James 3.13 - 4.3,7-8a, Mark 9.30-37
The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity (Proper 20), 20 September 2015, Queen Camel, Weston Bampfylde
The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 19 September 2021, St Columba's Church, Gruline
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 an evanescent world full of newscaster soundbites and social media snapshots we yearn for wisdom - the slow, considered truth of those who have nurtured inner depth and open understanding of themselves and others. [1]
Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. In a harsh world dominated by the brutal politics of ambition, 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, 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 at peace with others, whilst also being true to ourselves. [3]
We are hungry to be rid of envy and selfish ambition, we ache for an end to disorder and wickedness of every kind. By coming here, week by week, year by year, we show ourselves keen to detox, craving refreshment, determined to embrace the wisdom from above, that pure, peaceable, gentle wisdom, which is willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.
We intensely desire to be at peace with ourselves, we long to be people equipped to bring peace to the world. And, a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace, writes James.
The beginning of the wisdom which will enable us to be peacemakers, is 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. Listen again to his wise words:
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.
James is suggesting that we are led by our desires. Our desire to have what others have, to be what others are, is something which 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. What do you think James means when he goes on to say,
You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.
This seems to be about prayer. Its about the difference between praying for the things we desire because other people have them, prayers which feel more like letters to Santa Claus than conversations with God - and praying for our desires to be aligned with God’s desires for us.
This is close to the teaching of St. Augustine as he puts on it in the opening prayer of his Confessions: "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. As James continues,
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
Our longing to be at peace with ourselves, to be people equipped to bring peace to the world, begins to take shape when we - prayerfully, gently, wisely, recognise within us the desires which are driving us, and where necessary, relinquish them and turn our hearts towards God.
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, is it really possible for us to discover what God desires for us and to begin to turn our desires towards God, without the help of Christ as the go-between who helps us to understand and set that desire?
For us, Jesus is The Man, The One who knows all about human desires. Some novelists and filmmakers who have dabbled in this area have been dubbed heretical by some, but being fully human Jesus must have known what it felt like to want to be in a relationship, to want to be successful and so on.
And for us, Jesus is the God, the Son whose relationship with the Father is our model for divine desire. How The Son looked towards the Father is how we might look, what he prayed to the Father illuminates how we should pray, and so on.
And today’s gospel story is a classic outworking of these themes. Let’s take another look at it.
Jesus and his disciples came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house Jesus asked them, ‘What were you arguing about on the way?’ But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another about who was the greatest.
You can imagine it, can’t you?
Peter: “I’m the greatest - after all it was me who got out of the boat and walked on the water with Jesus. [4]
James: “Oh, yes, you were great at that, weren’t you? You sank in less than a minute!”
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]
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]
Note that when Jesus asked them what they had been arguing about, they were silent; they knew Jesus well enough by then to predict his reaction to any arguments they had about their roles and importance and status. Perhaps it wouldn’t have surprised them hearing 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 been a shock, a scandal, even, to 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
[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 Nuechterlein, 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.
Comments