The Gift of Angry Jesus--March 31, 2020
"So the Pharisees and the scribes asked [Jesus], 'Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?' He said to them, 'Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.' Then he said to them, 'You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and 'However speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.' But you said that if anyone tells father or mother, Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban (that is, an offering to God)--then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this'." [Mark 7:5-13]
I have come to love the moments when Jesus gets angry in the Gospels--because his anger is always born out of his love for people. And most of the time that anger is directed at the leading members of the Respectable Religious People's club, because they have found a way to miss the point and value things or traditions or their own position more than people. And if you ask Jesus, the clearest way to love God is to love the people around you.
This is the reason I am rediscovering an unexpected appreciation for this sharp little exchange between Jesus and the Respectable Religious Leaders. They think they are pointing out a flaw in Jesus' teaching because his disciples don't practice the ritual washing that was emerging in some Jewish circles at the time. Now, as a quick time-eth out here, Jesus isn't anti-handwashing (please, don't misunderstand that much!), and Jesus isn't even opposed to the idea of a ritual sort of handwashing as an expression of your faith. (Again, nobody back in the first century was thinking about "germs"--that's a modern notion. This was all about the categories of ceremonial purity, with its categories of "clean" and "unclean." So please, keep washing your hands for thirty seconds with soap and water.) The problem is that these religious professionals are trying to pose a "gotcha" question to catch Jesus, and he just won't play their stupid games anymore, because he's tired of the ways they have found to use religious game-playing for their own profits and at the expense of the elderly.
That's why Jesus pivots here in this confrontation to the issue of ritual handwashing to this other relatively obscure issue that refers to as "Corban." The gist seems to have been that someone could declare some part of their wealth as being "devoted to God," and therefore it was not able to be used for any other purpose--even if your aging parents were in need of provision and care! The Respectable Religious Crowd taught that it was holier to keep your pile of money officially "dedicated to the Lord" than to go ahead and spend as much of it as you needed to for the sake of caring for your parents. And Jesus just plainly saw this is as a total misunderstanding of what matters to God. It's always people. It's not about maintaining profits--not even for a supposedly religious cause.
God, after all, doesn't need our money, doesn't need our treasures, and doesn't need our offerings. But your neighbor... or your aging parent who can no longer work... or the senior citizen next door who is living on a fixed income... or for that matter the single mom on the next block over who doesn't know how she'll feed her kids after being laid off... these people do need our care. And Jesus says the choice is easy: we take care of people before we worry about buying more gold candlesticks for the altar or padding out the vacation fund. Raising up other people... caring for those who have their backs to the wall (as Howard Thurman used to put it)… and providing for the needs of others, (especially the generation before us that gave us life!) is how you show your devotion to God. Otherwise we are just sacrificing our parents and grandparents on the altar of wealth.
And Jesus just needs to be clear: the real and living God isn't hungry for those sacrifices.
And while I wouldn't have thought that needed to be said (because we so often assume we have all learned the lessons of the Gospels and have heard this all before), it seems we are once again in need of being reminded by Jesus himself, even an angry Jesus, that we owe more to the generation that bore us than we do to our own 401(k) accounts, our own vacation funds, and our stock portfolios. It's been only a few days since loud public voices were all insisting it would be better to risk more of the elderly dying or getting sick with COVID-19 than to have the stock markets lose more value and risk the economy slowing down too much. It was only last week that pundits were saying they would rather quickly send people back to regular work routines at the risk of spreading infection to their elderly parents and grandparents, so that the economy would recover faster, than to harm their precious profits. And for that matter, there are still lots of Respectable Religious folks insisting that the must hold to the "principle" of their freedom of religion and keep holding services in places where governors have ordered shelter-in-place closures, rather than to protect the lives of their neighbors, their parents and grandparents, or their own at-risk congregation members. And I can only assume that Jesus is rightly furious at it all.
See--we haven't learned. We Christians have a way of looking down on the religious leaders of Jesus' day as though the problem were specific to their being Pharisees. But that's not really the problem. We keep inventing new ways to avoid caring for our fathers and mothers and neighbors. We justify sacrificing them for the economy, or in the name of "religious liberty," and Jesus angrily and justly calls us out on all that garbage. He insists the way to love God truly is to love people more than your money and more than your pride and more than your sense of independence. And his fierceness is fueled by his love for the people we are tempted to think are expendable in the name of "freedom of religion" or "the good of the market."
This is a God worthy of our worship--a God who doesn't need to be fed with sacrifices of any kind, not of bulls and goats, and not of our grandparents, either. This is a God I would give my life to serving--one who is willing to get riled up and to toe-to-toe with Respectable Religious Leaders over their pretentious hypocrisies. This is why I love Jesus: he is always more interested in bringing people to life than in making a buck. All hail Lord Jesus, the face of God's ferocious love.
Lord Jesus, let us get riled up over the things that upset you, and let us root out the rottenness inside our own hearts and thinking that puts possessions or pride or profits about people you love.
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.' Then he said to them, 'You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and 'However speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.' But you said that if anyone tells father or mother, Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban (that is, an offering to God)--then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this'." [Mark 7:5-13]
I have come to love the moments when Jesus gets angry in the Gospels--because his anger is always born out of his love for people. And most of the time that anger is directed at the leading members of the Respectable Religious People's club, because they have found a way to miss the point and value things or traditions or their own position more than people. And if you ask Jesus, the clearest way to love God is to love the people around you.
This is the reason I am rediscovering an unexpected appreciation for this sharp little exchange between Jesus and the Respectable Religious Leaders. They think they are pointing out a flaw in Jesus' teaching because his disciples don't practice the ritual washing that was emerging in some Jewish circles at the time. Now, as a quick time-eth out here, Jesus isn't anti-handwashing (please, don't misunderstand that much!), and Jesus isn't even opposed to the idea of a ritual sort of handwashing as an expression of your faith. (Again, nobody back in the first century was thinking about "germs"--that's a modern notion. This was all about the categories of ceremonial purity, with its categories of "clean" and "unclean." So please, keep washing your hands for thirty seconds with soap and water.) The problem is that these religious professionals are trying to pose a "gotcha" question to catch Jesus, and he just won't play their stupid games anymore, because he's tired of the ways they have found to use religious game-playing for their own profits and at the expense of the elderly.
That's why Jesus pivots here in this confrontation to the issue of ritual handwashing to this other relatively obscure issue that refers to as "Corban." The gist seems to have been that someone could declare some part of their wealth as being "devoted to God," and therefore it was not able to be used for any other purpose--even if your aging parents were in need of provision and care! The Respectable Religious Crowd taught that it was holier to keep your pile of money officially "dedicated to the Lord" than to go ahead and spend as much of it as you needed to for the sake of caring for your parents. And Jesus just plainly saw this is as a total misunderstanding of what matters to God. It's always people. It's not about maintaining profits--not even for a supposedly religious cause.
God, after all, doesn't need our money, doesn't need our treasures, and doesn't need our offerings. But your neighbor... or your aging parent who can no longer work... or the senior citizen next door who is living on a fixed income... or for that matter the single mom on the next block over who doesn't know how she'll feed her kids after being laid off... these people do need our care. And Jesus says the choice is easy: we take care of people before we worry about buying more gold candlesticks for the altar or padding out the vacation fund. Raising up other people... caring for those who have their backs to the wall (as Howard Thurman used to put it)… and providing for the needs of others, (especially the generation before us that gave us life!) is how you show your devotion to God. Otherwise we are just sacrificing our parents and grandparents on the altar of wealth.
And Jesus just needs to be clear: the real and living God isn't hungry for those sacrifices.
And while I wouldn't have thought that needed to be said (because we so often assume we have all learned the lessons of the Gospels and have heard this all before), it seems we are once again in need of being reminded by Jesus himself, even an angry Jesus, that we owe more to the generation that bore us than we do to our own 401(k) accounts, our own vacation funds, and our stock portfolios. It's been only a few days since loud public voices were all insisting it would be better to risk more of the elderly dying or getting sick with COVID-19 than to have the stock markets lose more value and risk the economy slowing down too much. It was only last week that pundits were saying they would rather quickly send people back to regular work routines at the risk of spreading infection to their elderly parents and grandparents, so that the economy would recover faster, than to harm their precious profits. And for that matter, there are still lots of Respectable Religious folks insisting that the must hold to the "principle" of their freedom of religion and keep holding services in places where governors have ordered shelter-in-place closures, rather than to protect the lives of their neighbors, their parents and grandparents, or their own at-risk congregation members. And I can only assume that Jesus is rightly furious at it all.
See--we haven't learned. We Christians have a way of looking down on the religious leaders of Jesus' day as though the problem were specific to their being Pharisees. But that's not really the problem. We keep inventing new ways to avoid caring for our fathers and mothers and neighbors. We justify sacrificing them for the economy, or in the name of "religious liberty," and Jesus angrily and justly calls us out on all that garbage. He insists the way to love God truly is to love people more than your money and more than your pride and more than your sense of independence. And his fierceness is fueled by his love for the people we are tempted to think are expendable in the name of "freedom of religion" or "the good of the market."
This is a God worthy of our worship--a God who doesn't need to be fed with sacrifices of any kind, not of bulls and goats, and not of our grandparents, either. This is a God I would give my life to serving--one who is willing to get riled up and to toe-to-toe with Respectable Religious Leaders over their pretentious hypocrisies. This is why I love Jesus: he is always more interested in bringing people to life than in making a buck. All hail Lord Jesus, the face of God's ferocious love.
Lord Jesus, let us get riled up over the things that upset you, and let us root out the rottenness inside our own hearts and thinking that puts possessions or pride or profits about people you love.
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