1/29 Lectionary Notes: The Word is Love
Lectionary Texts for January 29, the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggeman calls both conservatives and liberals to account for their distortion of the Church. He writes,
The church will not have the power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity. And that is true among liberals who are too chic to remember and conservatives who have overlaid the faith memory with all kinds of hedges that smack of scientism and Enlightenment.
The Corinthians passage seems to function in a similar manner, calling believers from the extremes not to a middle ground, but to an entirely new way. In essence, the issue of eating meat that's been sacrificed to idols isn't about the meat at all. To those who would say the meat is off limits, Paul warns that they should be careful how much value they assign to false gods. To those who would say that they can eat the meat if they choose because they are under the rule of grace, he says that love is the ultimate guide for behavior, not rights.
This passage makes me think about the abuse of rights and agenda-driven language that damages our ability to truly serve one another in community. Too often, "It's my right" is used as an excuse to do our own will in spite of the transgressions we commit against those with whom we're supposed to be in relationship. I think of attempts to "save the seals" to the detriment of an entire native culture or a stubborn commitment to shop at corporate chain stores in spite of questions about producer and retailer ethics. Our knowledge of a thing's goodness can often be so over-inflated that it smothers the images of God in our midst.
On the other hand, how far will Christians go to keep the law of Moses on life support well into the 21st century? This past weekend, a friend who recently moved to a farm told me a story about moving the chicken house. Though the chickens were introduced to the new location, they all gathered in the evening at the location of the old house. The next evening a few chickens caught on and by the third night they all knew where to go. How long will some of us still feel more at home in the old house? Or are we self-centeredly afraid that the new house will have less to offer than what we already know?
When we act out of fear or ego, we miss the point of living in relationship and serving a God who can heal everything. Jesus gives us an example of life as it should be in the healing of the possessed man. Fear might have led Jesus to doubt the promise of the resurrection, to deny his nature as God, while ego may have led him to make a spectacle of the spirit at the expense of the human being whose body was its puppet. Instead, out of compassion, he claims the name given him--"the Holy One of God"--and uses its authority to heal. Mark's account of the crowd's reaction seems a bit sensational and I picture Jesus rolling his eyes at their superficiality. The healing was not for their sake, or for his own, but for the sake of the man, in an other-directed act of healing love that embodies who God is. We can stand with the groupies fainting in wonder at what we do not understand or we can marvel at the art of Jesus' gesture, responding in turn by addressing that which is within our own power to heal. We tell the story, sure, but we also are the story and we do well to realize that every opportunity to interact with another human being is an opportunity to enter into a complex relationship that will lead us toward the mystery of God.