Proper 20B, September 23, 2018
Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37
St Thomas the Apostle
The Rev’d Leo Loyola
It began as an experiment.
A group of first-year students from a very conservative seminary wondered what the Bible had to say about the poor and poverty.
So they scoured through the Old and New Testaments of an old bible.
And in their fervor, they made several keen observations:
- Poverty—second only to idolatry—was the most prominent theme in the Old Testament
- In the entire New Testament, one out of every sixteen verses spoke about the poor or the subject of money
- In the Gospels themselves, the proportions were greater. One out of ten in Matthew, Mark and John. And in Luke, one out of seven.
After hours of work, the group identified thousands upon thousands of references. Surely, they felt, that the authors of bible saw the moral and spiritual importance of addressing poverty.
Knowing this might make what the group does next shock you.
They then pulled out a pair of scissors and began cutting out every single verse they discovered from that old bible.
When they were done, the bible could barely hold itself together. It began falling apart.
It was a bible full of holes.
Now the teller of that true story is Jim Wallis. Jim is a leading figure at the crossroads of religion and politics in America today. And author to the book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, which our Tuesday morning book club is currently reading.
Jim still possesses that same old, fragile, incomplete Bible.
To this day when he preaches before American congregations, he takes it out, holds it high in the air and proclaims “Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible. It is full of holes.”
What the experiment reveals is our tendency to focus only on the parts of the Bible that fit within our personal politics and lifestyles, while ignoring the rest.
Whether we identify as liberal or conservative or anywhere in between, our Bible—that is, everything we understand and hold near and dear about our personal faith—is full of holes.
But this is not anything unique. We see this happening even by the forefathers of our faith, Jesus’s own disciples.
Our gospel from Mark (9:30-37) continues from where we last left off (8:27-38).
Jesus and company have begun their long 100 mile trek to Jerusalem.
Along the way, Jesus prepares everyone for what’s to come:
“The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”
Everyone hears Jesus, but they didn’t exactly welcome or understand what he said.
After all, the Messiah they envisioned would rise up and lead his people to glory. They would finally rid themselves of the Romans. They saw the chance in Jesus to establish a new and independent kingdom.
They never expected a martyr. They did not want one. After all, what good is there if their Messiah was dead?
It’s no wonder that when Jesus announced this shocking proclamation the first time, Peter rebuked him for shaking everyone’s faith.
But when Jesus repeats himself a second time, no one challenges him.
Confused, everyone wondered, “Is Jesus being serious?”
No one could yet understand that for the kingdom Jesus proclaimed in his Sermon on the Mount to come to fruition, the Son of Man must die.
Instead they do what people do when Scripture does not meet people’s expectations.
They ignore Jesus’s difficult words, and lock onto their own vision of the kingdom of God. An earthly one strong enough, powerful enough, to rid Israel, if not the world, of Roman rule. And as members of Jesus’s inner circle, the disciples saw themselves, ruling this New Jerusalem alongside their Lord.
This inner desire to be powerful men explains what happens next.
Jesus and men are now approaching Capernaum. They are tired, but still have 70-plus miles eft to go, before they reach Jerusalem. So they decide to rest up back at the house.
Jesus asks his men, “What were you arguing about on the way?”
The disciples were too ashamed to say, but Jesus already knew they had been fighting amongst themselves about who was the greatest.
Jesus knew that they were jockeying for position within his kingdom.
Jesus knew that they misunderstood the kind of power his kingdom will bring into this world. He knew they expected some kind of warrior-king like the kings of surrounding countries.
But Jesus’s faithful disciples were completely wrong. What they want is not always what God envisions. Their Bible was full of holes.
When Jesus explains that “whoever wants to be first”, he doesn’t present to his disciples a model fitting their worldly understanding of true power.
To Jesus, true power wasn’t about:
- Violent, physical strength, or
- Commanding political power, or
- Amassing great wealth, or
- Possessing a brilliant, tactical mind
But sadly, what the disciples understood as true power is how we often understand it.
We struggle to accept true power in the kingdom of God as grounded in humility to God’s will, not ours.
We struggle to accept that “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
We struggle with the idea that the young child Jesus paraded in his arms before his disbelieving disciples is miles closer to the kingdom of God than even the smartest, richest, most politically powerful among us.
Two thousand years have passed since that incident from our Gospel.
Two thousand years of hearing or reading scripture, reflecting upon it, then taking some form of action. And yet we still often get things wrong.
Two thousand years is a lot of time for us to perfect our faith. And yet our bible is still “full of holes”.
But we can be thankful for an even greater truth. Something more important than what we often get so wrong about God.
That despite our failings, God loves us anyway. Amen.
