From the Lectionary for 5 November 2023 (All Saints Day, Year A)

Revelation 7:9-10, 13-14 (NRSV Updated Edition)

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!”
...

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

1 John 3:1-3 (NRSV Updated Edition)

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Matthew 5:1-12 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

~

"There is good prima facie reason... to think that the subversion of the apocalyptic imagination by what I have called Jesus' “eschatological” imagination is something proper to Jesus rather than something invented by a bewildered primitive community in the face of the indefinite postponement of the Day. The prima facie evidence deepens somewhat when we discover that at the root of Jesus' subversion of these dualities we always find what I have earlier called the intelligence of the victim.

"Jesus provides a prophetic criterion in terms of realizable ethical demands at the base of his subversion of these dualities; the social duality is recast in terms of the victim, so that the victim becomes the criterion for whether one is a sheep or a goat (Matt. 25) or for being a neighbour (the Good Samaritan, Luke 10); it is victims and the precariously placed who are to be at the center of the new victim people of whom the kingdom of God that is coming into being (the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5-6).

"It can scarcely be surprising that this insistence, more in the line of the prophetic imagination than in that of the apocalyptic imagination, comes to be also subversive of the temporal and cosmic dualities. Thus the crucified and risen forgiving victim becomes himself the presence of the kingdom in the here and now. It is this that is being claimed in the “realized eschatology” of John [eg. John 3:14-15, where it is in the exaltation of the Son of man on the Cross that 'eschatologically' irrupts into human history]: that the victim is the judge as victim and that passing into eternal life is related precisely to the criterion of the victim.

"The same is shown in the heavenly liturgy of the Apocalypse: the central criterion, around which the eternal liturgy revolves, and thus the principle of continuity between this life and the next, is the slaughtered lamb, the heavenly victim."

James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, pg. 217

~

"[All Saints] is a wonderful feast for us to celebrate [on the website] Praying Eucharistically, because whereas every time we pray eucharistically we are making ourselves present to the great rejoicing that is in heaven just there, and make ourselves aware of how that great rejoicing is trying to reach out to us and envelope us, today we celebrate that even more richly because we remember all the brothers and sisters from generations past and present who are already taking part in that great rejoicing and reaching out to us to help us be enveloped, if you like, in that great rejoicing. So it's an even richer sharing in the presence today than normally.

"Before I look at the Gospel texts I'd like to just point out how the two readings which lead up to it, which are so beautifully chosen to fit in with the feast, give us a really key hint to how to read this particular text from St Matthew. The first is from the Book of the Apocalypse we get the vision of those around the throne of the Lamb standing as one slain. First of all, the witnesses from the people of Israel, and then a crowd far greater than can possibly be counted throughout the whole world, out of every tribe, nation, tongue, language, etc etc. In other words, it's really universal, this is something that is true about being human. And then the question of who are these, and the response from the elder: they are these who've come out of the great ordeal, they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Something about the presence of us in heaven is as of people who have come through a great ordeal, have been ground through the mill, being taken through the wringer, if you like. That's how great rejoicing comes into our lives, through this process.

"And in the Epistle from St John as well, we become aware of how it's a process starting from where we are but we don't know who we are to become. We know that as we are taken into purity of heart we will find ourselves like Christ. Again going through a process, not an easy process, but a process authentic, one that brings us into being.

"Okay, having started with that, having started with washing our clothes, if you like, in the blood of the Lamb, let's look at the Lamb speaking these things in the Sermon on the Mount. First of all, Matthew is of course extremely savvy. He has Jesus go up a hill. Moses went up a hill, but Moses went up a hill to talk to God and so that God would remain hidden from the people. Jesus goes up the hill and obviously, he turns around and sits down and speaks. And interestingly, the Greek doesn't say “he began to speak,” as our translation does. The Greek says: “and he opened his mouth and taught them” - “opening his mouth he taught them.” In other words, they could see his face. That's already a comment on the difference between the Mosaic teaching, a difference which he'll continue when he says later on “You have heard it said, but I say to you.” Here is the face that can be seen, not like in Deuteronomy where we were told, “You heard the voice but you did not see the form, you did not see the visage.” Here they are seeing the face and the face is speaking to them, not from above in some distant hidden place, but as a teacher at their level, very slightly raised so as to be able to be heard for purely practical reasons.

"So the really interesting thing about this, I want to suggest, is that he's not dictating  norms, he's describing a process of insiderness. He's speaking from inside, showing the kind of insiderness that he is opening up and inviting us to discover ourselves inside this. I just I bring this up because it raises questions about the words which we tend to translate either “happy” or “blessed”. We don't have much other choice in English when translating these words, and yet if you say, “Happy are the poor in heart” or “Happy are the meek” it seems to suggest for most of us a kind of an emotional state, and of course most of those who mourn aren't, as it happens, happy; those of us who are undergoing persecution aren't actually happy while that's going on. And if you say “blessed” it sounds as though it's a pious wish about something very much in the sky, 'pie in the sky', some kind of, “Oh yes it's very blessed to do those things.”

"I'd like to suggest to you a different word, a word which is not at all I should say an attempt to offer an alternative translation. This is definitely a paraphrase, but it's a word which combines happiness without making that an emotional state, and blessedness without making that a distant title, and that's the word “radiant”. “Radiant are the poor in spirit or the poor in heart,“ “Radiant are the meek,” radiant. If you translate that it's worthwhile going through the list yourselves: try the word radiant.

"Why? Because the suggestion precisely is that our Lord is talking about the sort of radiance that is the process of working through these things. And let's remember that each of these beatitudes is a sign of a particular sort of precariousness, it's one element of going through the grind... Radiance is to be found in the process of transfiguring every human pattern of desire from a position of precariousness into a sign of glory, a sign of being possessed by God's visibility. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,” is the central one of these of the beatitudes, that's the process. Pure of heart is not the purity of saving yourself from impure things, it's acquiring in the midst of the mill, in the midst of the wringer, a singleness of heart that is able to see God. That's 'look towards God and be radiant' - this is not looking towards God in the sanctuary of the temple, this is as you go through the wringer and find yourself given singleness of heart so you see God."

"Let me make a suggestion here about making this personal. Part of the joy of this feast is taking a little time to stop and think, not of the canonized saints we may have known in our lifetimes, which will inevitably be few, but of the signs that we're aware that there is much sanctity around us, that there have been glimpses of this hard-won radiance in our lives, in other people we've met and who have gone, as we say, to their reward, and that we were aware that something shocking, by comparison with the order of this world, was already radiant in them. We remember with joy and with gratitude those people, and ask that those signs be multiplied in your lives. ... These are the gifts of the saints which are being poured out to encourage, to help, to nourish us on our way."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Solemnity of All Saints" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1_Vy-mUFZo)

[Source of quote from Alison's The Joy of Being Wrong, and for discussion and resources on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/festivals/allsaints_a/]

From the Lectionary for 29 October 2023 (Proper 25A)

Matthew 22:34-46 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

~

"Matthew sets up this passage right at the beginning of Jesus’s teaching ministry. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17). What follows are six antitheses explaining his fulfillment of the law, ending with: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. . . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:43-45a, 48). I believe that “perfect” — teleios in the Greek, having the sense of completion or meeting a goal — refers back to the fulfillment of the law spoken of in 5:17. The law is fulfilled in the perfection of God’s love that reaches out even to enemies. It is the only perfect kind of love that would empower a person to live into the kingdom of heaven by suffering the violence of one’s enemies.

"One further comment on love in Matthew’s Gospel. I believe it is the measure by which not just individuals but nations are judged. In five weeks we will conclude the Year of Matthew’s Gospel with the end of Jesus’s teaching in Matt 25:31-46. This passage is tragically misread in the context of seeing salvation as individuals going to heaven when they die. In that context, each person is judged by whether they acted in loving service to the least of Jesus’s family. I will argue ... that this is a colossal misreading that ignores what Jesus tells us the passage is about: a judging of the nations. It’s the nations which are sorted as sheep and goats based on whether their politics and economics address the needs of the Jesus’s most vulnerable brothers and sisters — our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. Nations which fail to do so will end up on the scrapheap of history like most others before. In short, the measure of whether a nation succeeds or not — the measure of fulfilling its systems of law — is love."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from Opening Comments on the Girardian Lectionary page for Proper 25A (link in comments below)

~

"What [Jesus] does here is he establishes once again a definitive and unbreakable answer forever: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, all with all your strength. He's quoting here from the Book of Deuteronomy, possibly with a reference to the book of Joshua, [chapter] 22, where this is explained in similar terms, and then he's adding to that a commandment from the book of Leviticus, [chapter 19, about love of neighbour. And he's saying that they are similar, that's the key phrase. They cannot be separated: love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable. There is no such thing as loving God if you do not love your neighbour; in as far as you love your neighbour you love God.

"This is an anthropological revolution. Whereas in the previous two answers [in Matthew 22] he'd shown the complete lack of rivalry of God with any form of human worldliness, if you like, whether of power or of marital history, here he brings together God and the human to say that there will henceforth be no difference. In as far as you do it to God, you do it to your neighbour, in as far as you do it to your neighbour, you do it to God. Which he will then explicate more in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, but here he's setting for once and for all time the word that shall never pass away, that any form of dealing with God that does not adhere strictly to the consequences for humans is a fake form of dealing with God. You love God in as far as you love humans; if you say you love God but yet hate your brother you lie, as St John would say later.

"So this is the establishment, and it's an establishment not of something, if you like, that is simply a legal answer... What Jesus is doing is so much more than giving a legal answer; he's revealing the heart of God. The heart of God is passionate about the precarious, the weak, the outsider, the resident, the stranger, the person whom you might ignore. [God is] passionate in love for those people, and it's only as you learn, as I learn, as we learn as humans, to reach out constantly to ever-increasing, if you like, degrees of who is our neighbour that we achieve the heart of God, that we receive the heart of God in us and spread it to others. It's this longing that is at the heart of this, the love of God and of neighbour.

"It's interesting that both here and in Mark's Gospel Jesus just gives the answer: the love of God with love of neighbour. It's only in St. Luke that, if you like, the necessary question is put by the lawyer - which is, “Who is my neighbour?” - inviting Jesus to take it further, which he then does bringing out that it's not only the close neighbour, the insider, but it's the outsider neighbour whom you have to treat as well. In other words, the tendency of this is universal. Ultimately what Jesus is inducting us into is an understanding of being human, such that there should never be an outside other to us, never should be someone who dwells in shame, someone who dwells in precariousness, that God's project of love is towards all of those.

"There is nothing that can ever undo that teaching of God himself in God's temple as a human being saying it is only in as far as you love your neighbour as yourself that you love God. So let's rejoice! For me this Gospel is a matter of rejoicing, it's not so much a question of a legal answer, it's the definitive establishment on earth of an unbreakable principle. We're invited into this adventure of love of God and love of neighbour - how far can we take it?"

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 30 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxrcrbzS7mE)

[Source of Paul Nuechterlein quote, and for discussion and resources on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper25a/]

From the Lectionary for 22 October 2023 (Proper 24A)

Matthew 22:15-22 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Then the Pharisees went and plotted to entrap him in what he said. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the coin used for the tax.” And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, “Whose head is this and whose title?” They answered, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed, and they left him and went away.

~

Exegetical Notes

1. v 16, “for you do not regard people with partiality.” The Greek is, 'ou gar blepeis eis prosōpon anthrōpōn', which more literally translates as, “for you do not look upon the face of a man.” The phrase means what the NRSV indicates, but the literal translation is interesting since the episode involves the face of the emperor on a coin.

2. v 17, kēnson, more specifically, a “census tax” paid directly to the emperor, not an ordinary tax. The more general Greek word for “tax” is phoros (used in Luke’s version of this story, Luke 20:22). The census tax might have been more controversial to students of Torah because it’s paid to the emperor using coins with his image on it. Ordinary taxes are covered in the Torah as a common part of life.

3. v 20, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” Why translate eikōn as “head” rather than “image”? Yes, it was probably just the emperor’s head on the coin, but it causes the reader in English to miss the vital connection that I believe Jesus wants us to make: God makes each one of us in God’s image. This coin may bear Caesar’s image, but you and I bear God’s image.

- Paul Nuechterlein, from Girardian Lectionary page for Proper 24A (link in comments below)

~

"The biblical position represented by Jesus’s famous response in this passage holds human law as separate from God’s sovereignty but doesn’t vacate that sovereignty by too radical of a separation. God’s law, especially as fully revealed in the love of Jesus the Messiah, remains as a prophetic critique of human law. This becomes even more crucial in the fulfillment of prophecy that Jesus brought about: that the fallenness of human law is finally fully revealed as under the power of the sin...

"That’s why the movement of secularism is actually a consequence of the Gospel in the West. Secularism is the corrected worldview which separates everything human from theological justification. Human law is simply human; human politics are simply human; etc. But secularism goes too far to the other extreme from the biblical middle ground if it completely removes all that’s human from any possibility of critique from a transcendent perspective. This is tricky business, because any reassertion of theological perspective that lacks humility can easily collapse back into a false theological justification of the human.

"And that’s why prophetic critique can be more effective if it is offered in terms of anthropological hypothesis - which is once again a benefit of Mimetic Theory. A Christian prophetic stance against the status quo doesn’t have to settle for an authority based solely on, “Because God says so.” Rather, it can offer an analysis of what it means to be more truly human from the perspective of Jesus the Messiah, an hypothesis that becomes part of the conversation on matters of best politics, economics, ethics, and so forth.

"‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’ can thus be understood as an anthropological hypothesis. Jesus asks whose image (eikon) is on the coin. This recalls the Imago Dei, being made in the image of God (Gen 1:26). Yes, it’s a theological statement. But even more so it’s an anthropological statement. In a secular age, the emphasis is on the latter such that it becomes a proposal for understanding what it means to be truly human, or human-at-our-best. It is the ongoing conversation of what it takes to fully flourish as individuals and as a species."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from "Opening Comments" on the Girardian Lectionary page for Proper 24A (link in comments below)

~

"[Jesus is] teaching them about God and God's complete unrivaled being, in the presence of whom idols are as nothing - rulers are not in any sort of rivalry with God - and that therefore the question of what is good is going to have to be worked out by them in obedience, but also aware that following God's commands could put them into trouble eventually. This is the complete response that he's given them with a rabbinical authority.

"So it's then that they say when they heard this they were amazed and they left him and went away. In other words, not only did he sidestep their trap, actually he spoke straight into the midst of what they were asking and actually gave them an answer. I suggested that this wasn't a text about the separation between church and state, and it isn't. It's a text about the unrivaled power of God to do everything. But part of its effect, and one of the reasons why that reply lingers through the ages, and should linger through the ages, ... is that it has set us up in a world which is actually part of the Christian understanding of things, whereby we have learnt to de-divinize all forms of earthly power.

"There is nothing sacred in any of our legal systems. There is nothing sacred in any of our constitutions. They are all to be worked through at a human level, treated as just the human things that they are. In obedience, as far as we can be obedient to them, but then changing them when they need to be changed because they don't reflect the wisdom that shines and brings things into being, which is the command of God.

"In other words, part of the amazing secularization, if you like, of law, which has been one of the results of Christianity, [is that] we do not think of God fundamentally as a lawgiver. The commandments, our oath to God, God's command, is given us in the person of Jesus going up to his death and revealing what is at the base of so much civil and religious law - various forms of scapegoating, vengeance and oppression. [Those things] of course [are] the reverse of the command of God, and our task is always to work, with great freedom and sometimes at great risk, to make sure that our laws are obey-able by those who are seeking to obey our oath to God."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 29 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfiOoBjvvg)

~

1 Thessalonians 1:6-7 (NRSV Updated Edition)

And you became imitators of us and of the Lord, for in spite of persecution you received the word with joy from the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia.

"The Spirit is not some amorphous entity that brings ecstatic experience in order to ground faith. Rather, the experience of the Spirit is given for the benefit of the community. Thus one’s experiences of the Risen Christ are not to be seen as ego boosts, as though those who have them are better than those who don’t. The work of the Spirit creates conformation to Christ where experience of the divine, in ecstatic praise, harsh persecution, or the mundane task of labor, all contribute to the formation of the believer into Christ’s image, who is the Image of God."

- Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life (2nd Ed), pg. 258

[Source of Paul Nuechterlein quotes, and for discussion and resources on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper24a/]

From the Lectionary for 15 October 2023 (Proper 23A)

Matthew 22:1-14 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad, so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”

~

This is a difficult parable, and has been used both as justification for exclusion by Christian groups of those who they believe are not "wearing the right wedding robe," and well as a supporting text for the belief in the eternal conscious torment view of hell in a dualistic afterlife configuration.  I disagree with both of these readings, but, largely I think due to the long history of those interpretations, it is very hard not to read this parable within a dualistic/moralistic framework.

The context of the parable is very important, as it is a continuation of the narrative in Matthew 21 in which Jesus is trying to get the temple priests and Pharisees to change their way of thinking about God and what God wants for God's people, which started with Jesus being questioned about where his authority comes from.

As James Alison points out in his video homily on this passage (see below), there are a number of references in this parable to the immediately preceding 'Parable of the Wicked Tenants' (Matt. 21:33-46): there is a king and a son; the king sends out his servants twice at the beginning of the parable, but both times does not get the hoped-for response, and the second time, as in the previous parable, there is violence against the kings' servants; the king also responds to this in the way his interlocutors had suggested earlier, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death...”  The interesting inversion is that in "The Wicked Tenants" it is the king dealing with the "tenants" on their own territory, as it were, but in "The Wedding Banquet" the king is inviting them into his 'territory'.

The vital clue in interpreting this parable, according to James Alison, is a play on words, or possible two meanings, of an Aramaic word, "mil-lehamma" (that's probably not 100% right, but it's something like that), which can mean "go to war" or "go to feast [literally bread]."  There is a clear basis for this interpretation in the fact that the things the people give excuses for not coming to the banquet closely match the things that men of Israel can be excused for not going to war as presented in Deuteronomy 20.  The parable then becomes a story of people who think that God is calling them to "holy" war, when in fact God is calling them, and all people, to a feast.

~

"Jesus is playing with how the call of the wedding and the call to a holy war could be exactly the same thing, and which one you think you're in is going to be tremendously important. ... The chief priests and scribes seemed to have thought of themselves [involved in a holy war] when they regarded the proper response to the killing of the son [in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants] being an act of vengeance. ... But you have to decide what you're which one you're involved in when you come to the reality of the Son coming in, you're going to have to decide whether you're part of a holy war, in which case you're tied up in vengeance, or whether you're being called into the wedding banquet, in which case it's going to be plentifulness, entirely unmerited plentifulness, from here on out.

"Let's have a look at the passage from Zephaniah which is going to be key to this. Here is Zephaniah 1:7-9. “Be silent before the Lord God for the day of the Lord is at hand. The Lord has prepared a sacrifice, he has consecrated his guests, and on the day of the Lord's sacrifice I will punish the officials and the king's sons and and all who dress themselves in foreign attire on that day. I will punish all who leap over the threshold, who fill their master's house with violence and fraud.” Now I hope you can see that this is tough stuff for the chief priests and Pharisees, chief priests and scribes, to be hearing in the temple.

"This is how he says it: the king came in to see the guests he noted a man there who was not wearing a robe (so here we have someone in foreign attire) and he said to him friend (the Greek ... means companion and the interesting thing is that it can be either a military companion or a banqueting companion, this is part of the key distinction: are you part of a holy war or are you part of a guest feasting?) how did you get in here without a wedding robe? And he was speechless (you see it in Zephaniah, it says “Be silent before the Lord God,” and remember what Jesus had been doing was putting the chief priests and the scribes in a position where they needed to say by what authority he was doing these things if they wanted to get him to speak but they wouldn't; they were tongue-tied, they were bound by fear) ... so the king said to the attendants, bind him hand and foot and throw him into outer darkness where there'll be weeping and gnashing of teeth. In other words, if you are self-bound into your fear and scandal at the coming in, you will remain bound and scandalized. That's not how you come into the feast.

"Then he says, for many are called but few are chosen, and that's an Aramaicism, Hebrew-ism if you like, for a way of saying being called and being chosen are not the same thing. And he's going back to the account of the two sons who were called at different times, one said yes and didn't, the other said no and did. In other words, the being called is one thing, the finding ourselves chosen, that's actually finding yourselves invited into the wedding banquet. For those who know themselves invited, this is something that is free and wonderful and they know that they're a part of it, they would never be inclined to take revenge. On the contrary, this is what is being set up for them.

"I hope you can see that what Jesus has been doing here has been continuing if you like the previous parable. The murderous tenants have killed the son, the son's wedding banquet is now being opened up by the same king who was the absent landlord before. The previous tenants are now the guests, but they seem to think that they have been called to a war and for that reason they've engaged in perfectly good delaying tactics for not going to war because that's what the book of Deuteronomy allows them to do. They failed to see that they're actually [invited to take part] in a wedding banquet. They can't imagine that this is what is being called, so they've rejected the invitations. And all the others are now being called, all those who didn't think of themselves as having been worthy to be called into the banquet and now are, good and bad alike. Then we get the inspection where the state of stunned silence, scandalized silence, of the ones who were not prepared to decide whether they were there as soldiers in a war, thinking the whole thing was about vengeance, or guests at a wedding banquet who were being taken into the kingdom of God."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 28 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdFbR4hpDXU)

From the Lectionary for 8 October 2023 (Proper 22A)

Matthew 21:33-46 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went away. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first, and they treated them in the same way. Then he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures:

‘The stone that the builders rejected
    has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
    and it is amazing in our eyes’?

“Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces its fruits. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”

When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them. They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.

~

"Have you ever wondered why the owner of the vineyard sent his son at all? He had two groups of servants abused and even killed. Why risk your son? I would have sent an army! Wouldn’t you? Throw those bums out! Give ’em what’s coming to them! Jesus even gets the Jewish authorities to say that. He asks them what the owner of the vineyard should do, and they give the answer that all of us would give, based on our usual way of handling authority. ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death,’ they say. Right! You don’t pussy-foot around with petty dictators. You throw them out! You give them a taste of their own medicine!

"But notice that Jesus never gives this answer, nor supports it. Rather, he quotes Psalm 118: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.’ Yes, Lord, it is amazing. You didn’t send an army to crush the infidels; instead, you sent your son to die, and then raised him. You raised him up to new life to offer us the same new life. Help us to understand this kind of authority and power, one which gives life instead of taking it. Help us to live it."

- Paul Nuechterlein, from a sermon delivered at Emmaus Lutheran, Racine, Wisconsin, October 5-6, 1996

~

"[T]he heavenly Father in his Easter “judgment” acted differently from the master of the vineyard in the parable. Even the murder of his son did not provoke in him a reaction of vengeful retribution, but he sent the risen one back with the message “Peace be with you!” (Luke 24:36; see also John 20:19, 26) to those disciples who at the critical moment had allowed themselves to be drawn into the camp of the opponents of the kingdom of God. The judge’s verdict at Easter was consequently not only a retrospective confirmation of the message of Jesus, but it also contained a completely new element, namely, forgiveness of those who had rejected the offer of pure forgiveness itself and persecuted the Son. Through the Easter message of peace there came a redoubling of that readiness to forgive expressed in the message of the basileia..."

- Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 135-136

~

"[T]he risen Christ did not come with vengeance against the evil workers in the vineyard. Instead, the risen Christ came in peace with forgiveness. Those experiencing oppression are often scandalized by the notion of forgiveness, but we see in the unforgiving attitude of the Jewish leaders who are the oppressors that forgiveness is even more scandalizing for them. We often overlook how easy it is to hold unforgiving grudges against those people whom we have wronged in some way. The reason that we blame our victims is because accepting forgiveness from the risen Christ implies acceptance of our own wrong doing. No matter how gentle the Lamb of God is, forgiveness is still an accusation, and accepting forgiveness can only be done in a spirit of penitence. Looked at this way, the gift of forgiveness is not necessarily easy to accept."

- Andrew Marr, from blog post "Tending God’s Vineyard" (https://andrewmarrosb.blog/2017/10/06/tending-gods-vineyard/)

~

"[The priests and Pharisees] go along with the vengeful version of [the prophetic writing that the parable is most clearly referencing, The Song of the Unfruitful Vineyard, Isaiah 5:1-7], and with the obvious reading of the stupid tenants [who should have known that the owner would come and destroy them]. But this is the time when there's a pause, and then Jesus says to them, “Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’?”

"Because of course, if he is the son and heir, and the God who has sent him, the one who set up Israel, is not this vengeful figure, then something entirely different is going on here. He is coming into their midst, allowing himself to be killed, knowing that it's only by occupying the space of death and enabling us to be moved out of that shame, that violence, that fear, that hatred - it's only by occupying that space that we'd actually be able to grow at all.

"If he's done that, then that's the gift that's the wonderful thing. And he's actually pleading on behalf of the wicked tenants, he's saying, “Yep, okay, they were going to do this, but for anyone who's able to accept this as a way of being forgiven that's how you're going to produce the fruits I'm actually giving you. I, the heir, I'm coming in as the one who you are going to kill so that you can have the vineyard. You will be able to produce its fruits. You won't owe any more tithes to the temple, you will be able to produce its fruits. You will be the temple. I will have been the priest, the altar, the sacrifice, all in one so that you can be the new temple.”

"In other words, he's doing something which the temple authorities seem to be unable to imagine..."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 27 in Ordinary Time Year A' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NoiFj8OUp8)

[Source of quote from Raymund Schwager and links to Paul Nuechterlein's sermon and Andrew Marr's blog post, and for discussion and resources on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper22a/]

From the Lectionary for 1 October 2023 (Proper 21A)

Matthew 21:23-32 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came to him as he was teaching and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” Jesus said to them, “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things. Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” And they argued with one another, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why, then, did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we are afraid of the crowd, for all regard John as a prophet.” So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.

“What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not,’ but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same, and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him, and even after you saw it you did not change your minds and believe him.”

~

"Okay so Jesus is doing something really very subtle, I think, here, because he's asking them to go back into their own experience of what it was like trying to interpret whether a sign is real. It's only in as far as they sit in that experience that they're going to be able to tell whether he Jesus is doing these things with divine authority. You need to go back and think how did we do this when it was John, and here I think there's a point which is in a sense difficult to bring out.

"When we hear the words, “Repent for the kingdom of God is close at hand,” if you're anything like me, we hear this in a 'bully headmaster' mode. In other words, someone is coming along and saying, “You're an awful bunch and unless you repent there is going to be a terrible wrath. It's going to be terrible punishment, but if you go along with what I say and repent then I'll consider to be kind to you.” That's the old moralistic, emotionally blackmailing form of relationship which many of us imagine to exist between God and ourselves.

"And yet, curiously it's that world that Jesus is going to undo, and knows he's undoing, and realizes that John was merely the first step in the undoing of that world. Because how about if “Repent for the kingdom of God is close at hand” is not the bullying word of a headmaster but much more like a friendly invitation to softening of hearts. Because the one who is going to make possible that softening of hearts is coming into your midst, and that's the condition of surviving and getting into the new world that's being born, is having a soft enough heart that you're able to reach out and live and share with other people. And as far as you're able to do that you're going to be on the inside of the new project.

"In as far as you choose not to repent and not to allow yourself to have your heart broken, to allow yourself to understand what you've been caught up in, in as far as you decide not to go that route, then you're exposing yourself to all the wrath that is in fact going to come as the world changes. The world changes precisely because once the kingdom of God has come into the midst of people, immediately all the rules and forms of goodness that used to hold people together - forms of sacrifice, temples, strict rules, all of those - start to be corroded, because we start to learn to live. Those of us who were previously ashamed, we learn to live, creating humanity amidst our shame.

"Those of us who are tax collectors or prostitutes, or the modern equivalents, or any of the equivalents of people who have been considered outsiders and therefore living in shame, once the good news has arrived that we can repent, that our hearts can be softened, we no longer need to be bound by our shame, and that therefore we can reach out and be human to each other. One of the spin-off effects of that is terrible wrath for people who don't get with the show, but it's not the terrible wrath of someone who's threatening in a headmasterly way, it's simply the effect of what happens once sinners are able to get into the kingdom.

"That, I think, is what's going on here. Jesus is saying to them: if you didn't really understand what John was opening up when the old headmaster voice thing was just about possible - and John himself was a bit surprised at the lack of vengeance in the one who was coming, in the one whom he later recognized as the Lamb of God - if John himself had to undergo the change in his understanding of what was coming into their midst, and he was the one who was from God, and you haven't even been able to recognize him, then how are you going to understand the one who is coming into your midst as the one who is going to undo all false goodness and open up the possibility of the kingdom of God being dwelt in by humans."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 26 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHpBJR_qlLI)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper21a/]

From the Lectionary for 24 September 2023 (Proper 20A)

Jonah 3:10-4:4 (NRSV Updated Edition)

When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it. But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Isaiah 55:6-9 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Seek the Lord while he may be found;
    call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake their way
    and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them,
    and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Matthew 20:1-16 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received a denarius. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

~

"If we were truly being honest, God is both a scandal and a supreme disappointment to most of us. We would prefer a God of domination and control to a God of allowing, as most official prayers make clear. Both God and the True Self need only to fully be themselves and generously show themselves. Then the major work is done. The Source will always flow out, through, and toward those who want it. ... To allow yourself to be grabbed and held by such a divine wholeness is a dark and dangerous risk, and yet this is exactly what we mean by “salvation.” We are allowing the Great Allower to allow us, even at our worst. We gradually learn to share in the divine freedom and must forgive God for being far too generous."

- Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, pg. 19

~

"Our strongest resistance to forgiveness is that it just isn’t fair. It blows apart everything we think we know and believe about the economics of life. We think everything has a price, or should. We instinctively keep a tally of what we owe and what is owed us. Usually the latter is much higher than the former. This tally makes up a huge amount of our identity, an identity that forgiveness shows to be totally false. The tally is a desperate attempt to separate ourselves from others by letting the figures on our running tally come between us and them. ...

"The Parable of the Vineyard Workers (Mt. 20:1-16) speaks to this resistance. The workers who worked all day grumble when they get only the day’s wage they agreed on after the workers called in at the last hour of the day got the same day’s wage. I think all of us identify with the grumbling workers. The master sees the problem and seems to shrug his shoulders and say with a divine smile: “This is how I operate. Get used to it.” God’s economy takes a lot of getting used to. We are wise to start practicing now."

- Andrew Marr, Moving and Resting in God’s Desire, pp. 249-50

~

"“For many who are first will be last and the last will be first.” ... [This] little phrase is badly translated if we say “the first will be last and last will be first” - it's an English language approximation. Actually it says “all will be first-lasts and last-firsts.” In other words, there's something much much more interesting being taught here which is actually very much in line with our reading from Isaiah about my ways unimaginably greater than your way, and it's this that Jesus is bringing out ... as a way of illustrating all the strange 'upsets' that he's taught ... about all the people who are going to be inside his kingdom. It's all about the oddness of all of us, all those who might be insiders. ... Of all those who are going to be on the inside of this experiment it'll be a question of being 'first-lasters' and 'last firsters'. This is not so much a moralism as a teaching about discombobulation.

...

"Now as far as I can see, the point of this is to do with how we appreciate our relationship with others inside this project. All of us are 'first-lasts' and 'last-firsts' - there are elements in which some of us started very early and there are elements in which someone started very late and there are also elements in our lives which we are the ones who started late and others started much earlier. The problem is comparison. ...

"What he's suggesting is actually all those who are in inside this project have come to life in quite different ways, at quite different times, have let go of different things at different points, who found themselves called in in different ways. The biography of each one is astounding and unique... Everyone's inheriting the same, but everyone inherited a different way and through a different process. There are bits where we are 'last-firsters' and the bits where we are 'first-lasters' but the one thing we mustn't do is to allow ourselves to get caught up in jealousy about what is apparently being given to others, because that means we won't be able to appreciate what we're being given ourselves.

"I think that it's this sense that Jesus is so richly bringing out, that the life stories of those of us who are involved in this are going to be incommensurable one with each other. We've really no idea where we have been caught up in the coming into the kingdom, it's only after a long time that we may discover something that was part of our life and which suddenly blossoms into who we really are. All of these things are not to be measured in advance, not to be worked out by comparison. ... Just think how many ways we are dependent on comparison to judge our being brought into being our sons and daughters, and that's quite literally ... destroying our imagination of the goodness of the one who is trying to give us a gift.

"This for me is, if you like, this is the culmination of Jesus teaching on being on the inside of the life of the new creation coming into being... We're all screw-ups, we're all being called into being in rather extraordinary ways and finding ourselves on the insides of a process of being brought into being daughters and sons, [which is] the unique reward which is glory. And if we can begin to imagine how utterly astounding the lives, the patterns, the ways of being, are of our contemporaries, our friends, our enemies, those of whom we're jealous, just be able to sit back a little bit from our comparative jealousy, the insecurity, to be able to see where they are 'first-lasters' and 'last-firsters', just as we are 'last-firsters' and 'first-lasters' in different aspects of our lives.

"In that sense we might be able to come and enjoy [non-enviously] the sheer goodness, vivacity and strangeness of the one who is bringing us out of the corrupt and futile ways in which our world tends to curve down. That's what's being offered, and that's what Jesus is trying to bring out at the end of his, what's called ecclesiastical teaching - teaching on how it is that we are to live together in the coming into the new kingdom."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 25 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBAaXdPtf8)

[Source of quotes from Richard Rohr and Andrew Marr, and for discussion and resources on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper20a/]

From the Lectionary for 17 September 2023 (Proper 19A)

Matthew 18:21-35 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven[1] times.

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him, and, as he could not pay, the lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him by the throat he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

[1] The NRSV has "seventy-seven" in the text, and "seventy times seven" in a footnote. I have reversed this, as I tend to agree with those who see this as a reference back to, and subverting of, Lamech's declaration, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” (Genesis 4:24).

~

Matthew 5:25-27 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Matthew 6:14-15 (NRSV Updated Edition)

“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

~

The latter two passages (from Matt. 5 and 6) are not from this week's lectionary, I have added them to reinforce just how seriously the author of Matthew's Gospel takes the problem of unforgiveness, as the Matthew 18 passage clearly presents.  But why so extreme, to the level of suggesting that "the heavenly Father" will not forgive the non-forgiver but hand the non-forgiver over to torturers?

This question relates, I think, to other passages and parables which refer to exclusion (eg. The Parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew 22. And it is a question all human communities need to deal with at some time: what to do with people who themselves are rejecting, excluding - in short not forgiving - others in the community?  And I think what it comes down to is accepting the reality that, even though they seem to want to be part of the community, they are in real way excluding themselves from it by not accepting others.  They are essentially elevating themselves, self-appointing themselves as judge over others.  And this, if it is allowed to continue, is death for the community.

The other aspect of unforgiveness, as others have clearly articulated (eg. Rob Bell in his 'forgiveness' series on the Robcast podcast), is that it imprisons the non-forgiver far more than the one who they will not forgive.  So, I think, in a real way, the "torture" suggested in Matthew 18 is far more a consequence of the person's unforgiveness, rather than an external force applied to them.  The unforgiving servant's actions towards his fellow servant clearly shows that he was still locked in the 'debt-prison' mentality.  All that happens then is that the truth of this is revealed, and he ends up with physical conditions matching his psychological and spiritual condition, which hadn't yet grasped the reality of the grace which had been extended to him.

One of the most difficult aspects of this topic is, of course, the danger of turning forgiveness into a stick in which to beat the victim, adding further pain to what they have already suffered.  The parable in Matthew 18 clearly does not present this case, as the 'non-forgiver' was not in any real way a victim of injustice, in fact he had been forgiven a debt of staggering value (10,000 talents equates to around 300,000 kg of gold).  For a real victim, and there are far too many as we are all too aware, what is needed is compassion, understanding, acceptance and love, not scepticism about their experience or injunctions to forgive the perpetrator.  At the same time, I think followers of Jesus should not encourage unforgiveness in any way, but pray for the eventual 'release' of the victim into renewed wholeness and freedom.

~

"Now please notice that the key figure in this is the second servant - the second servant is the equivalent of the servant boy [from Matthew 18: 1-5]. It's the equivalent of Jesus, who will be in the midst of you [Matt. 18:20]. It's the one who has been scandalized. It's in not forgiving [the second servant] that the person was bringing the whole thing down. You've got to forgive. As you forgive, so forgiveness spreads. It's forgiveness that keeps the whole system going. This is what Jesus is teaching, [it's] very very remarkable.

"Whereas [in] the pagan kingdom it's debts and loans that keep the whole system going, and if you interfere with it you crash the whole system, Jesus is saying, “Actually no. I'm introducing into the midst the real working of creation, the real opening-up of creation, which is going to be from forgiveness. In as far as you keep the system of forgiveness going, carrying on forgiving each other - endlessly, 70 times 7, leaving the 99 sheep [and] going after the one, all of that - in as far as you do that, then with me, you are opening up creation and allowing creation to be brought into being. That is what my Father wants to do and that is why I have come into your midst: to open up the new creation through forgiveness.”"

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 24 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IjeL8taW4)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper19a/]

From the Lectionary for 10 September 2023 (Proper 18A)

Matthew 18: 1-7; 10-22* (NRSV Updated Edition)

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

“If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things are bound to come, but woe to the one through whom they come!

...

“Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.

“If your brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If you are listened to, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If that person refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.”

* Note that the actual lectionary text is vv 15-20 only

~

"The beginning of the discussion is, “who is greatest amongst you?” In other words, who are the people who are going to be in charge, what's it look like to be running this show? And Jesus takes, not as in some translations, a child, but a small servant boy, a young servant boy, and puts him in the midst of them and says this is the criteria for it. In other words, you're not going to be great except in as far as you become like this one and learn to listen to this one. Of course, servant boys were not considered proper authorities on anything - they were scarcely talked to, they would not have been noticed. ... Jesus is saying, the criterion for what counts as behaviour is a servant boy. And guess what, if you scandalize such people then you are destroying yourselves.

"So the next section is about how not to scandalize one of these little ones because the criteria of his own presence ... is going to be that of the servant boy, whom he very carefully puts in the midst of them. And I bring this out because in our gospel today at the very end of his passage, he says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name I am there among them.” In other words, he repeats exactly the same phrase: I am going to be amongst the decision-making group as a servant boy, the kind of person whose voice wouldn't normally be heard, who just gets on doing things and [looking] after people, who's present and should be present in a non-scandalized way that's the criteria that's at work here.

"Ok, immediately thereafter Jesus tells them not the parable of the Lost Sheep. ...  So here is Jesus teaching something very specific about how the business of authority is going to be exercised. It's going to be exercised in favour of the one that went astray, the lost one. The whole purpose is not to be shoring up the good; the whole purpose, even to the extent of leaving the vast majority, is to go after the one who seems to have gone astray, finding, them - that's the cause of rejoicing.

...

"What I'd like to propose to you is that what Jesus is offering [in vv. 15-17] is actually the mechanism ... to avoid a lynching. So the first tip: if another member of the church sins against you go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. Now I'm old enough to have been enough situations where I know that this is really really difficult thing to do. It's easy to get into a fight with someone but it's really difficult to take sufficient distance from what has gone on when someone has offended you to work out what's really going on between you and to be able to stand up, without the need to go and search for backup, to gossip to other people about what's happened, to try and present yourself as having been victimized by this person.

"It's tremendously difficult actually to be in a place of peace in yourself where you can go and say to the other person calmly, and not because you want to rub it in that person's face but because you really want to recreate friendship with that person, “Do you know you did this to me? I really want us to get beyond this.” It's an incredibly difficult thing to do, it requires a huge amount of that peaceful calm in your own life. ... It's a hugely important thing, but what is really important about it is what it's not doing. You are preparing yourself because you want to bring back this other person, you want to resolve this, you want this person to be on the same insider basis with you as everyone else.

"And it's only when that's failed, when you've spoken to that person alone so that there's no risk of you humiliating them so that they're not having to keep up appearances before anybody else - you have not told anybody else you, are not whipped up by gossip opinion against that person so that they need to defend themselves - it's only when you've done that and it's failed that you then need to go and talk to two or three witnesses. ... [By doing this], you are exposing yourself to the person who has been offended, you are exposing yourself to other people putting you right and saying, “Actually, I think you're misinterpreting what he or she did or said to you I think that there's a more innocent explanation that you should perhaps get off your high horse and see what's really going on here.” In other words, by all putting yourself through this exercise you're running the risk of learning something.

"And so then if thereon [the witnesses] agree with you and if therefore it seems clear that what you say is true they're prepared to back you up, for it's gone slowly enough so that the person who is being to be confronted has not been pushed into a situation whereby they're feeling paranoid and defensive - if all that's happened and still, that person says actually no, I didn't do that or I was right to do what I did, then before taking any action and before entering to get more gossip and trying to whip up popular opinion, then you talk to the whole of the community and see whether that they too can be won over by an account of events in such a way that they too could work out with you how to bring the person back on board.

"In other words, this is a mechanism for slowing down a lynching. And if at the very end of the process the other person continues either to deny that they did something or to deny the intention with which they did it or to deny that the thing they did was wrong, under those circumstances, having given them every possibility, it then says, treat them as a gentile or a tax collector ... If anything, for me, the use of the word tax collector there is one of Matthew's clever ways of saying, “Remember what this means is, we go back to the beginning and try to find ways of bringing them back in.” Because that's what this is about. And he then stresses to them that there is no way beyond this mechanism - the un-scapegoating mechanism - there's no external reference: God is not an outsider to this process, God is to be found present in the *undoing* of the scapegoating mechanism, which is how he, Jesus, is going to be present to them, occupying the same place as that servant boy [at the beginning of the chapter].

"And he says, no, you're going to have to take responsibility for this whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven in other words, it's you who are going to advance in understanding of how to create insiders together as you learn constantly to find ways of letting each other off awful violent mechanisms of control and policing."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 23 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MnbpZAWoKs)

~

"Matthew’s gospel is replete with midrashim, explorations of Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness. It does not help us to have these general categories like ‘to sin’ where we are then left importing all kinds of baggage to fill it up. Rules and laws and what’s right and what’s wrong. Because everybody fills up this generic category differently, each group defines itself by what it is not; it is not ‘the other.’

"The Gospel shouts that God goes out to ‘the other’ indeed to the ‘enemy other’, you and me. Woven throughout Matthew’s gospel in so many ways from Emmanuel to the Father who cares for the creation, the sparrow, the lost sheep, you and I, God goes to the other. God does this going indiscriminately, wholly in love, reconciliatory in concrete action. ... God is not willing to let even one little sheep get away, God goes after everyone indiscriminately. Everyone counts, even or especially ‘the little ones.’

"Vss. 15-18 then proceed to describe a community situation where followers of Jesus are not exercising forgiveness. They are holding grudges and seeking redress (are they perhaps reflected in 5:25-26?). These are the ‘brothers and sisters’ who are ‘sinning.’ How should Christians handle those who say they follow Jesus but will not forgive, who justify retaliation?

"The process is ordered in a step by step fashion to ... achieve maximum reconciliation. It recognizes the possibility that there will be those who stubbornly insist on their rights, who will not forgive. If these folks, who say they follow Jesus (‘not all who say to me Lord, Lord…), will not forgive, then eventually they are to be treated as those who have not yet known Jesus’ forgiveness of themselves, i.e., as pagans and tax collectors.

"Nothing is said about shunning here. Nor is anything said about exclusion from the church. It may well have been that pagans and tax collectors were shunned in general but this is obviously not the way that Jesus behaved with them? To treat the ‘other as enemy’ is not what is being said here. Such a reading is incongruent with the entirety of Jesus’ teaching as Matthew presents it.

...

"A positive mimetic reading of Matthew 18 frees us to perceive the true connection between scandal and forgiveness. Forgiveness, both to seek forgiveness and to forgive others, is the one attitude and act that can transform rivalry. A posture of forgiveness as a community has great power. It just takes two. Why two or more? Because what is being modelled is the relational character of forgiveness and reconciliation. ... So too, if we chose to read the entirety of Matthew 18 with an emphasis on forgiveness, we will radicalize the church. We remind ourselves as church that we are not about exclusion, but that we are most certainly about forgiveness. A church where forgiveness reigns, imagine that! How beautiful it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity!"

- Michael Hardin, lectionary reflections from preachingpeace.org (website no longer available)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper18a/]

From the Lectionary for 3 September 2023 (Proper 17A)

Matthew 16:21-28 (NRSV Updated Edition)

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block[1] to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

[1] The NRSV has "hindrance" in the main text, and "stumbling block" in a footnote. I have reversed it as the latter is the more literal translation, and also contains a subtle pun to the previous episode in Matthew's gospel, where Jesus gives Simon the name "Peter" (rock).

~

"Here is the same doubleness we have seen threaded through all the Gospel accounts. Peter’s picture of God forbids the Messiah’s identification with a victim. Peter rejects the idea of Christ’s suffering because of his natural human attachment to Christ, the attachment that leads us always to prefer victims who are not part of our closest circle. And he rejects it because he is hoping for a violently victorious God who will crush the enemies of Israel. Jesus says Peter is a “stumbling block” to him, offering a real temptation to deflect him from his path. If Peter were flatly wrong, this would not be a live temptation. But Jesus’ reaction makes it clear that it is.

"The objection affects Jesus for different reasons than it appeals to Peter. It appeals to Jesus because of its fundamental truth. This should never happen to Jesus, or to anyone. The wrongness in the cross is precisely what Jesus aims to oppose and overcome in bearing it. If Jesus’ death can oppose that evil, then that is why he will do it. But that injustice is also the strongest possible argument why he should not accept it. For all the wrong reasons, Peter has hit on the weakest point of Jesus’ resolve, and played Satan’s strongest card: to go through with this trip to Jerusalem is to implicitly cooperate in the most unjust in the long line of unjust sacrifices.

"Why would Jesus want to do Satan’s business for him? Precisely because Jesus is innocent, the strongest temptation to deflect him from his path is the simple truth. This injustice ought not happen. It “ought” to happen only if it can be unlike all the others from the foundation of the world, if it can reverse the practice. We can hardly blame Peter for not seeing how that might be. It requires resurrection, and a new spirit."

- S. Mark Heim, Saved From Sacrifice, pp. 152-153

~

"As we saw last week Jesus’ messiahship is at stake, the question of his character, how he will act, whom he will imitate is at the forefront. Will he be a Son of the Living God or a messiah in the service of just vengeance? This is the critical question posed by the New Testament about Jesus.

"The second critical question posed by the New Testament is how we shall perceive ourselves as his followers. This is explored in vss. 24-26. The fact is, the reality of discipleship consists of cross carrying, a willingness to be persecuted, but more so, a willingness to die forgiving and not retaliating as the Master has done. Jesus is not saying that his followers are to seek persecution, they are not to be masochists. But every follower of Jesus must be willing to die every day, forgiving.

...

"The supreme sacrifice is not service to country but service (death) for the kingdom of God. Bearing witness to peace, as Jesus did, being a peacemaker, as Jesus was, is the counter-cultural expression of faith. Standing for peace robs culture of it’s masking and mything of war and it’s continued use of scapegoats. Bearing witness to peace reveals that cultural justice is not righteous. Peacemaking, or ‘losing one’s life’ is the essence of Christian spirituality. It is the essence of Jesus’ person and work and thus stands at the center of what it means to be a child of God."

- Michael Hardin

~

"In today's reading in the Gospel from St Matthew we're continuing directly on from where we were last time. You remember, Peter somehow surprised Jesus by being able to say who he was - the Son of the Living God. Jesus recognized that this was something that he had been given - this wasn't something he'd made up or worked out - that he'd actually had an insight that was going to make him something very remarkable. And ... Jesus confirmed that by giving him the power of the keys, as you remember.

"So, what we have today is the direct continuation from that: the Davidic son who told his disciples not to let anyone else know that that's what he was at this stage because he had to enact that in Jerusalem now, from this period on. Now that the disciples have discovered for themselves who he is, he has to try and teach them what that actually means.

...

"Then Jesus told his disciples - this is where we get into the meat of this, if you like, ... because effectively he's saying something to all of them: if any want to become my followers; in other words, at this stage he's saying, 'you can get off this bandwagon now if you want' - “If anyone wants to become my followers let them” - our translation says: “deny yourselves” but the word is “disregard” in classical Greek, that's the way this word is used - disregard yourselves, count yourselves as nothing - “and take up your cross and follow me.”

"And people say, well is Jesus prophesying that he's going to be crucified here? We don't know. What we do know is that the cross was the ultimate shameful death. It was a death that the Jewish authorities wouldn't allow themselves to apply to other people. It was something that the Roman authorities used in particularly egregious cases, where they really wanted to humiliate somebody. It was their most humiliating form of execution, and carrying your cross was the person who is walking the walk of complete shame. So basically saying: if you want to follow me it's going to be a shame walk.

"Those who want to save their lives - grasp onto themselves, build themselves up, security, fine reputation, all of that - they'll lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake - those who prepared to go down the shame walk - will actually find themselves being brought in to be. “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world, but forfeit their life?” In other words, you can have the highest reputation, the most the property, the greatest security in the world, and have completely lost who you are. We see too many examples of that all around us the whole time. “What will they give in return for their life?” There's nothing commensurate with becoming who you are called to be, and for that being something that will not know death.

"“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father and then he will repay everyone for what he has done.” In other words, who I am will be known from a place of shame, and the Father's glory will be bringing that place of shame into life and making it radiant and dwellable in, and the angels will carry this news to the four corners of the earth so that the true reputation of who God is and how God loves will be known. “Truly I tell you there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.“ So he's prophesying that this is going to happen soon. They're on a learning process and they're going to see this shame held in glory and if they're going to be able to follow that then they'll be on the inside of it."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 22 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s9-YLqu-4o)

[Source of S. Mark Heim and Michael Hardin quotes, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper17a/]

From the Lectionary for 27 August 2023 (Proper 16A)

Romans 12:1-8 (NRSV Updated Edition)

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

~

"In writing to the Romans, Paul admonishes them to follow Abraham out of the idolatrous empire in which they live: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Rom. 12: 2) And what does this transformed people with renewed minds look like? Paul has just told the Romans that such people present their bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is [their] spiritual worship.” (Rom. 12: 1)

"The imperial culture is all about using power to make sacrifices of others for the sake of the Empire. The culture of Christ is all about making a sacrifice of self as did Jesus, so as to make all of our lives an act of self-sacrificial worship. Although emperors always think more highly of themselves than they should, Paul warns us not to think more highly of ourselves than we should, “but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.” (Rom. 12: 3) Paul then goes on the enumerate the measures of faith as a distribution of gifts of the Holy Spirit so that each of us makes our bodies living sacrifices of worship in various ways, making up the Body of Christ.

"Being transformed by the renewal of our minds entails a radical makeover. It’s not just a matter of changing one’s mind about what book to read next. Paul is writing about a radical turnaround in one’s attitude to power. The first step is to be very vigilant about the power we happen to have in relation to other people and how we use it. Even if some of us have rather little power we need to be acutely aware of how we use what little we have. Do we try to get an upper hand against other people one way or another rather than looking for ways we can lay down our selves in service to them?"

- Andrew Marr, from blog post titled "The Rock From Which We Are Hewn" (https://andrewmarrosb.blog/2020/08/20/the-rock-from-which-we-are-hewn)

~

"Romans 12:1-2 opens the ethical section of the letter by placing the image of sacrifice as a rubric over the discussion. It is, therefore, not substitutionary sacrifice that the image has in mind but rather self-dedication to God. Sacrifice is a metaphor for moral self-dedication and not a ruse for shifting responsibility on to a substitute. Thus the logic of substitution has been reversed, and instead of being a device for escaping responsibility, sacrifice is here a metaphor for the acceptance of responsibility before God. The metaphor is based on the “thanksgiving” element in sacrifice as an image of the moral dedication to God that acknowledges the creator as the “other” who constitutes the self by relationship.

"The noetic element is prominent in the passage — such self-sacrifice is reasonable (logikos) and renews the mind (anakainosis tou noos) — and this gives the following exhortation (Rom 12:3-8) — to maintain the proper order in the community — a moral rather than a sacral basis. In the realm of the ['religious'] Sacred, order is the effect of the filtered violence of ritual and prohibition; here it is to be the result of moral discernment by the renewed mind. Its mark is precisely the rational curb on rivalry by the responsible acceptance of the differentiated functions of an ordered society.

"In this Christian community the differentiation that is normally achieved by the threat of the vengeance of the god institutionalized in the law is to be achieved by rational self-restraint (phronein eis to sophronein — Rom 12:3). Therefore, not only the explicit image of sacrifice but also the deep logic of the passage attests the dialectical influence of the logic of the ['religious'] Sacred. The passage is in dialogue with sacrificial logic, correcting it in the light of the Cross, and redescribing sacrifice as self-sacrifice in thanksgiving, and order as the free acceptance of prudential constraints, rather than the fearful observance of divine sanctions."

- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 150-151

~

"As death loses its power, so commitment to the flourishing of what is fragile and precarious becomes possible, and our relationship with time changes. ... If time is not your enemy, then what you achieve or don’t achieve ... is secondary, and whatever you have will be for the flourishing of the weak one for as long as it takes, since you know that you will be *found there*. Being on the inside of the life of God looks like being decanted, by a generosity you didn’t know you had in you, into making a rash commitment which makes a nonsense of death, of worry, and of the panic of time, because you know that you want to be found in loving proximity to what is weak and being brought into being. Wanting to be found there is a huge statement of joy at the power and gentleness of One for whom it is the apparently weak and futile things that are going to be enabled to be brought into being. Being given the daring to be able to lose yourself in being found there is recognized as a privilege to be greeted with praise.

"This, I think, is ... what St Paul would describe as “rightly reasoning worship” (Rom 12:1-2). That God is the One who brings into being what is not. And dwelling on the inside of the life of God means being prepared to lose sight of all the apparently important things that are and to give yourself away in extreme gentleness and tenderness towards that which is apparently not, and yet which is being brought into being out of the brink of nothingness by one not ashamed of mingling with the least important of all, one who has nowhere more important to be (1 Cor. 1.22-29)."

- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pg. 550

[Source of link to Andrew Marr's blog and quotes from Robert Hamerton-Kelly and James Alison, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper16a/]

From the Lectionary for 20 August 2023 (Proper 15A)

Matthew 15:21-28 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.

~

"There are several clues to this reading. The first is seeing that Matthew might be doing something intentional here by changing Mark’s “Syro-Phoenician” woman to a “Canaanite” woman, which is an anachronistic term in the first century - like calling a modern Norwegian person a Viking. But “Canaanite” fits well to the time of Joshua and his conquest of the Promised Land. Is Matthew’s Jesus reconstituting that conquest?

"... [A] second important clue appears through what comes next in chapter 15 of Matthew’s story of Jesus: healing of Gentile crowds (Matthew tells us they are Gentiles by remarking that “they praised the God of Israel”; Matt. 15:31) and then a repeat of the miraculous feeding, this time with Gentiles. In the first feeding with Jews (14:13-21), there is a hint of reconstitution by the gathering of twelve baskets leftover, for the twelve tribes of Israel. In the second feeding with Gentiles (15:32-38), there are seven baskets leftover. If we look for a similar symbolism of reconstitution, we might look to the time of the “Canaanites.” As the people of Israel stand poised for conquest of that land, Moses says to them:

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations — the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you — and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.” (Deut 7:1-2)

"In the first encounter with the seven nations of “Canaanites,” they are to show no mercy. But Matthew’s Jesus has come to teach them something different, to learn what this means, “I desire mercy not sacrifice” (with Matthew’s Jesus twice quoting Hosea 6:6 in Matt. 9:13 and 12:7). ...

"[T]he “Canaanite” woman ... seems to remind Jesus of what the promise to Abraham and Sarah is really all about. She doesn’t begrudge Jesus the fact of his mission with his own people who have lost their way (Jesus himself calling them “lost sheep”). But she knows that if he is successful with his own people in helping them to find their way again, that she will at least receive scraps from their table. For the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham and Sarah is not for Jews to be blessed for their own sake but that they might become a blessing to all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:1-3)."

- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from discussion on this passage on the Girardian Lectionary page (link below).

~

"And now i wonder whether Jesus isn't actually going to do something much smarter than seems to be the case. He listens to the woman shouting, he hasn't intervened, he hasn't made any determination on whether she's of the demonized or of the prophetic sort. He sees the disciples are fed up he sees they want to get rid of her, so he answers them something which is strange enough - he is playing to their feelings: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That, of course, is what he's been doing, he's been re-enacting Joshua in you know, [crossing] the sea, putting right the things that Joshua hadn't quite completed.

"So ... she's come up and knelt before him. Now please notice, she wasn't there when he told them, “I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” that was for ... the benefit of the disciples, and I suspect that it's at least as much how they are going to react to all this and what they are going to learn from this that this story is about. But she comes and she kneels before him. So what we're talking about is something very peaceful very respectful saying, “Lord, help me.” And it's a much simpler word: it's not to have mercy on me, which might be drama-queen, it's Lord help me - it's a very simple, very humble word.

"[Jesus] answers, and it's not clear that he's half saying this for the disciples and half saying this for her: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house puppies.” The translations will always say “dog.” It's a very special word for little domestic dogs - house puppies. In other words, ... he's making a reference that she might get to the relationship between Israel and the nations. It's recognizing that they're not dogs, they're “house puppies.” They're insiders, there's a certain sense of being an insider, in being one of the nations whom Joshua allowed to stay. So he's saying something, yes to her, but very much in the hearing of his disciples.

"And this is where she gets it right with an extraordinary turnaround of what he's saying, and maybe, as I say, again this is as much for the benefit of the disciples as for anyone else. She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Actually, the word is not crumbs, it's swabs. We have napkins or serviettes with which we clean our mouths after being at a table. Not so in the ancient world, they would use swabs of bread to clean their mouth after eating, then throw the swabs on the floor. And of course the house puppies, the domestic dogs, would love that and would be very grateful. So she's referring not to accidental dropping but to deliberate discarding of something that's a sign of being satisfied and having come to the end of your meal, and therefore there is leftover for the dogs.

"And so she's saying she's taking the image of the house puppies and running with it, and she's running with it in a very elegant way - even the dogs eat the swabs, even the little house puppies eat the swabs that fall from their master's table. In other words, she reveals that she herself is very much on the prophetic side rather than the demonized side. She knows what she's asking, she's asking respectfully, and she's actually playing David back to David's son because she's almost quoting, certainly paraphrasing Psalm 17 [v 14], in the Septuagint version ... “Oh Lord from few things from earth separate them in their lives and with your hidden things their belly was filled they were fed with sons and they left the remains to their infants.” She's playing back: You are the Son of David, this is what David said, rather than treating us as enemies, as those who should be thrown out, you actually fill them. So fill me, let me be one of those who's being fulfilled, and my daughter as well.

"So Jesus is very struck about this, he makes no secret at all that one of the 'house puppies' has spoken up and is beginning to break through, hopefully in the presence of the disciples so they'll get this and they'll remember that he came to the house of Israel, [but] the house of Israel has house puppies also. Israel's 'house puppies' are beginning to come in. It's for the disciples not to have a 'get rid of these people, yeah sort them out and get rid of them' attitude. They're going to have to learn to discover that there are many people like the Syro-Phoenician woman who are going to become insiders in the house of God, because they know who it is who is amongst us and who it is who is setting us free from our co-dependencies, our demonized relationships, our inability to be good and holy by purity and by ritual. In the midst of all of this our Lord is allowing us to be filled and to go away free and whole.."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 20 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBGFTXHTr3c)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper15a/]

From the Lectionary for 13 August 2023 (Proper 14A)

Matthew 14:22-33 (NRSV Updated Edition)

Immediately he made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

~

"Our gospel today continues directly on from last Sunday's gospel where if you remember Jesus was re-enacting the manna and quails in the desert, he was re-enacting Moses, feeding the people but being much more than Moses, being the sign of what Moses had been pointing to. And we continue in exactly the same vein today, but now we move from Moses to Joshua.

"It's all in very fast motion. Today's gospel begins, “Immediately.” Jesus is in a hurry to get his disciples into the Promised Land that they should understand that that's what the purpose of the journey of the People of God through the wilderness was, was to get to the Promised Land. So he makes the disciples immediately, before he even sends the crowds away, makes them get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side. In other words, he's sending 'Joshua and his troops' on ahead into the Promised Land, actually the troops representing the 12 tribes on ahead into the Promised Land.

...

"When the disciples saw him walking on the sea they were terrified saying, “It is a ghost!” In other words, their first reaction is to misapprehend what's going on here, because the one walking across the sea is Joshua, who led the people of Israel and the Ark of the Covenant across the Jordan dry-footed. ... Here we have Joshua and the Ark itself re-performing the miracle - one greater than Joshua, one who actually is the Ark - re-performing the miracle of the walking across the Jordan. But they of course slightly misget it, think it's a ghost. They are not quite aware that they are re-enacting the second part of the move to the Promised Land.

"And they cried out in fear but immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” This is wonderful, he's quoting something from Isaiah here, ... Isaiah 43, “Do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you, and through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you.” So this is the Lord confirming to the people who are making the trek into the Promised Land, this is what's going ahead.

...

"Peter kind of half gets the idea right, he half realizes that this is a Joshua thing and therefore he who's the leader ought to be kind of Joshua too, so he wants to see whether he can walk across the river of Jordan dry-footed as well. So he says, if you command me to come to you on the water, saying, yeah I get it, I want to be I want to be your Joshua... All this is entirely unnecessary, Peter's doing this is just, if you like, a fit of enthusiasm which requires him to get out of the boat which is perfectly safely going across the storm. ...

"Our Lord reaches out to him, catches him, saying to him, “You have little faith right now,” and the funny thing is that we all resist, [we] all assume that that means, “Why did you doubt in your walking when you walked on the water?” But maybe it means something richer? “Why did you doubt that I was coming to you in the boat, that the Ark would cross, that the Lord would be with you in the boat as I was before, last time we had this story. You didn't need to get out, I am coming into the boat. The Ark is going in the midst of the people, and I am more than the Ark, I am more than Joshua, and you are going to get to the other side safely and fully. ...

"Again this wonderful realization that it is the Lord, the Lord whose ways are through the waters - this is a quote from Psalm 77: “Your way was through the sea, your path through the mighty waters, yet your footprints were unseen. You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.” And here by the hand of Joshua all of this is brought beautifully to life.

"In Psalm 107, which is actually obviously being quoted here since it actually has the sense of crying out, the disciples crying out to the Lord in their distress. “And bringing them out of their distresses, he makes the storm calm so the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desire haven.”

"So please notice what we're having here is the second part of the trek into the Promised Land, the Lord showing that there is one more than Joshua and that even the manner of following and being the new people doesn't even need a leader, a 'Joshua' style leader. He will be in their midst, all together, and will be carrying them across himself."

- James Alison, from video "Homily for Sunday 19 in Ordinary Time Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spx7AtFj8Us)

[For analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see also: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/proper14a/]