September 18 - The Emissary of God's Kin-dom

September 18 - The Messiah, Emissary of the Kin-dom of God

We had a great conversation in worship team last week as we looked at our series on Mark as a whole. We explored each week and looked for images to capture the essence of each topic. We also landed on the image of Window to look through as our primary image for the whole series. The idea comes from the understanding that the parables which Jesus taught were windows through which look at the world in order to see how God sees life. Likewise, Jesus (his life, his teaching, his death and resurrection, his ongoing presence in the world) can be our window to look through to see the world in a new way. Specifically, we are using the Gospel of Mark in this broken and fearful time as our window of seeing life from a new perspective. Looking through the window of the gospel, we can begin the task of Reconstructing Hope.

Along with the images for each week, I’d like us to also consider naming a contemporary analog for the situations we see in the parts of the Gospel of Mark that we will be using. Sept. 11 was obvious with the destruction of the towers and the attacks on the unspoken American mind-set. What other comparision can we make from today’s society to the ancient stories?

                Let me insert a parenthetical remark about this week’s topic: specifically the use of the term “Kin-dom of God.” The biblical phrase is literally the “Kingdom of God” (or empire, if you prefer). It is a gender-exclusive term (I’ve never heard of a “queen-dom”).  If we speak of the “Kingdom of God” then logically God is the King and thereby reinforce the notion that God is preeminently male. “Kingdom” is also hierarchical. The king rules the princes and dukes and princesses and duchesses who in turn rule the serfs and peasants who have power over the slaves. I am one of those who believes that the presence of the Divine expressed in our world is and will be inclusive of all genders, that it will be empowering among us all and not power over us. Some have tried to translate “Kingdom of God” into a more neutral phrase like the “Realm of God.”  While not bad, there is a sense of the generic in that phrase, somehow to me dissatisfying. I prefer the warmer sense of the “Kin-dom of God.” This is not original to me, and I do not know its source (a quick Google search attributes it to Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz), but I like the creative dropping of the “g” to name that God’s realm is the making kin of us all. We are all of us kin, all creation. Thus, when we attempt to live into the future that God is opening to us, we are making kin again in those places where our relationships have been broken.  And that brings us to this week’s topic, that the Messiah is the emissary of the Kin-dom of God.

Mark 2:18-28; 7:1-23

The Question about Fasting

 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.

 ‘No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’

Pronouncement about the Sabbath

 One sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’ And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’

The Tradition of the Elders

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’ He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

“This people honors me with their lips,

   but their hearts are far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

   teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’

 Then he said to them, ‘You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, “Honor your father and your mother”; and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban” (that is, an offering to God)— then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.’

 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.’

 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, ‘Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, ‘It is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’

I know, I know: this is LOTS of scripture to use on any given Sunday. Yet if we are going to give a good survey of the entire Gospel of Mark we need to not be shy about using it. These are stories where Jesus is shown redefining religious tradition, reshaping life, and reforming the abuses and hypocrisies of the ways he saw faith being peddled and proclaimed.

                In the first section, he and his disciples are accused of not being pious (not fasting). Jesus responds by claiming that the present time is a time to rejoice and not for mourning. Then he says out loud that he is about something new. It cannot be adapted to fit the old ways. New wineskins and new wine. While what Jesus taught and did came out of the stream of Judaism, those who wrote the Gospel of Mark understood that Jesus showed us that God was doing something new.

                Jesus and his ongoing confrontation with the religious authorities, a particularly recurring them in Mark, is crystalized in the question of the Sabbath practices. The Pharisees (Jesus’ primary antagonists in this drama) ask Jesus, none too gently, why he does not instruct his followers to obey the letter of the law regarding abstaining work (including gathering food) on the Sabbath. The assumption is that the law (here read Torah, God’s law) is above human need. Jesus boldly redefines the relationship: the Sabbath is make human life better, not humans to serve the needs of the Sabbath. This is new wine indeed.

                Now Jesus enters into a favorite theme of his: the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. They decry Jesus and his teaching for diluting the importance of the cleanliness code. Jesus retorts that they follow the letter of the law, but ignore the heart of it. This encapsulates a theme that Jesus will return to many times: the emphasis on cleanliness or purity as a means of ostracizing people, especially the poor. This Jesus decries as a human tradition, and not what God has decreed at all. Jesus specifically accuses the Pharisees of twisting the Torah to their own ends. What should be an act of dedication and sacrifice (the declaration of wealth as a gift to God – “Corban”) has become a gambit to avoid one’s obligation to care for one’s parents (the meaning of honoring one’s parents).

                Jesus then tackles the purity code head on. That code prescribes all sorts of things that make someone impure: gathering food on the Sabbath, eating with unwashed hands, sickness, touching blood, handling money, menstruation, sexual intimacy, and lots of other things. Jesus sees that all these are external encounters and have nothing to do with the interior life of people. Real impurity, Jesus says, comes from within a person, not from the things they encounter in the world. Jesus radically redefines what makes a person acceptable or not, and it is the entertaining of evil within oneself that is the true impurity. (Two notes: 1. most scholars agree that the comment about Jesus declaring all food clean is a later insertion. 2. The bible does not mention 7 deadly sins, and Jesus hears lists 12.)

                Most people, and especially poor people, in Jesus’ day simply could not keep up with all the demands of the cleanliness code as the Pharisees laid it out. It was a burden to them, and it was used as a means of delineating the good from the bad. Jesus saw things differently. His teaching and actions free people from those burdens and redefines what the religious relationship is. To recognize Jesus as the Messiah is to open ourselves to a bigger picture. When we look at Jesus, and not the Jesus painted in popular media but the one that Mark shows us, we see how God looks at the world. If we believe that Jesus is the one sent by God, then Jesus is God’s emissary to us. Jesus is the window through which we see how God wants the world to be. God does not want a religion that weighs people down and divides them. God wants to people to live freely, and to be gathered in a loving community.

                We still live in a world that burdens people severely: poverty, despair, warfare, preventable disease, classism, sexism, and racism all oppress people every day. That oppression also divides us. Even Christianity itself has become a millstone and a knife. What does Jesus show us about our lives today? Are the 12 interior evils he named still the same ones afflicting us in 2011? Are there others? If we can see a bit of God when we look at Jesus, how would this emissary confront us and our world today?

Good News: Jesus is the new wine who frees us.

Subject: Jesus shows us God’s desire for people to live in right relation to each and the world.

Igniting Desire:  We long for freedom from divisive, burdensome religion.