Rev Fanny Belanger

“The Lord has proclaimed to the end of the earth: Say to daughter Zion: See your salvation comes; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him” They shall be called “The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord” and you shall be called “Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken”.

Of all the prophets, the prophet Isaiah is the most well known to Christians, the most quoted one in all of the New Testament. I should actually talk about “the scroll of Isiah” rather than about the prophet Isaiah, since most scholars believe that the book of Isaiah was written over two hundreds centuries, by at least three different authors. I am not sharing these facts to teach a class about the prophets, as I am pretty sure that on Christmas Eve we’re not that interested in doing Bible History. What I think is important for us to know though, is that the scroll of Isaiah has been written over a very difficult time for the people of Israel. During those two hundreds years, the people of Judah had seen their kingdom falling apart, Jerusalem been besieged and attacked and fell at the hands of their enemies, the elite of the people being sent into Exile in Babylon where they lived as servants – until seventy years later they were finally allowed to come back – and although that day when they returned must have felt like a wonderful day, they still had to find the whole city in ruins and the Temple to be rebuilt from scratch. Difficult times indeed. And yet, covering the whole period, we have the Book of Isaiah – the prophet, or should I say the prophets and all the other prophets we’ve been talking about since the beginning of this season, the prophets being with the people all along, warning them, nudging them, comforting them – and in the voices of the prophets – the presence of God being manifested through them, in spite of it all, in the midst of it all.

I find it helpful in difficult times to be reminded of the difficult times people had before us, and especially I guess, for us as Christians, to be reminded of the difficult times of the people of God. Through adversity, sorrow and loss, their voices today can still be heard and they show us how they have struggled, doubted, lost their faith and then found it again – how they have managed to keep the hope alive and remained faithful through the messiness, the loss and the pain – and mostly, I find it helpful to see how God remained faithful to God’s people, in spite of all the suffering they had endured from the hands of others and in spite of the hurt they had inflicted on God, on themselves and on one another. In our passage today, after seventy years in Exile, the people are back to Jerusalem, after such a long time of repentance, a time so long that the scroll of Isaiah tells us that Jerusalem had now paid “twice for her sin”, seventy years reflecting and praying about how things went so wrong for the promised city, their kings and all the people and now they’re ready to start anew and God is ready to start anew with them, picking up where they left off for something better, rebuilding together their life and their story.

Seventy years of Exile. Let’s think about it for a moment. The people had been for seventy years away from their Temple, for seventy years they had been away from their city, for seventy years they had been away from their land, and for some of them, for seventy years they had been away from their family – that is, for the few ones who survived for such a long period. We’ve been two years in this pandemic – two years – and we are already at the stage where we feel that we cannot take it anymore, not for another minute. I am not going to tell you: “See, what are we complaining about?”, because one thing I have noticed over time is that it’s never useful when we suffer to be reminded that others have or had it worst. Generally, it just drags us down a little bit more, adding guilt to sorrow.

But as I have just mentioned, there are two things I find useful:

The first thing that may help us is to understand how God can use those times of Exile – whatever the Exile might be – to bring us to a deeper level of spirituality, a deeper level of wisdom and maturity, and this is certainly what God did with Israel. Maybe you remember how the prophet Malachi calls the Exile a time of purification – and yes, it can happen sometimes that trough suffering we become better people. We learn what really matters, we take care of each other. That happens sometimes. We also have to acknowledge that sometimes also suffering does not bring the best in ourselves: we get impatient, we fight, we try to survive at the expense of others.

So the second thing I noticed to be really useful – and really beautiful- is to see how God remains faithful to us – no matter what we do to ourselves, no matter what others do to us. God still comes to find us, to redeem us and to bring us back to life. This is indeed what we see in this passage of Isaiah: God ready to start it all over again with his people when the people thought it was all over, God ready to pick up where they left off, yet transformed and renewed, and God ready to rebuild Jerusalem, and to bring back joy, strength and abundance – wine and bread to all, reads the text.

And this is the story of the Bible you see: God finding a way for God’s people. God finding a way to God’s people.

This is to me the story of Christmas. We so often hear messages like that at church: “Have you found God?” or “Have you found faith?”, but in the end we know how unable we are to find God, or to find faith and sometimes to find any hope or joy at all in the world – in the end, it’s never us finding God, it’s God finding us, like the angels found the shepherds in the night, on that night we remember this night. I mentioned last week how Luke’s Gospel is the Gospel of the poor and the humble, and we can certainly see that in the way Christ came to us. Christ came to us in the darkest and longest night, in exhaustion, isolation and rejection. Joseph and Mary were away from their home, their family, their land, they had been pushed away by the people of Bethlehem and little did they know that they wouldn’t be back in Nazareth for several years because the king would want to murder their child. And yet, this is in this reality that God chose to visit them and to be with them and to start over with the people, and God will visit them and be with them in a way that God’s people have never experienced before – God will be with them in the flesh of a newborn. And of course for us as Christians we know how, throughout in life, Jesus will continue to visit humble people, people plagued with poverty, disease or handicap, people scorned by other people, people cursed by their own wrong doings, hurting themselves, hurting others, feeling lost and forsaken. Jesus came to all, had a message for all, had compassion on all and was ready to start it all over again with each one of them, as God was ready to start it all over again after the Exile in Jerusalem and on this Holy night where God made God present in the flesh of an infant. What Christmas tells us is that there is no situation that God cannot visit, assume and redeem – What Christmas tells us is that nothing is lost when God is present.

And so it is for us I guess. The example of our ancestors in faith shows us that however difficult the times, God will still find a way for us, will find a way to us, and even, maybe, be with us in ways God has never been before. It makes no difference to God the situation we are in, no matter how bad it seems to us, no matter the darkness, God promises God will find us, and will bring back to us joy, hope and abundance – bread and wine – as God did in the ruins of Jerusalem, as God will do once again in the upper room on Jesus’s last supper we will celebrate in a few minutes. The prophets remind us that through it all we are not forsaken, but rather sought after. That’s the story of the Bible, and it can be our story too. So maybe like the shepherds in the fields, the only thing we have to do is to allow God to find us in the depth of this night.

I wish you all a very blessed Christmas.

– We hear today a passage from the book of Micah, another one of the “twelve minor prophets” of the Old Testament. If you don’t know anything about Micah, you still might know something, this very famous quotation: “What Does the Lord Require of You? to Act Justly and to Love Mercy and to Walk Humbly With Your God.” (Micah 6:8). It reminds us of something we have already insisted on, that the prophets are mostly preoccupied with what we call today “social justice” but which is basically care for the poor – and beyond this care for the poor, choosing for oneself to become “poor” that is, humble. This way of living, according to Micah, is worth all sacrifices and offerings, of much more value than what was considered at the times the highest sacrifice one could do in the pagan world: the sacrifice of your own child – a sacrifice that the God of Israel supremely despises, but – so does the prophet remind us – it may happen with any kind of offering: Our gifts are of no value to God if not offered with a pure heart and living according to the rules God has given to the people.

It might not be useless to be reminded of that during Christmas time when we try to show affection or to “make up” relationships by the offering of the gifts. The gift may be of value if there is work being done on the relationships in the meantime, the gift being a symbol for the mending or the reinforcing of the relationship but it certainly cannot be a substitute for it. What matters is the intention of the heart and the conversion of the heart, this is how it should work with one another, and this is certainly how it works with God. In the Old Testament, all sacrifice / gift that is offered with no pure intention is considered as manipulative (=trying to obtain something from God without being willing to change). What might not be readily understandable for us is that, as they make this claim, the prophets inscribe themselves in a countertradition: they go against the tradition of the Temple and the tradition of the priests, whose job was just that: to offer the sacrifice. With the prophets’ counter tradition, we are, if you will, at a higher degree of spirituality than just mere religion: The true religion of the heart. And we have talked already about that last week, how the God of the prophets is a God who expects repentance from the people. Repentance not by offering wonderful gifts or by beating ourselves up about our sins, but by concretely changing our way of living, becoming humble, and by changing our way of relating to others, especially to the poorest among us and the most powerless.

– Now, it is interesting that we open the Gospel of Luke and this is exactly what the program is all about. Luke inscribes his Gospel in the tradition (or the countertradition) of the prophets. Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, was the priest designated to serve at the Temple on that year and he is silenced by the angel, he is made dumb, although he was a righteous man, he cannot instruct the people. But the women will. Over the voices of the establishment, we hear the voices of the poor and the humble: Mary and Elizabeth, and even an unborn child – John The Baptist, bearing his first testimony to Jesus by kicking in the womb.

This is very important to notice because we will hear during all this coming liturgical year from Luke’s Gospel, and these are two major themes in Luke: Humility and poverty. With each story, each parable and even as Luke gives an account of Jesus’s passion, the same statement is made again and again: The humble and the poor, these are the people who are close from God, these are the people who, emptying themselves, can be filled with the Spirit, these are the people who “get it” even if they don’t get anything else. These are the real prophets. No doubt in Luke’s mind that Elizabeth, the barren old woman, Mary, the unwed pregnant teenager, and John, the six months old fetus, are prophets.

And this is interesting we have today in our lectionary this parallel with Micah, because Micah was probably the poorest and most humble of all the prophets in the Bible – a small town man, from Moresheth-gath, a peasant, who had no relation whatsoever with the power structure in Jerusalem and who actually refused the title of prophet for himself (when other prophets like Jeremiah or Isaiah would go at length about their calling) (see Micah 3:5-8).

So what does it say to us when we see that the real prophet not only advocates for the poor and the humble but himself embraces humility and poverty because this is where the voice of God can be heard and where the change of heart happens? The prophet lets go of power, goods and even titles, even their titles in relationships with God- Micah is a true prophet as he refuses to be a prophet as a status – in this, Micah actually reminds me of St Francis of Assisi who refused to become a priest because of his great humility.

Now what about us? Do we want to help the poor and the powerless and stop there, or do we accept our own poverty and powerlessness and above that, do we go as far as choosing poverty and pwerlessness? Not because it’s a good thing in itself to be poor and powerless but because this is actually where the voice of God is being heard, and this is where God brings true salvation – as described in Mary’s famous song we have just heard this morning. The prophecy from Micah about Bethlehem has something to say about that too. This prophecy has been, of course, used many times by Christians. As we have noticed several times, we might just use it as a “prediction”: Micah says that a king will be born in Bethlehem and oh, this must be Jesus because Jesus is born in Bethlehem. But beyond that, what really matters in that Micah, the small town man, saw the real King as a small town man too, poor and humble and yet full of majesty as he would continue in King David’s steps.

– So yes, the prophet preaches repentance for the people – humility and poverty. Now I think we would stop half way if we would just stop at that. I think this is interesting in another manner that Micah would point out to Bethlehem, the city of David, as the place where salvation was supposed to come. To me, Micah means by that that in spite of all the sins of the people, God is ready to start again. God is ready to start again, with a new David, before the throne became completely corrupted in Jerusalem, and not only is God willing to start again, but God is ready to do something even better than what God did in the past. The mystery – and I think this is true in all the books of the prophets and in all the prophecies – is that if the people would repent, if they are really willing to change, God will repent too. God is ready to change too. We noted last week how God’s anger was a huge part of prophecies and how the prophets saw the calamities happening to the people as a punishment for their sins (collective – not individuals) but yet, there is always this possibility that if the people change, God will change too, and again, not only bring things back to normal, but will make things better than they were. More than speaking about God, or on behalf of God, the prophets show us how God feel about people. As Mary and Elizabeth do not only bear a message but bear the messengers themselves, the prophets show to the people how it is like to be God: Angered by their sins, mourning for their crimes, and in the same time full of compassion for the lost and longing to make things new. The care and concern prophets show for the people is a reflection of God’s own care and concern. God is moved in every way by those God chose to call God’s own.

So you see, the God of the prophets does not care for karma and fate and destiny – the people won’t get exactly (the bad things) that they deserve, but they are free to reinvent with God a new way of being, should they choose to. The prophets wrote in the darkest times of History for the people and yet they were able to discern what God was willing to do beyond that. Once again, this is not cheap hope that we find in the Bible, but faith in God’s willingness and power to turn things around. In the words of Mary:

“His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever” Amen.

We continue today our series on the prophets, and we meet so many during this season of Advent! I don’t know if you’ve paid attention, but in our readings today we hear from not less than three different prophets! Zephaniah (OT lesson), Isaiah (Canticle/Psalm) and John the Baptist in the Gospel. Isaiah and John the Baptist are of course well-known prophets – Zephaniah not so much…so I would like to start by taking a minute to present this one.

– What we should notice right away is that Zephaniah is not well known to us because…he’s actually not well known at all! Unlike prophets like John the Baptist or Jeremiah whom I talked about in my last sermon, we know almost nothing about Zephaniah’s personal life and vocation – except for a very short genealogy at the beginning of the book. Most scholars assume Zephaniah lived and preached at the time of King Josiah, one of the last kings of Judah before the Fall of Jerusalem and the captivity in Babylon. And the Book of Zephaniah itself is very short: three chapters only, which is the reason why Zephaniah belongs to the category of the “Twelve minor prophets” as opposed to the three majors prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel). Now “Minor prophets” does not mean that they are “less important” prophets. The scroll of the twelve prophets contains as many verses as any of the three major other scrolls, and the minor prophets complete the predication of the major ones in a significant way (for reasons too long to develop here!).

Now if we start looking specifically at the reading we are given today by our lectionary, we will notice that once again we are presented with only one aspect of the predication of the prophet – if you remember from last time, we had three verses of Jeremiah out of fifty two chapters! Here we have a longer extract but the tone is actually very different from the rest of the book, so we have to turn back to the whole book to understand what it is really about.

The portion we read today from Zephaniah is an extract from the third and last chapter of the prophet. What Zephaniah describes in this portion of the chapter is a beautiful and joyful vision, a vision of a better future for the people, where all will be gathered with God in their midst in the Holy City (And it’s the same idea that we have in the passage of Isaiah we have just read, and it should also sound familiar as it reminds us of the Book of Revelation.)

Now if you remember, we talked before about the way the prophecies bring comforting visions to people in difficult times. And with the Fall of Jerusalem and the Exile, Zephaniah certainly wrote at a difficult time when people needed hope and to be reminded that God would have the last word. Yet we would be wrong to assume that what the prophets say is that now is a dark time but sit tight, wait, because suddenly God will be here and make everything better. Unfortunately, this is often the way it’s interpreted. Yet if we look closer, the dark times – and this is certainly the case in Zephaniah – are understood as an expression of God’s wrath, a chastisement for sins, and even if only God can bring better times, dark times will turn into better times when people change their hearts, repent and get reconciled with God.

– Now of course this is not very popular for most of us…God’s wrath, chastisement for sins, or even repentance? In our Lectio Divina group, a few weeks ago, someone made a comment about never having heard an Episcopal priest preach about repentance – I had to agree, never did I! In our churches, we have to acknowledge that we cultivate an image of God who never gets angry and forgives even before we have confessed our sins (that is, if we still believe in sin!). We dismiss all this as an “Old Testament” understanding of God. Now we have to notice that this understanding of God is still present in the New testament though, we see that it is still present in John the Baptist’s proclamation who talks about the “wrath” and the “fire” that are coming, as well as “repentance” for the people. So should we dismiss this aspect of the proclamation too, or should we try to understand what it means?

As usual, I certainly don’t have an answer to all those important questions, but there are a few things we can keep in mind:

1 – In the messages of the prophets, God’s anger is not an expression of God’s hate – quite the opposite, anger is an expression of God’s concern for the people. God is not indifferent. Everywhere in the Old Testament, God is described as the one who sees and hears the people and is moved with compassion. Today many people wonder if God is touched by the suffering of this world, but the prophets didn’t wonder about that. God does not “allow” bad things as we say now, rather God is angry at the evil committed by the people, especially the injustices and exploitation of the powerless –and this is actually the source of God’s anguish and God’s wrath.

As we consider that, maybe we can question our lack of anger at many things that should make us angry – not out of hate, but out of concern for those who are suffering and even out of concern for those who wrong them. God desires repentance, change, rather than destruction.

2 – In the prophets’ message, the chastisement is a consequence of sin – those sins, that in the Bible are idolatry and injustices. Dark times are brought on themselves by the people, they are a consequence of the actions of the people for the very reason that the world God created is not designed to work with sin. When sin is present, things go wrong, because sin cut us off from God. Prophets have a very strong sense of God’s holiness. God cannot be associated with sin, if people are sinful they automatically set themselves apart from God. Now what is important to notice is that they do that as people, it’s a collective understanding of sin. Those who suffer the most aren’t those who sin the most, that’s actually often the opposite: the poor suffer while the powerful take advantage of them, and that’s part of the injustice God cannot tolerate.

As we consider that, maybe we can question how our choices affect others collectively and what society we contribute to create. A lot of our world problems today are a consequence of our selfishness and of our indifference. In this sense, at least in the prophets, God’s wrath is a tool to bring about change. God is not an angry God because this is God’s character, rather God uses wrath to lead God’s people to react and ultimately to save the sinful as well as those who are oppressed by the sinners. Wrath brings about conversion.

3 – And so, what it’s really about is repentance. Or to say it differently, the visions brought by the prophets are not happy dreams that would work as the “opium of the people”. Those visions of a better future may help us cope yes, but also they invite us to change. The times will change if people answer God’s call found in the predication of the prophets, and if the people respond by their willingness to change. Deeply, all prophecies are a call to repentance – this is very clear in the message of John the Baptist we have today. All of John the Baptist’s proclamation was about repentance (Same with Jesus, at least in Mark – If you remember, Mark almost never tells us what Jesus preached about, he only says that Jesus asked people to repent because the Kingdom was coming). The prophets are not dreamers even though they have visions, rather they are down to earth people who are passionate about justice, speak the truth to powers and call for profound social change, and that’s what the new Jerusalem is about.

As we consider that, we may understand that repentance is not about feeling bad about ourselves – the reason why we don’t like to talk about repentance! The Prophets don’t invite us to feel guilty or ashamed, they invite us to act, to “bear fruits worthy of repentance” as John the Baptist puts it, with very simple acts of justice and integrity in our everyday lives. We will participate in the kingdom announced by the prophets as long as we are willing to live according to what this kingdom is all about.

Advent is this time of the year when we read from several books of prophets. The readings may seem a bit random with the choice of texts and authors our lectionary operates. What these readings have in common though, and the reason why these passages have been selected, is that they all point to the coming of Christ – or at least this is the way we understand these passages as Christians. They are certainly read differently in the Jewish tradition

The passage we have today from Jeremiah is actually very typical of the way we as Christians often read the prophecies. We have a very short extract (3 verses) of a book that actually contains 52 chapters. In these verses, Jeremiah declares that God “will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem lives in safety”. As I mentioned last week when we read from Daniel about the “Son of Man”, as soon as we hear these kind of references we are tempted to “jump” immediately to Jesus and say: “See, centuries in advance, the prophets announced Jesus” “the Son of Man” or the “Son of David”, our “king of righteousness”, our “Savior” – and then we are done with the reading. We look in the Bible for confirmation of something we already know and we close the book because there is nothing more the Hebrew Scriptures have to teach us because we have found the answer with Jesus.

The problem though with our Christian understanding of the Old Testament in general, and of the prophecies more specifically, is that if we approach these texts only as “predictions about Jesus”, we take the risk to make of the Old Testament a book of divination (and divination that’s actually the way we often understand what a prophet does on a very basic level: the prophet is the one who sees the future). This is a dangerous and deceptive way of reading the Bible. First of all, it’s dangerous because it may lead some readers to try to use the texts to predict and control the future and even the end of the world, and we certainly know that many cults did just that when interpreting the Bible. But more often, without going that far, the problem with this type of reading is that it is deceptive: seeing only the “prediction” can make us miss the historical, ethical and spiritual meaning of the text. Interestingly, reading the Bible, and especially the prophecies, as a foretelling of the future is actually counter Biblical: there are many passages in the Bible that condemn astrology, divination and all the ways we try to manipulate our reality using a perverted form of religiosity.

So the question for us during this time of Advent could be: How – as Christians – are we supposed to read the prophets right and what can we learn from them? Well, I am not sure I have the correct answer, but there are maybe a few things we can talk about. Luther used to say that the Old testament was “the cradle of Christ”. I don’t think he meant by that that we should “read between the lines”, find hidden references to Christ in the Bible, rather Luther meant that the Old testament relates the history, the cultural context from where Jesus comes from and he probably meant also that we find in the Old Testament a growing sense of who God is, the God who Jesus called his Father.

And so back to our lesson for today – My sense is that there is much more to learn in Jeremiah than a simple prediction of a few verses. I am not convinced that Jeremiah was gifted with a sixth sense, or even had a revelation from above about what would happen in his land several centuries later. More important I think is that Jeremiah, as a prophet, shows us what it is to be a bearer of God’s word ( which is the Greek etymology of the word pro- phet. As a consequence, in Jeremiah’s way of living / of bearing the word, we are given clues to recognize the ultimate “bearer of the word” when he would come (“bearer of the word” / “the word himself” is the name John gives to Jesus in the prologue of his Gospel).

So what clues are we given?

– Well, the first thing we notice about Jeremiah is that he spoke the truth to power – specifically he told the king of Judah things he didn’t want to hear – that Babylon would prevail over Jerusalem and that he would lose his kingdom. We see in the Gospel today that it is exactly what Jesus does as well, as he predicts the second fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. They both teach that real power is to be found in God and not in human institutions.

– In the meantime, Jeremiah had words of comfort for those who were afflicted and enduring the oppression of the foreign powers and a corrupted king. The passage we have today is actually taken from what we call “The book of consolation” (chapters 30-33 inside the book of Jeremiah). In the same way, Jesus promised a reversal of situation to all who were oppressed (“the first will be the last”) and was systematically on the side of the powerless (sinners, foreigners, women and children)

– Jeremiah, as Jesus, loved the poor and lived in poverty as a way to proclaim that the true riches were to be found in God. They didn’t seek profit from their prophetic activity – quite the opposite, they didn’t receive prestige and wealth because their teaching was displeasing to many.

– Jeremiah suffered for the truth: He was imprisoned, mocked, starved and almost put to death – this of course reminds us of the sufferings of Christ who remained faithful to his mission to the end.

– Jeremiah died in exile and Jesus died being rejected.

– In the midst of the “gloom and doom”, Jeremiah and Jesus both encouraged the people to “watch expectantly” for God’s justice – as is very obvious in our Gospel today. Jesus says: “Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near”

There are for me two main lessons we can take away from that:

1 – A prophet embodies holiness. True prophets don’t just proclaim the message – they are the message, at their level, in their own circumstances, according to their own strengths (and weaknesses). If we believe that the prophets of the Old Testament announced Christ, we have to see that it was not only with their words that they did the announcement. They worked actively for the righteousness and the justice of the kingdom. As we read from the books of the prophets, we are invited to do those things as well: To put God first, even against our interests, to stand up against injustices (sometimes the ones done to us, and mainly, the ones done to others). We are invited to comfort the afflicted, to encourage the little ones, to help the poor, to find God’s presence in the midst of our personal sufferings and in the difficulties of our times. And above all that, we are invited to find hope and to bring hope.

2 – And I would like to conclude by saying a few words about hope as we can come to understand it in our readings. Hope as you know is generally the umbrella theme in Advent. Yet we often misunderstand hope as a religious form of optimism. We see though that hope isn’t cheap in the Bible. As we discover in Jeremiah and in our Gospel today, hope is the sense of God’s presence in a broken and suffering world, in the doom and the gloom. Jeremiah like Jesus do not sugarcoat it. Yet Jeremiah tells the people that in spite of all, God will fulfill his promises. Jesus invites his disciples to stand up. Hope does not come when we sit and tell ourselves that things will get better eventually (or even in a more spiritual way: “This too shall pass”). In Jeremiah, hope springs from righteousness, from holiness, embodied in God’s people. It is from people with a prophet’s awareness and behavior that God will bring healing and restoration to the world. This was foreseen in Jeremiah and will find for us clear revelation in Christ. But this is also an invitation for all of us. We too will be prophets and announce Christ if we embody this way of living.

– Today our Old Testament lesson is taken from the Book of Daniel and it’s interesting because if you’ve paid attention (and if you’re in the Bible study group, you’ve definitely paid attention!) since September we have been reading from the books of wisdom every Sunday morning. In Advent (starting next week) we will dive into the prophecies. It’s interesting because Daniel is sort of an “in between” book of wisdom / book of prophecy. The book of Daniel relates many visions, and yet the Jewish tradition does not acknowledge Daniel as a prophet per se because Daniel never had a direct conversation with God. On the other side, Christians like to think of Daniel as a prophet because he had these visions of a “Son of Man” and we know that’s the way Jesus used to refer to himself – so we like to think that Daniel anticipated the coming of Christ! But what Jewish and Christian traditions agree on though is that Daniel is also a book of wisdom.

Before we come to all the visions, the first part of the book of Daniel (Chap 1-6) relates the story of the man who, as many others, had been exiled from Jerusalem and came to live in Babylon, in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar. The story of Daniel is not unlike Joseph’s story in Egypt. In the mist of paganism and debauchery, Daniel, like Joseph, remains a faithful, trustworthy, god-fearing man whom people notice because of his excellent character and many gifts – not the least of them being the gift of interpreting dreams. Daniel, like Joseph, is not a magician though – it’s only for his piety that he is made able to understand what God says to men and women. Daniel deciphers the visions of others and later on he’ll receive his own visions.

And so that’s the first connection between wisdom and prophecy. In our modern understanding, we often see prophets as mildly eccentric, strange people saying strange things, but in the Bible, prophets are wise, godly, holy men. You don’t become a prophet because you’re an eccentric, you become a prophet because your heart and mind are close to the heart and the mind of God

Second connection between wisdom and prophecy is that prophets receive visions to help the people cope with difficult times – and we talked about that two weeks ago on All Saints’ Day. We mentioned that the Book of Revelation was written at a terrible time for Christian people, but the vision of the final victory of Christ is given to them so they can find hope and overcome adversity. This vision of Daniel, is, if you will, the ancestor of the Book of Revelation, the origin of what we call apocalyptic literature: A vision of the final victory of God against the forces of evil as we come to know them in History, through the violence and oppression of the nations. Apocalyptic writings are meant to show us that, in spite of all appearances, God has the ultimate power and is in control. An important thing apocalyptic literature is meant to teach us is to learn endurance and hope.

This should help us understand a little bit better the images we have today. The vision Daniel describes “one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven” certainly clicks immediately in our minds as referring to Jesus. It is good though to put back the vision in context and realize that Daniel sees this one “like a human” after he had the vision of four beasts: Lion, bear, leopard and one so scary that he does not even know what it is. And so that’s interesting because you see, the first idea is that we see God bringing a kingdom with a human figure versus a beastly one. For reasons too long to develop here, the four beats refer respectively to the Empire of Babylon, the Persian Empire, the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire. But the kingdom of God looks like a man. And you know I like it if we just take time to think about it before jumping to Jesus: When Daniel describes God, God looks like a human being for the simple reason that God does not look like a beast and does not behave like a beast. The kingdom of God brings humanity.

And so that’s the second thing we come to learn in this passage of Daniel: true power is to treat people with humanity, decency. Humanity is at the center of this power from heavens: not conquest, display of splendors and riches – the power displayed by God looks like people, is for people. And isn’t it what we want from the powers and nations and all those in authority? That they would act like human beings and that they treat everybody like human beings? That is the vision of peace God brings and this is not just a vision, it’s also a promise for what is too come. And this is also the question that is given to us: Do we want to foster this vision of the kingdom of God or we will side with the Empire? What is our understanding of power?

Which of course leads us to the question our Gospel asks today.

Pilate against Jesus in John’s Gospel is really about the Empire of the Beast against the Kingdom of God. Jesus describes his own power and he is very clear. Jesus says: “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.” The essence of Jesus’s power is non violence. To me, it’s really important we notice that because so often we think that these apocalyptic visions, the coming of the kingdom of God happens with violence. Yet we see with Jesus that there is no violence – only a Son of man, humble and vulnerable.

It’s important to notice that so we don’t have false ideas about God. Some Christians say: “God is violent but that’s okay because God is God” or “because God is good”, but we see in John’s Gospel that God’s power is completely different in nature from the powers of this world. It’s also important we notice that so we don’t have false ideas about ourselves too. Because some Christians believe a good God can be violent they say: “As long as the violence is in the hands of the good guys it’s okay” (and of course they understand themselves as the good guys). Well maybe at some point violence in certain circumstances is a lesser evil but it is certainly not the type of power Jesus embodies and invites us to imitate.

How is this power different from what we know and practice? Well, a certain theologian opposes what we call the “redemptive suffering of the Gospel” against the “myth of redemptive violence of the world”. The myth of redemptive violence – you know what it is – it’s everywhere in fiction and in facts: It’s the belief that if the good guy(s) kills the bad guy(s) the world will be saved. In fact, it’s a myth because violence just repeats itself, violence never ceases and that’s the wars between nations apocalyptic visions describe so often. To that, the Gospel presents an alternative vision, reverses the cycle: Bad guy kills the good guy and the world is saved – What we call “Redemptive suffering”.

Now we have to be very careful with that. Thinking about suffering as redemptive is dangerous. Redemptive suffering is not not about letting our enemies crush us or just endure everything that comes our way. It’s not the suffering in itself that is redemptive but the refusal to act with violence, to respond to violence with violence, to use violence as a solution. What is redemptive is Jesus standing in front of Pilate, standing against worldly powers and speaking the truth to this power whatever the cost. We see in John’s Gospel that Jesus did not see himself as coming to suffer and die but first of all, to testify to the truth. That’s also the story of Joseph, the story of Daniel and that’s the story we are invited to tell / to embody as well.

Now what does it mean for us to “speak truth to the powers”? Well – that’s what prophecy is all about. Prophecy is much more about speaking the truth in dangerous circumstances rather than having visions, dreams or being able to predict the future. And that’s what we’ll talk about throughout Advent.

All Saints Sunday is one of those too rare Sundays where we read at church from the Book of Revelation, so I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about it before we have a look at our Gospel.

The book of Revelation is actually quite a wonderful book when we do not use it to push an agenda, to terrorize people or just to try to determine when the end of the world will occur…

The book of Revelation was not written to terrorize Christians – it was actually quite the opposite. It is believed that this book is the latest (=most recent) book of the New Testament and was written at a time where Christians were terrorized (= persecuted). This book is the telling of a vision meant to bring courage and consolation as Christians await the final victory of Christ against the forces of evil and death.

What makes the Book of Revelation a bit terrifying is that it does not mean to bring courage and strength by denying how bad reality is – rather it dives deeply in the violence that tears our world apart and the sorrow that breaks our hearts. In this it is certainly not a self help book that motivates us to “feel better” by “looking on the bright side”. We certainly need self help at times and to not focus on the negative – yet we know it’s not enough in the end.

The Book of Revelation talks about the way in which – no matter how bad reality is – God will have the final word. God will bring consolation (wipe away all the tears) not just by bringing us temporary comfort, but by having the final victory against evil and putting an end to it.

The promise of the Book of Revelation does not describe a blissful reality, but it does not make a faint promise either: “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more”. That’s the promise of promises, the promise above anything else that can be promised and hoped for.

And this is really what the Book of Revelation is about: It’s about Hope. The Book of Revelation brings us a vision (indeed a “revelation”) that brings a new light on this, at times, terrifying reality and the book invites us to live this life believing that the best is yet to come, instead of thinking of reality as just a series of loss and tragedies. This world is passing away, yes, but not just to disappear. The world is passing away because God is bringing something new, something that will endure for ever.

It’s interesting if you think about it, because what makes life so hard is mostly because this world is passing away. We get older, we lose our friends, we lose our abilities, we cling to people or things that in the end let us down and deceive us, maybe we try to make a name for ourselves, or to surround us with material comfort – only to find out that nothing last.

The Book of Revelation puts this understanding upside down. This world is passing away but the author shows us that, in a sense, it’s good that it is passing away, it’s passing away because God can bring something good, something that will last forever, and also something we will be a part of (because otherwise, what’s the point for us?)

With this vision – we find hope. And we know how much hope is important in everyday life. We all need to have some kind of hope to get up in the morning. To make it through difficult times, we need to have a vision that brings hope: that we will find a job, that we will recover from this disease, or maybe just that we will learn something trough our trials. If we don’t have a vision that brings hope, we die inside.

And what the Book of Revelation does it that it does not bring us hope only for what’s next in this life, the book of Revelation brings us hope to what’s beyond life. The “hope for what’s next in this life” is important because it also points to the hope we should have for what’s “beyond life”.

Now you may know that it is believed (or was believed for a long time) that the author of The Book of Revelation is the author of John’s Gospel – John the Apostle, maybe. There is no certainty about that, but we can find in both book a common thread. In John’s Gospel too, we are given a vision – the author of the Gospel calls them “signs”, signs that point to a reality that hidden, not directly accessible to our eyes.

If you remember, I told you that Mark’s Gospel is much more concise than John’s. True – but in away, John goes more directly to what’s essential. Mark is interested in showing Jesus as a teacher, a healer, a miracle worker, and the divinity of Christ is kept a secret for a long time. But, on the other way around, what John is interested in doing is to show us the divinity of Christ at every turn.

The Resurrection of Lazarus is the last “sign” Jesus gives to the people before he is arrested and put to death. If Jesus weeps and dies with and like all the people, he is also the one who brings ultimate consolation and new life. It’s interesting to notice that people wonder aloud if Jesus, who had “opened the eyes of the blind” (and we talked about that recently) “couldn’t have kept the man from dying” – because actually the miracle will be even greater than opening the eyes of preventing someone from dying. Jesus does not makes life better just by healing people. Jesus brings hope when no hope is to be found, when all hope is lost. John tells us that the man had been dead for 4 days, when 3 days was believed by the Jews to be this lapse of time when the deceased was still hanging around, but after that, gone for good. Jesus can bring back Lazarus when he is already gone for good. We know that Lazarus will die again, but then, it’s a sign so we believe that Jesus has complete mastery on life and death. It’s a sign to believe in Jesus’s divinity.

If we believe the signs we will “see the glory of God”, says John. Not just as spectator, but by participating in this glory. I told you before that Jesus’s glory was to have his friends with him – and we can certainly see that in our story today.

Now what can we do with that, concretely?

1. Do not lose your vision. We are Christians for hope. A lot of people notice these days that you don’t need to be Christian to be a good person and that’s true, but it’s also true that if we really believe the promises of the Bible, then we will probably become better persons too, because we will know what really matters, we won’t feel like we have to cling to things we believe will make us happy, we won’t feel we need to be in competition with one another to be acknowledged – all of that gives us a false sense of immortality, whereas Jesus promises us real life.

2. Again, do not lose your vision. We are Christians for hope. Again, a lot of people notice these days that you don’t need to be Christian to be a good person and that’s true. What is unique to believing in God – and more specifically to believing in Christ – is that we have this hope beyond all hope, a hope that does not shed us from sorrow and pain but helps us not to be stuck in it, knowing that sorrow and pain are not the ultimate reality and do not have the last word. This hope we are invited to cultivate it for our own sake of course, but also to cultivate it for the sake of others in a world so often plunged in despair. This is really what us Christians have to offer, our gift to the world: Ultimate hope, because ultimate hope is nowhere to be found – nowhere to be found – except in Christ.

This month of November, we’re going to have a series of festival Sundays here at St Margaret’s: Next Sunday will be All saints’ Sunday, then we will celebrate St Margaret’s on November 14^th; the week after, November 21^st, will be Christ the King which will finally lead us to the first Sunday in Advent on November 28^th. After this Sunday, we will read from John’s Gospel until we reach Advent when we will start a new liturgical year – Year C – reading through Luke’s Gospel.

So this Sunday is sort of an “in between” Sunday. This is actually the last time we hear from Mark’s Gospel, and I find it very fitting that the last we hear is Jesus’s summarizing all the Law with these commandments of loving God and loving neighbor. It’s important to notice that it’s not just a “memo” though, a flash card for good disciples before they take their exams – Jesus is in Jerusalem, living his last days on earth. Those words we hear today are actually Jesus’s testimony, Jesus’s last will. If you remember Jesus’s farewell discourse in John’s Gospel, well, this is where we are in the timeline. What takes John four chapters to present is here condensed in a few verses by Mark. We have studied in Chapter 10 how people came to Jesus asking “all the wrong questions” until a blind man comes with the right disposition of heart. But you see, it’s not over until it’s over. After that, Jesus has many other encounters in Jerusalem with people asking him questions. But this time, in chapter 12, Mark puts a final dot. Our passage ends up with Mark concluding: “After that, no one dared to ask him any question”.

Loving God and loving neighbor is a summary of all the Law, and that’s it! But of course commenting about that would take all the sermons in the world and we would not even have begun to cover it. So instead of trying to do that, I think it would be more helpful to focus on the way Mark specifically puts the saying into context, and then we can have a look on how the commandments are actually formulated in Jesus’s mouth on that occasion.

1. First of all, what is specific about the context of this saying?

– A scribe comes to ask Jesus a question and in the end, Jesus praises him for his wisdom.

It’s important to notice because we can easily fall into caricatures about the scribes and the pharisees as the “bad guys” of the Gospel, and we don’t want to adopt this kind of thinking that could lead us to antisemitism. The scribe is praised by Jesus for his wisdom, and he “isn’t far from the kingdom of God”. We cannot reduce people in categories of bad and wrong / good and right in the Gospel. Jesus was tough with the Pharisees, but remember that Jesus had disciples among the pharisees (Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus). Some scholars believe that Jesus was himself a pharisee, and it makes sense because we are often tougher on our own people when we have moral expectations. For example, for us, our job would be to hold Episcopalians accountable to higher standards. It is okay because it’s something we need to require of ourselves, because we are Episcopalians, it’s not like we kept on saying that really Catholics should do a better job at being Christian! Jesus didn’t see the Pharisees and the scribes as outsiders, they were his people and so he could ask them to give their best.

– In Mark’s context, we also need to notice that it’s okay to ask questions! Actually, I am in awe to realize how many people in this Gospel ask questions to Jesus. And yes, they ask the wrong questions, but little by little, some people show up with better questions. The questions are not “wrong” because of their content, but what we learned last week seeing how Bartimaeus made his request is that people who came before him had the wrong attitude rather than the wrong questions. They asked questions to trick Jesus, to make him contradict himself, or contradict the law. They used their questions to show off or to justify themselves and Jesus refused to play the game. But when they come up asking questions genuinely and expectantly, Jesus always answers and he even praises those people. So it is for us. Our faith is not to accept everything silently, part of our faith is to ask reverent and relevant questions and to come up each time with better, deeper questions that will bring us closer to the Kingdom of God.

2 – Which leads us to the content of the saying = What is specific to Mark in the way it’s formulated?

I am going to skip a bit the part about the love of neighbor – just because we had already said a lot about it when we studied James, but also because this is not in this part that stands out in Mark’s rendering of Jesus’s words. What I would notice though is that if Jesus insisted so much on love, and made it a commandment – it’s because it’s not easy! We have a tendency to put ourselves first, a natural tendency of self preservation that can turn into something sinful when we lose focus that our neighbors are as important as ourselves, and it’s something we need to be reminded of constantly. We had a meeting this week at church and we discussed how this time of pandemic had increased in us our feelings of insecurity and defensiveness, and how we find ourselves in needing to learn to love each other again. It’s okay! It’s in the Gospel: We constantly have to work on being more loving. And we can always start again, start anew.

– Now I would like to turn to what I think is really the specificity of Mark’s Gospel today, and it’s about the love of God. If you know a little about Hebrew Scriptures, you will notice that Jesus quotes the “Shema Israel” the great prayer of the Jews from Deuteronomy 6. What is remarkable is that, as often, Jesus takes some liberties when quoting the Scriptures, and he actually adds a line! In Deuteronomy, the commandment is to love God with your “whole heart, whole soul and whole might” whereas Jesus says “to love God with your whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, and whole strength (or might)” and then the scribe repeats what Jesus says “yes, you have to love with all your understanding” – I think this addition is amazing. It’s amazing because this is what Mark encourages us to do, as noted earlier. Mark encourages believers to inquire, to ask questions, to seek understanding. Maybe you’ve heard of John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Bishop, who died recently. That’s what Spong used to repeat all the time: “We have to do a better job at loving God with our mind and we need to seek understanding of our faith”. He did that all his life and it certainly put him at odds with some of the teachings of the church, and we may not agree with some of his theology, but we can recognize in him the integrity of the scribe who instead of siding with his peers mindlessly, just repeating what he had heard, was able to think for himself and asked Jesus for clarification. Spong said that asking questions was “taking God seriously”.

So it should be okay to ask questions, God is a mystery but in Jesus God reveals himself and responds to us and make God known to us. Don’t be surprised by the ending line of our passage. People “didn’t dare to ask any more questions” to Jesus not because they felt silly or humiliated. They were in awe (=the meaning of the “fear of God” in the Bible). They stopped asking questions because they have had their answer to their deepest question: What is it, in the end, that matters the most – the scribe’s question.

As a conclusion, just notice that Jesus is asking us to be whole, to love God with all our being, as God is one, we should be one, all given to our quest for God – which is of more value than all the sacrifice, as the scribe notices – the giving of self in building our relationship with God.

– If you remember from the study we did this past summer on Mark 3-6, we have noticed that Mark invites us to question Jesus’s identity throughout his ministry in Galilee. As we read, we can come up with different kind of insights: Jesus as a teacher, Jesus as a savior, Jesus as a healer…And indeed, in Mark’s Gospel there are a lot of stories of Jesus performing acts of healing. This is where we are today, with one of the most famous healing, the healing of the blind man Bartimaeus.

When we look at stories of healing, there is a lot we can gather about Jesus: We learn that Jesus cared about people, that he wanted to help them, that he wanted to make them whole…That’s all important things. Yet, I am glad we have spent so much time on the whole Chapter 10 of Mark as we hear this last story, because if we hadn’t had a look at the context, we could certainly learn from this healing, but it wouldn’t take us much further than “Jesus performing another healing”, with the general conclusions we can draw from it. Having studied the whole chapter though, we can certainly go a little bit deeper wondering about this passage not only as “another of Jesus’s miracle” but pondering the significance of this very miracle: Why is it that Mark tells this story right here, right now? This is where I would like us to start today.

In this chapter 10, we have looked at three people / group of people coming to Jesus to ask something from him. The Pharisees who wanted to know if it was okay to divorce their wives, the rich man who wanted to know what to do to inherit eternal life and then James and John, Jesus’s very own disciples, asking to share in Jesus’s glory. Mark places the story of the blind man in the same context: He comes to Jesus, asking for something. What we have learned so far is that in this chapter all the people who came to Jesus came with the wrong questions – questions that revealed their preoccupation with self and their hardness of heart. They all left Jesus disappointed and frustrated.

And so what happens today is that we know that the story tells us something different: The man is granted his request. So this could tell us that he did something right, correct? What did he do? What did he say? Only this: He asked Jesus to have mercy on him and he asked to be able to see again.

Now this is interesting because there is a strong connection in the Gospel between sin and blindness – something that is very obvious if you read John’s Gospel who, as always, has the most extensive and comprehensive narratives about Jesus’s signs. Blindness is not, as the disciples first assume, a consequence of sin. Quite the opposite, in John’s Gospel (Chap 9) Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” And Jesus says also to the Pharisees: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains”. In a much condensed way, this is also what we find in Mark: The man asking for mercy is then made able to see. The chapter we have just read is about hardness of heart, which is the emotional name for what is the deeper reality of spiritual blindness. This chapter is about hardness of heart, spiritual blindness and the way to overcome it: By asking Jesus for mercy, for forgiveness, which in the Gospel is what enables us to be able to see (spiritually). Note that the man asks to be able to see “again” – which is sort of a way of asking to go back to the state of innocence or purity that has been lost. The man throw his cloak away: he is to be made new, to be “re-made” as God intended him to be from the beginning.

And so in the end we learn that’s the right question to ask, that’s the request Jesus wants to grant to all who want to be his disciples, the request that will finally make us well instead of leaving us disappointed and frustrated. Asking Jesus to set us free from the sins that blind us. As I think about it today, it seems to me that there are three main areas where we may want to ask for clarity:

– Jesus can grant us the ability to see ourselves. This may feel like something difficult to ask and a bit scary, but we would be wrong if we’d assume it’s only about asking God to be able to see our own sin – even if it’s of course part of it. Bartimaeus asks Jesus to “have mercy”: He asks for forgiveness and compassion in the same time, and we believe that God always reveals love and compassion as God shows us our sins. God helps us to understand our wounds, our story, the way our minds work… Maybe we need to ask God to be able look at ourselves with love and compassion too so we don’t have to be so tough with ourselves or ashamed of who we are. Self acceptance is the first action we can take to overcome the hardness of our hearts.

– Jesus can grant us the ability to see others in a different light. At the beginning of the story, Bartimaeus is only able to hear the people who are criticizing him, but then he hears also those who have for him words of encouragement. As he asks mercy for him, his vision changes of what he perceives in others. I’ve heard many times Christian saying that, when they have difficulties with someone, they ask God to be able to see those people as God sees them. This is a very good prayer. It shouldn’t be limited to ask God to be able to see what’s lovable in others though. It should also start with Bartimaeus’ prayer “Have mercy on me!”, acknowledging that the way we see others is often distorted by our own sin, or at least by our own issues. We see others through the lens of our own agenda, our past experiences, our assumptions, our personal prejudices or the prejudices of our social class, of our race. So repentance is at the heart of being able to really see others, seeing them for who they are instead of seeing them only in comparison with ourselves. As we ask for mercy on ourselves, we start to have compassion for others, and that’s another way to overcome the hardness of our hearts.

– Last, but not least, Jesus grants us to see God for who God is. A commentator of this passage notices how wonderful it is that the first thing Bartimaeus is able to see is Jesus’s face! He opens his eyes and he sees God truly manifested in the person of Jesus! In comparison, the mistake of the Pharisees, of the young man and of James and John is that they weren’t seeing the real God, they were looking for a God of judgment and a God of power. But here, as Jesus is heading towards Jerusalem, we know that Jesus will reveal through his passion a God who is to be found in holiness, love and giving of self. Our heart remains closed if we come to God only to fulfill our own agenda, but if we are open to God’s agenda, we overcome the hardness of our hearts.

– Conclusion: This story is the conclusion of Jesus’s different encounters but it is also a foretelling of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem. Anticipating the crowd, Bartimaeus lays down his cloak and acclaims the Son of David. We also have a glimpse of the meaning of the passion. Jesus manifests a God who “makes everything new” (Revelation) – as Jesus gave his new eyes to the man, in the same way God can place new hearts in God’s people – and that’s always the right thing to ask, even today.

We’re already in our third week in this Chapter 10 of Mark, a chapter where we have noticed that everybody “asks the wrong question”. And from what it looks like, one week after another, we add a layer of wrongness on top of the other. No only the requests are getting more extravagant, but they also come from people who are closer to Jesus and therefore should know better than that.

If you remember, the first week, we had Pharisees asking if it was okay to divorce their wives who had become displeasing to them. Kind of tough, but it didn’t really come as a surprise either. Pharisees are often presented in the Gospels as legalistically minded, most of them are focused on the law, rather than they do wonder about what is the loving thing to do.

Then last week, we had this man who wanted to know how he could inherit eternal life. Unlike the Pharisees who weren’t very impressed with Jesus, this man seemed eager to follow, yet not at the cost at leaving everything behind. He still thought about eternal life as something to add to his many possessions rather than an experience to be lived out in answering the call of the Gospel.

But now this week, it’s Jesus’ very own disciples who don’t get it, and they really, badly, don’t get it. And this comes as a surprise because they’ve been following Jesus all along and indeed they should know better. And their demand is actually doubly wrong:
– First they ask for glory when we know that Jesus taught the way of humility
– And then they ask for glory when Jesus has actually just mentioned his own death. We are at the gates of Jerusalem, Jesus announces his passion for the third time. The lectionary skips this passage, but it’s right there in the preceding verses (v32-34).

Speaks about insensitivity! If we can shake our heads at the request of the Pharisees or at the rich man’s question, this demand from James and John is probably much more shocking – and the story says that actually the ten (others disciples) were quite angered with James and John, cuing the reader in the right way to react. And we are not the only one to be shocked! If you have in mind Matthew’s Gospel, it’s James and John’s mother doing the asking. Well, most scholars assume that it’s the way Matthew put the story because it was too shocking for him to see the disciples being so wrong about something (Remember, at the time Matthew wrote, James and John were probably church leaders!)

Now we can be offended at James and John – but look at what Jesus does: He takes this opportunity to teach all of the disciples. I wonder if Jesus is offended – maybe he’s well aware of James and John’s naivete and maybe he knows the ten are not far from this thought process as well. They think: Yes, we follow Jesus but in the end…what’s in it for us? Remember from last week when Peter reminded Jesus that they had left everything for him (unlike the rich man) – surely, they would get rewarded too?

And so maybe we are offended, like the ten, but maybe we too have something to learn because I am pretty sure most of us have wondered at some point what it is that we would gain by following Jesus. We have wondered about that, first of all, because it seems like a reasonable question to ask before you do anything – whatever it is, it’s better to do something knowing why you do it! – and we also wonder about that because at times we don’t see the benefits of following Jesus, we’re discouraged or just impatient.

To this, as he did to James and John, as he did to the ten, Jesus responds again today: Don’t look for yourself, don’t look for your own advantages, as I came not to be served but to serve. Jesus says: “If you want to become great, be a servant, if you want to be first, be a slave to all”. I mentioned last week that Jesus had difficult words to those who ask wrong questions and indeed this could use a little bit of unpacking, right?

Well, there are three things I would like to draw your attention on and leave it to your own reflection for this Sunday:

– First of all, notice that Jesus is addressing all the disciples, the whole community. Those words of “servants” and even “slaves” can ring very wrong in our modern ears (and probably at the time too!) but Jesus is not asking his disciples to be servants or even slaves of their Gentiles masters. On the other way around, he says that the disciples shouldn’t do what the Gentiles do! Jesus says to the disciples that they should be servant and slave in their community, and more important towards one another, for one another. It’s not about serving someone who lords it over you, it’s about serving someone who is also your servant! Don’t let anyone abuse you by telling you that because you’re a Christian you should do whathever they need you to do!…If they want you to serve them, they have to serve you as well. That’s what being a Christian is about.

This model of servanthood actually reminds me of how a functioning couple works: It’s not one partner serving the other, it’s partners mutually serving each other. Jesus models a servanthood that brings reciprocity to the relationships. In this sense slavery could have a must different understanding. When Jesus tells the ten they need to be “salve to all”, it does not mean the disciples should let themselves be abused by their (rich and powerful) Masters, it means that they belong to one another in a life given for one another. And this I how our Christian communities should work as well! Everybody serving everybody: Not the priest being served by everybody and not the priest doing all the ministry, not the vestry serving everyone, but not the vestry being a position of privilege either, and not just a few volunteers for all the community but everyone serving everyone according to their own skills and abilities (You will find that that frequently in Paul’s letters!).

– Now we know what servanthood is about, we can wonder why Jesus mentions servanthood as a response to our own aspirations to glory (in the case of James and John) and to our aspirations to reward (like Peter)?

It’s funny because I read a lot of commentaries about this passage and nobody asks this question. I guess we just assume that Jesus wants quite literally to bring everybody back to earth and give them a lesson in humility. Well, there could be some of that, but beyond that, if we put this passage back in the context of Chapter 10, I think Jesus, again, is redirecting everybody towards relationships, like he did with the Pharisees towards their wives, like he did with the rich man towards the poor. What is Jesus’s glory in the end? Jesus’s glory is his friends and the love he has for his friends (Remember the Farewell Discourse in John?). That’s where true joy and true life is to be found, in loving one another. That’s the reward for all of us.

– Last thing I wanted to add is that maybe the wrongness of James and John’s request is not so much that it is arrogant or insensitive or inappropriate. Maybe the wrongness is just plainly that it does not make any sense. If we’re genuinely looking for God and understand who God is, how could we wish for anything else? There is nothing to be found beyond God. Our relationship with God is in itself its own reward. Maybe what James and John asked for was in a very clumsy way a request to be close to Jesus for all eternity – that would make sense. Yet Jesus reminds them that for now they have to be “drinking his cup and sharing his baptism” and it does not sound like a good news first, but it could in fact be good news because it means that we don’t have to wait for Eternal glory to know him, we can know him right there, where we are, even if it’s through our suffering. And so Jesus shows us that Glory is not an escape from this world but rather a life lived deeply in love with another and with God.