Author: Gregory C. Jenks

Contents 1 Lectionary 2 First Reading: Wisdom, the perfect life partner 2.1 The Innocent Victim 3 Second Reading: Wisdom from above 4 Gospel: Master class in discipleship 5 Jesus Database 6 Liturgies and Prayers 6.1 Music Suggestions

Lectionary

• Proverbs 31:10-31 and Psalm 1 (or WisSol 1:16-2:1,12-22)
• James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
• Mark 9:30-37

 

First Reading: Wisdom, the perfect life partner

The classic description of an ideal wife in Prov 31 has often been read simply as a reflection of a male point of view. We cannot get away from the fact that the passage reflects the patriarchal values of ancient Israel, but we may miss a hidden treasure if we too lightly pass this passage by.

Taken at face value the text may act as a mirror for us to recognize the continuing distortions of male-female relationships that arise from uncritical acceptance of traditional patriarchy. So-called “traditional family values” that are so staunchly defended by conservative religious leaders are often a thin disguise for self-serving male domination of women. It is well-attested that men tend to gain most in financial and personal well-being from marriage, while women tend to lose on both counts. At the very least, when a passage such as this is read in church, the Spirit may be whispering in our ears about the desperate need to redress that historic imbalance.

But there may be much more to this passage.

Like the majestic Psalm 119 with its extended theological reflection on the divine Torah, Proverbs 31:10-31 is an acrostic poem. These are not words that have been casually cast alongside one another. Someone with a love for the beauty of well-chosen words has gone to the trouble of composing a poem with each line beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

It may be that what we have in Prov 31 is a thoughtful celebration of Sophia/Wisdom as the soul’s true spouse.

Elsewhere in Proverbs we have many references to Sophia/Wisdom as the ideal woman (both lover and wife):

• 1:20-33
• 3:13-20
• 4:5-13
• 8:1-36
• 9:1-6
• 14:1
• 24:3-7

In addition, Sophia/Wisdom is explicitly contrasted to the “loose woman” who posed a mortal threat to the young sage:

• 2:16-19
• 5:1-14
• 7:1-27
• 9:13-18.

There may even be a delightful little “signature” hidden away in verse 12, as the Hebrew word ‏צוֹפִיָּה tsopiyyah translated as “she looks well to” is — possibly a pun on the Greek word, sophia (wisdom):

 

The Innocent Victim

Many congregations will read from the Wisdom of Solomon this weekend.

The designated passage is a portion of a Jewish text, written around 40 CE and therefore contemporary with both Jesus and Paul, that describes the evil ones plotting against an innocent “righteous one” with the intention of destroying their victim. In this traditional Jewish genre, however, the innocent victim is vindicated by God and his foes find themselves facing someone dispensing God’s judgment on them all.

• Innocent Victim – Outline of the Innocent Persecuted One

It is now widely recognized that this traditional Jewish version of the classic Greek hero myth has profoundly influenced the way that early Christians chose to present the story of Jesus. Paul’s tantalizing references to Jesus’ death and resurrection as being “according to the Scriptures” may well have WisSol in mind, a point missed by those who search the OT for prophetic predictions of a suffering Messiah raised to life “on the third day.” The “scriptures” (Gk: graphai, or writings) Paul had in mind may not have been restricted to the Hebrew texts that the Reformers (some 1,500 years after Paul) substituted for the Greek Bible that had served as the Christian Old Testament since the beginning of the church.

• Greek Hero

 

Second Reading: Wisdom from above

If there was any doubt that the Letter of James is an example of Christian wisdom literature, this week’s passage puts that to rest:

• Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. (3:13 )
• Such wisdom does not come down from above, … (3:15 )
• But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. (3:17 )

The passage begins with questions about the wisdom of the readers, and looks for them to exhibit characteristics that derive from wisdom — literally, “with Sophia’s gentleness.”

The Wisdom in the author’s mind is not a human quality, but something that derives from God. The term “from above” [Gk: anothen] is the same word used in John 3 and variously translated as “from above” or “again” (see John 3:3,7).

This wisdom from above is then described in terms that seem to echo familiar passages from WisSol:

For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. 7:27 Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; 7:28 for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom. 7:29 She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, 7:30 for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail. 8:1 She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well. … 8:9 With you is wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing in your sight and what is right according to your commandments. 8:10 Send her forth from the holy heavens,and from the throne of your glory send her,that she may labor at my side,and that I may learn what is pleasing to you. 8:11 For she knows and understands all things,and she will guide me wisely in my actions and guard me with her glory. (WisSol 7:26-8:11)

For examples of the Sophia tradition in Jewish and Christian sources, see the following pages:

• Sophia Bible Jewish
• Sophia Bible Christian

 

Gospel: Master class in discipleship

While we tend to think of the Gospel of Mark as a simple story of Jesus’ ministry, it may be better to think of it as a textbook on discipleship. The focus on discipleship is particularly clear in the extended section that runs from 8:22 to 10:52, and is clearly identified by its two “book end” as Jesus heals two blind people.

One of the threads that runs through this section is the nature of discipleship. Time and again Jesus is portrayed as teaching and mentoring the disciples on their own callings as he reflects on his own.

Like the first blind man, who at first only sees with blurred vision, the disciples seem to have trouble with their vision of what Jesus is about and what that all means for them. Mark makes this all the more obvious by his insistence that Jesus was now saying everything openly and plainly. Yet still the disciples do not get it.

Three times Mark has Jesus tell the disciples about his impending death in Jerusalem:

• Mark 8:31-33
• Mark 9:30-32
• Mark 10:32-34

Status in the Kingdom still loomed large in their imaginations. Coming as they did from a society governed by status and privilege, it was not surprising that they could not get their hearts and minds around the idea of a “kingdom of nobodies” (the phrase from comes Crossan, Historical Jesus, 266-68).

Crossan notes that children were not the objects of sentimental affection as they can be in our culture:

But what would ordinary Galilean peasants have thought about children? Would “like a child” have immediately meant being humble, being innocent, being new, being credulous? Go back, if you will, to those papyrus fragments quoted in chapter 1 of this book and think for a moment of the infants, often female but male as well, abandoned at birth by their parents and saved from the rubbish dumps to be reared as slaves. Pagan writers were, according to Menahem Stern, rather surprised that Jewish parents did not practice such potential infanticide (1976-84:1.33, 2.41), but still, to be a child was to be a nobody, with the possibility of becoming a somebody absolutely dependent on parental discretion and parental standing in the community. That, I think, is the heart of the matter with all other allusions or further interpretations clustering around that central and shocking metaphor. A kingdom of the humble, of the celibate, or of the baptized comes later. This comes first: a kingdom of children is a kingdom of nobodies.’ (Historical Jesus, 269)

• 020 Kingdom and Children

Jesus seems to have been strangely free of the need to cling to life, power, status. The early Christ Hymn quoted by Paul in Phil 2:5-11 actually identifies that as the essence of his divinity:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness …

The Child of Sophia has prepared the table and issued the invitation: “Come, eat. Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Christ/Sophia is both host and menu at the Table of Life.

Jesus Database

• 240 Passion Resurrection Prophecy
• 191 Leader as Servant
• 010 Receiving the Sender

 

Liturgies and Prayers

For liturgies and sermons each week, shaped by a progressive theology, check Rex Hunt’s web site

Other recommended sites include:

• Iona Community
• Laughing Bird
• Lectionary & Liturgy Forum
• The Text This Week

 

Music Suggestions

See David MacGregor’s Together to Celebrate site for recommendations from a variety of contemporary genre.

Contents 1 Lectionary 2 Introduction 3 First Reading: Rich and poor have this in common 4 Second Reading: A bias to the poor 5 Gospel: Jesus and the Lebanese woman 5.1 Jesus heals a deaf man with a speech impediment 6 Jesus Database 7 Liturgies and Prayers 7.1 Music Suggestions

Lectionary

• Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 & Psalm 125
• James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17
• Mark 7:24-37

 

Introduction

This week’s readings continue the exploration of biblical Wisdom writings and invite us to move beyond our comfort zones to the surprising places where true insight is to be found (and practised).

 

First Reading: Rich and poor have this in common

The passage from Proverbs presents us with some of ancient Israel’s collective wisdom on the relations between the rich and poor. The ultimate dignity of both derives from their common status as creatures: “the LORD is the maker of them all.” Generosity is a virtue, but the poor have a right not to be exploited. Ultimately, God was understood to have a particular interest in the poor.

 

Second Reading: A bias to the poor

There is a provocative convergence between the Jesus who encounters a pagan woman or uses saliva to heal a deaf-mute, and the text of James that challenges our comfort zones among people of similar social status to ourselves. James comes from a Christian experience that is more familiar with poverty and less accustomed to power.

Most of us are properly described as “a person with gold rings and in fine clothes.”

Would we choose to be disciples of the Jewish magician with muddy fingers if it also cost us our lifestyle? Are we genuinely able to make welcome someone whose poverty incarnates our own fears of what we might become?

Are we able to voice the beatitude of Jesus: Blessed are the poor?

 

Gospel: Jesus and the Lebanese woman

Like the modern lectionaries, not all ancient Gospel writers chose to use this story. Luke omits the story (along with several other stories found in Mark/Matthew) as part of his major deviation from the dominant Synoptic order. This so-called “Great Omission” by Luke excluded the following material from his account of Jesus:

• Mark 6:45-46 = Matt 14:22-23 Departures after 5,000 fed
• Mark 6:47-52 = Matt 14:24-33 Walking on the Sea
• Mark 6:53-56 = Matt 14:34-36 Many sick cured
• Mark 7:1-13 = Matt 15:1-9 Eating with defiled hands
• Mark 7:14-23 = Matt 15:10-20 Explanations in private
• Mark 7:24-30 = Matt 15:21-28 Greek woman’s daughter
• Mark 7:31-37 = ?Matt 15:29-31 Deaf-mute healed
• Mark 8:1-10 = Matt 15:32-39 Bread and fish for 4,000
• Mark 8:11-13 = Matt 16:1-4 Demand for a sign
• Mark 8:14-21 = Matt 16:5-12 Bread and leaven
• Mark 8:22-26 Blind man healed

 

It is not clear what Luke’s reason for omitting this week’s story may have been.

• Was he offended by the picture of a xenophobic Jesus needing a master class in Kingdom values from a pagan woman?
• Was it simply part of a section of Mark that Luke chose to delete in order to create his own “orderly account” arranged around different themes?

The story itself puzzles the modern reader, and may have also challenged the ancient Gospel writers. Luke omits it, while Matthew adapts the story in some significant ways. (For details see the horizontal line synopsis in the Jesus Database site.)

The general effect of Matthew’s changes is to improve the story so that Jesus is treated with more respect. The woman (now described as a Canaanite) uses proper Jewish categories (Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David). It is the disciples who seek to drive her away. Jesus acknowledges her great faith (unlike the disciples with their little faith, eg Matt 14:31; 16:8; 17:20) and the healing of the daughter is instantaneous.

Note how the story is set in southern Lebanon – the territory of Tyre, south of the Litani River. Jesus has left Galilee and travelled to the coastal city of Tyre for some respite from the pressures of his ministry. He finds – or knows of – a “safe house” where he can escape the glare of publicity. But word gets out and a local woman with a desperately ill daughter seeks his assistance.

The core of the story concerns an encounter with a pagan woman whose needs challenge his own assumptions about the extent of God’s love and his own obligations to people beyond his own community. While it dealt with an issue of great concern to the emerging Christian community after Jesus’ death, it portrays Jesus as someone needing to expand the boundaries of his own spiritual imagination. Even Jesus, it seems, had something to learn by welcoming and listening to the Gentiles. As such it seems unlikely to have been created by the early Christian story tellers. Like the brute fact that Jesus had begun as a disciple of John the Baptist, here was a story that either had to be suppressed (Luke? John?) or embraced.

• This story offers us an opportunity to expand our spiritual imaginations as well?
• How do we cope with a Jesus who is a life-long learner (to use modern educational jargon), rather than someone with all the answers in advance of the test?
• Who are the “strangers” that challenge our convenient assumptions about the limits to our compassion? Is there anyone who can be imagined as beyond the scope of God’s justice?

 

Jesus heals a deaf man with a speech impediment

This week’s lectionary also uses the story of Jesus healing a deaf man with a speech impediment. This is a story found only in Mark, although Matthew may have created a summary passage (Matt 15:29-31) partly on the basis of Mark’s story.

John P. Meier comments on this unusual healing story:

… there are indications that we are dealing here not with pure creation by Mark but with some tradition Mark has inherited. An initial signal is the significant number of words in the seven verses of this miracle story that never occur anywhere else in Mark’s Gospel. Then there are the unusual, even bizarre, elements in the narrative that make it stand out from the ordinary pattern of miracle stories in the Gospels in general and in Mark in particular. Specifically, the healing of the deaf-mute, perhaps even more than the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida, is replete with ritual or symbolic actions of Jesus that could be interpreted as magic. This may explain why this story and the healing at Bethsaida are the only two Marcan miracles that are omitted by both Matthew and Luke.
Jesus’ ritual-like gestures include (1) putting his fingers into the man’s ears (symbolic of opening them so that the man can hear), (2) placing his own saliva on the man’s tongue (symbolic of loosing the “bond” of the tongue so that the man can speak, (3) looking up to heaven (probably some gesture of prayer), (4) sighing or groaning deeply (estenaxen, seen by some as expressing the inner “arousal” of the charismatic’s miracle-working powers), and (5) the command “be opened” (given by Mark both in the Aramaic ephphatha and in Greek translation. [Marginal Jew II,711-14]

Jesus as charismatic healer and exorcist is not a familiar image to many Western Christians, although such an image would find a welcome in the life of a Pentecostal mission church and maybe in an African Anglican congregation.

The Jesus celebrated in this strange little story was perhaps too much into “magic” for Matthew and Luke. The charge that Jesus was a sorcerer and a magician was something they felt a need to guard against, writing some time later than Mark.

John Dominic Crossan has an interesting discussion of magic as “religious banditry” in his Historical Jesus, ch13. He writes at one point:

… magic is to religion as banditry is to politics. As banditry challenges the legitimacy of political power, so magic challenges that of spiritual power. Magic and religion can be mutually distinguished, in the ancient world or in the modern one, by political and prescriptive definitions but not by substantive, descriptive, or neutral descriptions. Religion is official and approved magic; magic is unofficial and unapproved religion. The question is not whether magicians are for or against official religion. Their very existence, totally apart from such intentions, is a challenge to its validity and exclusivity. [p. 305]

Warming to his theme, Crossan continues:

Because of magic’s position as subversive, unofficial, unapproved, and often lower-class religion, I have deliberately used the word magic rather than some euphemism in the preceding and present parts of this book. Elijah and Elisha, Honi and Hanina, were magicians, and so was Jesus of Nazareth. It is endlessly fascinating to watch Christian theologians describe Jesus as miracle worker rather than magician and then attempt to define the substantive difference between those two.

Both this story and the earlier episode with the Lebanese woman present us with unfamiliar sketches of Jesus. This is not the Lord of eternity, the one who knows what is in the human heart, and who calmly commits his mother into the care of another man before his own death confident of exaltation back to heaven. Instead, we catch a glimpse of a strange and somewhat frightening Galilean holy man. Is this the human face of God for us? Do we prefer a face that is more like our own? A figure less likely to stand out from the crowd on the sidewalk?

Jesus Database

• 237 Distant Girl Cured
• 238 Deaf Mute Cured

 

Liturgies and Prayers

For liturgies and sermons each week, shaped by a progressive theology, check Rex Hunt’s web site

Other recommended sites include:

• Iona Community
• Laughing Bird
• Lectionary & Liturgy Forum
• The Text This Week

 

Music Suggestions

See David MacGregor’s Together to Celebrate site for recommendations from a variety of contemporary genre.