The Challenge and Cost of Discipleship
Psalm 118:1–2, 19-29
Isaiah 50:4–9a
Mark 14:32–42, 15:25-39
Today’s service began as the last week of Jesus’
life began—with joy and pageantry and palms. It was a high
point—but gave no indication of the difficulties that lay ahead.
I don’t think Jesus was ever deluded by the acclaim of the crowd.
He had faced criticism all through his ministry—and he knew more was
coming, as he brought his alternative vision of God’s kingdom to the
very heart of Israel—to the temple in Jerusalem. That Palm Sunday
was a day to remember—to take heart and encouragement from perhaps—that
everyone who was there could know a day of such joy. Yet Jesus
knew that the Word he brought, the Word he embodied, was something much
deeper than the crowd comprehended.
“In the beginning was the Word”—the Word Jesus heard
took him into the desert to sort out the priorities of his
ministry. There he was confronted with the temptations we all
face—upon what values and beliefs will we build our lives?
Will we run after approval from others, trying to solve all their problems?
Will we seek power and prestige, no matter what the cost to our souls?
Will we think God is there to take care of us alone?
Like Jesus, we must face and answer these foundational questions before
we are ready to take the next step—putting our faith into action. Faith
in action is everything we are, expressed by everything we do and say.
Jesus left the desert, and returned to his faith
community with clarity. His clarity of faith and mission found
its expression in a passage from that section of Isaiah we call “Third
Isaiah:” The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has
anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to
proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to
let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The Lord’s favor will include those everyone thought
were excluded—the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed.
“It was this vision of radical inclusion that animated Jesus’ constant
transgressions of the social boundaries of his day: eating with lepers,
hanging out with women, touching the impure, teaching the
excluded. More than anything else, it may have been what got him
strung up,” wrote Ched Myers in a recent article in Sojourners
magazine. Jesus’ time in the desert convinced him that God’s love
was a love of radical inclusion, and he set about preaching and
embodying that love. As Jesus’ disciples, we too are called to
embody this expansive, inclusive love. What issue of our time
brings us face to face with the challenge and cost of being Jesus’
disciples, disciples that embody such love? The most obvious one
facing us today is, of course, immigration.
In addressing and confronting the social inequities
of his time, Jesus was guided by the writings of the prophet we call
Third Isaiah; Mr. Myers suggests that we too can gain valuable insights
into the immigration debate by looking to this prophet. The
first lines of the prophet’s first words set the tone for his
message: Thus says the Lord: maintain justice, and do what
is right…make sure no foreigner who now follows God ever has an
occasion to say, “God put me in second-class. I don’t really
belong.” And make sure no physically mutilated person is ever
made to think, ‘I’m damaged goods. I don’t really belong.’…Oh
yes, my house of worship will be known as a house of prayer for all
people.” (Isaiah 56: 1, 3 , 7, The Message) “The time has come to
gather all the nations and tongues: they shall come and behold my
glory.” (66:18)
Third Isaiah wrote addressing the recurring issue of
the gap between God’s vision of what Israel could become, and what it
often was. Like our nation today, Israel also struggled with the
difference between their “best selves” and their “worst selves.”
Israel’s history was filled with great moments of inclusion, and other
times of exclusion.
Sometimes the weak were protected against the
strong, but all too often laws and customs served “to shore up the
privileges of the strong against the needs of the weak.” (Myers, pg.
21) The setting for the prophet’s words was the return of the
exiles to Jerusalem, after their many years in Babylon.
It should have been the best of times—a chance to go
home again. But there were problems. First off, those who
had been taken away into exile were the upper class. The peasants
had stayed and continued working to eke out a living in a war-ravaged
land. When the elite came home, they wanted their lands and their
houses back, irregardless for who had been living there for the past
many years. In addition, they wanted to reestablish their
positions of authority in the political and religious spheres.
What was needed they decided was some good old-fashioned ethnic
cleansing—and so the leaders of Israel set about to ban intermarriage
with foreigners, and insist upon the deportation of foreign
wives. The children born to such “mixed marriages” were declared
illegitimate, and therefore outside the community of faith.
Third Isaiah became the vocal advocate for those
lacking the power and position to be heard. In contrast with the
leaders’ insistence upon purity codes, Third Isaiah argues that justice
and ethical standards are the key to Israel’s future. His message
focused upon obeying the laws of the Torah, keeping the Sabbath and
turning away from evil. Proper following of these divine
injunctions would result in a rejection of greed, allowing everyone to
have sufficient for their needs, and the release of those burdened by
debt. But even more important, through Isaiah God proclaims
welcome for the foreigner and for the physically mutilated; rather than
being rejected, they are promised an honored place in God’s house that
is to be a place of prayer for “all people.”
The perspective of Third Isaiah did not,
unfortunately, become the predominant perspective of his day.
Interestingly, many of those “kicked out” of Israel at that time became
the “Samaritans” of Jesus’ time. Knowing that bit of history adds
an interesting dimension to the story told by another itinerant
preacher who comes along 400 years later. When asked, “Who is my
neighbor?” Jesus tells the story of the Samaritan who acts with
compassion and concern for a Jew beaten and left for dead by
robbers. The Samaritan crosses not just the road but social,
political and ethnic boundaries to act in a loving way towards a
stranger and foreigner. It was a truly shocking and radically
inclusive redefinition of “neighbor” to his Jewish hearers.
Jesus took the words of Third Isaiah, and
“recontextualized” them for his time. He quotes multiple times
from Isaiah’s writings, and addresses many of the same issues.
Most germane to the issue of immigration which is so contentious in our
nation these days is a parable told by Jesus in the gospel of
Mark. In yet another skirmish with the religious authorities
insisting upon restrictive boundaries of purity codes and laws against
the outsider, Jesus says it’s not what comes in from outside that
pollutes and corrupts, but what arises from within:
“Jesus went on to say: It’s what comes out of
a person that pollutes: obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders,
adulteries, greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean
looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—all these are vomit from the
heart. There is the source of your pollution.” (Mark 7: 21
– 23, The Message) I find it fascinating that this parable is
immediately followed in the gospel of Mark with the story of the
Syro-Phoenician woman, the only time in the gospels that Jesus loses a
verbal debate.
He had entered a home, trying to stay out of the
public eye, but word of his arrival in the area spread anyway.
The woman, who was Greek, came to plead for him to heal her daughter
who was ill. Jesus rebuffs her with harshness, “Stand in line and
take your turn. The children of Israel get fed first. If
there’s any left over, the dogs get it.” She responds, “Of
course, Master. But don’t dogs under the table get scraps dropped
by the children?” Jesus concedes the justice of this female
foreigner’s insistence upon inclusion: “You’re right! On your
way! Your daughter is no longer disturbed. The demonic
affliction is gone.”
The message I take away from this story is to never
forget that every foreigner, every stranger, every immigrant, is a
child of God and worthy of God’s love. We must never fall into the
error of thinking of refugees and immigrants solely as
statistics. The issues related to the economy, national security
and immigration are complex and deserve our careful, thoughtful, and
faith-filled consideration. I urge you to pray for our leaders as
they seek to craft policies and laws that will be both just and
effective in addressing this difficult issue.
At the heart of his message lies the radically
inclusive love of God, and Jesus invites us to embody this love in the
same way he did. Lest we think that such discipleship leads
solely to a sense of fulfillment and joyful celebrations like Palm
Sunday, let us look at the consequences such preaching and teaching and
ministry brought to Jesus:
(Reading of Mark 14: 32 – 42; 15: 25 – 39).
May God grant us a deep understanding of the
challenges and cost of being Jesus’ disciples in our place and time.
Amen.
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