James 3.13 - 4.3,7-8a, Mark 9.30-37
The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, 23 September 2018
Clapham
An overweight, balding man shuffles out of the surgery, pauses for breath and says, ‘My doctor thinks I’m having a mid-life crisis. I was so surprised I nearly fell off my skateboard’.
Who is wise and understanding among you? In a world full of soundbites and snapshots we yearn for wisdom - the slow, considered truth of those who have nurtured inner depth and open appreciation of themselves and others. [1]
Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. In a dog-eat-dog world in which our lives are governed by institutions so large they are incapable of care for the individual, we yearn to be touched by gentleness. [2]
But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. In a world where our yearning to belong, our desire to be recognised, our need to be loved, cause us to bend ourselves out of shape to mould ourselves into other people’s image of who we should be, we lament the damage that this causes our soul, and long to be true to ourselves and at peace with others. [3]
A harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace, writes James. Making peace starts with our willingness to take a good long look at ourselves, recognising the reality of which James writes: that conflict in our world isn’t caused by things outside us; it comes from within. From ‘our cravings that are at war within us’.
James suggests that we are led by our desires. Our desire to have what others have, to be what others are, is deeply ingrained in us. It’s at the heart of all our disputes, be they little village spats or international conflicts, be they family feuds or civil wars, and it is no easy task to overcome them. Maybe we should pray about them. James says, ‘You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.’
There’s a big difference between praying prayers which feel more like letters to Santa Claus than conversations with God - and praying for our desires to come together with God’s desires for us.
This is close to what St. Augustine once wrote: "our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” We begin to move away from envy and selfish ambition when we begin to set our desires on what God desires for us, not what others desire, when we start to fix our heart on imitating God rather than following other people.
Now James has got to the heart of the deep conflict in human nature in this passage - and identified the only way to work towards healing. But James leaves out Jesus - and we need to ask, how can Jesus The Human One who knows all about human desires, help us turn our hearts to God? Today’s gospel story throws some light on these themes. You can imagine how it started - with the disciples arguing about which of them was the best.
You can imagine Peter saying: “I’m the greatest - after all it was me who got out of the boat and walked on the water with Jesus. [4]
And James: “Oh, yes, you were great at that, weren’t you? You sank in less than a minute!”
And John: “I think I’m the greatest because I’m a writer and one day I’m going to record all that Jesus did for posterity.” [5]
And Judas: “That’s all very well, but I must be the greatest because I look after the money and you lot wouldn’t have any food or lodgings if I didn’t do my job properly.” [6]
Now, when Jesus asked them what they had been arguing about, they went quiet; knowing that he knew and disapproved of their competitiveness over status. They probably weren’t surprised to hear what he said to them in response, ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’
But it probably would have shocked them, seeing what he did next.
Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’
The shock here is that Jesus turned the eyes of the disciples away from each other - away from those competitive relationships with each other which were their obsession, those competitive relationships of desiring what the others had in terms of status and position. And he turned their eyes towards a little child who he put among them - placed at the centre of their attention.
Now from what we know and can imagine, children in that society were largely invisible, powerless, the lowest in status of anyone. To make them the centre of attention was a radical statement of Jesus’ wanting to reshape the disciples view of who and what was important in life, to reform their desires from being among the greatest, to paying attention to the least.
Children are often caught up in our competitiveness: witness the lengths that parents go to to ensure their child succeeds in school. Children are always victims of our conflicts: I say just one word, divorce, to illustrate that point. And children are problematic: with their physical, emotional needs, with the financial burden they bring, with their new-fangled behaviour which we adults cannot fathom. Children are so often on the receiving end of adults’ violence, their misshapen, misdirected desires - it was the same in Jesus’ time as now. [7]
But Jesus took the child in his arms - directing his attention away from the squabbling disciples and focussing his attention on this little one, just as a loving father would his son, and telling them, ’Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’
Here is wisdom and understanding. Here is a good work done with gentleness born of wisdom. Here is the replacement of envy and selfish ambition of boastfulness and falsehood. Here is Jesus challenging his disciples and now also showing us how we can turn our desires around.
So Jesus invites us to welcome those who have nothing to offer us but their vulnerability; he encourages us to divert our attention away from the endless struggle for our own status to reach out in compassion to the little ones of the earth. He shows us that when we turn our hearts outwards, away from our own selfish instincts, when we re-set our desires to embrace others, when we cease from our competitiveness and instead place ourselves in a position of self-giving love, like a parent towards a newborn child, then our restless hearts will learn to rest in God.
There’s nothing new in this wondrous insight; but it’s as vital today as it’s ever been; I close with a prayer which Anglicans have prayed for centuries, and fits our theme perfectly. (We have said it together already today, as we always do, but let’s hear it again, the Prayer of Preparation), The Collect for Purity:
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen. [8]
Notes
Previously preached in Somerset in 2015.
[1] An Adbusters-influenced paragraph. Adbusters is ‘the journal of the mental environment’ which is currently publishing its Manifesto for World Revolution series - ‘a tactical manual for fighting back against the capitalist algorithm that threatens the very essence of the human spirit’.
[2] A paragraph influenced by my reading of Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, in particular Chapter 5, ‘Too Big.’, p.131ff.
[3] Here the influence is the mimetic theory of Rene Girard and the treatment of James (and Jesus) here owes a good deal to Paul Neuchterlein, girardianlectionary.net, Year B, Proper 20b.
[4] Matthew 14.22-23.
[5] John the apostle is traditionally held to be the author of the Gospel of John, see eg Wikipedia.
[6] John 12.6: ‘[Judas] kept the common purse…’
[7] See Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus, p.266-271 for a fuller discussion of ‘The Child, the Family System, and the Roots of Violence’.
[8] Wikipedia: Collect for Purity.
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