It's All In the Questions Proper 25B

 

It’s All In the Questions

Often, we come to our sacred texts looking for answers or directions. We have come to think of The Bible as a kind of cookbook filled with recipes for success in this life, or even worse, a kind of do-it-yourself handbook on how we can get more than we can ever ask for or deserve.

 

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Friar, Priest, and writer on Christian Spirituality, suggests there are three questions we ought to be asking the sacred texts we read: 1. What is God doing here? 2. What does this say about who God is? And 3. What does this say about how we can relate to such a God? To these three I would add a fourth: What question is the text asking us?

 

Our Bible, Hebrew Scriptures, Christian Scriptures and a collection of inter-testamental documents important to both Jews and Christians, is primarily about what God, for generations going back some three or four thousand years, has been doing for us – not so much about what we need to do for God. In our Bible, God is consistently portrayed as redeeming or saving us from ourselves. From the outset in Genesis 1:26 we learn that we are made “in the image of God.” Yet, we constantly miss the mark. Sin, an archery term for missing the target, is the word most often used to describe the human condition. Curiously, despite everything, God is portrayed as continuing to Forgive us and Love us, no matter what.  

 

Take Hebrews, which we have been reading for four weeks now. God, in Hebrews, is in the Word that became flesh and blood in Jesus. Chapter 7 reminds us that once upon a time Israel needed hundreds, even thousands, of families descended from the Levites and the Cohens to operate the Jerusalem Temple’s sacrifices day and night. As a child growing up west of Chicago, as we would drive from our house to my great-aunt Grace’s even further west, we would pass a small oil refinery smack in the middle of a suburb called Melrose Park. You could see flames and smell the chemicals 24/7, any time of day or night as the refinery never rested. So it was in the Temple.

 

Some forty years after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, however, Rome burned the Temple to the ground. All the Levites and Cohens were out of a sacred job – a very important job. Important to maintaining a right relationship with the God Israel understood had saved their people over and over again, as Psalm 126 reminds us. It should be observed, that the response of Israel to this tragedy was to ask questions of itself – to scour the sacred texts asking themselves: Where did we go wrong? We must have seriously missed the mark to have suffered this tragedy. It must be our fault. The texts asked them to remember who they are and whose they are.

 

Hebrews asserts that with the continued presence of Jesus we now have a single high priest who, through what he does and says can lead us on the way with no Temple and no need for other priests. We need only the example of what God’s Love and Forgiveness looks like when embodied in a person like one of us. The Word became Flesh and Dwelt among us.

 

Enter chapters 8-10 in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem begins with him asking his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” That’s the question for all of us, isn’t it?  Throughout this journey the disciples have not a clue, witness the episode where they, while Jesus is busy feeding hungry people and healing people from all stations of life of physical, mental and spiritual ailments, the brothers Zebedee, James and John ask to be appointed to positions of power and authority – to sit on Jesus’s right-hand and left. They imagine him sitting on a throne!

 

Jesus replies that we must be servants of all, and in John’s Gospel he is pictured on his last night before his crucifixion getting on his knees and washing the disciple’s feet: the role of the youngest child-slave or servant of the household. This is what it looks like to be created in God’s image.

 

Now, Jesus and his crowd of followers, enter Jericho [Mark 10:46-52].  At the gates to the city is a beggar named Bartimaeus. He is blind. He has heard about this man Jesus and what he does. Immediately we see, if we are listening to the text, that he, unlike the disciples, knows exactly who Jesus is as he cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”

 

People are annoyed. People from Jericho are tired of his begging day after day, and Jesus’s followers think Jesus is far too important to be bothered by this literal outsider. They try to quiet Bart. Bart’s desperation, however, is more powerful than their attempts to further marginalize him. He cries out again, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stands still and orders the crowd to bring Bartimaeus to him. Bart immediately throws off his only possession in the world, his cloak, and because of his faith, because he knows exactly who Jesus is, he can see. We are meant to see that God is in the welcoming mercy that transforms Bartimaeus, and those of us who can really see and hear what is happening, from an outsider to an insider who follows Jesus to Jerusalem, the Cross and his Resurrection.  

 

Now we know that he already could see what we, the crowd and the disciples could not see. That Jesus is the living image of the God who loves us and forgives us and wills to do everything possible to save us from ourselves – including teaching us not to marginalize people like Bartimaeus, who, unlike the rich young man just two weeks ago could not imagine parting with his possessions to care for the poor and follow Jesus.

 

When I was in Seminary, we visited one of the oldest Synagogues in New York City. The Rabbi invited us to ask questions. One of my classmates asked, “We know what the role of a priest is in our tradition. What is the role of the rabbi in a synagogue congregation?” I will never forget his answer. “The role of the rabbi is to lead and teach others through the stories of God as told in our sacred scriptures in such a way as everyone becomes a rabbi. So, my role is to put myself out of business!” If I hear Hebrews and Mark correctly, I should be feeling uncomfortable right now! With Jesus on our side, we no longer need a kingdom of priests! We are all called to live into being the image of the living God for others.

 

In our texts for today, God is in Jesus’s mercy shared with all people – especially the outsiders. This shows us that God forgives and loves all people, all the time, no matter what. So, what does this say about how we can relate to such a God?

 

Are we called to be insiders like the blind disciples and the rich young man? Or, are we called to be more like the outsider Bartimaeus, who although he is blind, can really see God is right in front of him? May God help us to see more clearly. Amen.