March 1, 2007
Quarrel
Lent 2C Lk 13.34f
If Jesus didn’t love Jerusalem, he probably wouldn’t bother to tell it that it’s going to Hell. He’d just let it go. For Jesus’ quarrel with Jerusalem is a prophet’s quarrel with the world. With all the zeal that he condemns, he, as well, yearns to embrace with all the tenderness and security of a mother hen and her brood. For the prophets quarrel is deep down a lover’s quarrel. It is another example of the irony that pervades every church worth its salt. It can well be called the “prophetic presence.”
Perhaps there’s no better way to sum up the church’s ministry than the old saying about good preaching, that it must both comfort the afflicted and, as well, afflict the comfortable. There must be no doubt about our caring. And there must be no hesitancy about our enduring demand for justice and peace. This is the irony of prophetic presence. With arms outstretched, the church must beckon all to come for both solace and sacrifice, for comfort and also to be made holy.
Only those subject to the worst kind of religious addiction, that crippling malaise ever so rampant today with all its denial and grandiosity, can fail to see these dimensions in Jesus presence before Jerusalem. Just as only the very spiritually mature can possibly endure such moments of judgment and truth, only such endurance can bring us to spiritual maturity.
Jesus’ ministry could not remain rooted in the tribal religiosity of Jerusalem and neither can ours in the tribal religiosity of our own narrow divisions. And just as his ministry came to be anchored in compassion and love, so must be ours. Such ministry reveals that the gospel is meant for anyone who will listen, that its healing is there for anyone who truly desires it, and that the grace of its salvation is accessible to any who dare take the risk of faith.
Tribe means nothing. Past affiliations mean nothing. The narrow-minded distinctions we impose on each other, as well, are simply silly. Any claim to be in the religious right is already by its very nature in the religious wrong. We have long since moved beyond the question of whether Jesus was Messiah only to Israel. We’ve already spent too much of our history in the opposite assertion that God cannot possibly love Jews. This, I suspect, is why the contention that Mel Gibson’s movie about the passion of Jesus is anti-semitic is at base fallacious. We crucified Jesus, and if need be to settle the argument, we are all Jews and whatever else the current anthropologic traffic will bear.
And yet, we continue to maintain our tribes within tribes, to erect barriers and lines across which Jesus supposedly doesn’t go or worse, still, dare not go. Some still make it their business to say that Jesus loves this one, but not that one, that Jesus will accept this group, but not that group.
An organization of Episcopal laity and presbyters in South Carolina, displeased with our former Presiding Bishop’s urging that we listen more compassionately to one another, instead, once asked him to resign. Two retired bishops actually announced that they’d excommunicated him. Our former here in Tennessee refused to worship with groups of his own people associated in well-established and unquestionably loyal church organizations, claiming that they are not “of the church” and all the while refusing to define what that might mean.*
In years past it was race or national origin or the ordination of women or denominations or sects-within-denominations. We seem marvelously inventive and presumptuously arrogant in knowing the mind of God by asserting that some people are beyond the reach of salvation.
It is unlikely that we will ever stop seeing skin color or hearing accent or noticing behavior. But we must no longer allow our perceptions — as important as they are to us — to be mistaken for truth. For our ways are not necessarily God’s ways. Virtually everything that people have fought over in the name of God has been proven to be meaningless, simply a token of personal rigidity, and hardly an expression of God’s will at all. Let us not lose sight that this gospel we profess is about conversion, about repentance, about returning, reconciliation, and renewal, about justice and peace, in short, about change. And that we, the church, are called to be primary stewards of all that both compassionately and prophetically.
Jesus sets for us one more splendid example of such spiritual authority in his prophetic presence at Jerusalem. Just as we must in this place offer our own community of welcome and of explicit common sense by the power of a faith than can provoke for the world a renewed crisis in perception. The old hymn calls it well. “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing — the marvelous peace of God” [1982 Hymnal #661].
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