September 2015 – Proper 19

Today’s readings begin with a passage of confidence in God in the face of opposition. These verses from Isaiah 50:4-9a are chosen to complement the prediction of the Passion in Mark; in that connection the lines “I gave my back to those who struck me, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting” are especially indicative. They set the stage for the deep faithfulness and confidence of “It is the Lord GOD who helps me; who will declare me guilty?” But it is particularly worth noting that this help and confidence are set in a context of mutual co-creativity: both God and the prophet are involved in creating the faithful witness and the strength to stand against opposition. The prophet has “the tongue of a teacher” and with it can “sustain the weary with a word.” But the prophet has received that teaching ability by being one who is taught: “Morning by morning he wakens – wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.” Without such listening there could be no sustaining word; but without the active work of speaking, the word of teaching would remain a latent potentiality with no realization. God and the prophet each contribute to the teaching moment; and that is why the word can both sustain the weary and also sustain the prophet himself in adversity. The verses serve therefore not only as a prediction of Jesus’ Passion, but as encouragement to anyone who speaks truth to power, to anyone who gives of their human witness to join in the divine mission to make truth.

The portion of the Psalter in Psalm 116:1-8 continues in the vein of predicting the Passion; but the relationship between the Psalmist and God seems much more passive here than in Isaiah or Mark. “The cords of death entangled me; the grip of the grave took hold of me,” the Psalmist says, which certainly fits with Jesus’ expectation that he will be rejected and killed. But where Isaiah “sets his face like flint” and Jesus “says all this quite openly,” the Psalmist does not seem to take a very active role in co-creating with God the moment of witness and confidence. “I called upon the Name of the LORD,” the poet says, intiating an action; but it is God who is active after that, watching over the innocent, treating the poet well, rescuing from death. The most the poet must do is to say “Turn again to your rest, O my soul,” which seems oddly lacking in witness or mission or active discipleship. Nevertheless, paired as it is with Isaiah and James and Mark, the Psalmist’s confidence to “walk in the presence of the LORD in the land of the living” could be taken as a commitment to bear witness to God’s saving power even in the midst of adversity.

While James 3:1-12 opens with what appears to be a link to the Isaiah passage in the reference to “teachers,” the main body of this reading is moral teaching on the dangers of excessive speech and the importance of custody of the tongue. James may actually seem to be a little excessive in his warnings against excessive speech: he calls the tongue a “fire,” a “world of iniquity,” a source of “stain,” a “restless evil,” a “deadly poison.” James is not even particularly clear about what is so bad about the tongue: he mentions “boasts” and “cursing”; but these two particular sins do not seem sufficient to explain the general condemnation of the tongue that drives this passage. All of this can seem very foreign to a late-modern reader, in a culture where a 24/7 news cycle, hundreds of cable channels on multiple viewing screens throughout houses and bars and airports, continual music on broadcast and MP3 players, constant updates on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram – in short, an inundation of communication and information and endless speech – is simply the norm, is just the way we live, and a moment of silence or an occasion of people in proximity not speaking to each other seems awkward and rude and to be avoided. In part we may say this is just a cultural difference: James in his pre-technological society simply did not have the same kinds of communication resources we do, and had a higher expectation of quiet; we, being able to communicate much more easily, are more accustomed to constant speech. But perhaps this can be taken in a deeper way as well. Perhaps we can understand this passage as inviting us to speak more intentionally, not as if speech in itself is necessarily bad, but as mindful of the power of speech and choosing to use that power sparingly. If the tongue is not necessarily a “restless evil,” it can still be said to be restless, and a constant desire to fill the quiet with talk or conversation or news or monologue or gossip or self-narration can become such a distraction that the mind is not able to listen for the still small voice of God, for the whispers of aims and ideals and lures to feeling that are God’s invitations to us to join in co-creation. Isaiah had to “listen as those who are taught”; the Psalmist needed “rest” in his “soul” to walk in the “presence” of the Lord; Jesus admonished Peter to “set his mind on divine things” rather than his own nagging fears and expectations; but no one can listen or rest or set the mind if the restlessness of constant loquacity drives them. It may be that, if we heed James’s warning, if we speak less often and more carefully, our speech may be more of a blessing, more a co-creation with God, more a participation in God’s mission of communion. Such participation in God’s mission by co-creating speech should be the aim of any “teacher.”

The thread that binds together the three subsections of Mark 8:27-38 is the question of identity. Jesus asks the disciples who they say he is; Peter must decide where he will set his mind, and therefore what aims and ideals will guide the becoming of his identity; Jesus teaches the crowd that they must lose selves they have known in order to find true selfhood in the Gospel. The episode of the disciples’ first identification of Jesus as the Messiah is perhaps better known in the Matthean version, where it culminates in Jesus giving Simon bar-Jonah the new name “Peter.” Mark’s telling is simpler, throwing the emphasis not on Peter’s insight but the disclosure of Jesus’ true identity. But even the title “Messiah” does not reveal the whole truth of who Jesus is: Jesus must still teach his followers that being Messiah does not mean being an anointed king to raise an army and drive out the Romans, reestablishing the Davidic kingdom; instead, being Messiah means being rejected by the powers-that-be, being killed, and demonstrating in his own person how the co-creative God can take even the worst wreckage of human existence and open up from it new possibilities for life. Jesus faces this certainty of rejection with confidence in God, as illustrated in the Isaiah passage above; but more than that, Jesus builds his own inner identity, his very sense of who he is and what his life is for, on his intimate and intentional relationship with God, the way he receives aims from God and embodies them in his concrete actions. This is what Jesus means by “setting the mind on divine things”; this is why Jesus can refer to God as “his Father”: because Jesus recognizes the origins of his actions and his very selfhood in his relationship with God. This is what Peter misunderstands when he takes Jesus aside and advises him not to speak of rejection and death as being the role of the Messiah. On one level, Peter is still thinking of the Messiah as a human military power, whose rejection and death would be the very opposite of the promised restoration; but on a deeper level Peter is still thinking of human life as self-referential and self-contained and needing to be self-preserved, not as grounded in an ultimate reference to God. So Jesus “rebukes” him, urging him to guide his becoming not according to human fears of loss and destruction and death, but to set his mind on divine aims and to derive his sense of self from confidence that God will never stop offering him co-creative aims for good even out of his own wreckage. It is that same invitation that Jesus then offers to the crowd, couched now in the language of losing and saving life. The word Mark uses for “life” in the Greek text is psyche; and that word has many levels of meaning. It can mean the animating principle that makes the difference between a person and a corpse; but it can also mean “soul” or “self” or “personeity.” So Jesus’ teaching on losing life for him and for the Gospel can point to actual martyrdom, as it is often interpreted. But more broadly, it can also point to a spiritual discipline of de-centering the self from its own anxious self-preservation and re-centering it on God, on accepting aims from God and making them the self’s own. Such re-centering gives rise to an identity shaped and grounded in relationship with God, not on an illusion of self-sufficiency. Giving up the illusory self and finding true self in Jesus-like co-creative relationship with God is what it means to “take up the cross and follow Jesus.” Such following may lead to rejection and suffering and even martyrdom – it is inevitable that genuine love will encounter opposition in an “adulterous and sinful generation” – but it is also a way of living that leads to richness of experience, adventure, zest, and peace: intensity of feeling with harmony of feeling in the embodiment of divine aims for giving and receiving with freedom and generosity in the making of right-relationships for mutual well-being. This is the ground of Jesus’ identity, and he invites his followers to share that ground for their identity as well.