Righteous Individuals? Or, A Just Society? Proper 10A

 

Righteous Individuals? Or, A Just Society?

“Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them… As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.” -Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

This Parable of the Sower sowing seeds poses several important questions: What type of soil are we? Do we hear God’s Word? Does our hearing lead to living a kingdom of God kind of life? I say “we” instead of “you” because in English one cannot distinguish between “you” singular and “you” plural. But Matthew’s Koine Greek does. It is therefore important to note that in the Beatitudes [Matthew 5] and in the parable of the Last Judgement [Matthew 25] the “you” is also always plural. And I would suggest that the Beatitudes and the Last Judgement bracket the entire ministry of Jesus. Matthew understands the Good News of Jesus Christ to inaugurate a new age in which we finally learn to love and truly care for one another as God loves “us.” We are especially to love those living at the margins of society.

 

There have been recent disagreements as to what these bookends are talking about. The Last Judgement, of course, finds Jesus self-identifying with those who are hungry, thirsty, sick, in prison, and strangers – and that as we address their needs we are serving him directly. The disagreement is whether these are instructions for individuals, or for society and nations at large. Which should be clear, since the parable opens by saying, “When the Son of Man (Jesus) comes in all his glory he will gather the nations before him [for judgement and sorting].” In some Bibles it is even called The Judgement of Nations. It is not judgement of individuals.

 

There are streams of American Christianity who see it just this way: that we are to become a nation that looks out for one another, and most especially those most vulnerable and in need of assistance. There are, however, other streams of American Christianity who think the nation as a whole ought not be involved in helping those in need; that rejects the idea that helping others is a moral duty, and teaches that rational self-interest is the highest moral purpose. Giving to others is acceptable only if it is voluntary, you can afford it, and the recipient is worthy. This might be called the Gospel of Ayn Rand’s brand of objective individualism which rejects altruism and all notions of living to serve others and self-sacrifice to help those in need.

 

This latter stream of American Christianity represents the “thorns” into which the seeds of God’s Word are choked out by “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth” Jesus speaks of,  yielding nothing more than self-preservation, self-happiness, and self-interest as the highest moral values that ought to concern us. I would further suggest that it is the American pre-occupation with what Hebert Hoover called “the rugged individual,” the idea that anyone, by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, can live a rags to riches Horatio Alger sort of self-improvement and success. Yet, even the author Horatio Alger’s young protagonists most often succeeded with the assistance of a wealthy benefactor!

 

Nevertheless, Scot Loyd, PhD, author of "The God I Was Given," and scholar of race, religion, culture, and communication has outlined how the cult of rugged individualism has reinterpreted Biblical religion: “For much of my life, I inherited a version of Christianity that instinctively read almost every passage of Scripture through the lens of the individual. Salvation was personal. Sin was personal. Holiness was personal. Evangelism was personal. Faith was primarily about the condition of my own soul and my own relationship with God. Looking back, I now realize that I was reading an ancient, communal faith through the eyes of a thoroughly modern Western culture. The more I have studied Scripture, the more convinced I have become that the biblical writers simply did not think the way we do. We tend to imagine ourselves as autonomous individuals who occasionally gather into communities. Ancient Israel understood itself first as a people. Identity was shared. Responsibility was shared. Blessings were shared. Even judgment was often shared.” [i]

 

If there was ever a time when America shared a common identity, a shared responsibility, shared blessings, and shared judgement, it is safe to say that that time exists somewhere in a distant past. That does not absolve Christians, however, to forsake the Bible’s vision, and thereby the vision of God in Christ Jesus, of our shared responsibilities to be peacemakers, to be humble, to offer, as we heard last Sunday, even a cup of water to “the least of these,” Jesus’s self-adopted sisters and brothers in need. Nor are we absolved from advocating for we, as a nation, as a society, to find ways to provide for all who are in need of assistance of any kind. For not everyone can be as lucky as those boys in the books of Horatio Alger to find a personal benefactor.

 

A careful reading of the Bible from one end to the other reveals that the dream and purpose of God is, as Jesus summarizes, “to love one another as I love you.” The Gospel of Rugged Individualism always results in the kind of self-interest focused on worldly desires and the lure of wealth, which chokes God’s word, and thus, it yields nothing but self-aggrandizement and greed. It yields a society of a few Righteous, Rugged individuals, rather than a Just Society.

 

This is why Jesus describes the Final Judgement as a Judgement of Nations, not of individuals. He deliberately frames His teaching in communal terms. The question is not merely whether particular people showed compassion. The question is what kind of society those people together have created. Which is the concern of all the prophets of the Bible with whom Jesus also self-identifies. Again, as Scot Loyd observes, ‘When Amos cried out, "Let justice roll down like waters," he was not addressing private devotional lives. He was confronting a nation whose religious worship had become disconnected from justice. Isaiah condemned elaborate worship services while widows and orphans were neglected. Jeremiah repeatedly warned kings who [trusted religious rituals while exploiting the vulnerable. Micah summarized true faith with words that have echoed across the centuries: "Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."’ [ii]

 

It seems that the Word of God in Christ Jesus has landed among the thorns of America’s various myths of Rugged Individualism, choking out any and all notions of the communal nature of Jesus’s teaching and the central focus of the whole Bible: to create societies and nations that care for all people, not just some, not just many, but “all.” This Parable of the Sower asks us as a community and as a nation: What kind of soil are we? Do we, plural, hear the Word of God? Do we, plural, allow the Word of God to grow and influence how we address the needs of the greater society in which we live? Can we, plural, hear the Word of God take us beyond our own personal needs to establish the kind of society and nation that reflects the kingdom of God Jesus imagines can be possible here and now? Do we, plural, want a nation of a few righteous individuals? Or, a just society for all people? I am grateful to Scot Loyd who helps us to recognize just how the thorns of individualism have obscured Jesus’s and the Bible’s vision for a society and a nation that truly wants to be one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. Amen.

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[i] https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscotloyd.com%2F2026%2F07%2F02%2Fmy-own-personal-jesus-rejecting-a-privatized-gospel%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBExbkpERlFiV21CTEpORk5MM3NydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7Z-HYJbtS0mZ6qvSCqVx9KBOKI7jTTHJHbnokXGM8lU1721lKtttnEJ6oUNA_aem_dusZgU6ImtuskLQX0BvsJw&h=AUCUf0tux7SXH5RTuLuUA3SSKCH40oXDdKsZEthCZrzxcgXS_c9WzltYnE0nvOFtkL_VQ4cqy7LFZ9gpOYF8k03MjLkhPlRgKD_3W0O4VB2MBrD-4RjHJFAoFEPOl5JxO0HP4NjrX11oGA&__tn__=-UK-y-R&c[0]=AUBTLdAP-icjCITTZLsHpJGhe4w9fuSuEA9jYAKQzoRgAbPLD8k5vqtJ3T5kOjJLcLeyKKBiLPmCOSrQpKUCv5gzXO63wOfBYdmi5lCEovOlCNJ9P7m7s1tF-7a42ggyUogQbbrsKqeDrOAplfYJS-j5pQNmjSDnqlBaNQV4yRM6Fpb-K0I6V28uvdWp8zFhwuJJWayLpco6WvJWHTY 

 

[ii] Ibid, Scot Loyd

Whose Yoke Guides You? Proper 9A

 

Whose Yoke Guides You?

Chapter 11 of Matthew explores at least two identity crises going on at once: who is John the baptizer, and who is this Jesus? Two upstarts that the credentialed religious professionals and the powerful political elite relegate to irrelevance: one for fasting and eating bugs dipped in honey, and the other for letting anyone and everyone sit at the dinner table with him. One is an ascetic, the other a glutton and a drunkard. The present generation, Jesus says, just does not understand. We are that “present generation” as Matthew understands it.

 

Jesus answers the detractors, “You have fallen for my Father’s strategy to keep the central message among the “little ones,” “the children,” the uncredentialed, the unprofessional, those exhausted from endless labor with no time for Sabbath, and weary from the multi-tiered taxation of the Empire, of Herod Antipas, of the priest’s tithes, and the Temple dues. These children are not darling, innocent post-Victorian waifs and little Lord Fauntleroys. They are the land and tax poor of any and all generations. Which is why in Matthew when Jesus teaches us to pray he says, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Debt is how they ended up in Egypt in the first place: by the foreclosure of their farms and herds they became slaves for Pharoh; for the empire.

 

We may notice five verses missing from our portion of Matthew 11. It seems those who set up the lectionary thought we might not be up for hearing Jesus go into an unscheduled tirade against some of the villages where he had been teaching in the region around Galilee. Considered, perhaps, too indelicate for our Sunday morning ears to hear him castigate these towns where he he also had healed people, but they refused to repent and follow him. To refuse to put off the yokes of the Empire and Jerusalem, and try another. His yoke. Missing the tirade makes it difficult to understand what happens next.

 

After praying for his Father to continue to confound the credentialed, rich, and powerful, and continue to point to what life in God’s kingdom looks like among the “little ones,” rather than Caesar’s kingdom. Jesus also prays that he will announce what his Father is really looking for, and that he will “choose” to whom to impart this wisdom from on high. Jesus then concludes with familiar words: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

 

For generations of our Anglican tradition, we have called these “comfortable words.” We tend to heave a sigh of relief when we hear them, missing the deeper inner meanings of a saying one might embroider on a pillow. Yokes are physical implements to guide and control beasts of burden, and had long become a standard metaphor in biblical religion to refer to having one’s life, and one’s community’s life, guided and controlled by Torah, God’s commands, which Jesus regularly boils down to love God, and love neighbor – which for God and Jesus means “all” neighbors, all people, everywhere, all the time.

 

One of the pesky words in these final words is the word “all.” Like his behavior at the dinner table, Jesus invites all, everyone and anyone, to sit down with him. This means the taxed and tax collectors; the land-poor, and those who have foreclosed and usurped their family farms; the religious conservatives and religious liberals; the undocumented resident aliens and those whose tribe and clan has been in the land for generations; those whose work, poverty, illness, or social location made Torah observance difficult or just plain impossible, and those for whom Torah observance was a kind of fetish and personal luxury. Shared meals created belonging in the ancient Mediterranean world of Jesus. They marked who was included and who was excluded, Yet, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you… all y’all,” crossing the lines that organize the world into binaries: clean and unclean, acceptable and unacceptable, respectful and disposable.

 

“You who are exhausted and weary” of being asked to fund tributes to Caesar, to fund vanity building projects for Herod Antipas (the king of the Jews) such as a building named after the Emperor Tiberias, and to maintain the demands of the Temple. It has been estimated that one-third to one-half of one’s yearly produce went to these overlapping demands, keeping families in chronic debt and vulnerable to foreclosure. When Jesus speaks of those who are weary and heavy-laden he speaks to those who are being ground-down by the dominant economic systems. Those who work half a year to satisfy the multiple yokes around their necks.

 

Come try my yoke instead, says Jesus. It’s still a yoke. There will still be responsibilities. You will have to lay down all the hatred and mis-trust, and love one another as I love you. As my father loves me. As the psalmist sings, “8 The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness. 9 The Lord is loving to everyone and his compassion is over all his works.” [Psalm 145] You will find that in loving all others as I love you there will be rest for your souls. The word for rest, anapausis, is used in Old Testament texts to mean Sabbath. Sabbath was not understood as a personal practice of piety, but rather represents a break with the dominant economic system and to attend to loving our family and neighbors: the hungry, thirsty, unhoused, undocumented, in prison, disabled physically or emotionally, and in any way ground down by work under the pressures of the Empire, and the state and religious elite.

 

In the very next verses in chapter 12, one sees Jesus pilloried for allowing people to work: to harvest food for the hungry while he heals people on the Sabbath day. He issues the challenge: is not relief and release from whatever exhausts one and makes one weary a kind of Sabbath in and of itself? Was humankind made for the Sabbath? Or, is Sabbath mandated for humankind?

 

Finally, he says, “My yoke is chrestos,” usually translated “easy.” Yet, it more often means useful, good, kind, or benevolent. It’s a Greek word used for the Hebrew ahavah, or “love,” as in “love thy neighbor and the sojourner in the land.” True love means actively giving to others rather than just having a feeling. It means doing something useful or kind for them. Which is consistent to the kind of Sabbath “rest” Jesus not only advocates, but encourages and actually acts out. This also may be a play on words to suggest that Jesus the christos (anointed) is also chrestos, benevolent 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Christos is Chrestos!

 

Who are Jesus and John? They do not support the status quo of dividing people into binary categories, a practice that is still prevalent in our “generation.” They share his Father’s will, love, mercy, and compassion with whomever they choose whenever necessary. Jesus insists that both he and John, and their respective followers, will be judged not by what they say or believe, but by what they do day in and day out. Jesus exposes the trappings of political power and religion as just that: traps that exhaust everyone but the elites. We all wear a yoke. The question is not whether we do or don’t, but rather whose yoke is it, and who profits from our labor? Jesus asks, “Are you ready to try my yoke?” Our answer will make all the difference in the world! Amen.