Homilies for 22 and 23 Pentecost

22nd Sunday after Pentecost

20 October 2013

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

Luke 18.1-8

The Badgered Judge

“Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather” (Luke 17.37).

This is not one of Jesus’ most beloved sayings. Nor is it as well known as it deserves to be. I quote it not for its intrinsic interest, considerable as that might be, but because it sets the stage for the parable of the badgered judge, this morning’s lesson at the beginning of the 18th chapter of Luke’s Gospel.

Back in chapter 17, the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was coming. They anticipated it with confidence, sure that when it arrived they would be vindicated and that Israel’s enemies would get what was coming to them. But Jesus’ answer shocks them. He portrays what’s coming as horrific, a scenario to gladden the heart of a doomsday prepper, but it terrifies any sane person. It will be like the days of Noah; sudden destruction overcoming the unsuspecting: wedding parties swept away in the flood. It will be like Sodom; fire and sulfur raining from the sky. Run for your life: you won’t make it if you stop to grab your belongings. To people with a dark collective memory of forebears carried off into exile by foreign invaders Jesus foretells: “two people will be sleeping side by side: one will be taken, the other left. Two women grinding corn, one taken, the other left behind.” Death, destruction, misery; nowhere to hide.

The disciples ask, “Where will these things happen?” They don’t ask “When will these things happen?” That’s what we might have expected. We hear dire predictions of impending doom and our first question is when is all this supposed to happen. I think the fearsome picture Jesus paints of what’s coming has shaken them because it sounds as though the horrors are going to befall Israel, not her gentile adversaries. Jesus seems to be talking about what is going to happen to them. They have no doubt about God’s coming judgment but they expect it there, not here; on them, not us. “Where will this happen?” Jesus answers: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.”

Thus ends chapter 17, and now chapter 18 begins. Having scared them half to death, Jesus wants to encourage them for the coming ordeal. Luke reports that Jesus tells them a parable about their need to pray and not lose heart. In other translations it’s ‘not give up.’ In the King James, it’s, “And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.” As a boy, clueless as to the niceties of Elizabethan English, I heard it literally: the alternative to always praying is to faint, to pass out and fall flat on your face. In context, this might be closer to the original intent: Jesus’ appalling vision of what’s in store is enough to make you swoon in fright.

An Israel that rejects its call to be a light to the gentiles, a house of prayer for all people, a kingdom of kings and priests bearing witness to the one true God, and instead proudly clings to a vision of nationalistic identity and religious purity has abandoned its God. It is lifeless, a decaying corpse; God’s spirit departed. Above all, if now it rejects its own Messiah, its very reason for being, it is dead. Israel’s last chance is at hand. To recall another parable: if the vineyard’s long-suffering owner sends his own son, and the tenants kill him, nothing lies ahead but judgment and destruction. Nothing remains but for the carrion to feast on the remains. If the traditional date for the composition of the Gospel is correct, about AD 60, Luke writes on the brink of the predicted catastrophe. Israel’s simmering insurrection against Rome is about to boil over with devastating consequences, massacres, mass crucifixions, Jerusalem besieged and burned, the Temple destroyed—not one stone left standing upon another—and the land turned into a killing field. Contemporary scholarship favors a later date, maybe a decade after the fall of Jerusalem. If so, Luke’s recounting of Jesus’ prophecy would have elicited horrible recent memories. At times during the siege, hundreds, even thousands, of Roman crosses surrounded Jerusalem, the air full of the cries of the dying and, perhaps, of vultures feeding on them. Either way, it’s no surprise that Luke wants to make it explicit: Jesus’ parable is for the sake of the remnant who will follow him into the coming disaster. Caught in the horror they can only have faith in God and not give up, lose heart, faint. When—maybe precisely when— everything goes to hell and God seems absent he is most assuredly there, with us, waiting for our prayers, determined to save us, whatever we have brought upon ourselves. They can look at last to God to save them not from, but through, the suffering that is to come. No doubt Jesus sees his own suffering looming, and he directs these words to himself, as much as to the disciples. He knows that deliverance—his, Israel’s, the world’s—will be not from the cross, but through it.

Why, though, does Jesus choose this little tale about a corrupt judge and the pugnacious widow who badgers him? The standard lesson has been: even an unjust judge will give you what you ask for if you keep asking; how much more confident we can be that God, who is just, will hear our pleas! Maybe that’s not exactly wrong, but it seems a bit off. The woman isn’t asking for what she wants, or for what she needs; she’s demanding her due. She’s insisting that the judge give her what she is owed. Whatever we hope to get from God, it’s not justice. What we seek in our prayers is help, mercy, grace, his limitless love, none of it deserved. None of it what he owes us. When it comes to giving, with God it’s always more and better than we can ask or imagine, let alone claim as our due. Nor, on the down side, do we want an exacting divine judge who sees to it that we get whatever our misdeeds warrant. (The other guy, sure, but not me.) When it comes to wrongdoing God simply forgives and commands us to do the same. Someone—no one actually knows who—said, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall!” but this is not the voice of God. God speaks from the cross, and he says, “Father, forgive them!” Yet the parable is about justice. Oppressed Israel wants its pagan enemies ground to dust. It dreams of a revolt backed up by avenging armies of angels that decimate the Roman legions. The Pharisees, the best and the brightest, long for vindication: we are the faithful, the pure; we keep the law with a vengeance: we want recognition. God accepts us and rejects them: let the whole world at last see it, and weep!

Jesus knows that this thirst for vindication leads only to death. I think Jesus’ parable mocks our quest for justice. Sometimes, as in the calamity sure to come from Israel’s contest with Rome, it brings tragedy. Sometimes, it’s just silly. The judge in the parable is ridiculous; the justice he represents is bogus: he could not care less about God or man, but he’ll give this old bird what she wants to shut her up. He says to himself, “This widow keeps bothering me. I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out!” N. T. Wright’s translation brings out the comedic element: the term that our lesson renders “wear me out” he translates “give me a black eye,”—literally: to bruise someone under the eye—apparently an idiomatic expression for getting in someone’s face and harassing him, maybe smacking him around. Some judge. Some justice.

Maybe the case has dragged on interminably, and whatever was originally at stake has receded into insignificance in contrast to the need to win, to get justice. Maybe the woman has gotten a bit crazy over it; that’s how these things go. The gas company once overcharged my mother-in-law—I think it was $92—and she persisted in her quest for a refund, sucked ever more deeply into its bottomless bureaucracy as the years went by…as far as I know, it goes on even now, Kafka Power and Light of Newark, New Jersey—or whatever it’s called—sublimely indifferent to her pleas. The point is not, I think, that God is just so we should pray to him, but that what we call justice is a delusion, absurd, and often deadly.

Block, the character Woody Allen plays in Deconstructing Harry, descends into hell in pursuit of his abducted girlfriend. As the elevator carries him into the depths, a voice announces: Floor Five: subway muggers, aggressive panhandlers, and book critics Floor Six: right-wing extremists, serial killers, lawyers who appear on television Floor Seven: the media (sorry, that floor is all filled up) Floor Eight: escaped war criminals, TV evangelists, and the NRA Lowest Level: everybody off! Harry steps out of the elevator into a scene from Dante’s’ nightmares. Baleful red light and flames everywhere. Hot Benny Goodman jazz blares. Harry wanders among the damned: hell’s hopeless denizens, naked, writhing, poked and prodded by devils with pitchforks. Suddenly, a voice he recognizes: “Harry! Get me out of here! This is terrible. You know how I could never stand the hot weather!” It’s his father, chained to his personal demonic tormentor. Harry demands, “What is this man doing here?” Matter of factly the demon answers, “He’s condemned to eternal suffering.” Harry says, “I don’t understand…what are the charges?” The devil unrolls a scroll and reads the indictment: The man has been a terrible father, making his son a miserable, neurotic mess, incapable of a decent life outside his imagination. This far into the film we know that this is the sober truth. We see it: there in the bowels of hell Harry’s father is unrepentant (like the rich man from Mike’s sermon two weeks ago). He insists that he treated his son just as he deserved. Even there, he cannot stop madly blaming Harry for the death of his wife, who died in childbirth. And now comes the moment of sheer grace, so far as I know unique in all Woody Allen’s movies: Harry shouts, “I forgive him! What’s over is over. It is finished! Please, let him go to heaven!” His father objects: “I’m a Jew. We don’t believe in heaven!” “Where do you want to go then?” “To a Chinese restaurant.” Harry directs the demon: “Take him to Joy Luck. I love him despite everything.” The demon shrugs and releases him. All is forgiven, hell is harrowed, love wins, and the claims of human justice are forever silenced, its chains broken.

Justice will be done, but it will be God’s justice, not ours. Our justice is all about keeping score, everyone getting what they ought to get. The ancient Greeks had the idea of dike, in Homeric times it was the compensation a commoner owed a noble for transgressing the social boundaries. Centuries later, Plato begins his Republic with Socrates asking, “What is justice?” What is dikaioshne? Someone says, “It’s when you give someone what you owe him, what is his. Like when your friend lends you his weapons and then you give them back.” To which Socrates, manifesting the annoying habits that eventually got him the hemlock, replies, “Do you mean that if your friend lends you his weapons, but then goes mad, it’s just to give them back?” “Well, no, of course not Socrates…” and they are off and running and philosophy is well launched. These plausible idea—justice is getting what you deserve— is built into the Greek language and pervades the classical world. In Luke’s text, the widow asks the judge, who is unjust—adike—to grant her justice, to avenge her— ekdikhson. But the common language obscures the crucial difference. God’s justice, the biblical “righteousness of God,” is something else altogether. It is God’s unshakeable faithfulness to his creation, his firm commitment to his covenant, his steadfast love for his people, no matter how unworthy of that love they manage to be. God is just: this means that God is love. God’s justice does not compete with his love and mercy; it’s the same thing. He is not—thank God!—the judge who ensures what we call justice. What we call justice is, in the end, the hell God, the crucified criminal, overturns. He is the God who hears us and will not delay in helping us, not because it is our due, but because he loves us.

Jesus says to be like the widow, who doesn’t give up, but persists in asking. There’s something of a paradox here: we should persist in asking because God will be quick in answering. If he does not delay, what do we need persistence for? The solution is that it’s our calling to trust him, to have the faith Jesus wonders about: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Or will we have given up on God? Not if we trust him, convinced that however bad things are, however forgotten or taken in we might at the moment feel, the faithful God’s help is on its way and will arrive not late, but at the right time.

Amen.

1

Twenty-third Sunday After Pentecost

19 November 2000

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Mark 13.14-23

It’s the End of the World as We Know It

When I was a boy an annual event in my church was the visit of an itinerant preacher who specialized in The Last Things - what in precincts of more theological sophistication I later came to know as eschatology. These preachers held forth in a series of learned disquisitions on such matters as the Rapture of the Church, the Great Tribulation, the Antichrist, the Mark of the Beast, the Millennium, and so on; in brief The End of the World which could as a matter of fact be expected to commence immediately. The biblical apocalypses of Daniel, the book of Revelation and texts like today’s lesson from Mark were presented as straightforward descriptions of future events. The centerpiece of these proceedings was The Chart. The Chart was wall-sized and dauntingly intricate, a kind of convoluted cosmic flowchart demonstrating how the unsaved were to be carried past the Great White Throne and funneled down into the Lake of Fire while the saved were to be reunited with their resurrected bodies and transported to the New Jerusalem as it floated down to Earth.

These texts were seized upon with a weird literalism oblivious to such matters as literary genre, the historical context of the authors or even authorial intent. We heard for instance that Daniel was writing about Nikita Kruschev’s imminent invasion of the Holy Land where Russian tanks would fight the battle of Armageddon, or that John’s vision on the Isle of Patmos of a beast with ten heads referred to the European Common Market. In retrospect this was zany stuff but at the time it was approached with full seriousness and with great respect for the esoteric scholarship being demonstrated.

(This is just one of the things one misses out on by being raised an Episcopalian!)

All this came to an end at last when one speaker, forsaking the standard black and white diagrammatic format, employed glow in the dark chalk. At a crucial moment, the lights went out and there before us the flames of hell balefully glowed red and orange. The children were terrified and the saner folk in the church prevailed: we’d had enough of Last Things. I turned to science-fiction and happily forsook matters eschatological for years to come.

The morbidly fascinating Chart was an example of what not to do with these exotic texts. But what are we to make of them?

The place to turn first is, of course, real history and the biblical writers’ attempt to penetrate behind history’s inchoate appearances to its meaning, a meaning ultimately and intimately secured in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Yet the use to which that history is put is largely foreign to us today. For a writer like Mark the fabric of this world’s space and time is folded over upon itself. Events remote from one another are juxtaposed to reveal their meaning.

Mark, writing probably in the eighth decade of the first century - i.e. about 40 years after the events his gospel relates - describes Jesus as speaking about an event yet to come: the “desolating sacrilege.” But in doing so he portrays Jesus as alluding to something that happened long before: in 167 BC the Syrian-Greek king Antiochus Epiphanies tried to force the ‘backward Jews’ to give up their faith and worship the Greek gods. He outlawed Judaism and its ceremonial practices and brutally punished the many who refused to obey. He converted the Temple in Jerusalem into a temple for Zeus and sacrificed a pig - an unclean animal - on the altar. Utter profanation. The worst thing imaginable. The abomination of desolation. This incensed the Jews and precipitated the Macabean revolt and the heroics the Jewish people came to celebrate as Hanukkah.

In Jesus’ day, all this lies two centuries in the past; the Greeks are long gone and replaced by the Romans. Yet the story remained painfully lodged in everyone’s imagination, shaping fears for the future.

This is just one of the layers of meaning in today’s lesson. We also know that there was another revolt, this one against the Romans, that culminated in the Temple being destroyed and Jerusalem being burned in AD 70. Probably, Mark’s gospel was written not long after this happened though it is possible that it dates to the years leading up to this cataclysmic event, another desolating sacrilege. Either way, it’s clear that part of what Mark wants to do is to report that Jesus had foreseen the catastrophe that would overtake the people of Israel. Recall that at the beginning of the chapter from which this morning’s text comes we hear Jesus telling his disciples, who have been admiring the Temple, that it will be utterly destroyed: “Not one stone will be left standing!”

For the pious Jew, whether of Antiochus’ day, or Jesus’, or Mark’s, the thought of the Jerusalem Temple being profaned and destroyed was an unmitigated disaster. It was the center of Jewish identity as God’s people. For a gentile power to desecrate it or destroy it was the end of their world, the end of their ability to function as God’s elect people.

I want to suggest that all this, though certainly a real part of what’s going on in today’s text, is secondary. Events closer at hand are, I think, foremost in Jesus’ mind as he utters his dark prophecy. Earlier in the gospel Mark has portrayed Jesus as explicitly aware of where his confrontation with the religious authorities is leading. Here in Chapter 13 Jesus moves quickly toward his Passion. His sparring with representatives of the main religious parties, the Pharisees, the Saducees and the Herodians, has turned deadly. Those who actually rule are playing cat and mouse with this clever and dangerous Galilean, probing for the opportunity to hand him over to the Romans to be gotten rid of for good.

In this context, Jesus’ foreboding, his realization that defeat and disaster looms, has as its main focus his own coming death. Surely he does not fully separate his personal disappointment, the anguish and shame at being rejected by his own people, his inexorably approaching public humiliation and execution, from the fate of the Israel that seeks its salvation without him, without God. The Jesus of this gospel knows who he is and he knows what is soon to befall him.

Mark’s own sense of hopelessness and horror resonate with what Jesus feels as he moves toward his arrest and crucifixion. Both Jesus before the fact and Mark after are acutely aware of the enormity - the infinite enormity - of the crime, the sacrilege of all sacrileges: Jesus a condemned criminal nailed to the cross.

Viewed from the outside, what’s coming is one more turn of the wheel of meaningless history. A personal tragedy but nothing important. Just one more sufferer, one more added to the endless ranks of the obscure dead; executed criminals or innocent victims - perhaps the difference not counting for much in the long run. But the fantastic language of apocalypse signals that here we’re shown not the outward pointlessness but the inner meaning, the divine purpose at work. Jesus depicts his own death in terms of cosmic disaster, a doom to engulf everyone, the end of the world.

All through Mark we’ve heard Jesus condemning the religious authorities, forecasting their doom in coming judgment. “Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand!” God’s Law was God’s gift to his people, a way for them to make concrete their trust in God, a means to make their daily lives a sweet dance of gratitude to their God. But the self-righteous and powerful turned that Law into a tool for justifying themselves and lording it over others. They replaced God’s way with a religion like all religions, a system of condemnation and control. Women, children, the poor, the diseased, the crippled, the gentiles, the unwashed, the impure, the needy sinners have been judged, found wanting and cut off from God. Jesus speaks like an Old Testament prophet announcing the Day of the Lord, when God brings a climax of terrifying judgment upon a world that delights in moral and religious propriety while oppressing the weak and blocking their access to God. Those self-justifying scribes and Pharisees, those protectors of the Law who proudly plop their big contributions in the Temple collection box are really devourers of widow’s houses. But judgment is on its way. Not one stone will be left standing. The end of their world is upon them. The kingdom of God is at hand.

If they had been able to look ahead thirty years or so, what they would have seen, the Roman’s destruction of the Temple and the decimation of the Jewish nation, would have terrified them. But that’s the lesser thing. The greater thing, the Last Judgment, the End of the World, was much closer. They helped bring it about but they did not know it for what it was. It was what Jesus did foresee, his own murder. The Ruler of the Universe put to death for sedition. The Creator punished for blasphemy by his all too religious creatures. Truth declared a lie, beauty bloodied, goodness himself counted among the wicked. This not at all conspicuous killing is the desolating sacrilege, the catastrophe that brings everything into judgment and lays waste all that seemed secure.

When Antiochus profaned the Temple and when the Romans burned it the world was about its business. The self-assuredly and self-righteously powerful humiliated and crushed the weak. God’s way in the world was held up to ridicule as a lost cause. That’s what it looked like in the sacrilege that happened between these two events. Jesus’ defeat was in reality the victory of God’s judgment on this world and its ways. But that judgment was not the destruction of those judged but their salvation. Our salvation. This is a judgment that does not look like judgment and a salvation that does not look like salvation. Yet we know that it’s here alone that God saves. Out of despair and death he calls forth life and hope.

Of course we’d find it preferable for God to save us by some more sensible means; by the conventional means of triumphant power that takes account of how deserving we really are, after all. Yet the world in which that might be a possibility came to an end around AD 30 outside the walls of Jerusalem. We’d like God to save us from pain and loss and death but by and large he doesn’t; no more than he saved his own Son our Savior. Later today for All Souls we’ll name and remember the dead. God did not deliver them from whatever loss their lives held. Nor did he save them from death. Yet he saves them: their lives are safe in the resurrected Christ. He saves us in - not from - our pain, loss and death.

The other day I saw a video about the Sudan. It reminded me that this is exactly how the God made flesh in Christ works. It showed thousands of Sudanese Christians in refuge camps. A few years ago they were animists, worshipping trees and cattle but their culture has been obliterated by the country’s genocidal, fundamentalist Muslim government. Yet they were dancing and singing hymns, each one grasping a little wooden cross. They clung to that piece of wood as though it alone had pulled them out of the wreck of their past lives. In the midst of untold disaster, their world at an end, these people have turned to the crucified Jesus. Let’s make it our prayer that we too will put our hope in him.

Amen

23rd Sunday in Pentecost

Chaplaincy of St. George

Orange City, Iowa

Mark 12.38-44

Nothing for God

Truly I tell you, this poor woman has put in more than all who are contributing to the treasury. Mark 12.43

It’s better to give everything you’ve got, even if it’s not much, than to give a lot when you have so much that you don’t miss it. I’m sure that’s true, but I doubt that it’s the main point of what Jesus says here. It fits with the conventional idea of Jesus the pious, the moral teacher who goes around dispensing edifying lessons, the religious reformer preaching sincere devotion over against formalism and hypocrisy. But I don’t think it fits with the real Jesus who engages our attention here, the strange and dangerous character whose visit to the Jerusalem temple is one provocation to the authorities after another.

Consider, first, where Mark locates this little scene in his narrative of Jesus’ assault on the temple. In the preceding chapter (Mark 11.15-18), Jesus pushes over the tables of the moneychangers and of the people selling animals, and he chases the animals out. Here too we’re often offered a palatable Jesus. We’re told that he is trying, zealously enough, to purify the temple, to clean out the commercial activity that defiles it. I take it that something else is going on. Jesus drove the animals and moneychangers out of an outer part of the temple complex, an area called the “Court of the Gentles.” It was the one place where non-Jews could come to worship Israel’s God. They were banned, on pain of death, from proceeding farther into the temple. But they were allowed to be here on the periphery. However, when people came to the temple to make their contributions and sacrifices, they often needed to exchange their foreign currency for local coins, and some of the poorest needed to buy animals for their sacrifices. Entrepreneurs had responded to this need, but by setting up their stands here they effectively blocked Gentiles from the one place where they could approach God. This is what trigger’s Jesus’ anger, not any alleged defilement of the Temple by dirty animals or dirty money. “Isn’t it written, ‘My house will be a house of prayer for all nations?’ But you have made it a den of thieves!” Whether or not the people doing business here were crooked, because of their desire to make a buck they’re acting as though God is theirs alone. Rather than being a nation of priests, a light to the Gentiles, they’ve stolen God from them and kept him for themselves.

Now Jesus has moved farther into the temple complex, up onto the nine-foot high terrace and to the other side of a five foot wall. Now he’s in the “Court of the Women,” so called because any Jew was allowed there, even women. Beyond this point, only Jewish men could go. Beyond the area where Jewish men were allowed, only ritually purified priests are permitted. And at the center, the most sacred place, the Holy of Holies where God was present. Walls within walls within walls. The temple is supposed to be a sacrament, the visible sign of God’s presence in the world. Now it’s an obstacle. It’s not about making God available to people who need him; it’s about excluding those who do not deserve to come near God. (I’m writing this on the 12th floor of the Marriott in downtown Des Moines, looking down at our cathedral. It’s not the most impressive building, but with its bright red door opening onto a busy city street and its good old “The Episcopal Church welcomes you” sign; I’m appreciating the contrast.)

In the outer courtyard, Jesus’ target is an Israel that stands between gentiles and the God it wants to be exclusively its own. Here, in the Court of the Women, his target shifts to those who stand between God and the most down and out within Israel.

Watching the scribes going about their religious duties, Jesus warns, “Watch out for them! They look like they’re doing God’s work, but they devour widow’s houses!” The scribes were professional interpreters of the Law, and roughly equivalent to lawyers today. They sometimes served as trustees of widows’ estates and, because their fees for doing so were taken from the funds they administered, an unsuspecting widow could end up sucked dry by those whose duty it was to protect her. And now one of their victims appears. She has nothing left but two tiny coins, lepta—too small even to bear an inscription—which she drops into the temple’s coffers. A devoured widow. Consumed. Used up and discarded.

We read the story assuming that Jesus praises the woman for her generosity, with the implication that, in contrast to the hypocritical scribes and ostentatious rich people parading by, she loves God enough to give everything she has. Maybe so, but I want to slow down to notice that this is not quite what Jesus says. He doesn’t actually say anything about her motives. I’m hesitant to pounce on the conclusion that what she’s doing is such a great thing, if for no other reason than that in real life none of us would believe for a minute it’s a good idea. I’m imagining how Karen and I would react if we found out her eighty-something year old mother had just sent her last $10,000 to some televangelist, or even to Episcopal Relief and Development. No one really thinks it’s a good idea for widows to give all their money away, even to a worthy cause, even to God. Maybe the woman gives her last money away out of devotion to God. Or maybe she’s in such despair she simply tosses it, and her life, a way. Or she’s been pressured by the temple fundraisers and is grudgingly doing her duty. (I suspect that in some quarters the principal use of this text is to encourage people who have very little to give it to the Church.) Or she’s simply flaky and doesn’t know what she’s doing. It doesn’t really matter what moves her to do it.

What we hear is something like, “The woman who put in her last two half cents was worthier than those rich people who put in lots of money.” What Jesus says is that she put in more; that her two tiny grubby copper coins are worth more than the bulging bags of silver plopped down by the rich. What she has to give really is worth more to God than what they put in. Yet, for all practical purposes, what she puts in the collection, and what she has now, is nothing. Unlike the long-robed scribes who imagine that they have all kinds of stuff God can put to good use: their expertise in the Law, their moral influence on centers of power, their piety, purity and righteousness, and unlike the rich people who love the idea of their money going to maintain this beautiful edifice, it’s all too obvious that she has nothing to give, and that her donation amounts to nothing. But in God’s view, and thus in reality, their contributions are precisely worthless; their money and their knowledge of the Law can go to building more walls, to more rigorously excluding the unwanted from God’s kingdom, but God is in the business of breaking down the walls: bringing in the lost, the least, and the last. They have nothing to offer for that. They can only get in God’s way. In contrast, the destitute widow has just what God wants to work with: hopelessness, helplessness, haplessness…she has nothing. She has brought him precisely what he prizes: her utter lack, her need. It’s not that proportionately she has given more than them, it’s that they have not given God anything he wants, while she has given him everything he wants. She’s dropped her miniscule offering in the hopper and now comes to God with plenty of nothing, with the empty hands that she needs to receive the gift of God himself.

The easiest thing in the world is to think that God really does care about what we have—or don’t have—to offer him, that we have some currency negotiable in the kingdom of heaven, something that can purchase God’s favor or attention. We all know that God accepts us totally unconditionally, no strings attached, and that nothing we do or don’t do can make him love us the slightest bit more or less. But that conviction has a half-life of about twelve seconds. Maybe we’re most like the scribes and rich contributors Jesus condemns, and least like the poor widow he commends, when we’re at our most humble. “First I’ll work on my arrogance, vanity, self-centeredness, selfishness, self-righteousness, contempt for others, vanity, pettiness, laziness—the list gets uncomfortably long—then I can be of some use to God.” Taking if for granted that if I weren’t such a normal human mess, I’d have something of value to give him. As if it’s our good behavior and not us, screwed up as we are, that God so loves. But the good news—the Gospel truth—is that the God who empties himself as Jesus is so profligate he lets all that wealth, or all that talent, or all that yearning for righteousness or religious purity go to waste, declaring it worthless in the economy of his love. In the only bookkeeping that can save us, the most you can have is nothing. As Robert Capon once called it, this is, “the weird Good News of the God incarnate who makes the wreck of our lives his favorite workshop.” (The Foolishness of Preaching, 133)

I wonder whether Jesus sees himself in that desperate woman. Where our text says that she has put in everything she had to live on, the Greek literally says she has put in her bios, her “living,” her life. At this point in Mark’s narrative, it is plain as day where Jesus’ confrontation with the temple and the religious and political powers it represents is headed. He knows that, like her, he will be a victim of the rich and powerful confident they are doing God’s work. Like her, he faces the loss of those he loves in rejection, betrayal, and abandonment. She has been reduced to nothing in the world’s balances, cast aside as worthless, a zero in the calculations of those who think they have what God wants. The same fate awaits Jesus. He knows that one pays with his life to be a failed messiah; he knows that he will be nailed to a cross, ridiculed, cursed, and killed. Spit out by Israel, handed over to Rome, disposed of, a bloodied, lifeless corpse. Made of no account on our behalf. Gone. Made nothing.

Yet, Christ is risen. From that absolute negation of all our attempts to make things right, to be like God knowing good and evil, the God who resurrected Jesus brings our appalling salvation. Out of the nothingness of that death and that grave comes the crucified God with fullness of life for all.

Christ is risen indeed, but sometimes we’d much prefer to keep that scandal of divine powerlessness safely in the faded past. We’d prefer it to stay God’s impotence and not ours. Like those who walled out the Gentiles and the women, devoured the widows, and killed Jesus, we know all about wanting to share God’s righteousness and God’s power, to be pure and strong, to make things right, to change the world, not to be nothing but to amount to something. We know the temptation to balance our accounts, to get into the black with God. We want to be vindicated, not accepted willy-nilly without regard for our assets. And we wish God would snap his cosmic fingers and make things right for the world, for us personally. What’s the use of omnipotence if you don’t use it? But none of this is the way God is. He calls us, not to triumph and vindication, but to the way of the cross. The God who was in Christ calls us to take on his weakness, his loss, his death. In Jesus he showed us who he is, as remote as that might be from our idea of a proper God, and now he asks us to be like him, no matter how implausible a way of life that might seem to us. In a church in Corte Madera, near San Francisco, there’s an ancient wooden crucifix. Ann Lamott describes it as, “a tall splintering wooden Christ with his arms blown off in some war, under which

someone has written, ‘Jesus has no arms but ours to do his work and to show his love’” (Operating Instructions, 161). Even the resurrected Christ, Lord of all, Savior of the world, remains the God who makes himself helpless, of no account in this world, putting himself into our hands, trusting us, for better or for worse, to be his presence in the world.

Amen.

23rd Sunday in Pentecost

Church of the Savior Orange City, Iowa 31 October 2010

Climb the Tree!

When I was a boy back in Sunday School, the story of Zacchaeus was one of our favorites, or at least the teachers thought it should be. We were supposed to identify with him; even though he was a grown up, he was short like a kid and had to climb a tree to see what was going on. We even had a song about him, sung with untuned gusto and accompanying hand motions:

Zacchaeus was a wee little man And a wee little man was he He climbed up in a sycamore tree For the Lord he wanted to see And as the Savior passed that way He looked up in that tree And He said, “Zacchaeus, you come down! For I’m going to your house today For I’m going to your house to stay!

We’d heard Jesus’ appealing stories about a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son. Who doesn’t want to save a wayward lamb, missing money, or prodigal son? But a lost tax collector? Not much was said about what a rotten guy Zacchaeus was, and how the rest of the folks in Jericho must have looked down on him, not just literally, but with hatred and contempt. Nor was much said about how provocative what Jesus does here is, how in this encounter he’s deliberately ratcheting up the tension with the authorities he’ll dangerously confront when he reaches Jerusalem, now just a few miles away.

The little story does not suggest that when Zacchaeus climbs the tree he’s motivated by anything more than curiosity. He’s heard the rumors of a Galilean teacher and healer, maybe a prophet, and he wants to get a look at him. He was, Luke says, “trying to see who Jesus was.” There’s no reason to imagine that climbing that tree was some sort of incipient turn to God, some kind of expression of faith in Jesus.

No doubt, Zacchaeus is surprised when Jesus stops and speaks to him. He’s probably not thrilled suddenly to be the center of attention, a grown man, the chief tax collector no less, up there in the branches. He’s always been despised; now he looks silly too. But what Jesus says changes that: “Zacchaeus hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today!” This mysterious man everyone is trying to get a look at sees Zacchaeus, calls him by name—How does he know who I am? —and invites himself and his entourage to have dinner at his house and stay the night. Of course, Zacchaeus is delighted. All these people who think he’s no better than a dirty, godless gentile hear Jesus announce that he wants to eat at his table and sleep under his roof. Recall the profound significance in this religious culture of the code of purity with its rules about table fellowship, the rules that say he can’t eat with this defiled man without defiling himself. But here’s Jesus saying he must stay with him. Keep in mind what Jesus doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “If you get out of the tax racket, pay back all these folks you’ve been shaking down for years, and give the rest of your ill-gotten riches to the poor, then I’ll come have dinner at your house!” There’s nothing conditional in the invitation. He acts as if the visit doesn’t even depend on his host’s willingness to have him. He doesn’t ask if he may come. He simply says he has to. I don’t know precisely what the customs were, but Jesus doesn’t seem very polite. He says, “Hurry and come down!” And Zacchaeus does hurry down and he’s “happy to welcome him.” Indeed. I imagine Zacchaeus practically falling out of the tree.

If we stop the action right we here, there’s something to note: Jesus has called, and Zacchaeus has responded to him, but once again the text gives us no reason to ascribe deep or good motives to the tax collector. In my evangelical upbringing, we were taught that Jesus looked into the hearts of the people he publicly called, saw that they were repenting and putting their faith in him, and because of this proclaimed their salvation. But in retrospect it seems to me that this is a wrongheaded attempt to fit Jesus into our theology. All that’s happening at this point is that Zacchaeus, accustomed to the disdain of his neighbors, realizes he’s being honored by this itinerant rabbi they think is so amazing. And he’s glad of it.

If there’s a moment of conversion, a point where Zacchaeus casts his lot with this Jesus and the gracious God he makes manifest, I think it comes next, as he stands there between Jesus who accepts him as he is, no questions asked, and all these people who despise him. They grumble, their excitement at seeing Jesus rapidly changing to suspicion and anger. Disapproving, they say, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner!” Maybe this Jesus isn’t much of a prophet after all, not if he can’t tell who’s worthy of fellowship and who’s an outcast. Or worse, maybe he knows what he’s doing and doesn’t care. From their point of view—and maybe ours too—the story gets things out of order. Only now, after Jesus has announced that he’ll eat with this despicable character, after he has in the most concrete terms made it clear that there is peace between this sinful man and God, only now does Zacchaeus repent: “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much!” Had Zacchaeus, not waiting for Jesus to speak, scrambled out of the tree, thrown himself at Jesus’ feet, and made this promise, everyone could be happy. But he doesn’t. The implicit repentance from exploiting his neighbors, and the explicit promise to make amends, are the tax collector’s response to Jesus accepting him as he is, without any preconditions. We have no reason to think Jesus would not have gone home with him had he not said this. We have no reason to think Jesus making himself at home with this sinner depends in the slightest on his mending his ways, nor should we suspect it depends on him recognizing Jesus as anything special, the messiah of Israel, let alone God incarnate. Jesus’ unexpected and by rights unacceptable acceptance of this s. o. b is what comes first, and it doesn’t depend on anything, least of all on how Zacchaeus responds. This is what the people of Jericho grumble about. It’s not Jesus being at peace with ex-sinners that upsets them; it’s his flagrant willingness to be with them, disregarding the so-carefully maintained boundaries that keep God’s people at a safe remove from everyone else, and even, it appears, having a good time in the process. His critics were quick to point out his readiness to share food and wine with anyone on the outs with God.

Jesus strips away the consolation these poor people have, their conviction that unlike this traitorous little creep who puts the screws to them, shaking them down for that last denarius they were saving to buy food for their children this winter, they at least are God’s people, maybe not so scrupulously pure as those uptight Pharisees, but solid descendants of Abraham. Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to his house, because he too is a son of Abraham.” It was a great question of the day: Who is an authentic son of Abraham, who is the genuine heir of God’s covenant promises, the recipient of blessing and salvation? The unhappy onlookers would have been satisfied if Jesus said that Zacchaeus is a true son of Abraham because of his contrition and charity, that his decision—though who knows if he’ll stick to it?—makes things right between him and God. But Jesus audaciously blocks this understanding. Salvation has come to the tax collector’s house and it’s Jesus who is coming to Zacchaeus’ house. The wicked tax collector is saved not because of what he does or doesn’t do, but because God himself makes peace, coming to him in Jesus. He may respond well or badly, reasonably or unreasonably, but he responds to the fait d’accompli: Jesus his friend is at the door, salvation has come.

There might have been another reason Zacchaeus chose to watch Jesus pass by from up in the sycamore tree: so as not to meet him face to face, and thus not to risk a confrontation, where this holy man might call him out on his wickedness. He might have expected an encounter with Jesus to be condemnation. He might have expected to be treated as what the people of Jericho saw him as: an outcast. He would not have expected what he got instead: to be greeted as a friend: “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down so we can have dinner together!”

In our story, Zacchaeus responds well to the fact that God accepts him as he is. We don’t know how things turned out in the long run. We’re not even told whether he found a new line of work. One ancient tradition identifies him with Matthias, the Apostle chosen to replace Judas Iscariot. Another says that he travelled with Peter and eventually became a bishop which, I guess, is a step up from being a tax collector. Whatever stature, if any, the little man achieved in the church, Luke portrays him choosing for the moment to do what makes sense in light of the new reality he met on the road in Jericho. He chooses to turn from greed to generosity, to treat the people around him with something resembling, even if just a bit, the love with which God treats him.

I’m sure that however it went with Zacchaeus, his story was essentially the same as ours. Sometimes we reject the God who offers himself to us without constraint or condition. Sometimes we just ignore him. Sometimes, pretty often, in fact, we do what can only be described as absurd, making no sense in light of who God is for us. We respond to his inclusion of us by finding someone to exclude, to his unfettered forgiveness of us by withholding forgiveness from one another, to his abandonment of control, condemnation, and judgment by trying to control, condemn and judge others, and to do it in his name, no less. And maybe, every so often, like Zacchaeus we find a fitting way to welcome him. This happens, I think, just when we see God for who he really is, in Jesus breaking through our moral and religious presuppositions, breaking down the doors of our guilt and pride, fear and indifference to be our friend.

Zacchaeus the publican was trying to see who Jesus was, but he couldn’t because of the people around him and because of his own limitations. He might have stayed safely on the ground, lost in the crowd. But he didn’t; for a moment he forget not just his dignity, but everything about him that by rights should have separated him from God. Now, like him, we wait as Jesus approaches. Let’s climb the tree, let’s pray that, once again, we see who Jesus is.

Amen.