Jesus and His Bible, Part 12

The God Who Is 

This chapter 12 of Mark describes Jesus in one confrontation after another. After the one about the unfaithful vine-growers, the Pharisees and Herodians (unlikely allies) tried to trap Jesus about paying taxes to Rome, and then the Sadducees came up with a long story about a woman who married one brother after another until she finally followed the seventh in death.  I speculate that this was one of those perennial points of debate between the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the Pharisees, who did. Their participation together in trying to trap Jesus reveals that in their time as well as ours, politics made strange bedfellows. (Also, to me, it resembles the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.)

Jesus answered first by saying to the Sadducees, “You don’t know the scriptures nor do you know the power of God.” Once again, hardly conciliatory. This was a confrontation with the priestly establishment who were in positions of political as well as religious power, and Jesus described them as ignorant of their scriptures and of what God can do. (He went on to say that resurrected people are no longer involved in marriage, and are like angels, a fascinating statement, but beyond what we’re working on here.)

And then he said this: “But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?” (Mark 12:26). Again, “Have you not read”—Jesus asked those in charge of religious observance if they were even reading their scriptures.  

Jesus asked them a good question which goes right back to the rescue of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The question exposed their superficial reading of the scriptures that were basic to their national identity, their claim of being chosen by God. 

The context for the quotation is the story of Moses and the slavery in Egypt of the Hebrew people.  Moses was born at a time in Egypt when the Pharaoh had decreed that all Hebrew boy babies were to be killed at birth. The heroic midwives Shiprah and Puah refused to obey the edict and instead reported to Pharaoh that Hebrew women delivered too quickly to need their services. Then Pharaoh required his own people to throw Hebrew sons into the river. When Moses was born, his mother hid him for three months, then placed him into a small woven and waterproofed boat and floated him on the river. 

Pharaoh’s daughter took him out of the water and had compassion on him, even knowing him to be a little Hebrew boy.  His birth mother became his wet-nurse for pay, and the princess adopted him and named him Moses. Moses grew up in safety, even privilege, though he knew of his Hebrew origin, and when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, he killed the Egyptian and hid the body.  The Hebrews denied his authority and Pharaoh wanted to kill him, so he fled the country to Midian, where he found water, a wife, and a job as a shepherd.  

Some time later, he saw a bush burning without being burnt to ashes, and he went to investigate. God called him by name from within the burning bush.

It is worth wondering what Moses’s exact religious upbringing had been. It seems likely that  his mother taught him about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and the God they worshiped. It seems likely also that the princess taught him about Ra and Isis and Osiris, and the rest of the Egyptian pantheon. But this is the flashpoint of his understanding who his God is and will be going forward.

“I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). This reminds Moses of his immediate father in Egypt as well as of his ancestors. So much history is embedded in those three names, so much of their personal relationships with this God. I think of Abraham leaving his homeland to wander at the word of God; of Abraham taking his son Isaac to be a sacrifice at God’s command; at Isaac being rescued from that sacrifice by the messenger of God; at Jacob running from the consequences of his duplicity only to be met by God in a dream, and then years later on the way back home wrestling with God’s messenger into permanent lameness. So much that could be explored, too much for this post. All of their stories are implicit in Jesus’s quotation, and he requires his opponents to look at the history of personal relationship and responsibility to God embodied in those patriarchs.

The emphasis on “I am”  in the list is an insistence on the present tense of God.  It also looks forward to the point in Moses’s story when he asks, “Who shall I say has sent me?” The reply, I AM WHO I AM, doubly emphasizes God’s irreducibility and presence, God’s creative and sustaining power.  

Further, Jesus went on to say that “God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” He linked this to an affirmation that the dead are alive with God, which his Sadducee questioners denied. But it is more profound even than that. 

What else could this have meant to Jesus’s hearers?  I think it meant that his questioners needed to look at their own personal relationships with the God of their patriarchs: each of them had had personal encounters with the “I AM WHO I AM” who spoke to Moses.  They needed to acknowledge God being immediately present in the moment in which they were questioning Jesus. They needed to admit God’s claims on their obedience and loyalty. But what they did was take refuge in tradition and traditional understandings that allowed them to maintain their status quo. This is a lesson for all of us.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 11

 The Rejected Cornerstone

Immediately following the parable of the faithless vine-growers, Jesus carried the confrontation into the religious leaders’ camp.  He asked them: “Have you not even read this scripture: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, this became the chief corner-stone; this came about from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?” (Mark 12:10). 

Let’s not ignore the implications of how Jesus introduced his quotation.  “Have you not even read this scripture?” Not conciliatory in the least.  And you can tell this is so by their reaction, which is to move toward assaulting him, only restrained by their fear of the crowd. I wonder how often today God’s Holy Spirit says to each of us, “Have you not even read this scripture?” Do we respond with defensiveness or do we sit down to listen? I remember when the Spirit brought these verses into my heart and said, “Have you not even read these scriptures?” And I had not actually let them sink in to form the foundation of my faith until that point.

Hebrews 10:1 The Law foreshadowed good things to come but could not bring them about.

Ephesians 2:15 Christ abolished in his flesh the law. 

Romans 7:4-6 We are dead to the Law by the body of Christ; we are delivered from the Law.

Romans 7:25-8:2 The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death.

Hebrews 7:18-19 The earlier commandment has been annulled and replaced by a better hope in Christ as our high priest, through whom we draw near to God.

Galatians 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not annul or reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law. 

So Jesus’s question to religious people of his day is still resonant today.

The passage Jesus quotes is from Psalm 118. This Psalm celebrates the everlasting kindness of God. The psalmist says that he called to God and God answered, that the Lord is for him, and that with the Lord’s name he cut down all the nations. “You pushed me hard to knock me down but the Lord helped me. My strength and my might is Yah, and he has become my rescue.” He claims the Lord as his rescuer. Then comes the passage that Jesus quotes: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. From the Lord did this come about—it is wondrous in our eyes. (Psalm 118:22-23).  The psalmist then petitions the Lord for rescue and prosperity and then this: “Bind the festive offering with ropes all the way to the horns of the altar.”

By quoting this passage, Jesus identified himself with the psalmist as one who fears the Lord. He asserted that God has answered his call, that God is for him, that God is his strength and might. Yet at the same time, the faint echo of the coming offering/sacrifice is hinted at as well.  

Jesus also calls his critics to account—do they fear the Lord? Can they point to where God has answered their call?  Are they rejecting the cornerstone, the stone from which the whole building is measured out and built? 

Jesus and His Bible, Part 10

The Faithless Vine-Growers

Mark 11 ends with the priests, scribes, and elders asking Jesus who gave him the authority to do such things as clear the merchants out of the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple.  He “answered” them with a question about where the baptism of John came from, whether heaven or humans.  They refused to answer, because he had trapped and immobilized them. 

Mark 12:1 And He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard, and put a wall around it, and dug a vat under the winepress, and built a tower, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey.” 

The parable goes on to tell how, each time he sent servants to collect the rent, the vine-growers beat them, stoned them, shamed them, and killed some of them. So he sent his son, thinking they would respect him. But instead they reasoned that killing the son would make them the de facto owners, so they did kill him and throw his body out of the vineyard. 

Jesus asked the crowd, “What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vine-growers and give the vineyard to others.”

Jesus’s Bible has so many references to vines and vineyards that they cannot all be brought to mind here.  The references are particularly prevalent in the Prophets, and we will look at just one, Isaiah:

“Let me sing now for my well-beloved a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.  My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. 

And he dug it all around, removed its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. And he built a tower in the middle of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; then he expected it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. And now…I will lay it waste…For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his delightful plant. Thus he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress…Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil…Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight.” (Isaiah 5)

The context of this parable is the prophet Isaiah’s call to his nation to repent; his description of the suffering their sinfulness will call down on them; his prediction of the dissolution of their community and kingdom; his list of their sins, including a plea to “cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow” (1:17). Interspersed among the warnings and accusations are visions of a blessed future, where war is no more, where Zion is holy and protected, which Isaiah so much wanted to be true. 

Isaiah  goes on following his parable of the vineyard to predict the defeat and downfall of the nation of Israel.

By quoting this passage, Jesus brought before the priests, scribes, and elders their worst nightmare—the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem and the nation.  It had happened before when Babylon invaded, and the Jews were dispersed out of their homeland. Isaiah’s prophetic vision was accurate.

Jesus essentially said to his hearers that the same conditions that provoked judgment before have occurred again, and even worse, and how can they hope to escape?  This was infuriating, and it confirmed their fear that Jesus’s message and person had both personal and political implications. Their arrogance and their will to power and their personal corruptions were laid bare by Isaiah’s words in Jesus’s mouth.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 9

Welcome and Worship in God's House

To summarize events between the last quotation and this next one: After his encounter with the rich man, Jesus educated his followers on how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Then he said that those who left their houses and relationships and lands would receive back  a hundred times their loss in this time, accompanied by persecution, and in the time to come, would receive eternal life.  He told the disciples he would be killed in Jerusalem, and the response recorded by Mark is that James and John came to ask for seats of preeminence in the kingdom. Jesus said they would have to share in his experience, and that they would indeed share it, but that he didn’t decide who was preeminent in the kingdom of God. (He had just said that the last would be first, so that’s a clue.) He also said that whoever wants to be great among Jesus’s followers must be the slave of all.  Then he healed blind Bartimaeus. 

He entered Jerusalem on a colt and the crowds hailed him as King. He looked around the temple and went back out of Jerusalem for the night.

On the way back into Jerusalem, he cursed a fig tree without fruit, and then returned to the temple. It is easy to connect the fig tree to the temple as an enacted parable, given what happened next.  He drove out those who bought and sold in the temple and turned over the tables of the money-changers.

And then he said: “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a robber’s den” (Mark 11:17). The picture invoked is that the merchants in the temple are like a band of robbers who hurry back to their safe hideout to count their takings, and the temple is that cave.  

Jesus quoted two prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The first is Isaiah 56:7. This quotation comes from a passage that begins “Preserve justice, and do righteousness, for my salvation is about to come and my righteousness to be revealed.” The passage promises blessing to those who do not profane the Sabbath and who do no evil. The blessing is also for the foreigner and the eunuch who keep God’s Sabbaths and choose what pleases God and hold fast to God’s covenant.  

Jesus invoked Isaiah’s inclusive prophecy as he cleared out all the hubbub and chicanery from the court of the Gentiles.  By his action, seen as a parable, Jesus took the holy interior of the temple where only Jews could go and extended it out into the outer court where Gentiles were allowed to visit. He invited outsiders into God’s presence, including them in the privilege of worshiping God. 

The second is Jeremiah 7:11. This comes from a word that Jeremiah was told to speak in the Lord’s house, the temple, to all the people of Judah who entered to worship. This is the immediate context: 

Amend your ways and deeds and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not think that because the temple is here, you are ok. You must practice justice, you must not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, or the widow, and you must not shed innocent blood or worship idols. But if you do wrong and then come here and say “We are delivered”—has this house, which is called by My name, become a den of robbers in your sight? 

This directly confronts any sense of being exclusively chosen to belong to God, the sign of which for the Jews is the temple. Sadly, however, their actions do not reflect justice and mercy to those who are other and those who are needy or helpless. If they are implicated in the death of the innocent and if they put anything (like wealth, see the rich man of Mark 10) ahead of God in their worship, they have made the temple a robbers’  hideout. (It is not hard to apply this to the many who make money out of religion in our time.) Jeremiah highlights the teachings of the Torah that specifically command justice and mercy to vulnerable groups of people and the many instances in the Hebrew scripture that insist on care for the innocent and putting God first. 

In both quotations from Jesus’s Bible, the context has to do with the fact that the chosen people have themselves chosen to act without justice and righteousness and they have thus obscured the intent of God, which is to invite and include the foreigner, the powerless, the eunuch in the knowledge and worship of the true God, and to protect the interests of the helpless, friendless, and innocent.  Instead, in Jesus’s time, the place these folks were welcome had become a marketplace rather than a place of worship, a place where the “protected” classes were taken advantage of in order to accumulate money.

Jesus and His Bible, Part 8

Mark 10:19 The Rich Man Wants Eternal Life

Question: Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

Answer: Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.

“Why do you call me good?” This abrupt response puzzles me. I think, as with other surprising responses, it is tailored to the person with whom Jesus was speaking. It suggests that this conversation began with a compliment from one good person to another.  I recognize you as good, the rich man said, because I also am good. Jesus brought him up short when he asserted that “no one is good except God alone.” While this is not a direct quotation from Jesus’s Bible, it sums up multiple references to God’s goodness in the Psalms, and in many of those, God’s goodness is linked directly to his loving kindness, his mercy. This mercy, this care for the weak and helpless, is what the rich man is apparently specifically missing.

But first, Jesus made the “law-abiding” answer: “You know the commandments: do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.” Interestingly, Jesus did not begin with Exodus 20:3: “You shall have no other gods before me,” nor did he include the prohibition of sacred images, or swearing oaths falsely using God’s name. He omitted the positive command about keeping the Sabbath. Instead, he focused on the ethical commands, the ones which detail how we are to treat other people. (See Exodus 20:12-16; Deut. 5:16-20.)

Jesus concisely summed these ethical commandments up, with the interesting addition of “do not defraud,” which extends “do not covet”  into the actions that result from covetousness. Fraudulent practices are condemned in some detail in various teachings about honesty in business practices in both the Pentateuch and the Prophets.

Embedded in this story are numerous political and theological threads, making the answer a complicated one, despite its apparent simplicity. The questioner who asked about eternal life, if sincere, must have been a Pharisee. They were at odds with the Sadducees over this issue. The Pharisees also were strict followers of their interpretation of Mosaic Law, both the written and oral traditions. By agreeing that “eternal life” is possible, Jesus aligned himself with the Pharisees in their debate with the Sadducees. And yet he was in constant conflict with the Pharisees over how to fulfill the Law. Specifically here,  when Jesus summed up the “other-facing” laws so concisely, he confronted the complexity of the traditions followed by the Pharisees. 

Jesus’s assertion that “no one is good except God alone” confronted the rich man’s awareness of his own goodness, as exposed in the exchange in which the rich man asserts that he has kept the commandments from his youth. This came out of Jesus’s  love for the questioner, a love which insisted on his looking honestly at himself.

Then Jesus answered with “sell all you have and give it to the poor”; Jesus reasserted that mercy is an essential aspect of goodness. He challenged the rich man to radical generosity. Mercy goes beyond the law of Moses into the law of love; now it isn’t about stealing or defrauding but about giving.  

Further, Jesus said: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Crucifixion was the punishment for rebels against the civil power of the Romans. In this context, Jesus signified the need to rebel against the idea that legalistic fulfillment of the law is enough, the need instead to embrace the idea of a whole-self giving away of privilege and power. This rebellion, though figurative, would have made real the worshipful attitude the rich man began with (“good master”).  “You call me good, but none is good but God; if you really believe I am good (if you really believe I am God), throw away your life and follow me. This is the absolute best I can offer to those I love.”

Jesus and His Bible, Part 7

(Note: I didn't like how I organized this originally, so I've reorganized it and added a bit.)

Jesus and his disciples went into Judea, which is closer to Jerusalem. There he met Pharisees who had a question they hoped would trap Jesus into revealing that he was not adhering to the Jewish law. This question about marriage and divorce is a big question for human relationships, and several inferences have been drawn from it that are in their turn legalistic and inhumane. This is the same Jesus who came not to condemn but to save, and who came to give abundant life, and who promised the Spirit of truth who would guide into truth, and that truth would set us free.

Specifically, Pharisees asked whether it lawful for a man to divorce a wife. Jesus met this with another question: “What did Moses command you?” 

The  marriage laws in Deuteronomy require some context. The Jewish Study Bible summarizes the cultural setting thus: “In the ancient Near East, marriage was a contractual relationship. A woman, regarded in terms of her relation to her father or her husband, could not act independently. There was little conception of the woman as a free agent, either in legal or sexual terms” (Deut. 22, 416, n.). Out of this context, the JSB editors see the Jewish law moving the woman toward agency and moral responsibility (p. 417, n. on verse 22). Jesus followed that direction right into equality, as we shall see.

The law quoted by the Pharisees comes out of Deuteronomy 24:1-4. “If a man takes a wife and she loses favor with him because he finds some indecency or uncleanness in her, he may write her a certificate of divorce and send her away.” This “indecency” could be something morally reprehensible, a physical defect, or lack of sexual satisfaction for the male (Alter, Moses, 698, n.).  Deuteronomy goes on: “If another man marries her, and he also turns against her and writes her a certificate of divorce or if he dies, the first husband absolutely must not take her back as his wife.”

The stipulation of a written certificate of divorce gives the woman a legal status permitting her to remarry. (This is an important distinction for her in a polygamous society.) Additionally, there is some evidence from the 5th century BCE that wives could initiate divorce. Exodus 21:10 specifies that a slave wife is entitled to food, clothing, and conjugal rights; withholding these sets her free from the marriage. Rabbis Suffice it to say that the legal context for marriage and divorce was complicated in Jesus’s time.

The Pharisees have bypassed the male-oriented commands about a husband who discovers his wife is either not a virgin when they marry or is unfaithful while married. In both cases, they can have her stoned to death. I speculate that whether or not the Pharisees were in agreement with the law, actually putting someone to death was tricky under Roman occupation. Another possibility is that stoning to death  for sexual sins had fallen out of favor. We know Joseph decided not to make a public spectacle out of Mary’s unexpected pregnancy, going on to marry her only when an angel said she was pregnant by the spirit of God. (Later, Pharisees would taunt Jesus by saying, “We know who our father is.” )

I cannot ignore Jesus’s teaching elsewhere that adultery takes place in the heart before it ever takes place in the bed. Underlying this teaching here in Mark is the understanding that wayward desire is common, and is no excuse for hardening one’s heart towards a spouse.

We have one account of what Jesus did when confronted with a stoning sentence for a woman taken in adultery. (See John 8.) He did not comment on stoning to death per se, but he did stipulate that only those without sin could throw stones, with the result that no one threw any. And Jesus himself, without sin, did not throw any either. 

The Thorny Question about Divorce, Installment 2

Jesus said that Moses allowed divorce because of “your hardness of heart. But from the beginning, God ‘made them male and female. For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh.’ What therefore God has joined together, let no human separate” (Mark 10:6-9).

Jesus based his answer, not on the law, but on the creation narrative.  “And God created humanity in God’s own image; male and female, God created them” (Genesis 1:27). “In the day when God created humanity, God created them in the likeness of God, male and female, and God blessed them and named them Adam (Human) in the day when they were created” (Gen, 5:2). “For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). 

First, Jesus singles out for notice that God made humanity in God’s image, in the likeness of God, and that included maleness and femaleness. We can also see from other scripture as well that God exhibits both masculinity and femininity in God’s self , so it should not surprise us to see both in our own selves. So while some see this as confirming binary sexual divisions in humanity, it is also possible to see it as affirming that each person, bearing the image of God, includes masculinity and femininity as part of the whole self.  We ought not to try to separate ourselves from our own true identities; we ought to acknowledge and make use of our own interior diversity, as God does.

Second, the husband or the wife can file for divorce in Jesus’s hypothetical scenario. “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she herself divorces her husband and marries another man, she is committing adultery” (Mark 10: 11-12). This is a fundamentally egalitarian teaching. It applies not only to equality between men and women but within each individual equal respect for their masculine and feminine aspects. 

Second, he comments on what “one flesh” means, namely, a unity that cannot be broken by a certificate of divorce.  So he communicates a sense that there is a holy truth in the unity of the sexual act—a truth that goes beyond body to soul and spirit as well. The whole of the human being is involved with another human being. Try as we will, that unity cannot be undone, that involvement cannot be erased. I’ll point to the difficult passage from Paul who says, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? …Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a harlot is one body with her? For He says, ‘The two will become one flesh’” (1 Cor. 6:15-16).  This teaches us that what we do with our bodies is not simply casual or fleeting; in fact, traces of our actions remain with us in our bodies as well as in our spirits. No one is free from these consequences. 

However, in the context of Genesis 2:24, this statement of unity is immediately followed by the story of the temptation and fall, in which each person is treated as an individual, and in which one person blames another person for his own choice. This shows a limit to the degree to which “one flesh” applies to a relationship in which there are two persons. Each is still responsible as an individual to God.

Jesus went on to teach that second marriages while the first spouse is still alive, even after a legal divorce, is committing adultery. This can be seen as logically following on from the premise of union as one flesh that cannot be undone. However, it is important to understand the context in which a divorce for any cause—any cause—was popular at his time. Jesus spoke into that context. (See the parallel passage in Matthew 19, where the question was: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause at all?”) Jesus confronts his hearers with the idea that a divorce for trivial causes is no divorce at all. I think he also speaks obliquely against the practice of polygamy as well, despite its prevalence in Israel’s history.

Notably, he never said that divorce because of “hardness of heart” cannot happen. He did not set aside the Mosaic requirements that a husband provide food, clothing, and companionship to a wife.  His taught only that even those who experience a hard-hearted spouse cannot erase the fact of the union they have had with each other. I expect that anyone reading this who has been divorced will agree that a divorce does not magically erase that relationship.

If you have more questions about the topic of divorce, and who doesn’t, please take a look at Dr. David Instone-Brewer’s work on it. Here’s a place to start.

https://www.baylor.edu/ifl/christianreflection/MarriageArticleInstoneBrewer.pdf

Jesus and His Bible Part 6

One Misunderstanding after Another

After Jesus had chided the disciples for worrying about having literal bread, and he had healed a blind man, they walk along through the villages of Caesarea Philippi. He asked them what they think about him. Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” 

Jesus followed this up in a way that surprised his disciples. He told them plainly that the Christ, the Son of Man (Jesus’s preferred title for himself), must suffer and be rejected and killed, only to be resurrected on the third day. Peter objected, and Jesus treated his objection as he did the temptations of the devil in the desert. All this must have been very surprising to the disciples and likely hurtful to Peter.  

I wonder if this relates directly to the two-part healing of the blind man, especially after Jesus pointed them towards the double meanings of his actions. At first the blind man saw unclearly, similar to their understanding of the work of the Messiah. It was not enough that they identified Jesus as the Christ because they also continued to misunderstand the work of the Christ. So Jesus went to work to clarify their vision, and they did not get it even then.

And Jesus makes it more poignant by insisting that those who want to follow him should expect their own cross, should expect to trade their whole lives in for the work of following Jesus. 

Jesus then took Peter, James, and John up the mountain where they saw him transfigured and accompanied by Moses and Elijah. They were astonished, and Peter blurted, “Let us make tabernacles here for the three of you.”

God replied, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

They did not yet understand what Jesus was telling them about dying and rising again, and they were still unable to look at the scripture with imagination, so they asked when Elijah was to come to herald the Messiah. Jesus said, “He has already come, and they killed him.” From this they could have realized that the prophecy was a parable also, and that John the Baptist had filled the function of Elijah. 

They arrived back with the other disciples to discover that a child had been brought for healing who was so oppressed by evil so that he could not speak and had dangerous seizures. The disciples could not heal him, and the father begged Jesus to intervene “if you can.” Jesus admonishes the father to have faith and then heals the boy.

When the disciples got Jesus alone, they asked why they could not cast out this evil. It is not surprising they were puzzled because earlier Jesus had given them authority to do just this (see Mark 6). Jesus responded that this kind came out only by prayer, which must have puzzled them further, and still puzzles people today.  

On the way to Capernaum, he again told them he must die and then rise again; their response this time was to talk among themselves about which of them was the greatest. Jesus had to correct their understanding of greatness by telling them that whoever wanted to be great must serve everyone else.  

So they’ve made three mistakes in understanding Jesus since the one about leaven. They refused to see that he must die, they wanted to make him an object of worship, and they thought he would set them up in a hierarchy. 

These are mistakes we still make today. We judge people based on their obedience to religious traditions. We deny the necessity of dying, the requirement to take up our own cross every day, the unavoidableness of suffering. We want to keep Jesus in a religious house where we can go to worship him. And we think Jesus set up a hierarchy.

We come to one more error, one which resonates today in the midst of our culture wars here in the United States and similar conflicts everywhere.  John told Jesus, “We found someone casting out demons in your name and we told him to stop because he wasn’t one of us.” 

This was a fraught issue, given that they had just failed to cast out a demon themselves, so it is not surprising they were unhappy to see someone else being successful. It is a human tendency also to want to keep any kind of power within one’s own in-group.  

But Jesus told them that “whoever is not against us is for us, whoever gives you water to drink because you follow me will be rewarded, whoever causes a little one who believes to stumble would be better off drowned in the sea; if your hand, foot, eye, causes you to stumble, get rid of it; better to enter God’s kingdom maimed than to be cast into Gehenna ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’ For everyone will be salted with fire (Mark 9:48). 

We can learn from what Jesus says that those doing good in Jesus’s name should be encouraged to continue, that those who cause other believers to stumble would be better off dead, and if we are controlled and hindered in discipleship by our ability to control, to be mobile, or to oversee our world, we’d be better off losing all control, mobility or vision in order to be able to enter God’s kingdom.  

The quotation is from Isaiah 66:24 and is for those who rebelled against God: “For their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched” and they shall be an abhorrence to all humankind. And who are those rebels? Those who perform the rituals but prefer their own way. God promises to come in fire and whirlwind and execute judgment by fire on them. I am reminded of the cautionary comment in Hebrews, “Our God is a consuming fire”  (Hebrews 12:29), and of the passages in Paul’s epistles where our works are tested by fire in the judgment. Fire and wind are purifying and sanctifying agents, as witnessed at Pentecost with the sound of a strong wind and tongues of fire. By invoking this passage in Isaiah, Jesus taught his disciples to expect that God would indeed purify and sanctify them from their dependence on religious rituals and their preference for their own way.  

Isaiah goes on to add: “But to the ones who are humble and contrite and tremble at my name, I will extend peace and I will comfort like a mother comforts and nurses her children.  I will take some of them for priests; all humankind will come to bow down before me."  

What we learn: God prefers the humble, the contrite, and those who are awed by God’s name to any who set themselves up as enforcers, or any who perform the outward signs of religion while secretly following their own lusts and disobeying, or any who simply prefer their own way to God’s way. Jesus reinforces that by puncturing the disciples’ sense of being special: whoever is not against us is for us. I am not just for you twelve or seventy-two or the inner circle. 

And forbidding others to do good in Jesus’s name is like offending one of the little ones who believe in Jesus. It is a serious crime against life.

Jesus continually corrected the disciples’ misunderstandings to emphasize to them that they had to embrace suffering and humility and graciousness in order to follow him.