Last revised: March 1, 2019
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FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY — YEAR C
RCL: Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13); 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
RoCa: Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
Opening Comments: Elements of a New Reformation
In 2022, I preached on the Second Reading as the second in a two-part sermon series on how the Passion of Jesus changes both human stories and the human story. Last week, was on how the cross of Jesus changes the kind of story: from an Us-vs-Them plot of the Good Guys defeating the Bad Guys, to the plot of victims of human violence helping to transform the Us-vs-Them into only Us. This week, the focus is on the resurrection as a transformation of from whose perspective we tell the stories. Typically, the winners get to write history. With the resurrection, the Forgiving Victim of human violence begins to shape the writing of history from the perspective of the victim. This has import today for things like Black History Month — would such things be possible if the resurrection hadn’t changed who gets to tell the story? The resulting sermon is “Resurrection Means That the Forgiving Victim Writes History.”
In 2019, I didn’t have to preach, but I wrote the following essay on the Gospel Reading . . . on the call to discipleship.
The call to discipleship is itself grace. In the face of rising authoritarianism in Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s major statement was his book Discipleship (Nachfolge in the German, published in 1937), whose first chapter was famously about “costly grace” vs. “cheap grace”:
Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which has to be asked for, the door at which one has to knock.
It is costly, because it calls to discipleship; it is grace, because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live. (p. 45)
Continuing to follow Jesus in a world that resists the healing of tribalism — where powers continue to seek entrenchment of tribalistic empire — means there will be bearing of crosses. The call to discipleship is a paradoxically gracious call to live under the costly threat of self-sacrificing death.
“How long, O Lord?” (Isa 6:11). The day’s First Reading from Isaiah 6 was embraced by Jesus to articulate his sense of call, in which disciples follow. Jesus quotes the oddest of verses in this text, not the dramatic call itself but the strange message:
“Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’ Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed” (Isaiah 6:9-10; quoted by Jesus in Mark 4:12 and Matt 13:13-15, where Jesus introduces “parables”).
The fact that the Powers will continue to pursue tribalistic imperialism is a fact that God anticipates in calling prophets. Imperialistic culture dictates people’s worldviews, determining what they can see and hear and understand. For Jesus, this dictates the vehicle of his message: parables. The typical human way of making change by using violent force cannot itself be changed by using direct counterforce, even in messaging. Matthew’s Jesus doubles down on the quote of Isaiah 6 by quoting Psalm 78:2-3 in saying, “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world” (Matt 13:35).
Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World — the title of René Girard‘s magnum opus. Since the human species originates in both Us-Them thinking and Us-Them structuring of the cultures that nurture us, it is not easy to begin the healing of tribalism — possible, really, only through God’s gracious intervention via Jesus the Messiah. How does one begin that saving work without getting caught up with an oppositional Us-Them thinking that itself quickly descends into Us-Them thinking? Consider this “Catch-22”: “Us” are those who are trying to reveal and undo Us-Them thinking, and “Them” are those who resist “Us” by persisting in Us-Them thinking. A frontal assault on Us-Them thinking results in “Us” lapsing into yet another form of Us-Them thinking! So how does Jesus initiate healing? He begins not with a direct assault on Us-Them thinking but with an indirect parabolic language that turns the ‘normal’ upside-down and inside out.
But the Us-Them structuring of human culture will take much more than a strategy for teaching. It will require action that again does not use direct, forceful assault. It will mean nonviolent engagement that risks becoming a victim of violence. Eventually, it leads Jesus to choose suffering a direct assault of sacred violence upon himself. This is the costly grace that awaits those who choose to answer the call of discipleship — a commitment to nonviolence that leaves one vulnerable to those who still operate by violence. Jesus clearly tells us, “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matt 11:12).
“How long, O Lord?” The answer in Isaiah 6 is akin to the apocalyptic mood that Girard increasingly inhabited:
“Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the LORD sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.” The holy seed is its stump. (Isaiah 6:11b-13)
I propose that Isaiah 6 is not only a call passage, but it is also the first great apocalyptic text. How many rounds of our cities being laid waste has humanity endured since the Lord spoke these words to Isaiah? Since Jesus revealed what has been hidden since our origins? And we are in the midst of another rise of totalitarian imperialistic power-grabs. The holy seed has been sown for 800 (Isaiah) +2000 (Jesus) years. When will it bear the fruit of healing our tribalism to the point of rebuilding our culture into Us-thinking — into ‘there is no longer Us and Them, only Us’?
“How long, O LORD?” That Girard’s last major book (Battling to the End) featured apocalyptic reflections and was his most pessimistic is quite understandable. So much over the last century seems to speak to an escalation of the violence, or “escalation to extremes” (the phrase Girard borrows for Carl von Clausewitz’s On War as his book’s mantra). Yet I propose that our pessimism may be tempered if we highlight a movement over the past century which is a sign of God’s healing and saving Spirit. Just as humankind was entering a phase of world war, inventing Weapons of Mass Destruction, there also came about for the first time a mass movement of waging war nonviolently, explicitly as a means of following Jesus. It took a Hindu man in the first instance, Mahatma Gandhi, to take Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount seriously enough to imagine it as a mass movement, a new way to wage war nonviolently.
We began with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “costly grace” in the face of the rise of Nazism. While in London in 1934, Bonhoeffer made active plans to visit Gandhi — with the help of two Brits who knew Gandhi, Charlie Andrews and Bishop George Bell — and to learn the way of nonviolent resistance. Andrews encouraged Bonhoeffer to visit the Quaker center Woodbrooke, to “see our friends who both know and love India and also are trying to follow the Sermon on the Mount” (DBWE, vol. 13, London, 1933-35, p. 137; see this volume for more on Bonhoeffer’s plans, including a letter to Bonhoeffer from Gandhi himself). Bonhoeffer’s recognition of Gandhi’s work was another sign that nonviolent resistance as a mass movement following the way of Jesus is finally the ‘seed falling into good soil and bringing forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold’ (Mark 4:8).
Subsequent history has only highlighted its importance. Exactly sixty years ago (February-March 1959) Martin Luther King, Jr. went to India with Coretta to learn from Gandhi’s disciples. Many years later a taped message was discovered in India in which King emphasizes his intellectual debt to Mahatma Gandhi’s message of nonviolent social action. He says,
. . . if this age is to survive, it must follow the way of love and nonviolence that he so nobly illustrated in his life. And Mahatma Gandhi may well be God’s appeal to this generation, for in a day when sputniks and explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. Today, we no longer have a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. (NPR story of January 9, 2009)
The Civil Rights movement became the next major example of what we may characterize here as God’s working to heal the structures of tribalism — the tiny mustard seed ‘growing up and becoming the greatest of all shrubs’ (Mark 4:32). And it continues to spread its branches today with things like the Women’s March in response to the presidency of Donald Trump and Rev. Dr. William Barber II‘s revival of King’s Poor People’s Campaign.
“How long, O Lord?” There is plenty of reason for pessimism in answering this question today. My hope is that nonviolent resistance as a mass movement is finally a reason to hope that we might at least be witnessing the beginning to the end of violent tribalism as the way of human order. This isn’t optimism, because it involves terrible suffering. But it is faith in costly grace: “It is costly, because it costs people their lives; it is grace, because it thereby makes them live.” It is Christian hope.
Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
Resources
1. A very significant passage for me is Isaiah 6:9-10 (among the optional verses for this lection which I would obviously advocate using). It figures prominently in both the introductory essay on my homepage and in my essay “Girardian Anthropology in a Nutshell.” I have argued that Mark makes this passage a centerpiece of his Gospel, arranging his material around the themes of deafness and blindness. Jesus quotes these two verses from Isaiah in Mark 4:12 (and par.). His two major sermons, then, use keywords that warn against these maladies: “Listen!” in Mark 4, and “Watch!” in Mark 13. Jesus’ healing of deaf and blind people also shape his narrative. It is commonly recognized, for example, that the section in which Jesus is trying to get his disciples to see what following him means, i.e., following him to the cross, is sandwiched between two healings of blind men (Mark 8:22-26 and 10:46-52). These blind men can now see, but the disciples can’t. They have ears unhearing and eyes unseeing. For more, see comments on the gospel for Proper 25B.
2. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, p. 63. His citing of Isa. 6 kicks off a brilliant section that ponders the use of such an idea in the gospels, such as in Mark 4. It is no surprise, then, that this is one of my favorite sections in this book, and so I share with you these pages on the “Doubling of Sin and Hell.”
3. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence & the Sacred, p. 143. Williams has this to say about the call of the prophets, Isaiah in particular:
When we turn to the great prophets whose names are preserved in the books ascribed to them, we find the victimization mechanism overcome as they draw upon its structure and transform it. In his relation to the God of Israel, the prophet who stands out of the community structures of violence does so in order to stand for both the community and its victims. I have already referred to Amos, who was probably the first of these prophets chronologically (c. 750 B.C.E.). He says that “the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel'” (Amos 7:15). In justifying his prophetic calling he uses the analogies of a lion attacking its prey, a bird snared by a trap, and a trumpet of war causing fear in a city. He likewise is “attacked,” “snared,” “afraid.” “The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8). As one who is singled out, who is a kind of “victim” for the sake of his calling, he announces divine judgment on Israel, on those who “sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes” (Amos 2:6).In Isaiah 6, which is commonly recognized as his call vision, Isaiah is set against his people with a message of destruction. Only a tenth of the people will remain, and even it will be burnt the way a stump is burnt after a great tree is felled. The process of selecting the prophet takes the form of sacrificial initiation and commission by God. The sacrificial initiation involves a burning coal from the altar that is touched to Isaiah’s lips by one of the seraphim that he sees. The seraph says, “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven” (Isa 6:7, RSV). I commented on “forgive,” Hebrew kipper, in chapter 2. There I concurred with Gese’s conclusion that the verb and its noun, kofer, has to do with the price of exchange, with what is given in exchange for one’s life. In the temple setting of Isaiah’s vision, animal sacrifice is in the background of the sacrificial ransom, but it is relegated to a distant point, for the giving over of the prophet’s life is symbolized in the purifying effect of the burning coal. Then the prophet hears the divine voice speaking in council, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (6:8). Although the total experience is overwhelming, Isaiah, in contrast to Amos, puts himself forth as a volunteer. “Here am I! Send me” (6:8). Depicted here, then, is a group in the heavenly sphere, similar to the assembly of the gods in Enuma Elish; however, in this case the gods or angels are clearly subordinate to YHWH, and it is presumably a smaller group functioning as his advisers. The prophet, in responding positively, is not coerced but willingly gives himself to the task, on which he is sent. “Sending” (Hebrew shalach), simple word though it is, is quite interesting in uncovering the sacrificial mechanism. The intensive verbal stem in Hebrew sometimes means “to expel,” as in the scapegoat sent into the wilderness (Lev 16:10). It is employed likewise of the act of the rapists in judges 19:25: “And as the dawn began to break, they let her go.” That could be translated “then dismissed her” or “they cast her out.” However, the prophet, though he faces the possibility of being “cast out” of his society as a messenger of judgment, is sent from the divine community with a mission to Israel. This mission required that Isaiah proclaim judgment upon oppressors who “turn aside the needy from justice, and . . . rob the poor of my people of their right” (Isa 10:2). (pp. 143-144)
4. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon from August 10, 2003 (Woodside Village Church), 6th in a series of eleven sermons on the prophets.
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Resources
1. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong, p. 71, nt. 10 on p. 78. The Resurrection is the foundation for all of Alison’s theologizing. Pages 70-83, encompassing two sections entitled “The Resurrection” and “The Intelligence of the Victim,” lay important groundwork for Alison’s entire approach. They provide helpful background for St. Paul’s great chapter on the Resurrection.
2. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 102, 103, 138, 144, 152, 154.
3. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon from February 7, 2010 (Society of St. John at St. Mark’s Chapel, Palo Alto).
Luke 5:1-11
Resources
1. Gil Bailie, the lecture series on “The Gospel of Luke,” tape #3. He nearly skips over this passage, only making the following observation: In this story is a representation of the two churches of the 1st century: Jewish and Gentile. On the lake of Gennesaret (Galilee), Jesus sees two boats, one belonging to Peter [the other unspecified]. Getting in Peter’s boat, Jesus has them cast their nets. They catch so many fish that “they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them.” This might be a reference to the Gentile churches of Paul.
Bailie has a lot more to say about the surrounding context of healing and forgiveness. See my notes / transcription on Luke 5.
2. Andrew Marr, Abbot of St. Gregory’s Abbey (Three Rivers, MI) is a long-time reader and writer on Mimetic Theory and in his blog, “Imaginary Visions of True Peace,” made these reflections of the text in 2019, “On Being Called by God.”
3. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon from February 8, 2004, sermon from February 4, 2001 (both at Woodside Village Church), and sermon from February 4, 2007 (Society of St. John at St. Mark’s Chapel, Palo Alto).
4. Sermons/blogs from a Girardian perspective by members and friends of Theology & Peace: Tom Truby, a sermon in 2019, “Isaiah’s Gloom and Jesus’ Abundance.”
Reflections and Questions
1. Might one say that this is only the first time that Jesus called his disciples? And that it didn’t stick this first time, since they all abandoned him at his arrest, and so Jesus had to call them a second time after the Resurrection? I have a sermon that begins with this idea of a second call, bringing the other two lessons in: the First Lesson to provide language to talk about what blocks us from hearing the call, and the Second Lesson to talk about what is different after the Resurrection. Link to the sermon “A Bad Hire?“
