The trickster God
Commentary
Object:
The religions of the world are divided into types: monotheistic, pantheistic, and panentheistic; mystical; shamanistic; nature/fertility cults; and trickster religions, to name a few. Many years ago I became interested in Native American religions. Living in Wisconsin, as I do, I had the opportunity to meet people of the various groups that live here, and to learn their beliefs close-up. I was fascinated. I went to Indian Summer Festival and watched the fancy dancers, admired the work of bead artists and learned more of their craft, and talked with religious leaders. One day I walked into a shop that sold all sorts of supplies for Native artists and shamans. I was able to ask the woman behind the counter how these things were used, and found her to be quite learned and friendly. At last she asked me why I was asking so many questions: was I a shaman? “Well, in a way, I guess I am. I’m a Christian pastor.” She shrugged and said, “I have no use for Christianity. I don’t get it.” I answered back, “It’s not difficult. It’s a trickster religion.” Her eyes got big and her mouth dropped open. I could practically see her brain tracking down my statement. Finally she said, “You’re right! It is!” We laughed together for a moment before I paid for my purchases and left.
So what does it mean to be a “trickster religion”? Around the world, in Africa, Asia, and here in the Americas, the trickster comes to earth to turn humans around, to set out beliefs on their heads, to change the order of society. They can be friendly, but they can cause all kinds of trouble for people. They are to be avoided if possible, and placated when we unavoidably meet them.
Of course, we don’t think of Jesus as a trickster. He’s the incarnation of God. But the God of the Bible does tend to be somewhat tricky. He promises a middle-aged man that he will become the father of so many offspring that you might as well count the stars in the sky as his descendants. Then God makes him wait until his wife is well past menopause before fulfilling that promise. Sarah, listening to the three angels tell this to her husband, laughs, because it’s impossible. But have a son she does, and names him Isaac -- “he laughs.” And then there’s the story of Balaam and his talking donkey (see Numbers 22-24, 31; Jude 1:11; 2 Peter 2:15). And the story of Jonah, swallowed by a giant fish and spit up on the shore where God had sent him in the first place. The entire story of Jesus’ death and resurrection hinges on the reasonable expectation of the authorities that dead is dead. But even death is turned on its head. The devil may have thought he won, but he did not; even his unholy expectations are overthrown by our God. Martin Luther said that the one thing the devil cannot stand is laughter. And we have a God who laughs as he overcomes evil.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
This passage from Jeremiah has been misused in our modern world. People will point to it and say, “You see? God knew you before you were born.” But the word of God to Jeremiah is not a word to each and every one of us. The misreading happens primarily because we American Christians are unwilling to say that God treats anyone differently than everyone. “We are all alike in the sight of the Lord” is one of those bedrock beliefs that permeates our thinking about our relationship with God. If we were to hear God whisper to us “You are special to me,” most of us would brush that away. After all, God doesn’t have favorites, right? So it must be that everyone is known by God before we are born. This is not, however, the attitude of the Old Testament.
When God needs a pastor or a prophet, we believe, a person will arise who has the qualities needed to fulfill the role. This is not what this passage is saying. This passage actually says that God knew Jeremiah before he was even conceived. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” That even goes beyond the call of most of the prophets.
Prophets were called by God for a specific purpose in a specific time and place: “Go and tell the king (or high priest) that which I tell you to say.” And when that task was done, the prophet was free to return to the life s/he had been living when s/he was called -- providing, of course, that the king or high priest or whomever he’d gone up against hadn’t killed the prophet first.
Although it is an encouraging thought that God has plans for each of us, that isn’t necessarily true. Most of us are free to engage our free will and make as many mistakes as we wish, even throw our lives away or steal the lives of others. But some jobs require a special person -- and Jeremiah is just that, created by God for his particular time and place.
We could compare this to the opening of the gospel of John (1:12-13), where it says that those who would follow “the Word” had “the power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” John was seeking to explain why the Good News was not accepted by all of the Jews when they had been praying for the Messiah to come. Only those who had been given the power to do so by God’s Spirit could accept Jesus. Our country holds up two values: our freedom to be and do what we want; and the equality of all people. But neither of these values was part of the society of the Old Testament. Jeremiah, Moses, the other prophets, and the Temple priests were all set aside for the use of God. They were holy vessels for God’s word, charged with the task of confronting those who thought they held all the power with God’s demands.
Jeremiah, like Moses and so many of the prophets, shakes his head. “I do not know how to speak, I’m only a boy!” He might have added, “How can I talk to those who hold power in Jerusalem? They won’t listen to me.”
But God is not about to let him off. “You shall go where I send you, and you shall say what I tell you to say to those I tell you to say it.” But there is reassurance from God as well. “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.” Then God touches Jeremiah’s mouth with his hand and says, “Now I’ve put my words in your mouth, along with my power to build and tear down kingdoms.”
Jeremiah was going to have a hard time of it. At one point, he was thrown into a dry cistern and left there to die. But God gave him visions, which gave Jeremiah a strong bond with God, and the words to say what he would have been unable to say on his own. He will go up against the powerful and deliver God’s message. But they will not listen, and Jeremiah will live to see his nation defeated and led away as prisoners of war.
It’s hard to warn people who do not want to hear what we have to say, who are arrogant and dismissive when we speak out. It feels like failure when we preach and are told not to say things that will upset people, and perhaps lose our church or even our ministry because we are preaching the word of God. But we need to remember that, like Jeremiah, we are not called to succeed, but to be faithful.
Hebrews 12:18-29
The writer of this sermon has been the subject of some speculation ever since the advent of historical analysis of the Bible. Clearly, whoever it is shares Paul’s theology; but just as clearly, the style and vocabulary are not Paul’s. The experts in New Testament writings will undoubtedly continue their debate for some time, especially since many are now proposing that the author may very well be Priscilla (see 1 Corinthians 16:19 and Acts 18:2-3). For this reason, I will be using the feminine pronoun as I talk about this passage. The reader may opt for whichever pleases.
The lectionary reading comes as the author is in the process of talking about the meaning of faith. She has been using Old Testament heroes: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and, of course, Moses. These people compose the “great... cloud of witnesses” who, by example, show us how to throw off all the things that keep us from being able to keep up our own faith, and by doing so become encouragers of many.
In verse 18, our author makes a rather abrupt switch from the cloud of witnesses to the pivotal point of the Jewish faith: the encounter with God at Mount Sinai. She begins with a segue that is not particularly clear at first. She says Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils; by which she means that Esau traded off what he could not hold in his hand (his birthright, which would come into play only when his father died) for something he could hold in his hand (a bowl of lentils, to satisfy his bodily hunger).
Then she jumps to the encounter at Mount Sinai. God told Moses to put up a fence to keep both the people and their animals from touching the mountain, and that whatever or whoever touched the mountain was to be put to death. The mountain, undoubtedly a volcano, makes terrifying noises as it erupts in flame and smoke. As with most eruptions, there are blasts of lightning and thunder as well. Can we even begin to imagine how overwhelming this encounter must have been? Even Moses himself said, “I tremble in fear.”
However, the people receiving these words are told that they are not at Mount Sinai, they have come to Mount Zion, the eschatological symbol for the Kingdom of God realized on earth. Mount Zion is the mountain that Isaiah said all the earth would flow toward in the Day of the Lord, the day when all of the promises of God will come to pass. The New Jerusalem will be realized in that day, the City of God, on the top of Mount Zion. This vision combines the promises of old with the new promise that Jesus will speak as our lawyer, helping us to be assured that we will be among those whose faith is perfected (not without flaw, but a mature faith), and that we will join with “innumerable angels in festal gathering” with Jesus and the living God.
We might think of this as being like being on the red carpet at the Academy Awards ceremony or some other very fancy, well-designed event at which we are honored guests. We have worked on our faith and our manners so that we don’t look out of place at this amazing ceremony and don’t simply pass out upon meeting some of the very talented, well-polished people around us. Angels are singing, we look the best we ever have, and we know we belong here, because God has said so!
All of this is due to Jesus’ willingness to sacrifice himself on our behalf. If we remember that animal sacrifices were still being made in the Temple, we will know that “the sprinkled blood” is the blood of the sacrifices that were sprinkled on all those gathered at the altar of God, offering up an unblemished lamb to renew their covenantal relationship with God. “The blood of Abel” is the blood that his brother Cain spilled on the ground when he killed Abel. When God came to Cain for an accounting, it was because Abel’s blood had cried out from the earth that had absorbed it. Abel’s blood cried out for justice, but Jesus’ blood cries out for mercy, a much better word in the estimation of the writer.
The warning “on earth” (v. 25) is the warning of God through Moses. The warning “from heaven” is of God through Christ. The warning “on earth” is like the roar of a volcano. The warning from heaven shakes not only the earth but the heavens themselves. There is no place to run, says the author, when God speaks and shakes the creation. Nor is there any place to hide when God speaks except in the Kingdom of Heaven, which cannot be shaken. It is the recognition that we are safe only in God that makes us reverent, bowing down before God, who “is a consuming fire,” a fire that destroys all that is temporary and fragile. It is our faith in God that makes us safe. It is our faith in God that assures us a place on the Holy Mountain.
Luke 13:10-17
Luke puts this story of healing in what at first looks like a strange position. It is preceded by the parable of the barren fig tree, and followed by the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the yeast. These stories are all about the Kingdom of God. Before the fig tree parable, there has been a series of stories and teachings about how the followers of Jesus are expected to behave, and after the parable of the yeast there is the saying about the narrow door and the way that God will turn all of our expectations upside-down.
So what is the point of this story? The way it is placed, it is clear that this story is really the heart of the Good News:
13:1-5 -- Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts: someone in the crowd following Jesus told him about some Galileans “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” Jesus asks if they think that their deaths show that they were “worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Jesus’ answer is “No, but if you don’t repent, you’ll all die the same way.”
13:6-9 -- A man tells his gardener to cut down a fig tree that isn’t producing. The gardener refuses, saying “Give me a year while I dig around it and add manure. Then, if it doesn’t produce, I’ll cut it down.”
13:10-17 -- A woman bent over for 18 years comes into the synagogue where Jesus is teaching, and he calls her to the front and tells her she is set free. He lays hands on her, and she immediately stands up and starts praising God. The leader of the synagogue is irate at this interruption and tells those gathered to come some other day, not the sabbath.
13:18-19 -- The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed planted in a garden, which grew up into a tree where all the birds can nest.
13:20-21 -- The Kingdom of God is like the yeast a woman puts in flour to leaven bread dough.
As we can see when we lay it out this way, we have a classic chiastic structure. Luke is putting the story of the healing of the woman on the sabbath at the center, which is usually the way to point out “this is the most important part of this series of events.” If that is the case, this healing story has a point to it that we could easily miss if we didn’t notice the structure of the longer work.
Jesus’ stories are often stories that turn our common understandings on their heads. We who go to church every Sunday are going to heaven. Those who don’t are going to hell. We who are healthy are being blessed by God. Those who are sick or crippled or fat are paying for their lifestyle. People who are shot while walking down the street shouldn’t have been where they were. Women who are raped were dressed or acted some way that encouraged the man. But Jesus says, “No. Do you think those Galileans who died at the hands of the Roman police were worse sinners than others who are still alive? Well, they weren’t.”
Those of us who don’t “produce” for the Kingdom should be cast aside? No, we’ll give them some added attention this year and see what happens.
Mustard seeds are quite small. Therefore they must be unimportant. No, in the climate and soil of Israel, they grow into trees big enough to hold birds’ nests. Is Jesus telling us that the Kingdom consists of thousands of small people? Or that no matter how little faith we have, it can grow if properly nurtured? Maybe both.
Yeast is an unclean substance in Orthodox Judaism. When Passover comes, the house is scrubbed clean and everything with yeast in it, from bread to aged wine, is thrown out. How, then, can it represent the Kingdom of God? Is it because yeast permeates nearly everything in the house where bread is baked regularly? Is it because a small amount of yeast in a large amount of flour can produce delicious bread? Again, maybe all of the above.
And in each of these stories, the Kingdom of God is unexpected, all-pervasive, affecting everything, whether we expect it or not.
So what about this woman who is bent over and has been crippled for 18 years? She didn’t come up to Jesus and ask to be healed. He called her. Of course, she belonged in the back of the synagogue where she will not distract the men from their learning. But when Jesus told her to come up, she did. He was the teacher for the day, and she was used to doing what some man told her to do. The leader of the synagogue is outraged! She has her place, let her keep it. She’s been bent over for 18 years, she can wait another day! And he kept saying these things, as though no one could hear him.
“Hypocrite!” Jesus says. Hypocrite -- Greek for “actor.” An actor in the theater, who hides behind a mask that tells you what part they are playing. You are not to notice the boys who follow the actor, holding up the mask so the actor’s hands are free to emote. “Actor!” Are our masks to be torn away? We’ve worked hard on these masks we wear every day. You’re not supposed to notice that they’re masks.
“Actors! On the sabbath you still milk your animals. You untie the rope that keeps your donkey where he belongs (untying a knot is forbidden on the sabbath) and take him to the trough so he can drink water.” Why does Jesus use a donkey as his example? Because donkeys are unclean animals. “Ought not this daughter of Abraham (one of God’s chosen people) who Satan bound for 18 years (not God’s doing that she’s crippled, it’s the devil’s work) be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
He’s come to turn everything topsy-turvy! Those who were shocked when Jesus called her forward, who were more than annoyed at the attention she got at their expense, are embarrassed. As for all those who were not good enough to be in positions of authority, they were rejoicing! How many times they had thought the same thing, that this poor old woman never got the respect the aged deserved. She couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way of running boys. She couldn’t see the butcher with his thumb on the scale. Some people even blamed her for her bad health: “She must have offended God to be so bent over.” And here is this famous rabbi, putting them all in their places. Rejoicing? They were rubbing their hands in glee. They were delighted! Look at grandma up there with the rabbi, right in the middle of the men!
But the authorities were not amused. They must bide their time, but they would get this man, the one who keeps turning things upside-down, honoring those at the bottom of society and arguing with those at the top.
So what does it mean to be a “trickster religion”? Around the world, in Africa, Asia, and here in the Americas, the trickster comes to earth to turn humans around, to set out beliefs on their heads, to change the order of society. They can be friendly, but they can cause all kinds of trouble for people. They are to be avoided if possible, and placated when we unavoidably meet them.
Of course, we don’t think of Jesus as a trickster. He’s the incarnation of God. But the God of the Bible does tend to be somewhat tricky. He promises a middle-aged man that he will become the father of so many offspring that you might as well count the stars in the sky as his descendants. Then God makes him wait until his wife is well past menopause before fulfilling that promise. Sarah, listening to the three angels tell this to her husband, laughs, because it’s impossible. But have a son she does, and names him Isaac -- “he laughs.” And then there’s the story of Balaam and his talking donkey (see Numbers 22-24, 31; Jude 1:11; 2 Peter 2:15). And the story of Jonah, swallowed by a giant fish and spit up on the shore where God had sent him in the first place. The entire story of Jesus’ death and resurrection hinges on the reasonable expectation of the authorities that dead is dead. But even death is turned on its head. The devil may have thought he won, but he did not; even his unholy expectations are overthrown by our God. Martin Luther said that the one thing the devil cannot stand is laughter. And we have a God who laughs as he overcomes evil.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
This passage from Jeremiah has been misused in our modern world. People will point to it and say, “You see? God knew you before you were born.” But the word of God to Jeremiah is not a word to each and every one of us. The misreading happens primarily because we American Christians are unwilling to say that God treats anyone differently than everyone. “We are all alike in the sight of the Lord” is one of those bedrock beliefs that permeates our thinking about our relationship with God. If we were to hear God whisper to us “You are special to me,” most of us would brush that away. After all, God doesn’t have favorites, right? So it must be that everyone is known by God before we are born. This is not, however, the attitude of the Old Testament.
When God needs a pastor or a prophet, we believe, a person will arise who has the qualities needed to fulfill the role. This is not what this passage is saying. This passage actually says that God knew Jeremiah before he was even conceived. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” That even goes beyond the call of most of the prophets.
Prophets were called by God for a specific purpose in a specific time and place: “Go and tell the king (or high priest) that which I tell you to say.” And when that task was done, the prophet was free to return to the life s/he had been living when s/he was called -- providing, of course, that the king or high priest or whomever he’d gone up against hadn’t killed the prophet first.
Although it is an encouraging thought that God has plans for each of us, that isn’t necessarily true. Most of us are free to engage our free will and make as many mistakes as we wish, even throw our lives away or steal the lives of others. But some jobs require a special person -- and Jeremiah is just that, created by God for his particular time and place.
We could compare this to the opening of the gospel of John (1:12-13), where it says that those who would follow “the Word” had “the power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” John was seeking to explain why the Good News was not accepted by all of the Jews when they had been praying for the Messiah to come. Only those who had been given the power to do so by God’s Spirit could accept Jesus. Our country holds up two values: our freedom to be and do what we want; and the equality of all people. But neither of these values was part of the society of the Old Testament. Jeremiah, Moses, the other prophets, and the Temple priests were all set aside for the use of God. They were holy vessels for God’s word, charged with the task of confronting those who thought they held all the power with God’s demands.
Jeremiah, like Moses and so many of the prophets, shakes his head. “I do not know how to speak, I’m only a boy!” He might have added, “How can I talk to those who hold power in Jerusalem? They won’t listen to me.”
But God is not about to let him off. “You shall go where I send you, and you shall say what I tell you to say to those I tell you to say it.” But there is reassurance from God as well. “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.” Then God touches Jeremiah’s mouth with his hand and says, “Now I’ve put my words in your mouth, along with my power to build and tear down kingdoms.”
Jeremiah was going to have a hard time of it. At one point, he was thrown into a dry cistern and left there to die. But God gave him visions, which gave Jeremiah a strong bond with God, and the words to say what he would have been unable to say on his own. He will go up against the powerful and deliver God’s message. But they will not listen, and Jeremiah will live to see his nation defeated and led away as prisoners of war.
It’s hard to warn people who do not want to hear what we have to say, who are arrogant and dismissive when we speak out. It feels like failure when we preach and are told not to say things that will upset people, and perhaps lose our church or even our ministry because we are preaching the word of God. But we need to remember that, like Jeremiah, we are not called to succeed, but to be faithful.
Hebrews 12:18-29
The writer of this sermon has been the subject of some speculation ever since the advent of historical analysis of the Bible. Clearly, whoever it is shares Paul’s theology; but just as clearly, the style and vocabulary are not Paul’s. The experts in New Testament writings will undoubtedly continue their debate for some time, especially since many are now proposing that the author may very well be Priscilla (see 1 Corinthians 16:19 and Acts 18:2-3). For this reason, I will be using the feminine pronoun as I talk about this passage. The reader may opt for whichever pleases.
The lectionary reading comes as the author is in the process of talking about the meaning of faith. She has been using Old Testament heroes: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and, of course, Moses. These people compose the “great... cloud of witnesses” who, by example, show us how to throw off all the things that keep us from being able to keep up our own faith, and by doing so become encouragers of many.
In verse 18, our author makes a rather abrupt switch from the cloud of witnesses to the pivotal point of the Jewish faith: the encounter with God at Mount Sinai. She begins with a segue that is not particularly clear at first. She says Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils; by which she means that Esau traded off what he could not hold in his hand (his birthright, which would come into play only when his father died) for something he could hold in his hand (a bowl of lentils, to satisfy his bodily hunger).
Then she jumps to the encounter at Mount Sinai. God told Moses to put up a fence to keep both the people and their animals from touching the mountain, and that whatever or whoever touched the mountain was to be put to death. The mountain, undoubtedly a volcano, makes terrifying noises as it erupts in flame and smoke. As with most eruptions, there are blasts of lightning and thunder as well. Can we even begin to imagine how overwhelming this encounter must have been? Even Moses himself said, “I tremble in fear.”
However, the people receiving these words are told that they are not at Mount Sinai, they have come to Mount Zion, the eschatological symbol for the Kingdom of God realized on earth. Mount Zion is the mountain that Isaiah said all the earth would flow toward in the Day of the Lord, the day when all of the promises of God will come to pass. The New Jerusalem will be realized in that day, the City of God, on the top of Mount Zion. This vision combines the promises of old with the new promise that Jesus will speak as our lawyer, helping us to be assured that we will be among those whose faith is perfected (not without flaw, but a mature faith), and that we will join with “innumerable angels in festal gathering” with Jesus and the living God.
We might think of this as being like being on the red carpet at the Academy Awards ceremony or some other very fancy, well-designed event at which we are honored guests. We have worked on our faith and our manners so that we don’t look out of place at this amazing ceremony and don’t simply pass out upon meeting some of the very talented, well-polished people around us. Angels are singing, we look the best we ever have, and we know we belong here, because God has said so!
All of this is due to Jesus’ willingness to sacrifice himself on our behalf. If we remember that animal sacrifices were still being made in the Temple, we will know that “the sprinkled blood” is the blood of the sacrifices that were sprinkled on all those gathered at the altar of God, offering up an unblemished lamb to renew their covenantal relationship with God. “The blood of Abel” is the blood that his brother Cain spilled on the ground when he killed Abel. When God came to Cain for an accounting, it was because Abel’s blood had cried out from the earth that had absorbed it. Abel’s blood cried out for justice, but Jesus’ blood cries out for mercy, a much better word in the estimation of the writer.
The warning “on earth” (v. 25) is the warning of God through Moses. The warning “from heaven” is of God through Christ. The warning “on earth” is like the roar of a volcano. The warning from heaven shakes not only the earth but the heavens themselves. There is no place to run, says the author, when God speaks and shakes the creation. Nor is there any place to hide when God speaks except in the Kingdom of Heaven, which cannot be shaken. It is the recognition that we are safe only in God that makes us reverent, bowing down before God, who “is a consuming fire,” a fire that destroys all that is temporary and fragile. It is our faith in God that makes us safe. It is our faith in God that assures us a place on the Holy Mountain.
Luke 13:10-17
Luke puts this story of healing in what at first looks like a strange position. It is preceded by the parable of the barren fig tree, and followed by the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the yeast. These stories are all about the Kingdom of God. Before the fig tree parable, there has been a series of stories and teachings about how the followers of Jesus are expected to behave, and after the parable of the yeast there is the saying about the narrow door and the way that God will turn all of our expectations upside-down.
So what is the point of this story? The way it is placed, it is clear that this story is really the heart of the Good News:
13:1-5 -- Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts: someone in the crowd following Jesus told him about some Galileans “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” Jesus asks if they think that their deaths show that they were “worse sinners than all other Galileans?” Jesus’ answer is “No, but if you don’t repent, you’ll all die the same way.”
13:6-9 -- A man tells his gardener to cut down a fig tree that isn’t producing. The gardener refuses, saying “Give me a year while I dig around it and add manure. Then, if it doesn’t produce, I’ll cut it down.”
13:10-17 -- A woman bent over for 18 years comes into the synagogue where Jesus is teaching, and he calls her to the front and tells her she is set free. He lays hands on her, and she immediately stands up and starts praising God. The leader of the synagogue is irate at this interruption and tells those gathered to come some other day, not the sabbath.
13:18-19 -- The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed planted in a garden, which grew up into a tree where all the birds can nest.
13:20-21 -- The Kingdom of God is like the yeast a woman puts in flour to leaven bread dough.
As we can see when we lay it out this way, we have a classic chiastic structure. Luke is putting the story of the healing of the woman on the sabbath at the center, which is usually the way to point out “this is the most important part of this series of events.” If that is the case, this healing story has a point to it that we could easily miss if we didn’t notice the structure of the longer work.
Jesus’ stories are often stories that turn our common understandings on their heads. We who go to church every Sunday are going to heaven. Those who don’t are going to hell. We who are healthy are being blessed by God. Those who are sick or crippled or fat are paying for their lifestyle. People who are shot while walking down the street shouldn’t have been where they were. Women who are raped were dressed or acted some way that encouraged the man. But Jesus says, “No. Do you think those Galileans who died at the hands of the Roman police were worse sinners than others who are still alive? Well, they weren’t.”
Those of us who don’t “produce” for the Kingdom should be cast aside? No, we’ll give them some added attention this year and see what happens.
Mustard seeds are quite small. Therefore they must be unimportant. No, in the climate and soil of Israel, they grow into trees big enough to hold birds’ nests. Is Jesus telling us that the Kingdom consists of thousands of small people? Or that no matter how little faith we have, it can grow if properly nurtured? Maybe both.
Yeast is an unclean substance in Orthodox Judaism. When Passover comes, the house is scrubbed clean and everything with yeast in it, from bread to aged wine, is thrown out. How, then, can it represent the Kingdom of God? Is it because yeast permeates nearly everything in the house where bread is baked regularly? Is it because a small amount of yeast in a large amount of flour can produce delicious bread? Again, maybe all of the above.
And in each of these stories, the Kingdom of God is unexpected, all-pervasive, affecting everything, whether we expect it or not.
So what about this woman who is bent over and has been crippled for 18 years? She didn’t come up to Jesus and ask to be healed. He called her. Of course, she belonged in the back of the synagogue where she will not distract the men from their learning. But when Jesus told her to come up, she did. He was the teacher for the day, and she was used to doing what some man told her to do. The leader of the synagogue is outraged! She has her place, let her keep it. She’s been bent over for 18 years, she can wait another day! And he kept saying these things, as though no one could hear him.
“Hypocrite!” Jesus says. Hypocrite -- Greek for “actor.” An actor in the theater, who hides behind a mask that tells you what part they are playing. You are not to notice the boys who follow the actor, holding up the mask so the actor’s hands are free to emote. “Actor!” Are our masks to be torn away? We’ve worked hard on these masks we wear every day. You’re not supposed to notice that they’re masks.
“Actors! On the sabbath you still milk your animals. You untie the rope that keeps your donkey where he belongs (untying a knot is forbidden on the sabbath) and take him to the trough so he can drink water.” Why does Jesus use a donkey as his example? Because donkeys are unclean animals. “Ought not this daughter of Abraham (one of God’s chosen people) who Satan bound for 18 years (not God’s doing that she’s crippled, it’s the devil’s work) be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”
He’s come to turn everything topsy-turvy! Those who were shocked when Jesus called her forward, who were more than annoyed at the attention she got at their expense, are embarrassed. As for all those who were not good enough to be in positions of authority, they were rejoicing! How many times they had thought the same thing, that this poor old woman never got the respect the aged deserved. She couldn’t move fast enough to get out of the way of running boys. She couldn’t see the butcher with his thumb on the scale. Some people even blamed her for her bad health: “She must have offended God to be so bent over.” And here is this famous rabbi, putting them all in their places. Rejoicing? They were rubbing their hands in glee. They were delighted! Look at grandma up there with the rabbi, right in the middle of the men!
But the authorities were not amused. They must bide their time, but they would get this man, the one who keeps turning things upside-down, honoring those at the bottom of society and arguing with those at the top.
