Sing a song of silverfish, a thimble full of sky.
When Maggie caught the mockingbird, it called her, "Maggie Pie."
When Anna, in her dancing gown, asked all the stones to spin,
The silverfish danced to the gate, and Maggie let them in!
Dandelions, daffodils, and buttercups are we.
We sing our yellow flower songs to butterflies and bees.
The bees buzz in the clover patch, MacKenzie's in the tree.
The butterfly plays in the sun and tickles MacKenzie's knee!
Christina was a ladybug, and Angela was too.
They lived inside a teacup Anna painted all in blue.
They rested on their leaves of grass for half a dreamy day,
Then Anna tossed the teacup up and told them, "Fly away!"
Jim Weller is a graduate of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is currently a member of Peace United Church of Christ, formerly called First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Sermon Preached Sunday August 14, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Santa Cruz
Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Thus said the LORD:
“Observe what is right and do what is just;
For soon my salvation shall come,
And my deliverance be revealed.
And the foreigners
Who join themselves to the LORD,
To minister to God,
And to love the name of the LORD,
To be his servants -
All who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it,
And who hold fast to My covenant -
I will bring them to My sacred mount
And let them rejoice in My house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
Shall be welcome on My altar;
For my house shall be called
A house of prayer for all peoples.
Thus says the LORD God,
Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
“I will gather still more to those already
gathered.”
Reflection: On the Hope of Israel
Those are the words of the ancient Jewish author known to Bible scholars as Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah. He is thought to have been among the second generation of Judeans exiled in Babylon in the sixth century BC. Fifty years before then, the Babylonian empire had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon’s temple. The Babylonian armies decimated the Jewish population, and took captive large numbers of the Jewish elites. The captives became a dislocated community living in a foreign land, until Babylon finally was conquered by the rising Persian Empire. Then the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great restored the exiles to Jerusalem.
Deutero-Isaiah wrote in the tradition of the prophet Isaiah, who lived earlier in the sixth century, in the final period of First Temple Jerusalem. Like the original Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah looked forward to the dawn of a new era, but apparently he no longer held any expectation that a descendant of King David (or any other human being, for that matter) would reign as king in a restored Jerusalem. Rather, God alone would rule over all Creation in that day. Thus, Deutero-Isaiah foretells of a messianic era, but not of a personal Messiah.
At first, like Isaiah before him, Second Isaiah predicted a return to Zion that would usher in a renaissance of the Judean commonwealth, a reunification of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel, disjoined since 922 BC, bringing restoration of the wholeness, sovereignty, and peace of King David’s once expansive realm. This would be an era of amity among all nations throughout the world, the end of Gentile ignorance in disregard of the true God of Israel.
Unfortunately, though the reconstructed Second Temple in Jerusalem was dedicated near the end of the century, the Judaic restoration did not have such far-reaching effects. Judah became no more than a poor, insignificant province of Persia – not an exalted, independent Jewish state directly ruled by God.
Relatively few of the exiles availed themselves of the opportunity to return to Zion, and the world remained largely unchanged. Still, Second Isaiah continued to predict that a greater ingathering of exiles would occur, and that a new and holy world order would eventually appear.
We don’t know how significant these hopeful prophesies were in Jerusalem over the following five hundred years, but after the end of the Second Temple period they were appropriated with great significance by the early Christian author of the Gospel According to Mark, and by the authors of Matthew and Luke, following Mark.
That’s why we’re reading from Isaiah in today’s lectionary. The Gospels anticipated the realization of Second Isaiah’s prophecy in a hoped-for new world they said was proclaimed by Jesus as the coming kingdom of God.
So let’s fast-forward six hundred fifty years or so from the advent of the Second Temple era to a reading from Mark and Matthew about Jesus in his time.
Matthew 15:10-20, 21-28
Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand:
it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”
Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?”
He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.
Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.”
But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.”
Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding?
Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?
But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.
For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.
These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.
Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”
She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Reflection: He Who Was Called Christ
Today’s Gospel reading pretty obviously is a pair of unrelated pericopes, as set in the Gospel According to Matthew. Pericope. Isn’t that a great word? Pericope is derived from the Greek, by way of Late Latin, meaning, literally, a “clipping” or a “cutting” – a “piece cut out.” A pericope is a selection of text, an extract from a book, usually the Bible.
It’s easy to see that our reading involves two selections, cut and pasted together. This cutting and pasting is typical of the way the authors of the Gospels assembled their materials. In both of these, Matthew used Mark as a source for the narratives, incorporating the received text more or less intact, with some variations and elaboration.
Mark was the earliest written of the New Testament Gospels, put together about fifty years after Jesus died from a collection of oral and written traditions about Jesus, with a liberal dose of invention and imagination. Matthew and Luke both were published some twenty years later. Each of them incorporated most of the Mark material, with additions from other sources.
Our first pericope is about what defiles a person spiritually. This theme may have reflected an authentic teaching of Jesus, though it is not found in the more recently discovered collection of Jesus’ sayings known as the Gospel of Thomas, nor in any of the other ancient documents known as the Nag Hammadi Library – both of which are thought to have existed prior to the composition of Mark. On the other hand, the teaching concerning what defiles a person may have been a Markan invention attributed to Jesus.
There are two particular sentences in this reading not directly related to the theme of defilement, though, which belong to the hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings known as Q. Those are the warnings that the plant not planted by the heavenly father shall be uprooted, and the one about the blind leading the blind.
All put together, we have a composite discourse against the piety of the Pharisees who required ritual purity for Jews, and who demanded strict conformity with the letter of the law of the Torah – in this instance, a critique of the Pharisees’ application of kosher rules regulating ritual purification of foods.
There are two streams of Jesus tradition combined here.
The first is typical of the authentic Jesus teachings, emphasizing the importance of moral discernment as a matter of religious character, the saying that “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,” insisting that uncleanness and depravity of this kind – not merely ritual impurity – is what defiles a person morally and spiritually.
In perhaps the most memorable of the Gospel scenarios, Jesus quotes the Hebrew Scriptures, saying,
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might and . . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these greatest commandments, Jesus said, “depend all the Torah and all the Prophets.” To love God is to love God’s Creation as well. To love one’s neighbor as oneself is corollary, because we all are aspects of God’s Creation. Love in action, Jesus taught, is the moral test for every practical application of the Torah’s standards for religious purity.
The other theme, more polemically against the Pharisees, is related to an issue especially significant in the time of the latter-day followers of the Jesus traditions, when Mark and Matthew were composed.
By then, the general project of differentiating the religious commitments of emerging Judeo-Christian communities from the conventional observance of Jewish Torah rituals had become important for congregations comprised mostly of Greek-speaking Gentiles. For them, Jewish standards of ritual purity were burdensome and unacceptable. Mark composed for Jesus a discourse to support this view, one that arose from certain religious circumstances of his own time, which had not yet emerged as current concerns in Jesus’ lifetime.
The bottom-line faith commitment of the New Testament Gospels is that in the church of Jesus Christ faithful Gentiles are members of the people of God just as authentically as faithful Jews are – and without regard to whether or not they observe the ritual purity requirements of Torah with the same alacrity as their Jewish brethren.
Jesus though, like any of us, was presumably a man of his own time; and he was one hundred percent Jewish – as we see in our second pericope.
Here we find him and his disciples in foreign territory, having wandered out of their home region of Jewish villages in the hill country of ancient Israel, into a coastal district now part of southern Lebanon. Matthew called the people of that place Canaanites; Mark called them Syro-Phoenecian. To Jesus and his disciples, they were aliens, people of non-Jewish ethnicity. They were Gentiles.
There is no gospel narrative in which Jesus teaches a Gentile, and only one other Gentile-healing episode. Nor do Jesus and his disciples stray outside Jewish precincts, except in two instances, of which this is one. It does seem that Jesus’ message, in his own time, was exclusively for God’s chosen people. Those were the people of Moses’ covenant, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the Jewish people.
To the contrary of the post-resurrection gloss in the New Testament, it appears that the good news of God that Jesus proclaimed during his lifetime was only for the descendants of the sons of Jacob – not for the whole world.
I’m not sure what to think about this vignette, one featuring a hostile Jesus with a chauvinistic, in-your-face attitude. I’m sure the evangelistic author of this narrative invented its setting and composed the dialogue – with a distinctive message in mind. But still, we might have a glimpse of the real Jesus here.
This aspect of Jesus’ Jewish persona could have been preserved authentically in an oral tradition received by the author of the first Gospel. It would not really have been out of character to find an observant Jew of Jesus’ time insulting and humiliating a Gentile woman – despite Jesus’ moral critiques of false piety found in other contexts.
Think of another Matthew passage, the one in which Jesus compares his followers’ discipleship to the light of the world, and to a city set on a hill. We read that people do not “light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all the house.” The phrase, “all the house” is of course an exclusive reference to the House of Israel.
On the other hand, in the Luke version, the lamp is put up on a stand, “that all those who enter may see the light.” Here we have the Gospels’ inclusive, universalizing, ecumenical message to “the whole inhabited world.”
Though some of the intended audience for Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels were Jewish, they were living in reformed modes – in full fellowship with Gentiles. They were no longer practicing the religion of Jesus of Nazareth and his contemporaries. They were developing a revisionist religion concerned with Jesus the Christ – not as he was in life, but as he was mythologized, in the changing post-Judaic tradition.
And that tradition, expressed in the New Testament Gospels, is the tradition we have received. We can’t reach back to a time decades before the first Gospel, to discover who Jesus actually was. There aren’t any contemporary accounts. We simply cannot know historically very much about Jesus, who lived and died two millennia ago – he who was called Christ.
So we interpret the scriptures we have as best we can, using the tools of critical scholarship and the insights of tradition. We construct meaning for ourselves on the basis of tradition and scripture, but more importantly, by application of our own experience and reason.
The thrust of the Christian gospel, extending to everyone everywhere Jesus’ perhaps parochial message, is that God’s Presence, God’s redeeming grace, and God’s covenanted relationship with all humankind, indeed with all Creation, is universal.
As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
So when Mark and Matthew conclude their narrative with the Gentile woman asserting her own inherent worth and dignity, and with Jesus in response casting this as a powerful confession of faith, the same message of universal salvation is prefigured.
In our own time, we carry that faithful principle forward, seeking to embrace all differences among us in the circle of our beloved community.
The author of Mark, writing for the faithful of his time, also revived the six centuries old prophecies of Second Isaiah, to which Jesus himself apparently never referred in his authentic sayings. But these fit the anticipation of a Messianic glory to come that was so characteristic of the Gospels.
We know now how the nineteen centuries between their time and ours have instead been a history of pretty much one damned thing after another. Yet even today Christians everywhere hope and pray for a new dawn of the kind hailed by Deutero-Isaiah, for the coming of an era when peace and loving-kindness will prevail on earth, when the nations will be ruled in justice and mercy, when people everywhere will live together in faith and forgiveness.
We’re not naïve. We know how improbable it is that such a world transformation will become reality. And yet, somehow, we continue to hope in the power of love and faith, knowing that a more excellent way is possible, and that the way begins with each of us, following the moral example of Jesus, and extending his world-redeeming message of grace and salvation by our example to each person with whom we share our lives.
We try to live in the present as though our hope were already being fulfilled.
The earliest Christians – some of them anyway – actually imagined the second coming of Christ and the advent of the kingdom of God would happen to them in their lifetimes. Now I would guess that no one here actually anticipates that one day Jesus Christ will come roaring down from the sky in a blaze of glory, with angel trumpets blaring, to plant his banner triumphantly on the Mount of Olives.
And while we know that a mother’s faith and love, like that of the Canaanite woman, may banish something like a demon from her child’s soul, in our day we wouldn’t understand that as a supernatural miracle.
What is the good news of God for us, today?
I think of Jesus as the archetypal human person – the "Son of Man," a child of humankind, one who sought the Presence of God at the very center of his own being, and called on his people to join him in that quest. The good news of God today for us, I believe, is that God’s transforming Presence is with us here and now, as it was with Jesus, and has been always.
This ultimate and eternal reality is the unfathomable source of a love supreme, a transforming power that works in us, and among us, by the saving miracle of the spirit we call grace, through our acts of faith.
For God is with us so intimately that we are truly of God, and God is love, so that to love God is to love one another as oneself. This is the good news of God, and the ever-fulfilled promise of the holy covenant, ancient and new.
If we can no longer believe in the creeds and confessions of a past orthodoxy, we can take hold of the ancient vision of justice and redemption for all humankind, and we can become that vision by the very manner in which we live our lives.
The times change, and with them our lives and we must change. The signs of the changing times are all around us. Yet as it was written in the first century, so it is now that faith, hope, and love abide. And love is still the greatest of these. Let love light our way, for we know God is with us – as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Amen.
Thus said the LORD:
“Observe what is right and do what is just;
For soon my salvation shall come,
And my deliverance be revealed.
And the foreigners
Who join themselves to the LORD,
To minister to God,
And to love the name of the LORD,
To be his servants -
All who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it,
And who hold fast to My covenant -
I will bring them to My sacred mount
And let them rejoice in My house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
Shall be welcome on My altar;
For my house shall be called
A house of prayer for all peoples.
Thus says the LORD God,
Who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
“I will gather still more to those already
gathered.”
Reflection: On the Hope of Israel
Those are the words of the ancient Jewish author known to Bible scholars as Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah. He is thought to have been among the second generation of Judeans exiled in Babylon in the sixth century BC. Fifty years before then, the Babylonian empire had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon’s temple. The Babylonian armies decimated the Jewish population, and took captive large numbers of the Jewish elites. The captives became a dislocated community living in a foreign land, until Babylon finally was conquered by the rising Persian Empire. Then the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great restored the exiles to Jerusalem.
Deutero-Isaiah wrote in the tradition of the prophet Isaiah, who lived earlier in the sixth century, in the final period of First Temple Jerusalem. Like the original Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah looked forward to the dawn of a new era, but apparently he no longer held any expectation that a descendant of King David (or any other human being, for that matter) would reign as king in a restored Jerusalem. Rather, God alone would rule over all Creation in that day. Thus, Deutero-Isaiah foretells of a messianic era, but not of a personal Messiah.
At first, like Isaiah before him, Second Isaiah predicted a return to Zion that would usher in a renaissance of the Judean commonwealth, a reunification of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of Israel, disjoined since 922 BC, bringing restoration of the wholeness, sovereignty, and peace of King David’s once expansive realm. This would be an era of amity among all nations throughout the world, the end of Gentile ignorance in disregard of the true God of Israel.
Unfortunately, though the reconstructed Second Temple in Jerusalem was dedicated near the end of the century, the Judaic restoration did not have such far-reaching effects. Judah became no more than a poor, insignificant province of Persia – not an exalted, independent Jewish state directly ruled by God.
Relatively few of the exiles availed themselves of the opportunity to return to Zion, and the world remained largely unchanged. Still, Second Isaiah continued to predict that a greater ingathering of exiles would occur, and that a new and holy world order would eventually appear.
We don’t know how significant these hopeful prophesies were in Jerusalem over the following five hundred years, but after the end of the Second Temple period they were appropriated with great significance by the early Christian author of the Gospel According to Mark, and by the authors of Matthew and Luke, following Mark.
That’s why we’re reading from Isaiah in today’s lectionary. The Gospels anticipated the realization of Second Isaiah’s prophecy in a hoped-for new world they said was proclaimed by Jesus as the coming kingdom of God.
So let’s fast-forward six hundred fifty years or so from the advent of the Second Temple era to a reading from Mark and Matthew about Jesus in his time.
Matthew 15:10-20, 21-28
Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand:
it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”
Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?”
He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.
Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.”
But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.”
Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding?
Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?
But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.
For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.
These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.
Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”
She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Reflection: He Who Was Called Christ
Today’s Gospel reading pretty obviously is a pair of unrelated pericopes, as set in the Gospel According to Matthew. Pericope. Isn’t that a great word? Pericope is derived from the Greek, by way of Late Latin, meaning, literally, a “clipping” or a “cutting” – a “piece cut out.” A pericope is a selection of text, an extract from a book, usually the Bible.
It’s easy to see that our reading involves two selections, cut and pasted together. This cutting and pasting is typical of the way the authors of the Gospels assembled their materials. In both of these, Matthew used Mark as a source for the narratives, incorporating the received text more or less intact, with some variations and elaboration.
Mark was the earliest written of the New Testament Gospels, put together about fifty years after Jesus died from a collection of oral and written traditions about Jesus, with a liberal dose of invention and imagination. Matthew and Luke both were published some twenty years later. Each of them incorporated most of the Mark material, with additions from other sources.
Our first pericope is about what defiles a person spiritually. This theme may have reflected an authentic teaching of Jesus, though it is not found in the more recently discovered collection of Jesus’ sayings known as the Gospel of Thomas, nor in any of the other ancient documents known as the Nag Hammadi Library – both of which are thought to have existed prior to the composition of Mark. On the other hand, the teaching concerning what defiles a person may have been a Markan invention attributed to Jesus.
There are two particular sentences in this reading not directly related to the theme of defilement, though, which belong to the hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings known as Q. Those are the warnings that the plant not planted by the heavenly father shall be uprooted, and the one about the blind leading the blind.
All put together, we have a composite discourse against the piety of the Pharisees who required ritual purity for Jews, and who demanded strict conformity with the letter of the law of the Torah – in this instance, a critique of the Pharisees’ application of kosher rules regulating ritual purification of foods.
There are two streams of Jesus tradition combined here.
The first is typical of the authentic Jesus teachings, emphasizing the importance of moral discernment as a matter of religious character, the saying that “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,” insisting that uncleanness and depravity of this kind – not merely ritual impurity – is what defiles a person morally and spiritually.
In perhaps the most memorable of the Gospel scenarios, Jesus quotes the Hebrew Scriptures, saying,
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might and . . . you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these greatest commandments, Jesus said, “depend all the Torah and all the Prophets.” To love God is to love God’s Creation as well. To love one’s neighbor as oneself is corollary, because we all are aspects of God’s Creation. Love in action, Jesus taught, is the moral test for every practical application of the Torah’s standards for religious purity.
The other theme, more polemically against the Pharisees, is related to an issue especially significant in the time of the latter-day followers of the Jesus traditions, when Mark and Matthew were composed.
By then, the general project of differentiating the religious commitments of emerging Judeo-Christian communities from the conventional observance of Jewish Torah rituals had become important for congregations comprised mostly of Greek-speaking Gentiles. For them, Jewish standards of ritual purity were burdensome and unacceptable. Mark composed for Jesus a discourse to support this view, one that arose from certain religious circumstances of his own time, which had not yet emerged as current concerns in Jesus’ lifetime.
The bottom-line faith commitment of the New Testament Gospels is that in the church of Jesus Christ faithful Gentiles are members of the people of God just as authentically as faithful Jews are – and without regard to whether or not they observe the ritual purity requirements of Torah with the same alacrity as their Jewish brethren.
Jesus though, like any of us, was presumably a man of his own time; and he was one hundred percent Jewish – as we see in our second pericope.
Here we find him and his disciples in foreign territory, having wandered out of their home region of Jewish villages in the hill country of ancient Israel, into a coastal district now part of southern Lebanon. Matthew called the people of that place Canaanites; Mark called them Syro-Phoenecian. To Jesus and his disciples, they were aliens, people of non-Jewish ethnicity. They were Gentiles.
There is no gospel narrative in which Jesus teaches a Gentile, and only one other Gentile-healing episode. Nor do Jesus and his disciples stray outside Jewish precincts, except in two instances, of which this is one. It does seem that Jesus’ message, in his own time, was exclusively for God’s chosen people. Those were the people of Moses’ covenant, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the Jewish people.
To the contrary of the post-resurrection gloss in the New Testament, it appears that the good news of God that Jesus proclaimed during his lifetime was only for the descendants of the sons of Jacob – not for the whole world.
I’m not sure what to think about this vignette, one featuring a hostile Jesus with a chauvinistic, in-your-face attitude. I’m sure the evangelistic author of this narrative invented its setting and composed the dialogue – with a distinctive message in mind. But still, we might have a glimpse of the real Jesus here.
This aspect of Jesus’ Jewish persona could have been preserved authentically in an oral tradition received by the author of the first Gospel. It would not really have been out of character to find an observant Jew of Jesus’ time insulting and humiliating a Gentile woman – despite Jesus’ moral critiques of false piety found in other contexts.
Think of another Matthew passage, the one in which Jesus compares his followers’ discipleship to the light of the world, and to a city set on a hill. We read that people do not “light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all the house.” The phrase, “all the house” is of course an exclusive reference to the House of Israel.
On the other hand, in the Luke version, the lamp is put up on a stand, “that all those who enter may see the light.” Here we have the Gospels’ inclusive, universalizing, ecumenical message to “the whole inhabited world.”
Though some of the intended audience for Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels were Jewish, they were living in reformed modes – in full fellowship with Gentiles. They were no longer practicing the religion of Jesus of Nazareth and his contemporaries. They were developing a revisionist religion concerned with Jesus the Christ – not as he was in life, but as he was mythologized, in the changing post-Judaic tradition.
And that tradition, expressed in the New Testament Gospels, is the tradition we have received. We can’t reach back to a time decades before the first Gospel, to discover who Jesus actually was. There aren’t any contemporary accounts. We simply cannot know historically very much about Jesus, who lived and died two millennia ago – he who was called Christ.
So we interpret the scriptures we have as best we can, using the tools of critical scholarship and the insights of tradition. We construct meaning for ourselves on the basis of tradition and scripture, but more importantly, by application of our own experience and reason.
The thrust of the Christian gospel, extending to everyone everywhere Jesus’ perhaps parochial message, is that God’s Presence, God’s redeeming grace, and God’s covenanted relationship with all humankind, indeed with all Creation, is universal.
As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
So when Mark and Matthew conclude their narrative with the Gentile woman asserting her own inherent worth and dignity, and with Jesus in response casting this as a powerful confession of faith, the same message of universal salvation is prefigured.
In our own time, we carry that faithful principle forward, seeking to embrace all differences among us in the circle of our beloved community.
The author of Mark, writing for the faithful of his time, also revived the six centuries old prophecies of Second Isaiah, to which Jesus himself apparently never referred in his authentic sayings. But these fit the anticipation of a Messianic glory to come that was so characteristic of the Gospels.
We know now how the nineteen centuries between their time and ours have instead been a history of pretty much one damned thing after another. Yet even today Christians everywhere hope and pray for a new dawn of the kind hailed by Deutero-Isaiah, for the coming of an era when peace and loving-kindness will prevail on earth, when the nations will be ruled in justice and mercy, when people everywhere will live together in faith and forgiveness.
We’re not naïve. We know how improbable it is that such a world transformation will become reality. And yet, somehow, we continue to hope in the power of love and faith, knowing that a more excellent way is possible, and that the way begins with each of us, following the moral example of Jesus, and extending his world-redeeming message of grace and salvation by our example to each person with whom we share our lives.
We try to live in the present as though our hope were already being fulfilled.
The earliest Christians – some of them anyway – actually imagined the second coming of Christ and the advent of the kingdom of God would happen to them in their lifetimes. Now I would guess that no one here actually anticipates that one day Jesus Christ will come roaring down from the sky in a blaze of glory, with angel trumpets blaring, to plant his banner triumphantly on the Mount of Olives.
And while we know that a mother’s faith and love, like that of the Canaanite woman, may banish something like a demon from her child’s soul, in our day we wouldn’t understand that as a supernatural miracle.
What is the good news of God for us, today?
I think of Jesus as the archetypal human person – the "Son of Man," a child of humankind, one who sought the Presence of God at the very center of his own being, and called on his people to join him in that quest. The good news of God today for us, I believe, is that God’s transforming Presence is with us here and now, as it was with Jesus, and has been always.
This ultimate and eternal reality is the unfathomable source of a love supreme, a transforming power that works in us, and among us, by the saving miracle of the spirit we call grace, through our acts of faith.
For God is with us so intimately that we are truly of God, and God is love, so that to love God is to love one another as oneself. This is the good news of God, and the ever-fulfilled promise of the holy covenant, ancient and new.
If we can no longer believe in the creeds and confessions of a past orthodoxy, we can take hold of the ancient vision of justice and redemption for all humankind, and we can become that vision by the very manner in which we live our lives.
The times change, and with them our lives and we must change. The signs of the changing times are all around us. Yet as it was written in the first century, so it is now that faith, hope, and love abide. And love is still the greatest of these. Let love light our way, for we know God is with us – as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Amen.
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