Epiphany 3C: Outside the Water Gate--Seeing How Jesus Sees and Reading How Jesus Reads
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral
Church of St. Mark
3rd Sunday After the
Epiphany, Year C
The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty,
Priest-in-Charge
In our passage from the prophet
Nehemiah, we have this scene of Ezra reading the entire book of the law, which
God had given to Moses, to the gathered people of Israel who have recently
returned from exile. The first thing they do as a reconstituted people is
listen to their story, to remind themselves of who and whose they are who they
are called to be. The law is read outside the Water Gate—a place outside the
Temple where everyone, even the ritually defiled, could be present. The story
belongs to everyone. And rheir identity as a listening people, a people who
discover who they are not by listening to the cocktail chatter of their own
self-centered fears, desires, and petty grudges, but to how God has spoken is
revealed. God speaks—in creation, in the calling of his people, in the giving
of the law, in the liberation of his people, in the raising up prophets—and it
is Israel’s job to listen, to receive, and, of course, respond.
But notice that when the law is read,
Nehemiah tells us that, “they read from the book,
from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the
people understood the reading.” Interpretation is baked in to the listening.
There is no such thing as the so-called “plain sense”—biblical literalism is
not just a heresy, it’s an impossibility that presumes we could somehow get
plain, unvarnished, access to an interpretation-free reading.
So if interpretation is
unavoidable, we have to be careful about the lens through which we read
scripture. But my recommendation is that we read it the way Jesus’ reads it,
that his hermeneutic should be ours.
If we have the mind of Christ and are called to put on Christ, it’s our job as
Christians to see how he sees and read as he reads. The birth, life, teaching,
death, and resurrection and ascension of Jesus are the lens through which read
the scriptures.
If you take a look at how
Jesus reads his own Jewish scriptures, you find some interesting things. He
emphasizes some things and deemphasizes others. He breaks taboos. It puts
people before abstract adherence to the laws of ritual purity. He’s a
simplifier and focuser of the scriptures—the entire canon of 613 Levitical laws
is reduced to just one: “Love the Lord thy God will all your heart, with all
your soul and all your mind. This is the first and great commandment and the
second is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself.”
In our Gospel for today, we see much of
how Jesus reads and interprets scripture on full display. Having just emerged
from the forty days in the desert where he is tempted by Satan to substitute
power, prestige, possessions for reliance on God and God alone, Jesus enters
the synagogue and reads from the scroll. Remember, this is the first thing
Jesus says in his public ministry and it serves as the guidepost, the
benchmark, of everything that is to come. And what does he read? That beautiful
passage from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has
anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to
the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
Of all the scriptures this is one that
Jesus chooses to mark the beginning of his ministry. Interesting, isn’t it? But
what’s more interesting is that Jesus is interpreting as he is reading. He actually leaves out the last part of the
passage from Isaiah that speaks of the “day of vengeance of our God” and ends
instead with the proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus is reading
with the eye of love letting everything that doesn’t accord with that vision be
relativized or recognized as perhaps saying more about the human character and
preoccupations of the divinely-inspired (but not dictated to!) authors of
scripture than it does about God.
After Jesus reads, he sits
down—a prophetic sign act that speaks much more than simply the desire to take
a load off. To sit down is to take a position of authority, a teaching
position. And Jesus tells them that, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled
in your hearing.” All eyes are fixed on him, staring at him. Jesus is telling
them that scripture is no longer a book, but a living person. If you want to
know the meaning of scripture, don’t debate with the Scribes and Pharisees, but
look at the shape of my life. How I live my life, and how that leads inevitably
to my death at the hands of the authorities, is my interpretation of the
scriptures. Who I break bread with, who I touch, who I heal, how I forgive on
the way to the cross—that is my
interpretation of the scriptures.
So if we are interpret the
scriptures in the same way that Jesus does, we need to see how he see, live how
he lives, love how he loves. That’s the whole purpose of Church and the two
thousand years of tradition that have been handed over to us—to make us into
“little Christs” as St. Augustine says, to become “partakers of divine nature”
(2 Peter 1:4). Everything thing we do comes from having our eyes “fixed on him”
that we might become more like that which we see. Our worship and liturgy, our
daily prayer, our wrestling with the scriptures, our service to others in the
spirit of sacrificial love, our work for freedom, justice, peace, and
reconciliation—these are the appointed means by which our lives, right here and
right now in this very place, become a little more like the one we behold, the
one we worship, the One whose meaning is Love.
You’ve probably guessed
already that when we come to Paul’s First
Letter to the Corinthians, we can see that Paul, too, interprets scripture,
Paul, too, has a lens through which he reads the tradition and the
circumstances of his daily life. In 2:2 he proclaims, “I decided to know
nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Faced with all manner
of shenanigans in the nascent church at Corinth, all manner of problems to
which he could have tried to address, Paul shows a singularity of vision, a
passionate focus, a centering of the entirety of his attention on Jesus Christ
and him crucified. It’s striking that in a time when a managerial mindset plays
such a prominent role in the church and you’re as likely to hear church leaders
talk about “building capacity” or “operationalizing the Jesus Movement,” Paul
provides a powerful counter-example. Paul chooses to “know nothing” but Jesus
Christ in the faith and hope that everything he needs to know will be given to
him through Christ, in the degree which he becomes more and more like Christ.
The explosive growth of the
early Church suggests that Paul might just have been on to something: that it
is in deepening our relationship with Jesus Christ, doing what he says,
listening to him, keeping our eyes fixed on him, knowing nothing but him, that
what we seek through management techniques and growth strategies, is given unto
us—not as reward for implementing a program, but as the fruit of relationship
with the source of all beauty, truth, and goodness.
As members of the Body of
Christ we all have a single purpose in life—to become love for others. But how
that manifests is gloriously, dizzingly, diverse. Our passage from Paul’s First
Letter to the Corinthians is concerned with addressing our apparent need to
compare the unique way one member walks in love with how another member does
it. Again, Paul looks to the Jesus Christ and him crucified as a way to show
the Corinthians their error. Jesus in the one in whom there is Jew, nor Greek,
slave, nor free, Paul reminds the Corinthians. The life and witness of Martin
Luther King, whose holiday we celebrated on Monday, demonstrates the same
Jesus-centered logic—that everything that gets in the way of love, every form
of oppression that destroys or distorts the children of God must be lovingly,
non-violently, but relentlessly dismantled. For Jesus is the one who could
never utter the words, “I have no need of you,” to anyone—lepers, prostitutes,
tax-collectors, centurions, patrons of the synagogue, women with issues of
blood, even those who wanted to execute him. Living from belovedness, and
seeing with the eye of love, Jesus’ life was one of terrifyingly undefended
vulnerability, indiscriminate hospitality, and radical welcome. Following him,
seeing with his eyes, means that the work for freedom and reconciliation, the
naming of structures of previously invisible oppression goes on that those
words we utter every day, “Your Kingdom come,” might become a reality.
When we look to him, how is
it possible to think that a pancreas is better than a liver, a foot than a
hand, and eye than a knee. The church finds its unity, its harmony, in looking
not with the eye of comparison at each other, but by standing shoulder to
shoulder with that person you’d never otherwise know and gazing at Jesus. Love,
as Antoine de Saint Exupéry reminds us, come not from staring at each other,
but by looking in the same direction. The bond between saints like Clare and
Francis comes not from some erotic, proto-hippy free-love licentiousness as
Franco Zeffirelli seems to suggest in Brother
Sun, Sister Moon, but in shared turning to Jesus that each of their lives
evinces.
As we gather, after our
worship together for our annual meeting to hear from the various members of the
body about where we’ve come from, where we are now, and who God might be
calling us to be, keep Paul’s metaphor of the body in mind. Listen for how the
ministers of the church—the laity—each in their own way, according to the
various gifts they have been given have been working together for the building
up of the body. Listen as well for the ways in which the Cathedral has been
working to make this increasingly a place where fixing our eyes on Jesus,
following him, listening to him and doing what he says, seeing how he sees and
loving who and how he loves, is the most important thing. Listen for how your
focus on him might be sharpened, deepened, but also how you, a beloved,
indispensable member of the body of Christ might share the fruits of that
turning to him with others, and with the world.
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