive to those who are going to destruction anyway!”  But she asked it anyway, because she knew that I am no fundamentalist, and believe that in order to be understood, God’s word on occasion needs to be reframed or even rephrased. 

Today’s Gospel reading, shares the same problem.  “I am the Good Shepherd” Jesus says, not “a good shepherd.”  And he adds, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”  Likewise, in the Acts reading, St. Peter ends his short speech on Christ being the stone once rejected but now made head cornerstone by saying, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”

We here at Trinity Church glory in the fact that we are inclusive.  One of our core values is hospitality.   We believe that inclusiveness and hospitality are what God calls us to.   We believe that because of what scripture teaches us. 
During the life of Jesus, everyone knew that one of the great images of the Hebrew scripture for God’s saving act at the end of time was that of a great banquet. Even though there were plenty of passages that said, like Isaiah 25:7, that this banquet would be for people of all nations, many of the religious teachers around Jesus taught that this would be an exclusive event limited to a few of God’s chosen only.

Jesus replies to such a stingy image of God with parables. He points to the weather and says that God gives his rain and sunshine to both good and bad people alike (Matt. 5:45). He says this tells us about God’s love for all and should be a model for us in how we treat others. Jesus points to families and notes that when children ask for bread to eat, parents do not give them stones, or when they ask for an egg to eat, do not give them a scorpion. “If even average parents try to give their children good things, how much more generous will God be?” (Matt. 7:9-10; Luke 11:11-13)

Jesus’ actions matched his words. He regularly ate and drank with people that his religion told him would make him unclean. He had dinner parties with drunkards and prostitutes, much to the horror of Jesus’ “righteous” opponents. “It is the sick who need a doctor,” he would say, “not healthy people.” (Matt. 9:12)

But not everyone wanted a God as generous as the one Jesus described. They would quote scriptures that “proved” God was picky and exclusive. Jesus would reply by quoting other scriptures, where God looked more loving. 

Jesus reserved his deepest anger for people he accused of “refusing to enter God’s door, and also barring the way to others” (Matt 23:13). He told other parables to explain why it was that despite God’s overwhelming goodness and generosity, some people were right with God and others were not.  The ones who were not truly thankful for God’s generosity, and were not likewise generous to others, were the butt of such parables (Luke 18:10-14).

When Jesus described what he believed the dividing line on the Last Day will be between those who stand and dwell with God and those who do not, he said that it was whether people had been hospitable, and whether they had cared for the marginalized  (Matthew 5: 35-40). 

So inclusiveness and hospitality are core to the Gospel, not just affectations of Trinity Ashland.   

What, then, are we to make of the verses of the New Testament that seem exclusionary? 

Here in post-modern America, with its wide diversity of religious and non-religious traditions, it is always a temptation to simply ignore these verses or deny that they hold any truth or value.   In a landscape of radical diversity, all religious options seem equally valid, valuable, and true, with the exception of views that exclude or subordinate others, or claim unique truth or authenticity.   This often finds expression in a consumer’s approach to religious belief:  pick and choose those things of religion—any religion—that appeal to you, that suit you, and moosh them all together into your particular faith.  “I’m spiritual but not religious” is a common tag line of such boutique faith.  A little bit of Christianity, of Buddhism, of mystic Islam or Judaism, stripped of their authoritative claims or difficult doctrines, of their craziness, and you can arrive at a pleasant blend all your own, like some customized pipe tobacco or drug stash.

To those who might find boutique religion attractive, it is important to remember wise words from the Dalai Lama.  He says that if you take a little of this faith and mix it with a little of that one, you have neither the one nor the other and cannot be properly formed by either. You never will sink your roots deeply enough into a single tradition to truly grow and mature spiritually.  It is only when you sink your roots deep, with an open heart and mind, and acquire some spiritual maturity that you can “branch out” and truly enjoy the fruits of another tradition.  “If you are Christian it is better to develop spiritually within your religion and be a genuine, good Christian. If you are a Buddhist, be a genuine Buddhist.” (H.H. the Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, p. 46).

Historically, the Church has read these verses and taught that Christ is the sole savior.  This usually entails claims that other faiths are deficient, and are only true or valid in the degree that they copy or agree with elements of Christian faith.  The most exclusionary form of this for the Roman Church has been the doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside of the Church, there is no salvation”).   Protestants have their own form of the doctrine, based on Romans 10:9.  Paul’s “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” in this view becomes, “unless you declare this with your mouth and believe this in your heart, you will not be saved.   

But this exclusionary doctrine has undergone a great shift in the last 40 years, primarily due to the work of Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who developed the doctrine of the Anonymous Christian.   The idea is that a person can live in God’s grace and attain salvation through Jesus even outside explicitly constituted or stated Christianity.  If a person, say a Buddhist nun or a Muslim imam, tries to do the right thing, be right with whatever God they conceive of, and follow his or her conscience, that person might be considered an anonymous Christian and be saved through Jesus’ victory over death and sin.  They would not have to explicitly accept Jesus or Christianity, or might even, because of circumstances and constraints, have rejected these explicitly.  But God’s universal salvific will and the greatness of God’s grace would save them too. 

The idea of the Anonymous Christian was promulgated as official Roman Catholic doctrine in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. 

The idea is also found among Protestants. The final book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, has the character Emeth, a Calormene prince who had fought against Aslan and Narnia and served his own god, Tash.  He has done his best to live uprightly within the traditions he as raised in.  In the end, Aslan receives him as one of his own with these words, “I and [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.^”  

The doctrine is also found in our Prayer Book, where we pray, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375).

Some have criticized this effort at Christian inclusivity saying that it is condescending.  “I’m Jewish, thank you very much, and do not want to become Christian, even anonymously” expresses the idea.  These critics say that a tradition is truly inclusive only when it recognizes that other traditions have truly separate paths and confesses that these too are valid, without need for any “anonymous” adoption into our tradition.  

There is, however, a prior issue here.  The verses that Christians use to endorse exclusivist claims, when examined carefully, don’t actually teach the doctrine of exclusive, brand-conscious religious truth.  They are concerned, rather, with something else.    Remember that Paul in Romans did not write, “if you don’t confess and believe, you won’t be saved.” 

Take also the verse at the end of today’s Acts reading: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”  That phrasing should strike you as odd if indeed what Peter had meant to say was “there is no other name by which we can be saved.”  The problem is starker in the Greek of the passage, which says “by which it is necessary for us to be saved.”  The context of the verse provides the clue necessary for us to see what it is actually trying to say:  Peter is answering the authorities’ question of how, or under whose authority (“by whose name”) he has performed a miracle.  In verse 9, Peter says he is explaining “how this man has been healed.”  The word healed translates the verb sosthenai, “to be saved,” the same verb he uses when he says “there is only one name given under heaven by which we must be saved.”    The logic of the argument in the passage requires that the verses in question mean something like this: It is through Jesus’ name that we healed this man.  Such healing does not come from just anywhere.  For Jesus is the only one God has ever raised from the dead.  Thus, if you use his name, you just have to be healed. You can’t say that about any other name that I know of.” 

Similarly, when Jesus in John says “I am the Good Shepherd, … and there will be one flock and one shepherd,” this is more an affirmation of the reliability of Jesus and an exuberant expression of how good this is, not how deficient others might be.  Though the text contrasts this model shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep with other “hireling” false shepherds, it chooses the Greek word for “one” that means “one among many” (heis) rather than the Greek word for “one and only one” (monos).   

We often lose the point of the image of the model shepherd:  shepherds, to be effective, need to establish a caring relationship with their sheep, being attentive to their various wanderings, bad choice of plants to eat, and the first signs of sickness.   It is the quality of the relationship with Jesus experienced by the believer that is at heart of the Good Shepherd image, and lies behind all the passages that might be construed as exclusionary. 

This is why we should not ignore these verses or believe they have nothing to teach us. 

We who have experienced the joy and sweetness of being shepherded by Jesus are bound by the quality of that experience of faith to share it with others.  But this is sharing, not sales promotion or brow beating, and must be based in the joy of our experience and our love for others, not some silly and misdirected fear that somehow they won’t be saved or blessed by God if they aren’t like us.   And this joyful sharing to which our experience and God calls us can only be cheapened if it is linked to a looking down our noses at the experience and faith of others as deficient or inadequate.   

Bishop and theologian Krister Stendahl once said that Christ calls us Christians to be the kind of people that others want to be around, not to constantly harp at others to become like us.  We must so show the joy of the good news that others will wonder at and want what we have, whether in their own tradition or by adopting ours.   

St. Francis said that we should preach the Gospel at all times and in all places, and only occasionally open our mouths to do so.   

That is why I told the deacon to go ahead and not use that half verse.  “I am the way, the life and the truth” was sufficient for our purposes at the funerals, and “no one comes to the Father except by me” raised far too many questions with little time to answer them. I happen to agree that it is almost inconceivable to experience God as Father in as an intensely personal way as Christians do apart from a faith in Christ as the Son of God.  But that does not mean that God is not at work in other faiths. 

May the love of the Good Shepherd, the power of this Jesus who calls us into relationship both with him and with those who differ from us, help us be the more respectful of others, and more intent listeners when their stories diverge from ours.

In the name of Christ, Amen.   

Surrender to Win (Proper 8 Year C Gospel)

Surrender to Win 

Luke 9:51-62
Homily delivered Fifth Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 8; Year C RCL)
27th June 2010; 10:15 a.m. Said Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20;
or 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21; Psalm 16;
Galatians 5:1, 13-25; Luke 9:51-62

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

I remember very vividly the moment when I knew I needed to leave the denomination of my youth and become an Episcopalian.   I read in Thomas Merton’s book Zen and the Birds of Appetite a passage that said something like this: “Any God that needs to be kept alive through constant effort of mind and acts of will is an idol." The next day, I read in Merton's Meditation and Spiritual Direction, "God does not expect us to be a robot army of victim souls.”  The two passages, taken together, spoke to me clearly and struck me to the core. 

I remembered that St. Paul says the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23).   These things were not present in what I had been calling my “spiritual life,” but I had glimpses of them in Episcopal worship.  The God I had been experiencing really did seem grim, set upon my becoming a robot, and I felt like a victim, and was angry.

 Thomas Merton

I realized I had been worshiping at the altar of an idol, and needed to come to the Table of Christ, the altar of the loving, gentle God of all. 
 
Jesus in today’s Gospel has his “face set to go to Jerusalem” and seems particularly grim, if not outright fierce.  He scolds a man who wants to take a day or so off so that he can fulfill that most basic obligation of a child, to bury his father.  “Let the dead bury their own dead,” he says.   He then refuses to let another go and bid his loved ones farewell.

These are two of the so-called “hard sayings” of Jesus.  It is important to understand what he is saying.

It is not that he wants us to be heartless robot souls.  He is not calling us all to be irresponsible people negligent of our duties and common decency.   Even in these verses, he reproves his followers for mean-spiritedness and he seems almost wistful in telling the other disciple just how hard the path he has chosen has been for him.

Jesus is set on the road to Jerusalem, where he will fight on behalf of all God’s creatures the final battle with Evil, the Powers of this world, Law, Guilt, Sickness, and with Death itself.    He is focused on the real and true dynamics of evil and death in the world.

These hard sayings are about a key issue, the very one behind Merton’s insight.  God is Love itself, Reality itself.  We must love God above all others.  All else—no matter how good—corrupt and are part of the reign of Evil that God sent Jesus to overthrow.  

Soren Kirkegaard

Danish theologian Soren Kirkegaard said “Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God . . . Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.”

The first of the Ten Commandments tells us something profound about the nature of sin and evil:  “I am the Lord Your God, and you shall have no other God before me.”   Jesus says that the first and most important of all the Law’s commandments is “You shall love God with all your heart, might, and mind.”  It is only then that we can truly love our neighbors (and our families) as ourselves.

When I was young, I took the image of a jealous God very literally, as if God were a very petty, insecure person who just couldn’t bear having us love anything or anyone beside him. After long, painful experience trying to find my sense of self worth apart from God I realized that the image of a jealous God is a distorted mirror image of us when we place other things in God’s stead.   It describes how our relationship with God feels to us when we don’t put God first. 

Everyone gets their identity, their sense of being distinct and valuable, from somewhere or something.  Sometimes it’s work, sometimes it’s duty, sometimes it’s relationships, sometimes it’s a search for one’s will or one’s own pleasure.

Kierkegaard’s point is that we are made in such a way that we must love God supremely, center our lives in him above anything else, and build our sense of worth and distinctness on him. As
Saint Augustine famously says in the Confessions, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee!”

This means that sin is not just choosing bad things.  It means that sin also includes choosing anything over God, even good things.   Even things like family relationships, obligations respected, and religious practices upheld.

These are good things.  But all good things, if pursued in the wrong context, in improper amounts, or without right motives, by their nature become distorted, become exploitative or harmful.

Think of the difference of the innocent pleasure of alcohol moderately indulged in among friends and the bitterness of the addiction of alcoholism, and its destruction of relationships and all enjoyment.   Contrast the loving joy of physical intimacy between newlyweds, and the exploitation and ruined self-esteem from intimacy outside of the right context.   Contrast the faith and religion of the truly humble who seek God’s will, whatever it may be, and try to do it as they find out more and more of it, with the harm done by religious people who are sure they have already found God’s will, close their hearts to further light and truth, and then insist that one size fits all.

Even such a basic good institution as the family can be distorted and turned into something very ugly if it is pursued as an end in itself.  “The family” without God is the Mafia.

The choice we have is this:  love God above all else or eventually lose all the other loves.  This is not because a petty jealous God will blast them to spite you, but because without that hole in our hearts filled by God,  we place too much expectation on these other loves, and we twist and ruin them.  

A right ordering of loves, putting love of God above all, redeems other loves already corrupted, and sanctifies and purifies all our loves, so that they be what God intends as he creates us.

You have to be willing to give the other loves up.  Not that you actually have to give them up, though this may be necessary, but that you be willing. 

Jesus said you must first lose your life in order to find it (Matthew 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; John 12:25).  He was describing from the inside what it feels like to reorder things, to put God at the center.

Twelve-Step recovery programs stress that the first steps in recovering from any addiction is admitting one’s powerlessness, coming to believe in power greater than oneself, then turning one’s will and life over to that greater power.

Several years ago, my wife and I encountered some real problems in our relationship.  We went in for couples counseling to help us sort things out.  It was a lot of hard work, but both of us wanted to make the marriage work.  Part of the problem was my wife’s burden of emotional hurt caused from years of selfish behavior on my part.  As long as I wanted to keep the relationship going for my own purposes, the counseling made little headway.   I then realized that out of love for her I needed to be willing to lose her and have her go her separate way if that is what she needed to be whole.  Only then was there a breakthrough.    Only when I was willing to lose her for her sake (and for the sake of God) were we able to start actually making progress in repairing the relationship.

Love is always a risk, whether it is love of God or love of others.  We often are afraid of trusting our fragile hearts to someone else, especially if our heart has been bruised or broken.  But not loving is not an option.

C. S. Lewis writes:  “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

Jesus is saying in this passage that you have to be willing to give up everything for God.  It’s as simple as that.  Whether you do this from desperation because nothing else seems to work, or out of pure love because of grace you have experienced, is irrelevant.  This side of paradise, our motives will always be mixed.  As St. Julian of Norwich taught, do the right thing regardless, and God will redeem your motives.  Just don’t think that this trusting God, this willingness to give up all for God, is somehow an act on your part that will make you worthy and put God in your debt.  Doing so would be just setting up another idol you will be putting ahead of God.

Putting God first, surrendering to God, means letting your own will and desires take second place.

It means having an open heart rather than a closed one.

It means sensing God’s love, and giving love in return.

It means doing good because we love it and want to, not because we are obligated to.  It means avoiding evil not because it is against the rules, and breaks the commandments of Law, but because it is not what we know God wants for us.

We are damaged goods, all of us. But God made us for a home we have not yet ever seen, and that we can barely even imagine now  And he loves us dearly, each and every one.

The death of our Lord on the cross, and his glorious coming forth from the grave not only shows us the way, but also gives us the power to return God’s love.

Let us all make the effort.  We must lose our lives to find them.  We must surrender to win.

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.