September 2015 – Proper 20

The first reading, from the apocryphal book The Wisdom of Solomon, is an ironic foray into the supposed psychology of unbelievers. The unrighteous, says the Wisdom author, find the presence of the righteous “inconvenient,” because those who pay attention to God’s guidance in the form of Torah and Wisdom traditions are a constant reminder that there can be another way to live. There are those who observe the visible conditions of life and conclude from them that “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from Hades”; from that conclusion they draw the further corollary that any pattern of action or “manner of life” that bases its decisions on perduring values or aims for eternal objects is “strange,” foolish, and a waste of time. To them, the “last end” of any life is a mere empty blank; and therefore anyone who claims that “the last end of the righteous is happy” will be speaking outrageous nonsense. Such a claim makes them fear that their own manner of life is “base” and “unclean.” And so they respond with outrage and contempt. “If being religious is so good,” they seem to ask, “what really does it get you?” They propose to test the believer to see if any good can actually come from religion: “Let us lie in wait for the righteous,” they scheme, “Let us test them with insult and torture, so that we may find out how gentle they are, and make trial of their forbearance.” The operative assumption behind these schemes is that, of course, gentleness and forbearance will disappear, as they would for any self-centered person, as soon as any real difficulty is encountered in life. But, says the Wisdom author, this reasoning of the unbelievers is flawed. “Their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God”; and their inability to conceive of any values or satisfactions that last beyond their own finite lifespans has led them unknowingly to make “a covenant” with death. The irony of unbelieving psychology is that it ends up believing far too much in what is immediate and obvious, and therefore cannot perceive or believe the “purposes of God” that extend to wider time horizons and deeper forms of life and experience. All that remains, then, is a destructive fury toward those whose lives do actually reflect those wider horizons and deeper experiences.

Psalm 54 echoes the first reading, pleading to God for rescue from “the arrogant” and “the ruthless” and “those who have no regard for God,” who “have risen up against me” and “sought my life.” Here again the link is made between disregard for God and ignorance of the ways of “prayer” and “sacrifice” and “praise” on the one hand, and murderous fury on the other. But where the Wisdom author is content to let God’s true purposes be revealed in a happy “last end” beyond death, the Psalmist seeks vindication more immediately, begging God to “render evil to those who spy on me; in your faithfulness, destroy them.” This puts the psalm and the first reading in an interesting tension: while both cite lack of faith in God as the source of unrighteousness and violence, and the Wisdom reading suggests that faith is an antidote to violence, the Psalm looks to God to repay violence with violence. Many people today argue that religion is a major factor in violence around the world, and that belief in a God almost requires murderous fury against those who do not believe. Various kinds of fundamentalism in the world’s religions seem to support this accusation. The Wisdom reading – and, below, the James and Mark readings as well – makes a different claim: that faith in God is a major motivator toward a different, non-violent response to the enmities and struggles of human life. They offer an alternative vision to the assertion that being “rescued from every trouble” is equivalent to seeing “the ruin of my foes.”

The opening verses of James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a provide an immediate echo of the Wisdom reading, speaking of the “gentleness born of wisdom.” James sets up an intractable contradiction between the wisdom “come down from above” and the cleverness or craftiness that resembles wisdom but is at heart “earthly, unspiritual, devilish.” It requires a certain ingenuity to exercise “envy and selfish ambition,” to satisfy the “cravings” and “covetings” that arise in the human heart. Manipulating people and resources “in order to spend on pleasures” takes a certain clever intelligence. This cleverness might, from the outside, look like practical wisdom and the skill to make a way in the world. But it is eventually self-destructive, collapsing in on itself in “disorder and wickedness,” “conflicts and disputes,” and “want” and “murder.” Over against this craftiness masquerading as wisdom is the divine wisdom, which is “first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” Instead of seeking only its own ends, this wisdom seeks practical ways to enact in human life the divine aims and ideals of God’s will for goodness in the world, the right-relationships of mutual well-being that constitute Beauty and Peace and the Adventure of the Universe as One. “Those who make peace” according to the guidance of divine wisdom sow potentials not only for their own immediate satisfaction, but also for long-term and widespread well-being for many, and thus prepare “a harvest of righteousness.” James thus echoes the contention of the first reading that violence stems from unbelief, from a lack of faithful trust in the ways of God, and from the anxious need to secure one’s own satisfactions without reference to wider aims or the not-immediately-visible “secret purposes” of God. The answer to such violence is the wisdom that elicits into prominence in experience the feeling for God’s Peace.

There are two subsections in Mark 9:30-37, one in which Jesus predicts his Passion for the second time, and one in which the disciples must learn about true greatness. Both illustrate the theme of gentle wisdom. In predicting his Passion, Jesus is clear that he will be the victim of betrayal and violence, yet he does not intend to offer any kind of resistance. He will not offer violence for violence, or even pray for or predict the downfall and ruin of his enemies. Instead, his response to violence is to place his reliance in God, and in the promise of life that God extends; instead of fighting back or visiting destruction on his oppressors, he will “rise again” and demonstrate even to the violent that violence cannot undo the Peace of God. And if that is Jesus’ intention, then it must also be the intention of those who follow Jesus. When the disciples are caught in the act of arguing with each other which is the greatest among them – an argument we must assume is born of a sense of competitiveness, perhaps even aggression, between them – they are at first so ashamed of themselves that they can only be “silent” before Jesus’ questioning. They already know this is not the spirit that Jesus is teaching them to maintain with each other. But Jesus makes the point still more forcefully: he tells them that “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” a version of his frequent teaching theme of the Great Reversal; and he illustrates it by placing a child in their midst and in his own embrace, and telling them that “whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” and that to welcome him is in fact to welcome the one who sent him. It is helpful to remember that the ancient world did not idealize children the way the Romantic and late modern mindset do; while children were highly valued as a sign of prosperity and as potential future adults and workers, any individual child was more often seen as property of the paterfamilias, as a person-in-the-making more than as a true human. We must be careful not to sentimentalize Jesus’ symbolic action here: by identifying his welcome with the welcome of a child, Jesus is identifying himself as marginal, as not-fully-valued by the dominant culture, as someone terribly easy to overlook and ignore. Greatness in the commonwealth of God is not determined in the way the disciples were trying to determine it, but is instead measured by the way in which one welcomes the inconsequential, the way in which one is willing to become inconsequential in order to enable the welcome of others. True greatness is not about being able to assert your own will or establish your own prominence, by violent means if necessary; true greatness is about welcoming and being welcomed for the sake of gentle wisdom and the ideals of God. This is what the disciples are too ashamed to admit and to afraid to ask. This is what Jesus must demonstrate in his Passion and vindicate in his Resurrection. This is what we also must seek in our wisdom and ways in our world.